Military Model IV

[Mark_Everson]

It's time for Military Thread IV!

For reference, the beginning of the immediate predecessor, the Military III discussion, is here.


A brief status report is in order, and seeing as there's no one in charge of the military model design at the moment, I can't stick anyone else with doing it...

The current model:

For an overview of what has gone before you should look at the Military Page at the Clash web site. For a brief idea of what we're doing, look at the introduction there. After that, the next important thing you should check out is the battle and units model worked out by Harli and Krenske. Here is a link to the Scouting Model of their design. Don't follow the links in it, more current links to the other modules (Manuver, Assault, and Units) are found in the Updated Model. Please go down to Krenske's post of February 2nd for brief discussion of the revised model.

Although we have a lot of the bare bones of the model, there is an Enormous amount of specification, and refinement, to be done. If you are a Military Guru and would like to apply for the position, please let me know in this thread, or e-mail me. We are also interested in getting whatever comments people have at any level on the basic models, or things that were set in the other discussions. But the most important part is that we will soon have code to test further parts of the model, which leads to the...

Coding Status:

Laurent D. is busy getting the new military code off the ground. I will leave it to him to update the status at a future date.

[Edit 3/28] Put in link to updated model up top.
[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited March 28, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited March 28, 2001).]

[Lord God Jinnai]

I like the solution 1, but with some changes. First, a province need not have an economic center if it has a military center such as a fortress or encampment that should solve most of the problems, but for the few remaining ones, the AI or the player can designate a point within the province for these units to be constructed. This may also leed to a small city-like boom because the resources will be centered there. Generally if the AI plaaces it, it should be for strategic area first and then possible city growth as secondary.

In cases where 2 or more such city/fortress combinations occur within 1 province, the player can either focus on having them be built in only 1 place, which default should be the largest fortress or have the option of pooling resources from the neighboring squares of each.

[Mark_Everson]

One thing has come up in my Econ model coding that relates to the military model. It involves govt orders to build military units. What I envision is that the player or AI orders such and such a queue of units to be built and can have either resource constraints (like use local taxes only) or time constraints (extra money needed then comes from the treasury). There will also be effectiveness constraints so you don't build legions in places where it is especially expensive to do so. And of course you can specify what region you want things built in also. So far, so good, its flexible and doesn't require much micromanagement to get what you want.

The problem happens when running the economy at an individual map square level like I'm doing now. If the govt order is "Build Legions everywhere using 35% of tax revenues" it is simple to do just that. But you won't get very satisfactory results, because squares with small economic capabilities will take Forever to build one legion.

Solution #1:

You could just build all the legions in cities, with their presumably much larger economies, and just take cash taxes from the little places. Over time this economic stimulus will grow the city economies even larger and stronger. This works fine where a few squares in a province are predominant economically. It doesn't work when the economic oomph is spread evenly.

Solution #2

I have a crude solution that I'm not quite happy with. I'll present it, and then we can see if anyone else has a better idea. You can have all the squares work on legions, but not require each square to build a whole legion itself. FE every time a square gets to, say, 10% of the size of a legion it marches off to the provincial capital to be unified with other bits into a whole 'standard' legion. Optionally these 'stub' units could just teleport there 'cause they'd be really annoying on the map IMO.

Any suggestions from the croud?

[Richard Bruns]

Possibility:

Define how much time you want to take to build the stuff. Then pool squares into "production units" so that each production unit takes the specified amount of time to build the unit. For example, 20 underdeveloped squares combine into a production unit to make 1 legion in over a period of 2 years, while a city square makes a legion in 2 years all by itself. The unit, when built, is moved to either the border or a nearby city. This has the added bonus of alloting defense according to economic capacity, guarding more valuable regions.

[LDiCesare]

Caravans? Solution 2 reminds me of building wonders in civ: You could have caravans that are built (fast) in one place, and that are building a given kind of work (here armies). Once the caravan is built, you move it to someplace and it helps building. That's solution 2 but more general (not only units could be built that way). You could either show the caravans as units (so you can attack them, they cannot defend) or teleport them with a cost (loss of time, loss of production) or make them "trade routes" (just lines drawn -or not- along the map which could be pirated if we add that one day).

