The Unit "Think Tank"

[Straybow]

NOOOOOoooooo! Micromanagement hell awaits you all! Abandon hope, all ye who enter!

I'd like to see a game with truly strategic scale operations. Footsoldiers can march 20-30 km in a day, so on Earth they can reach anywhere on the same continent in months. Wheeled vehicles can move anywhere the roads go in days. Ships can go to the farthest reaches of the seas in weeks. Aircraft can attack almost anywhere on the planet in hours.

The strategic limitations on movement in a year-long turn are entirely determined by supply. If my planes can land and refuel, or refuel in the air, they can go anywhere and return. On the other extreme, if I can get food to my troops they can march anywhere.

I've seen suggestions (not in this thread) that units should have to "get on" a rail system (possibly requiring a Station tile improvement or city improvement), move, "get off" the rail (again maybe needing a Station), then move or attack or whatever. I'd rather finish a turn while I'm still young enough to care. Civ2 rail movement is probably the most micromanagement-free aspect of the game, and the most realistic given the scale of distance and time involved.

I wouldn't want to have to load an infantry unit onto a train or into trucks or planes, move the vehicle x tiles per turn, then unload. I would want to set up a strategic transportation network and use it transparently. I don't even like doing it with ships in Civ/SMAC—it is a "necessary evil."

The concept is called "generalization." When you draw a map you leave off details that don't matter. The time required to load and unload a vehicle is insignificant compared to the length of a game turn. The time required to travel the distance is often insignificant compare to the length of a turn.

The airlift feature is the most abstract example of generalization in Civ2: start in an Airport, choose a destination, *poof*. You see, in this case even the route taken by the transport aircraft isn't critical to the model. A slightly less abstract model is the paradrop feature: activate the unit's paradrop capability, then put the cursor where you want to go.

Civ2 airlift also covers the matter of defense abstractly: if an enemy fighter is based within a certain distance of either the origin or the destination it has a chance to intercept. Unfortunately there is no provision for fighter cover from the origin or destination.

Think about ship transport. How big is one ship? You might fit a whole battalion-sized modern unit on a single ship, but not the multiple units allowed in Civ and SMAC. Certainly not a year's worth of supplies and ammo for that battalion. A transport unit must actually be many ships. Attacking a fleet or network of transports isn't going to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Sinking one ship, or many ships, is going to probabilistically damage the unit(s) carried.

How about amphibious assaults? The assault on Normandy is a classic example. Ordinary army units (not marines) were trained in the field for the job. The boats they used were short range, intended for one trip only. The units that landed on the beach were refreshed with ordinary troops not trained for amphibious service, and so did not keep their amphib status. Can any Civ-like game model those aspects?

For an example of the reverse, look at Germany. They never developed amphib training. They never developed landing craft. They never had the leadership and vision of strategic scale amphib operations. The Wehrmacht lacked amphibious capacity at all levels.

The Nazis invaded Norway by taking lightly defended ports with small paratroop units, then unloading troops in larger numbers on the secured ports. They fell for the decoy army under Patton poised to strike at Calais because they thought the first objective would be capturing a major port intact. They never thought the Allies would be able to build floating docks in situ to supply a sustained offensive with fresh troops, food, and ammo for weeks until a mmajor port could be taken.

On the other hand, the best marines in the world aren't amphibious capable if they aren't supplied with landing craft. The best paratroopers in the world aren't airdrop capable if they aren't supplied with planes to take them to the objective. On the strategic scale the landers and airplanes themselves are non-combatants that are part of the cost of operation for the military units.

[Blake]

Um my nefarious plan to eliminate micromanagment is to essentially have "mobilisation" movement, you "mobilise" an army to any friendly/neutral point on the continent (or globe, for those able to traverse water). This takes one turn. To enter enemy territory your army must "crawl", as it fights it's way forward.

For warfare purposes, territory is defined much like Zone of Control in Civ games, every army (note I avoid the use of "unit") has a circular ZoC radius, determined by it's strength and number of units in it. The units are pretty much considered to be spread out within the ZoC radius, not all clumped in the center. That means an army can "sweep" through enemy territory, engaging all armies in it's ZoC and capturing cities and improvements inside it's ZoC and not protected by enemy ZoC. The idea is to make the game more about choosing your battles rather than manually fighting them.

If that seems like a pretty easy way to capture territory, then remember the enemies situation is equally rosy, when they see your forces mobilise, they can smack a large army down in it's path, which will cover a large area with protective ZoC.

