Military Model III

[don Don]

Good! it is important to stay out of the typical ever-increasing experience and morale prevalent in this type of game. Allowing experience and morale to decrease when losses (due to battle or retirement) are replaced with green troops, or when a leader sucks, will help keep play interesting.

It would be especially interesting if some of these factors are hidden form the player. The "official" morale and experience status would stay the same while the "true" levels drop. Only combat, or perhaps an mobilization exercise against a competant commander, would have a probability of revealing the negative leadership effect. But only a probability, because even the best leader sometimes makes a mistake, or is simply bested on the field by dumb luck.

[LOGO]

Don don, you idea of your comanders lying to you is one that is being debated on the Charactor model (or should I say was being debated, nobody's been posting lately) under the idea of corruption. There are two sides, one that says corruption is a necisary part of the experience that would increase realism and another that the game would be broken when you can't trust your own information. I don't quite have an opinion, and the only real agreement each side has had is that if it was implemented it would be optional.

Also I don't quite understand what you meant by "dumb luck" there is a amount of randomness to ever battle in the model if that's what you mean.

[Harlikwin]

Ok, In terms of the general thing and the charter model there are really 2 options.
One, every general you have is a character. Problem with this is it might lead to too many charaters in the game.

Two, There are none to a few charaters that are generals, while the rest of the generals are modeled in a more limited way through the mil model. Naturally the charters should be better than the mil generals (or look that way) This keeps the number of charters down, but provides less choice in terms of who is commanding what.

Also on the "not knowing exactly how the military is doing" This is something I want modeled and I even have an Idea of how to do it. The point would be that you would have a rough idea of certain stats within a certain % depnding on techs. As for leader stats these would be random (to the player anyway) and the more the general got used the more concrete they would become (I do have a rough formula for that too) I'm pretty sure that this won't make demo 5 though...

-Harli

[LOGO]

I'm sorry but how many TFs would be in the game at once? I'm having a tuff time putting the TF system in our context, for example would our army in Desert Storm be 1 TF or several? And what about our north African offensive?
There's an idea in the Charactor model that i've given and it has to do with advisors. The Advisors might be charactors so my idea was a sort of military window. Let's say your the US and you've decided to attack Iraq (there would be an advisor system helping you to decide if you should attack Iraq also) and you're really not in the mood to micro-manage. Well you could go to a military screen where you'd have all your top generals and they'd pitch different stratigic ideas, everything from the Gulf War like attack to Kosovo air attack to a vietnam to a nuclear attack. You'll be able to move between different strategies or even make you own (but put it in a general's hands to make it work) I don't know how feesible this system could be but if we could pull it off it would be fantastic. Any thoughts?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi LOGO:

Your idea has been in the general plan for quite a while. It all depends upon how good we can make the AI as to whether this is really a good alternative for the player or not. FE with civ2-level AI such an idea would be pointless since the AI is so Awful very few would ever want to put it in charge...

[LOGO]

I totally agree, it's really not worth doing without a really great AI. Honestly if I knew how to code I would again how many TFs would be in any given game at once? I think the charactors you would deal with would be at the very lowest a 4 star general.

[Brian W]

Hello everyone. This looks like a very cool game and I would love to be a part in making it. I have emailed Mark Everson and he told me to introduce myself and to ask for an order of implementation. I could probably start working on something by Friday of this week. Thanks.

Brian W.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Brian:

I'd like to give you a warm official welcome to the project!

Until Harli comes up with implementation suggestions, I'll just throw out a few things as thought starters...

We've already discussed getting the pathfinding algorithms that JimC got going. There is also a demo for some more advanced uses of pathfinding that you can reach from the MapAI page of the web page. After that one thing that can probably be coded soon is the ticks system that is up higher in this thread.

Glad to have you in the project!

Mark

[Harlikwin]

Few things...

Logo:
The smallest character I would envision would be something like a 4 star, i.e. head of a TF (at the smallest scale) As for your earlier suggestion it would be great, but only if we can get the AI to do it. Currently the battle resoluition model is up in most of it's entirety, (I haven't heard from kerenske in a while but we shall finish it once I do)

As for new stuff. The next things that I would like to discuss would be: Supply, Guerilla warfare, SF implmentation... Stuff has been posted previously on these topics so I would advise people who have thoughts on them to go back in the fourms / pages and read what has been talked about so that we don't have to replicate a lot of arguments...

-Harli

[Harlikwin]

Brian

Welcome aboard...

I guess I detailed where I kinda want to go next in my previous post. However if you have something specific you want to do that I didn't mention let me know. Also if you have any thougths on the current battle resolution system (on kerske's webpage) let me know.

Logo:
TF's um, basically one or two per a geograpohic area. Ex, Desert storm would likely be one big TF (the hooking bit) and like one blocking TF. A place where you would have several TF's would be like WWII Russian front where you would have like 3-5 per side. (mainly for manouverability purposes) Ex: Army group center, south and north...