[Mark_Everson]

Hi All: Thanks for the ideas!

I think Richard's idea is clearly better than what I had. I am inclined to just accept his idea for the time being since its farily easy to implement, and yet fits with everything.

I don't really understand your piece LGJ. If you use solution 1 there Must be areas with high economic activity where you build the units. Otherwise it will take forever to build in the middle of nowhere. The resources won't get there by magic... If there are no artisans there, all the raw materials in the world won't do any good, etc. When I get Merchants working, your idea will be possible, but Very expensive, since you need to bring everything, including workers if not there already, to your military outpost. IMO its much better to build the units where the production capacity is, and then ship them off to the fortress or whatever.

The caravans you're proposing Laurent are basically what Merchants are supposed to do. (The only difference is you are tranporting the men as well as the weapons.) But right now I don't have the Merchant code written, so its not a solution .

[Lord God Jinnai]

The one problem you face still is in backwater provinces with no economic activity woth mentioning, not much more than your local village and its not near any major threat so there are no military instalations nearby.

[Krenske]

Hi all,

I am back from the wilds of Africa, Egypt and India, I now have a much better understanding of just what civilisation is. (No it is not the actual buildings but the underlying ideas, education and communication ability. Anyone can take over a civilised infrastructure but give it a generation or 2 and not much is left.)

I have been able to aply some thought to the 40% complete combat model we had in place and have decided to give it some strategic beatings until it reaches 45% or maybe more. It is apparent that the existing version is veryflexible but would also be very difficult to code an AI for.

I am attempting to simplify the model by removing some of the phase repetition (in the scouting and maneuver phases) replacing it with a single step. A victory in the scouting phase will modify the maneuver phase and a victory in the maneuver phase will modify the mass combat\assault phase.

Hopefully the result will be a faster resolution following a systematic approach not requiring a lot of AI intervention in the actual resolution of each battle.


Note I did a quick review during some of my flights of average troop concentrations in battles over the last 5000 years and found that they rarely got larger than 40000. Our current element based system assumes the use of 500 man elements with damage counted in the 100's of men. So almost all historical battles at least up to the age of napoleon would have about 80 elements per side which equates to around 6-10 actual units within each TF. Even modern battles rarely involved more than 40 000 men in any one engagement. Just some information to put things into some scale.

[This message has been edited by Krenske (edited January 23, 2001).]

[Mark_Everson]

LGJ: Well, we'll see how it works out... I don't think its a major issue.

All:

There is some discussion on the building of military units, elements etc. taking place in the Infrastructure Model thread. We are also discussing things like shipyards for building battleships etc. Its just the last few posts in that thread that will be of interest from a military perspective.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Paul, welcome back!

Your ideas / observations sound good to me. Looking forward to more .

Although what you say about troop densities sounds right, modern battles will be much more complicated, because a single square won't contain the battle. (As you well know.) So there'll be interaction between lots of battles going on in individual squares. That's going to be more of a challenge for the AI than even the complexity of the current single-square battle model! But it sounds like your simplifications to the model won't really cost much in terms of the flavor of the system anyway. You might want to think in the background about how the model handles big modern battles that roll from square to square... is there always a full scouting phase when an existing battle just grows with addition of new troops etc.?

But anyway, for the soonest demos just getting the single-square ancient battles to work right will be enough of a challenge. If you get the chance we should get a few ancient units actually specified so Laurent D. can acid-test the details of the combat model with semi-real numbers!

