Military Model VI

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
There is a hard coded provision in the code that kills elements with less than 1 health, in order to avoid fights between element1 with 0.0002 health vs. element2 of health 0.0004 which could last forever.

The Warrior unit that killed the hero had a Health value of 0.016. Fractional health was something I was used to. Is it a problem to put in an option to turn off that provision? I don´t see how it causes a problem, anyway. I assume that the code now is:

attack = element attack * number of elements

That would mean that one of those two wounded elements would die swiftly, since they each get their full attack, which would wipe out the little health that remains.

Now the amount of damage taken may be more than what you think. Increase the defense or decrease attack or change the damage divider until you have an idea of how much damage is dealt by a 1 attack vs. 1 defense unit in a fight.

I have been testing and tweaking this for two days now. Combat between two Warrior units with attack, defense, and health of 1 each works perfectly, as I described in the Scenarios thread where I posted my small number combat scenario. The Hero had exactly the same stats they did. Download the file to see that combat in action. It doesn´t include the Hero unit, though.

I certainly plan on altering the default military.xml file so that the weakest unit in the game has stats of 1 in most things.

[Richard Bruns]

I gave the Hero unit ten health and it still died in one hit. It is impossible that a fraction of a Warrior unit could deal 9 damage in one round of combat, when a combat between two such warriors usually lasts for about two turns, taking dozens and dozens of rounds even when they have 1 health each.

[LDiCesare]

The 1 limit really helped at a time. I am quite sure it would lead to endless fights if removed. One weakness of the combat model is that you are never actualy outnumbered more than 2 vs. 1, which means killing off a small party should take some time.
About the hero, that is the hero unit stats which I am interested in.
The attack of an element is attack*manPower (number of men), not attack*health (and damage is dealt to manPower, after being divided by nominal health).
When I suggested big values, I thought of 100, then 1000 if it doesn't work and so on. Then adjust damage divider if needed.
I don't really want to tune the system for units with manpower of 1 vs. units of manpower of 1000. At 1 vs. 1000, you should lose IMO, so I won't spend much time testing it myself unless you really find it extremely annoying.
I hope you haven't noticed yet that when I say I will not fo something unless it is really extraordinarily unprobable that I change my mind, I tend to do it right afterwards.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
The 1 limit really helped at a time. I am quite sure it would lead to endless fights if removed.

It seems to me like a remnant from the times of fixed-man elements. I don´t think it is useful anymore. After all, a fight between two severely damaged elements with manpower of 2 each should take just as much time as combat between two healthy units of manpower 20000 each.

One weakness of the combat model is that you are never actualy outnumbered more than 2 vs. 1, which means killing off a small party should take some time.

That could be a problem. If my Hero remained alive, he would only be able to kill two Warriors each tick, so they would take forever to die. Where does this limitation come from, why don´t units face more enemies? I thought combat was a matter of applying the attack power, dividing by defense and armor, and taking off that much total health from the elements in the front row.

About the hero, that is the hero unit stats which I am interested in.

I am not sure what you mean. I posted the Hero stats above. The Warrior stats were posted in the new scenario thread, the attack and health are both 0.001 and there are 1000 of them in a unit.

damage is dealt to manPower, after being divided by nominal health).

I see now. The Warrior unit did 0.001 damage to the manpower of Hero, which was rounded up, causing him to vanish. When his Health was ten, the Warrior unit did 0.0001 damage to the manpower, but it was still rounded up for instant death. If the damage didider is increased by a factor of 100, the Warrior unit does 0.000001 damage, and then Manpower is reduced by one.

When applied to the normal combat with Warriors with health of 0.001, this system works fine. Damage of 0.005 is divided by the health of 0.001 to do five damage to manpower, just as if a damage of 50 divided by a health of 10 does five damage to manpower. I also understand why you had to round up the manpower damage. If it ever got rounded down, than elements might never die when the attack was a lot smaller than the health.

Basically, the system seems set up so that each attack much deal an integer amount of damage to manpower. This causes problems no matter which way the damage is rounded.

Instead of dealing damage to manpower, could you deal damage directly to the health of the unit and then calculate the remaining manpower based on the health, rounded up to the nearest whole person? That way the two tiny units would still be able to kill each other but a strong element is not killed in a single hit from a weak one.

[LDiCesare]

Richard, damage is never rounded. Manpower is a float, so you can have 1.5. The only rounding is that manpower < 1 is killed, and not health < 1 as I thought. I think that explains all. This provision was because I didn't really want to have armies of 1 man running around after a fight. I'll comment it away and we will see what it gives.

