Military Model VI

[Mark_Everson]

Well... I did make a start on a siege model but haven't gotten very far. I'll try to get my act together later this week

[Mark_Everson]

I've started a new thread for the Fortifications and Sieges discussion, and posted my first crude version of a model in it.

[LDiCesare]

Reinforcements

Martin the Dane said in the D7 download/comments thread:

Reinforcement The game needs some form of reinforcement I have the following two suggestions.

1.Add survivors after battel to other units. (or combining units)
2.Reinforcement build command. This would either meen that the unit remains in a province or the reinforcement moves to the unit with risk of taking losses on the way

I understand the need of reinforcements as units don't heal. Reinforcement could be done by healing units, at a production cost. That is my idea all the way, though I never went so far as to start coding it.
Combining units after battle: I don't see what that gives except less unit figures in a TaskForce - could allow to have an idea at the TF strength without looking at the power circle.
Reinforcement build command: I think that is pretty much what I have in mind with "healing", except that I don't show the reinforcements moving. Note that with my model, all people drawn from the population would be drawn from the local province, although capital, production and services spent may come from anywhere.

[Mark_Everson]

Re: Reinforcements

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I understand the need of reinforcements as units don't heal. Reinforcement could be done by healing units, at a production cost. That is my idea all the way, though I never went so far as to start coding it.

Hi Laurent:

I think, with you, that auto-reinforcement of units that are at home is the best overall for gameplay. Even units not too far away from home should be covered in a simple way IMO. Resources could even be allocated at the civ level for reinforcements. Or perhaps resources allocated to building units could first be used to reinforce existing units, and only after that's done would they build new ones?

Reinforcement build command: I think that is pretty much what I have in mind with "healing", except that I don't show the reinforcements moving. Note that with my model, all people drawn from the population would be drawn from the local province, although capital, production and services spent may come from anywhere.

This sounds ok, but I'd rather avoid MM as much as possible. If people can't come from the province the unit is in, for whatever reason, I'd let them come from some distance away just to keep things smooth. But this would only happen within or fairly close to the home civ.

[Martin the Dane]

I have a minor comment about units and their drain on the population. I have at several occations felt that the drain on the population was far to greate, when building units the population dwindles, to a point where more than 50% of the total population consists of wariors.

In Jerico I have had a triving population reduced to unnder the size of a single unit, all to fights outside the province.

In other scenarioes it has not been as severe but it has been far in ecess of the male population, or even the adult population.

[Richard Bruns]

Posting from the D7 thread:

I think I prefer the old military model, with longer fights. I noticed in this game that units seem to suffer pretty severe attrition even if they won, and that they never replaced the men that they lost. What this led to was "Expendable Unit Syndrone" where all my men are reduced to numbers and cannon fodder. Especially in antiquity, a unit that is not completely destroyed should last for a very long time. Roman legions, for example, had long distinguished histories, and until late in the Empire it was rare indeed for one to be wiped out complely. Is there even any way to heal an injured unit?

Eventually I would like to see units gain experience as they win fights. This could be as simple as a bonus to Military Tactics that only affects the power of that unit.

And now some new comments:

I think that reinforcements should be fairly cheap, readily available, and automatic. There should be a certain amount of reinforcements provided for free, as part of the cost of the unit's upkeep. If I am paying 10% of the unit's cost each turn, I think it is perfectly reasonable to freely replace at least 5% of its health and strength each turn it is in my civ.

One problem with the current model IMO is that it makes absolutely no distinction between killed and wounded men. It assumes that anybody who is unable to fight is gone forever. This causes excessive casualties for even the victor.

I think that the model should keep track of all removed elements and not make them vaporize instantly. The battle would function as normal, but after the battle the model would decide what to do with these removed units. There are several options:

Vaporized: The unit is gone forever.
Killed: Manpower is gone but the equipment remains and can be reused, so that the unit is reinforced more cheaply. This may be difficult to implement.
Equipment Loss: The people still remain, but the equipment is gone and must be resupplied. Also may require changes to implement
Wounded: The element has a chance to be freely returned to the unit. Ideally the rate of return would be tied to technology.
Deserted: The element vanishes, but is added to the province as normal population
POW: The element has been captured by the enemy.