Surface combat will essentially become a numbers game, superier numbers and equipment will win the war. Overwhelming will help a little, but not that much. If you have an army of 200 units, and your enemy has two armies of 100 units, and you engage them seperately, then in most games you would sustain around 50 losses in the first battle and 67 in the second, with 83 survivors. Due to the ease of overwhelming with the ZoC model, a more reasonable figure would be 30 survivors (remember these are equally matched forces, the only difference being one lot is seperated into two seperate armies).

Anyway, I do believe that large army ZoC, enabling multiple cities to be captured by a single army in a single turn should dramatically decrease tedium.

How big could ZoC's get? For a very large army, probably as big as Australia, and conquering aussie would take around 3 turns, 1 to mobilise, 2 to conquer.

This is getting really off thread, but I'll continue anyway.
With space movement and combat, it becomes "point based", valuable stuff is concentrated into points, making it real easy to have things like space combat on a "combat map". Because everything must be at exactly one point, it's easy to say when a fleet is in orbit of a planet, or when two fleets are at the same place, they can engage in battle. The wide open of space, and valuable locations makes for somewhat more interesting tatics and manuvering (because of movement vectors of space fleets, it's easy to tell where they are headed, it's also fairly easy to decieve)

Speaking of ships, I would prefer to make them an unnessecary evil, with a range of hovercraft, that can not only bring land forces across the oceans, but up the beaches too. Then you can just merge your land forces with the hovercraft, and it becomes an army that can cross water. That allows the army to get to any point on the globe with just 1 command (Go There!) rather than around 5:
troops Go To the beach, hop in the ship, ship sail to shore near destination, troops hop out the ship, troops Go To actual destination.

[Kuciwalker]

I think there's another, more realistic way to eliminate MM: reduce the power of the player.

While the player CAN, if he WANTS TO, MM the exact composition of an army, if he is like most people, he'll let it happen in the background. The player won't use the numeric keypad to move units. He won't use the mouse to move units. He'll tell the governor, or the leader in charge of the entire force, to "capture this region" or "defend this city". Then the leader does what it thinks will work best to achieve the goal. And this is ONLY IF THE PLAYER IS THERE. If this is happening on another world, the Governor will do this on its own.

Also, leader will (or at least should) be able to communicate with each other. If the leader decides that, to defend the city, it would REALLY HELP if there was a fortification right HERE, he would ASK the governor to allocate worker to construct the fortification.

Even more importantly, say the leader decides he NEEDS MORE UNITS. He'll ask the Governor, or maybe even the Mayor of the city, to build number X of unit Y, and so on, depending which units would be best for the situation.

You only give broad objectives, and the AI works out the details. I think that the AI will be the single most important part of this game.

[Blake]

The problem with writing AI, is you need to write AI.

[Kuciwalker]

Yea. Kinda tautological :P

Still, wouldn't it be GOOD to have a good AI. It also occurs to me that this would mean there would be a smart ENEMY AI, because there would already be the entire cooperation thingy. We could just substitute the supreme leader for the human.

[Straybow]

I prefer more of a wargame-type system than the Civ-style combat system. What you describe seems somewhere in between. There will still be plenty of µmgmt as players figure out just how big their army needs to be in order to have a ZOC of 2, 3, 4 etc tiles radius.

Clash ran into the same problem: how to make units engage by their ZOC size, and how to move units around in the long game turns and whether to have shorter combat turns within each game turn.

[Blake]

Um armies will (hopefully) move on a point based system, ie can be moved to any point on the map not constrained to the center of tiles, and the ZoC radius will be truly circular, meaning no fiddly "optimising". Ofcourse there will still be tiles to assist in route finding and map rendering, much like most recent 3D RTS games.

[Jeremy Buloch]

Yes, the point based system sounds like a good way of moving the units. I agree.
-J.B.-

[Kuciwalker]

The player won't figure that stuff out. The computer will.

[DeathByTheSword]

about moving armies and stuff i would suggest and support any idea that would create frontlines. the problem with smac and civ is that you fight base per base. but in real life they have front line which are protect all the way. i believe the ZoC plan will allow some kind of frontline in the game because putting several armies X tiles away from eachother will create ZoC overlapping and a solid line

[Kuciwalker]

I like it.

[Jeremy Buloch]

Since we are currently discussing a system in moving units, I have no comment to make. Except for: I like the idea of having a frontline.
-J.B.-

[DeathByTheSword]

frontline will help us to use artillery in a totally different way and spying will be made more hard. and a so called frontline will also cause damage on the near by facilities and nature and stuff. just think of the frontline war of WWI and stuff. also supplying of units will be simpler because they arent everywere

[Kuciwalker]

True true.

[Jeremy Buloch]

Yes, the Idea is supported by me to the fullest. I have no bad comments about it, at the moment that is.
-J.B.-