The attack limited to 2 vs.1 is because at melee range you can't mop up on a man at 10 vs.1. e.g. A line of 10 men is attacked by a line of 20+: 10 flankers can go round the line of 10, who can attack only one opponent but are attaked from the front and flank. Thus the limit of 2 vs. 1.
Now in one tick, there are several rounds of fight (up to a limit now set in the xml file, I think 20 or 30 by default). So an element of 1 can kill at most 20 or 30 opponents in one fight.
The system is not designed to mimic 1-man fights, and I don't want to make it more complex or less realistic for mass fights in order to allow it.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent. My recent play of several scenarios leads me to believe the combat is slowed down too much. I just commented on this yesterday in the New Scenarios thread re: Jericho, and its even worse in Attila. I don't know what exactly the changes were that lead to it, but I thought I should let you know my opinion. IMO part of the problem in Attila is. . .

The attack limited to 2 vs.1 is because at melee range you can't mop up on a man at 10 vs.1. e.g. A line of 10 men is attacked by a line of 20+: 10 flankers can go round the line of 10, who can attack only one opponent but are attaked from the front and flank. Thus the limit of 2 vs. 1.

What about the rear? And there are two flanks. . . Not to mention other things like rotating in fresh troops that are possible when one has the preponderance of force. I think there should be able to be at least three or four to one odds have affect.

If nothing else its boring and frustrating having battles that are foregone conclusions last forever. That is what we have in Attila now. Is this easy to change? If not, some other things to make combat quicker, like giving advantages in the early-phase bonuses for power superiority could give similar results.

[Richard Bruns]

I have found that combat speed is entirely due to scenario design. In the current testbed, low tech combat is long but combat in delenda is very quick and deadly. But in my tech tree, high tech combat actually took more time than low tech combat until I cut down the armor of later units. I have fixed it so that most fights take a couple turns, but a powerful force can mop up a smaller one in only one turn, and that combat is relatively constant over all tech periods. It is a matter of balancing attack versus defese and armor in the unit design.

So combat speed is very easy to change in the xml, and no coding solution is required. I would also like the option of getting rid of the 2-1 limit, though. Can you fix it so that it reads from a tag in the military defaults with a name lime "MaxOutnumbering" so the designer can play with it and see what happens?

What happens to attack numbers when manpower is rounded? Does an army with 10.5 men have an attack of 10.5 times element attack?

And I don´t see any major difference between armies of 1.5 men and armies of 0.5 men running around after fights, so I vote to keep that commented out. Anyway, the smallest army I have seen is 16 men. If endless fights are a problem, the attack can be rounded up to the nearest whole man so that 0.02 men versus 0.1 men is over swiftly.

[LDiCesare]

As Richard said, there are now lots of figures that can be used to tune combat. There are militaryConstants in military.xml. Touch the damagedivider and heal rate and you should be able to move from deadly fights to no fights.
I changed one thing to allow units with manpower lesser than 1, that is to round to nearest higher integer the "frontage" of units.
About flanking, 2 vs. 1 is about the max you'd get on a line: (a for attacker, d for defender, in compact formation):
_aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa_
addddddddddddddddddddddddddda
_aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa_
Additional elements provide increased firepower if they have ranged fire.
It should be possible to provide customization of the 2 factor, but I am not sure it is needed, as other factors can speed up the fights, and healing rate gives the attacker a diminution of the casualties anyway.

[Richard Bruns]

Melee combat rarely happens in a nice line; it is usually more like a mob, and it is entirely possible for people to be outnumbered by up to nine to one or worse in such a situation:
aaaaaa
adaada
aaaaaa

[LDiCesare]

The situation you describe doesn't match what happened in armies like phalanxes. There were lines, walls, you couldn't flank in the middle of a line. Greeks used a shield bearer and a spear bearer for instance. Pikemen, the Swiss of the Renaissance for example, fought in tight formation. That is also true of roman legions. The battle of Hastings also showed this kind of behaviour: Armies are not mobs.

I think, however, an improvement could be made to allow different frontage in attack and in defense, allowing an attacker to regroup itself more than usual if they outnumber their opponent. The examples I gave were mostly about infantry formation, defensive formations. Cavalry are different, and for cavalry, your example could be good. Since I thought cavalry had little to differentiate it from infantry anyway (better mobility is currently not very useful), it could be an option to allow cavalry to better regroup, and thus flank enemies more effectively. Since cavalry was a flanking weapon, I think that would be accurate.

Thus I propose to leave the system as is for infantry, and to provide a mobbing value for cavalry (actually this would be per element, so you could give it to infantry too if you like). Note the flanking units model works quite well in CtP2. What do you think?

