Military Model III

[Henrique Duarte]

By the way to adress instantaneous production (in this case of manpower or equipment) I think that this could be handled the following way:
Manpower production rate: that dependes on nº of barracks you have - if you need to you can start imideatly to produce whatever you need.
Industrial facilities - whell this one belongs pherhaps on the economic thread - to change the industrial output for ex. from 80% civil prod. 20% military to 60% civ/40%,mil, the player should set it´s civ/mil objective rate and the game mechanics would establish a trend towards that objective (the rate would change on a economic turn basis). This way if you where producing 1.000 HC last turn you will not be able to produce 10.000 HC the next turn.

[Kull]

First the caveat: Commentary on military force composition and tactics prior to 500 BC or thereabouts (i.e. before the works of contemporary Greek authors) is based largely on guesswork and inference.

So were the Assyrians the first "professional" military force? I don't think so. Almost 1000 years earlier (1700 BC), archaeological evidence suggests that most Bronze Age kingdoms and city-states were heavily reliant upon a professional military made up almost entirely of chariots. A chariot was an expensive piece of equipment with no civilian use, so it had to be maintained by the government (the King). Using a chariot effectively in war required extensive training, so it's hard to imagine they were manned by a militia. You needed two healthy horses, a skilled archer, and a good driver. Even the medium sized city of Ugarit had a chariotry of about 1000, and wielding them in battle is a lot more complicated than rounding up a few thousand farmers armed with spears and slings.

Going WAYYY back to Sargon of Akkad (2400 BC), it seems likely that he used a professional military to conquer the far more advanced cities of Sumeria. Recent evidence suggests that his grandson Naram-Sin made conquests from Elam to the Mediterranean coast. Not something likely to be achieved with an army of part-timers.

Not that this has a whole lot to do with the military model, other than history suggests that professionalism is not a new concept.

[Henrique Duarte]

Kull

The british celts used chariots on a regular basis and they didn´t have a professional standing army

What I mean by a professional army is not a permanent fighting force that pops up from a fighting elite (whose meaning of life is to make war). What I mean by professionalization is when the major part of an empires army is professional, and that means professional rights and obligations maintained by the empire on a very regular basis (the Assyrians held their empire with a large payed permanent force for a reasonable amount of time).

Bottom line
The maintenance of a permanent professional army is totally different from the one of a Militia army. The Romans acquired a big part of their Empire during Early and Mid Republic and back them they did not have a professional army.

Anyway pherhaps the way you are looking at things is the best thought approach to game mechanics - probably the player will be allowed to decide how much of its army will be a professional standing army or not - still I percieve the large scale army professionalization as something that had great impact in military thinking and organization.

[Harlikwin]

Ok, as to the Standing army/militia debate... The way I see it each culture would have some portion of its military as a "standing army" This to me means that they train on a somewhat regular basis. This would include the charioteers, (as kull said, it is a non-civilian skill) Knights and so forth. The rest of the militia would be raised when needed (peasent levies etc) and in might be trained by the regular army (The US used this sytem for years) The ratio of how much of a standing army you have would be determiend partially by the player but also by stuff like govermnt type, econmincs and so forth.

-Harli

BTW: Mark, I'll try to get somthing up soon.. Currently I'm amalgamitng somthing like 20 posts...

[Andrew Warwick]

Been a while since I was involved in the Clash project (couple of years probably - greetings again to those few who may remember me.) I really have to wade through all the posts and catch up on whats going on so I can get involved again but an awful lot has changed and been added.

Economic/Military Timescales:
From what I've read Mark's overlapping timescale is the best way to get over that horrible problem. (When I first joined up the two timescales were suggested to get over unit movement problems and the like. Seems to have only caused more problems.)

When i finish reading the rest of the thread I'll start commenting on other matters.

Cheers

[This message has been edited by Andrew Warwick (edited February 07, 2000).]

[don Don]

Henrique,
The problem I'm tying to address is the scale differential between the Mil turn and the Econ turn. Yes, the economic perspective is fairly simple. But when Clash only allows mil units to move a tiny fraction of the real world capability over the course of an econ turn (5-10 years for much of the game) there must be a further limit on mil production, else every defender will, in one econ turn, produce giant armies to man stockpiled or new weapons while the approaching enemy is only allowed to move a short distance.

(I didn't intent to impose limits on TF composition, except for the primitive units being limited to "horde" on the organizational level.)

Mark,
Returning to Global War, the map is partitioned into developed (blank) and undeveloped (shaded) regions. In developed regions units move in one 3 month turn according to the (European) seasons: Winter = 3, Spring = 2, Summer = 4, Fall = 5. In undeveloped regions movement in a turn is simply 1.