For now, I think we should at least implement the difference between vaporized and wounded. IMO at least 50% of the elements removed from combat should be returned for free (wounded and recovered) if the unit won the fight.

[LFS]

re-posted from another thread

==================================
regarding men lost in battle - it is an issue i really noticed in the carthage scenario, battles seem to knacker both sides. This is fairly un-historical, most ancient battles were fairly one sided in terms of the overall result - certainly there were battles where the victor took excessive casualities but they were exception not the rule.

(good ol Pyrrhrus comes to mind, but even his 2 major victories cost him only around 7000-8000 - about half that per battle- out of some initial 30000, and that was considered 'pyrrhic'. This game seems to make pyrrhic more desirable than a normal result).

I think the game does need some way of reflecting the generally one-sided nature of victories, and returning lost men back to the victor may be a way of achieving this - the victor recovers his wounded who lives to fight another day.

though the the current model does seem like it may well deal with combat during the period of the rifle and machine gun (circa 1860 - 1918)

One source puts ancient casualties from battle at about 7/10 for the defeated and 1/10 for victor. though this was probably averaged over various battles.

Marathon is another good example of one sided casualty lists - 100-200 greeks compared to upto 7000 persians!
========================

Going back to the hannibal scenario - recreating anything like the historical situation seems impossible, Hannibal fought several major battles (Cannae being the the most famous) and marched up and down the penninsula for years. In the game the army would be wiped after a winning a couple of major fights.

[LDiCesare]

Issues that haven't been addressed in the code yet:
Healing of units (and reinforcements, about the same).
Experience of units.

Both can be added at fairly low development cost (I just won't be coding something else at that time).

About deadly fights:
There are two issues:
1- Should fights last longer?
2- Should fights cause less damage to the winner (apparently, yes).
Excessive damage to units: I can heal half of the casualties at the end of a fight unkess the unit lost the fight (so victories aren't as pyrrhic...). I'll try that and check what the results look like.
I'll probably tinker a bit with lots of parameters and tell you what the results are so we can decide what to do exactly. If I can, I'll try to find a way of providing the maximum tinkering possibilities to players so I don't have to do it all myself.

[LDiCesare]

To make things clearer:
If I heal 50% of casualties after a fight, it will be after one tick, so, since there are 10 ticks in a turn, it turns out to be more than 50%. I'll try to set a Pyrrhic factor in some xml file so anyone can change the default value if that seems worthwhile.

[LDiCesare]

Originally posted by Martin the Dane
I have a minor comment about units and their drain on the population. I have at several occations felt that the drain on the population was far to greate, when building units the population dwindles, to a point where more than 50% of the total population consists of wariors.

In Jerico I have had a triving population reduced to unnder the size of a single unit, all to fights outside the province.

In other scenarioes it has not been as severe but it has been far in ecess of the male population, or even the adult population.

First, the armies aren't made only of males (see Mark for more comments about that in this thread or others).
There is a limit against the total population of the square, which can be changed in the scenario.
The number of men in a unit can also be adjusted quite easily in the military or scenario file.

I wanted a more detailed demographic model, but it didn't get coded (maybe check the Siege thread and Expansion & Settlement thread).

[Richard Bruns]

Putting a healing factor somewhere in the military xml file would be very nice. It would be even nicer if an application in the tech model could change that healing factor, but that is probably a ways off.

Also, is there some way to set a command line switch or something that changes the model from the variable element size used now to the fixed element size that was used in earlier demos? That way we could experiment with both and see which one we like.