[LFS]

I'm not entirely sure what this 2-1 limit is about, but at least in melee battles (i.e. pre gunpowder) flanking and rear attacks were devestating (they still are )- its a morale thing as much as anything else, but also the loss of formation for the victim - you just can't maintain a phalanx (elite units may coprfor a while) when fighting to more than one side, and most disciplined units rely on a formation (phalanx being the extreme example) for effectiveness.

What i'm saying is once you are hit in the flank or rear (all other things being equal) you are likely to lose rapidly. Of course other things are seldom equal - but don't treat a flank/rear attack as simply a way of getting extra attacks on someone.

[Richard Bruns]

A mobbing value assigned to each element would be good. That way elite troops can mop up weaklings better than ordinary units.

If we want to get really detailed, we can assign a formation value to each element, and the maximum outnumbering can be the attacker´s mobbing value divided by the defender´s formation value. If the formation value is bigger than the mobbing value, the maxoutnumbering could actually be less than one, which would simulate things like the Greek phalanxes being able to take out massive numbers of unorganized Persians because the Persians couldn´t fight them all at once. Terrain would provide a nice bonus to this formation value, simulating the fact that difficult terrain prevents flanking.

[Richard Bruns]

Elements and Units

Replying to comment in the other thread:

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi Richard. I think Laurent's approach [units with many different elements] is better. First it makes individual units not be hamstrung by being too one-dimensional, and thus losing combat effectiveness. Second its the way brigades and such work in the real world. To finetune overall number of skirmishers or scouts in an army you certainly could have dedicated skirmishing/scouting units that could be added in addition to the normal scouting strength of a unit.

The problem is that each individual element has a different tech requirement, which meant that if a unit had multiple elements it could not be built until all the element prerequisites were met. So instead of pushing to Ranged weapons 2, getting archers, and adding them to a TF with Warriors, you would have to hit knowledge 2 in a lot of different things and then build a generic "Army level 2."

Forcing the player to get a lot of different prerequisites for each unit drastically limits the player´s options. If we already have all of the seperate elements available to build, then there is absolutely no point in making a unit that has several types of elements together, especially when a unit is nothing more than a bunch of things thrown together, with no cost benefit or combined arms bonuses compared to building them seperately and combining them in a TF.

And if we do not have the seperate elements available individually, then the players options are reduced even more. Making a seperate default unit for all kinds of different possible element combinations would be a mess, and would still not allow the player to customize the army.

The only benefits I see to putting a lot of different elements together in a unit is flavor for individual civs, and as a crutch for an AI that cannot handle combined arms properly. The former is good for scenarios but bad for a generic default file, and the latter is rapidly being corrected by other means.

[Mark_Everson]

Re: Elements and Units

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
The problem is that each individual element has a different tech requirement, which meant that if a unit had multiple elements it could not be built until all the element prerequisites were met.

That certainly is a problem, and I have to admit I hadn't thought about it.

Forcing the player to get a lot of different prerequisites for each unit drastically limits the player´s options. If we already have all of the seperate elements available to build, then there is absolutely no point in making a unit that has several types of elements together

How about, its a lot easier to build a few types of multi-purpose unit than having to assemble lots of little pieces by hand? I personally have absolutely no desire to do it the way that you think is best.

. . . especially when a unit is nothing more than a bunch of things thrown together, with no cost benefit or combined arms bonuses compared to building them seperately and combining them in a TF.

But nonetheless a single unit can only have combined arms characterstics under the way it currently works. Your approach would eliminate that possibility. I feel this is a serious defect in the way you want to do it.

And if we do not have the seperate elements available individually, then the players options are reduced even more. Making a seperate default unit for all kinds of different possible element combinations would be a mess, and would still not allow the player to customize the army.

On your first point, there will be nothing to stop the player from doing it the way you advocate once the unit workshop is available. I just think that 80% of players won't want to do it that way. YMMV.

Lets see what Laurent and others think about these issues and we can at least work out a default approach for the near-term.

[LDiCesare]

I think having to assemble skirmishers with melee units by hand is not good from a micromanagement point of view. You are just pushing the problem anyway, since I can't combine a unit of 2000 melee-ers + 200 skirmishers if I don't have a unit of 200 skirmishers, and adjusting the cost orders of all the various units to get one good task force would be a nightmare for me. Particularly if/when units heal, where I would have to replace a damaged unit in a taskforce by a new one instead of letting the unit heal all by itself.

I also don't mind needing 2 techs to be able to build a unit.