Global War is designed with armor and motorized infantry in mind, but much action is still defined by foot movement (artillery supported infantry or infantry supported armor). Ancient feet move at the same speed as modern feet, 18-20 miles per day, which ends up with movement rates comparable to modern ones except for tactical (and some operational scale) advantages to the modern units as long as the units remain in supply. In GW, the undeveloped regions may have roads but not enough for the supply needs of a motorized division.

Each GW hex is about 300 km, 3 Clash tiles wide, but then you're also looking at 1 month mil turns instead of 3 months. I'd assume movement in the best season (generalizing that if you encounter bad weather it just takes longer, but not so long as to require an extra mil turn) and use 5. For Clash, and certainly for Demo 5, you are still set for only one movement per econ turn. With that severe limitation I can only suggest not differentiating between different kinds of movement. It seems you're already using the 1 battle per 3 day "tick," allowing supporting units to come in after the first battle, which is really the only "combat" movement in the model. Unless you expect people to be setting up giant empires on this demo there may not be need for anything complex.

I suggest that for the present, like Civ, roads allow strategic movement regardless of who "owns" the territory, so divide move cost by 2 or 3. Unlike Civ you are requiring military units to intervene directly rather than indirectly via ZOC. That is where the model breaks down: you need AI for decisions about how to react. It makes little difference what your movement rules and rates are at that point. The only thing is after battle does the invader continue moving, or does movement cease regardless of how trivial an encounter may be to the invading force?

What we need (eventually) is strategic generalization of movement and supply that allows for reasonable response to invasion and reasonable extended campaigns. That means not having rigid movement allowances or action points, except for extreme limits that we'll encounter only when moving across central Asia, or attempting to capture Gaul in one turn.

[Mark_Everson]

Harli:

Well, You don't have to hurry quite as much anymore, I am going through a period where I am slightly "burned-out", so I need to goof off a little bit. So if you just could come up with this stuff as soon as possible without significantly sacrificing quality that is probably the best approach at this point.

It sounds like we are mostly in agreement on the standing army vs. militia thing. We just have a bunch of details to work out.

don Don:

I think of movement of five is too large. One of the main reasons that we chose a month, was that under combat movement rates you would be able to move a few squares at most. Allowing locking in and of movement of any amount > something like three squares would not allow the player to react to unforeseen circumstances. Strategic movement on roads being a factor of two or three faster is about what I had in mind. Harli and Krenske, what do you guys think about that? The distinction between your own territory and the other guy's really comes down to a matter of supply. I guess if you are in supply that it doesn't matter whose road you're traveling on so long as you also have maps. Partisan activity could come into play also...

The rigid action points are only for handling things behind the scenes. The player should never really see them, except to know that if I move this far I can't also have fortified camps every night or something like that.

[Henrique Duarte]

Don don

I am not really sure about this one but if I understood well the ideas of the Mil fellows, each economic turn will see a big amount of movement - the biggest problem was how much movement and if the AI would cope with all the changes that would occur during a single econ turn.
If they can manage to squeeze enough movement per econ turn without penalizing game fun then I suppose that, no mater what your basic economic capacitiy is, you can still be overruned if you are either caught unaware or without a big enough militia/task force to defend yourself.

By the way you can´t really "stockpile" manpower, as Harli said the most you can do is keep a sort of regularly trained militia on call and it would cost you just to maintain this militia. In game terms I suppose this means the most you can do is mobilize your militia for defense (which IMO is reasonable) or use this reserve to make a task force.
What I think is unreasonable is that a player can attack a province that as little or no standing army and expect it to fall on its lap without defense, at least for pre-modern times. If you attack Gaul, even if there is no horde expecting you, you should anticipate that the horde will pop up as soon as you start trampling their lands.

[Richard Bruns]

There seem to be a lot of problems with the two different timescales. I have an idea for moving military units within the economic timescale. This has been brought up before, but I think that it has enough merit to be considered again.

The plan is mainly for using military units in the early game. Assuming that the average turn early on is 10 to 20 years, why don't we treat early military units the same way we treat airplanes or cruise missiles? A soldier will only be fit for fighting for at most 20 years anyway, and after that they get too old and exhausted. So people can build attack units with the realization that they will last one turn. They send it out on a campaign path in the same fashion that they would order an airstrike.

For defense, players build garrison units that automatically replenish themselves every turn. If their territory or a nearby one is attacked, they 'scramble' like fighters to meet the threat. If they win, they return to their base. This prevents anyone from getting in your territory if you have a good defense frontier.

When the armies meet, the current military model takes over, allowing the player to choose tactics and command troops like they normally would.