[LDiCesare]

I have coded the very basic combat system and unit system. If you can provide me with how scouting should affect deploy phase and how deployment should affect fight, along with any ideas to simulate combined arms tactics, I could really begin coding the model. Currently in a TF all units strike the first unit of the next TF, which is quite poor but easily coded.
I can think of making a small grid so that the army would face some direction and use scouting/deploy change that direction.
You could also think of cutting in center, left wing, right wing (additionally), deployment being useful there. Any idea?
Additionally, how should upkeep costs should work? Supposing that armies require only money, I think that the amount should change based on their orders (costs more to move than to stay still, even more to attack) and some economic factors, but which ones?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent:

One comment about armies only requiring money for supply... its true and yet it isn't. At the risk of telling you something you already know, here's a bit from the mil model intro.

quote: The necessity to supply military units with provisions and ammunition plays a very large part in their capabilities. I think we can actually handle supply in Clash without significantly hassling the player. The basic idea is to use dedicated merchants (already need to be coded anyway) to supply the troops. All the player need do is say how much money they're willing to spend to supply x front. The merchant/supply manager does the rest. You would build essentially a special class of merchant that would try to purchase goods from the surrounding area (or home, if transportation is good enough). This supply unit would travel with large armies and provide feedback to the army commander about whether (and at what price) it would be able to supply the army if it went to spot X. Units that were not fully supplied would fight at reduced effectiveness, or have the need to forrage for supplies, reducing movement. Mongol Horsemen could probably forrage fairly effectively, modern armored divisions hardly at all. Using a merchant that goes out and buys supplies for you has the advantage that the player doesn't have to orchestrate the supply itself, but only decide if the price of supply is worth it. A bonus of this supply system is that supply lines can be attacked. This allows proper modeling of a modern envelopment battle, one of the coolest martial activities known to man ;-). In addition the supply system would give a lot of correct flavor in terms of Where large armies could go historically, with little loss in smoothness of gameplay.

So it does only require money for supply, but the money needed won't be the same, even for a given army. It depends on where the army Is. And some places will be prohibitively expensive. Also if there are no paths for the supply line to follow the best merchant quartermaster in the world won't do you any good .

So at least in my thinking supply should be composed of varying amounts of the four basic commodities: food, resources, manufactured goods, and services. Mostly food and manfactured goods in most cases... Under usual circumstances all the player does is sign the check!

[LDiCesare]

I know armies don't need just money, I wrote that in order to simplify things, since I'll probably code supplies of only one thing in order to test it before I switch to lots of stuff.

[LDiCesare]

Currently, fights are coded as follows:
When armies meet, they check whether to flee or not. Attackers may not be able to flee, defenders always succeed (I took the behaviour from Mark's demo4 code).
When they fight, there should be scouting and deployment phases which determine whether they can flee or not, (like you can flee only if you deploy before the opponent).
The actual fight takes place afterwards. Currently the first unit found in a TF is attacked and may be killed in one round. Then I check again for flight and iterate (3 times in my test, which is arbitrary).

Questions:
Should the fight be allowed to end without a victor (both armies still alive, no one fled yet, ready to fight for the next turn)?
To put it another way, how many armies are allowed to die before you break off or stop fighting in order to let reinforcements come in?
Any ideas of how to use deployment? Does right wing, left wing, center front, rearguard and center/HQ make sense?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent:

Here is my take on your questions. Hopefully Krenske will get his comments in soon too.

Should the fight be allowed to end without a victor (both armies still alive, no one fled yet, ready to fight for the next turn)?

Yes, I think this is essential in a final model.

To put it another way, how many armies are allowed to die before you break off or stop fighting in order to let reinforcements come in?

I think periodically the odds should be re-assessed and the general/AI should make the decision based on available knowledge. I did this in demo 4 and it seemed to work sensibly.

Any ideas of how to use deployment? Does right wing, left wing, center front, rearguard and center/HQ make sense?

That sounds good to me. But we need some more specifics. If deployment is at the unit level then what happens if there are two units do you have just center and right with no left? that doesn't seem correct. So IMO if we use this there needs to be a way to thin units so they do more than one job. I could come up with a proposal, but will wait for Krenske to respond... If you get to a point where this is starting to hold you up, let me know and we can figure something between ourselves to use at least temporarily.