[Richard Bruns]

I managed to get on one of the better computers, so I was able to actualy win delenda, thanks use of triremes as troop transports and liberal wall building. I even took over Sicily. But my entire trireme fleet was wiped out in melee combat when my heavily defended and walled city of Marsaglia was kamikazed by a single puny phalanx. That stinks, especially since I couldn´t build any more. Triremes should be left out of land combat completely, unless they are the only units of your side. Especially in a siege.

Before attacking the city of Carthage, I took over every square in Africa with my legions. Then I parked those legions outside the city, set the square they were standing on to the province capital of Africa, set a provnce order to crank out Siege Weapons at 300% of taxes, and hit the End Turn button a lot. Here is what my army looked like before it attacked:

Details for 61st TF

Attack 4200967
Health 108647
Defense 20.4
Personnel 80147

Contains 14 Legions and 56 Siege Weapons.

Details for Carthage

Attack 226619
Health 5000
Defense 23.3
Personnel 5000

Contains 1 Phalanx

I Breached the walls and won instantly, but it cost a lot Here is what my unit looked like the next turn:

Attack 3667205
Health 99782
Defense 20.2
Personnel 71282

So I lost 8865 men in that assault.

After I won, I experimented with disbanding units. Carthage contained 62560 Carthaginians and 62560 Numidians. I disbanded a unit, but forgot to check how many men were in it. Then there were 62790 of each ethnic group.

I disbanded a full-strength legion with 5000 men, and each ethnic group then had 64040 each. So disbanding a unit of 5000 Romans led to the population of Carthaginians and Numidians increasing by 1250 each. Disbanding an injured unit with 500 Romans only added 39 people to each ethnic group.

Next I tried this in Sicily. Disbanding a full-strength Roman unit resulted i teh Sicilian population increasing by 2500. It seems that disbanding only returns a limited number, and they all go local.

I would like to be able to disband an entire TF all at once. Siege weapons are easy to build, they slow down the army, and they are useless by themselves, so after I am done with them I would like to be able to ditch them all at once.

Also, IMO, disbanding should return all personnel to population, and they should be the ethnic group of the army.

Before that happened, there was the usual fight for Spain. I am almost certain that the enemy units get some kind of mobility bonus or cheat. They even seem to be able to teleport. As you can see in the attached photo, I had a line of forts to prevent them from getting into Italy, Not one, but three seperate Carthaginian TF´s simply walked right through this and marched into my homeland. I got quite annoyed at that. What does it take to keep them out?

[LDiCesare]

Also, is there some way to set a command line switch or something that changes the model from the variable element size used now to the fixed element size that was used in earlier demos? That way we could experiment with both and see which one we like.

I am afriad that is not possible. It changed a lot of things in the code and also in the xml files, and I can't really revert easily.

The siege stuff lacks the fact that siege weapons are supposed to fire BEFORE you attack. That is why defenders always manage to kill lots of attackers. It needs fixing.
I'd also like to disband the whole army personnel to the local population. Keeping track of the ethnicity may be troublesome, however, particularly when I'll start putting reinforcements in. I agree with you on what we should have, but it won't be just now for lack of coding time.

Now, the moving through troops bug is really annoying. They don't teleport, but something is bugged in the way I cancel orders. Normally an army entering a square where it fights has its orders suspended, and, if they flee, cancelled and changed to a "go back to last square" command. If however they win one fight out of ten in the several ticks, they might manage to go through. Anyway, it is a bug, and I'll try to chase it.

[LFS]

Now, the moving through troops bug is really annoying. They don't teleport, but something is bugged in the way I cancel orders

It could be considered a feature.

don't forget the gladius did not exactly excert a large zone of control, theres no reason why one army couldn't sneak though a square occupied by the enemy, especially if more mobile/competent than the enemy.
A fair number of major battles came as a surprise to at least one side, even occasionly both sides.

But on the whole it should be removed to stop it happen so much.

[LDiCesare]

Mmmm... Feature... It is the word for "bug I don't want to correct", isn't it?:P