This idea has several advantages:
1. Less troop micromanagement, and thus quicker miltiplayer games
2. Realism. The scales for miltary and civilian operations will not have to be different. Also, you will not have some military unit exploring the map for hundreds of years. Map exploration would be done with units that return to base at the end of the turn.

Alexander's armies explored and comquered all of Persia in less than 10 years. A Clash player could duplicate this by building a lot of armies and sending them swarming into enemy territory. They fight and return to their homeland in one turn. The territory is then open for your people to colonize.

To counter this threat, you are informed of enemy troop buildups so you can raise garrison armies to defend yourself. If attacks do not take place until the turn after they are ordered, a defender who knows about the attack order can build defenses before the attack arrives.

I am not suggesting that this be the only method of troop movement. I am suggesting that it be an option for the early game. It should require very little excess coding; just import the code for fighter and bomber behavior. I know that this idea in its current form is not complete enough to be used, but I think that it can be used as the basis for something suitable. I would like to know what others think about this. A player who cares about civ management more than military movement would probably find this to be a more appealing fighting system.

[don Don]

Mark,
Seems like that's a risk the player must evaluate. Send you troops off and you're vulnerable, especially if they're more than 1 turn away should the need to recall them arise. If movement is 3 or 5 at that point it doesn't matter.

The move after battle is still a more important question. If engaging an enemy force effectively ends movement for the turn it again doesn't matter if I had one point left or three.

[Mark_Everson]

I'm for continuing movement after battle if its within the scope of the force's mission.

What do you think Harli? It would need Some AI to figure if the original mission were still feasible

[don Don]

Can you change the weight of moving more than a certain distance in the AI, unless it is simply transfering a unit to a city or fortress? Then it would be less likely for the AI to leave itself wide open.

[Harlikwin]

Mark:

Yeah move after a battle seems fine to me... Though as you said the AI would have to reevaluate what to do. Especially if it lost etc...

-Harli

[LOGO]

There's a couple of people who just started talking about the rate of movement system, I think this is pretty important so I'm throwing out a couple ideas.

-first of all we have to have MUCH more variables to make movement rate interesting, which means just a little bit unpredictable

-Roads, there really isn't that much differance between a high way and a Roman road so I guess we can leave it at that,

-train tracks, this is really stupid, why does an army automaticly get their own train in Civ. II when they pass over a track? I realize trains were used strategicly in WWI and the civil war but I don't know much about them, anyway the idea should be reformed

-wheater/climate, this should be a biggie, things like a horrible winter should dramaticly affect your spead (and your casualties) I urge you to factor in the climate (Napoleon in Russia) and make the wheather semi-random

-guerrilla forces, they should REALLY slow you down, I'm not too sure about the specifics

-terrain, odviously it's kind of hard to pass the grand canyon or the Alps, I think it should slow down

ooops! out of time, I'll finish this up later.

[Xin Yu]

The combat system should not be a 'one size fits all' one. There are different situations where different factors will become cruicial in deciding the outcome of a battle. I'll try to list some of them here.

I think battles can be classified into the following groups: Ambush, Skirmish, Siege, Duel.

Ambush: in this type of battles a factor of 'suprise' is incorporated. This includes the chaos caused by sudden appearance of enemy troops or other situation such as fire set up by enemy or boulders rolling from hilltop. The characteristics of Ambush is that one side is well prepared while the other is not.

Skirmish is an unprepared battle for both sides. Veterans will gain an upper hand in this situation. The occupation of strategic positions such as certain high points will make differences in the outcome of the battle.

Siege is an attack of a side to another side behind geographic obstacles, natural or man-made. Important factors are supply for both sides and siege weapons available for the attacker.

Duel is more interesting. In a duel, both sides are well prepared. Each army will have a left front, a center front, a right front, and a reserve (some armies have 1st and 2nd reserves). Each army will have one or more bases. The roates connecting a base and the front are called line of communications. Occupy an enemy base or cut off the line of communication will severely damage the enemy's supply and sometimes will cause chaos. Flanks are the two sides of your army. Some terrians give you protected flanks (river, cliff, etc.) while others give you open flanks where the enemy may strike from. A battle of duel is considered win if one side forced the other side to retreat, either by pushing it back or by occupying its bases.

There are several classical tactics in a duel type of battle. Center break, double-break, single flank, double flank, falsed retreat (to lure the enemy into a double flank), infiltration (send troops to cut off the lines of communication), and so on. Each of them has different pros and cons. For example, in a single flank attack your main resources are allocated to one side of the front, making the center and the other side weaker. Mobility is very important in catching opportunities. Suppose your right front is winning, if your reserve is too slow then the enemy will have time to push your troops back, thus you lose the opportunity.