-Harli

[Mark_Everson]

quote: Originally posted by Harlikwin on 03-29-2000 09:23 AM TF's um, basically one or two per a geograpohic area. Ex, Desert storm would likely be one big TF (the hooking bit) and like one blocking TF. A place where you would have several TF's would be like WWII Russian front where you would have like 3-5 per side. (mainly for manouverability purposes) Ex: Army group center, south and north...

Hmmmm... At the front level, this is a different conception from what I had. I'd envisioned something like 3 or 4 TFs under one commander would compose each army group (of which we'd have 3-5 for the Russian WWII front) Giving something like 15-20 TFs for a big front.

I agree that operationally there would be 3-5 army groups, but realistically the forces would be spread out over like 20 squares or the dispersions would be all wrong. So at a minimum we would need some patch to fix this problem. I think that could be worked out. We could assume the Army Group size TF has a ZOC or something to simulate forces that are actually in those other squares, but aren't shown for game mechanics purposes.

The more important problem I see is with fun. Players IMO will love to try encirlement strategies etc, and with a small number of TFs that aren't filling the whole 'front' this kind of thing will be much harder to pull off.

That said, your approach would almost certainly make the AI much easier to do, and reduce micromanagement if we can pull it off while still having max fun factor.

Thoughts from everyone on this Big issue?

[F_Smith]

Personally, I agree with Mark:

I would likely enjoy more units on a big front, from 10-20.

But otherwise, excellent model. Great object design (Taskforce, Unit, element), using both encapsulation and inheritance. Tight integration. Very, very good work.

You can go very far with this design.

Can I suggest one last layer of encapsulation?

Add to 'Element' a 'weapon' and 'armor' object? It would simplify some of the coding. Just a suggestion!

Again, good stuff.

[LOGO]

Hi Brian welcome to the party

A thing about TF's, I agree with both Mark's and Harli's points, though I do think Harli's system would be easier to manage but mark's might be a little bit more satifying. I'm trying to imagine what they would look like on the battle field but it's just not clicking, I don't think we should worry too much about it, this sounds like one of those problems we really need to try out and see which works better. I don't think 10-20 is at all a realistc number, and I think it might just become really stressful when you get that high, if I'm wrong tell me why (it happens so times )

Has Krenske put together a navel model yet? I remember we were putting off both air and naval until we had land.

A little thought, do we have anything in our model governing night fighting? It sounds pretty complex and I don't know if it really has a place but it did play a big role in several conflicts...

I was just thinking, I really didn't like civ. II's use of cruise missles at all. It made absolutly no sense to me why we'd have to go through the incredible micromanagement and unrealistc expense for such an unimportant weapon. I think it would be much easier if the "cruise missle" system be used only by a unit's weapons not individual (we could put the SCUD like launchers under a form of artilleria, this might drasticly effect the combat system, which cruise missles did do when they became a real weapon) Along with meduim range missles I think we need a real ICBM system, the best I can think of is one somewhat like the satelite warfare system in SMAC, thereby you can easily launch missles at targets and automaticly set a responce to launch back at enemy nations. We should also create Star Wars project to go along with that.

[This message has been edited by LOGO (edited March 30, 2000).]

[Brian W]

For the past week, I've been reading up on this game. This is probably the largest web site I have ever seen! I'm still only half way through. Anyway, I have been particularly impressed with the military model. It sounds very well thought out and it will be awesome! I'm glad I have the opportunity to help in this game.

I especially like the idea of ticks and the entire battle model. That is one thing that I don't like about the current games in this genre. Either you win the battle or you are destroyed forever and only one kind of unit can join in a battle at a time. This is the best model I've ever seen. Keep up the good work!

[Harlikwin]

Ok, couple of things...

Mark: Your idea is ceratinly feasible. The system can be scaled to that many units, we can have TF's divide into smaller units. It was something Kerenske and I talked about a bit. The smallest unit though would be an element. If we want to go this route the game will kind of look like TOAW (I&II) since there you can subdivide units quite a bit. Though if we do that I would like to include a small factor for each time a unit is divided it looses combat efficiency (the units are trained to fight together and share equipment) But it can certainly be done that way... The system is at this point designed to pander to the wishes of the users

F_smith:

Could you expand a bit on the armor and weapon objects? (if you just want to email its fine)

LOGO:
Night fighting will be generalized under a misc tech modifier.

Also missiles etc will be dealt with more in the air model but my current stance on this is there are different classes of missiles (like in RL) we have Tac-battleield missels (TOW, Maverick, Hellfire, LAW) ARty missels (MLRS, SCUD, ETC) Strategic missiles (ICBM, IRBM etc. Also cruise missile packages)

Brian:
Glad you like the system.

-Harli