Pondering a possible future battle concept.

[KGB]

Piranha,

I understand what you want to do.

But unless players manually control the units or get a fair bit of control over the units how will you guarantee a Wizard/Elf gets to face a flier? You'd have to write logic into every unit since an AI would be controlling them. So in addition to Wizard/Elf trying to get to a flier you'd need logic for a flier to avoid/run from such units and only attack ground units as it's a pointless system if the flier doesn't try to avoid such units. That seems awfully complex on your side. Same with units avoiding piercing damage etc.

Plus right now fights are always 1-1. But if you had 3 units and your opponent only 2, you should get a 2-1 battle someplace. How would that be handled? Or a fast moving unit that moved 3 could literally always run from a slow moving unit that only moves 1 such that it could in theory perpetually avoid combat.

You'd need an awful lot of simulations to figure out how to handle that and deal with 2-1 attacks and AI's for all kinds of different units. Otherwise you get something that's not really any different than what you have now.

The strength of the current system is that it's got tens of thousands of games (War2/DLR/Warbarons etc) played on it to help balance things. A new system would need a tremendous amount of balancing effort. This would have to be done by computer simulation since games take so long to play that you'd end up taking a year just to get this kind of combat system remotely workable before you got down to the final balancing.

KGB

[Pillager]

ut unless players manually control the units or get a fair bit of control over the units how will you guarantee a Wizard/Elf gets to face a flier? You'd have to write logic into every unit since an AI would be controlling them. So in addition to Wizard/Elf trying to get to a flier you'd need logic for a flier to avoid/run from such units and only attack ground units as it's a pointless system if the flier doesn't try to avoid such units. That seems awfully complex on your side. Same with units avoiding piercing damage etc.

I don't think units would need to have an avoidance AI. Just have them behave aggressively, attacking opponents within range according to their priorities. Warlord has always been a brutal game, every unit fighting to the death without any thoughts of self preservation..can't see any reason why that should change.

[ezras]

this also reminds me of tartarus. a spectacular online game from faraway.co.uk (no mac client or else i'd still play) But I for one am already dreading some of the complex changes that are going to take place in beta4 and this seems to increase that complexity.

[KGB]

Pillager,

If units are just charging the nearest opponent then the whole concept of the tactical screen is a complete waste of time for Piranha to do. There are lots of other cool things that could be done for Beta5/6 etc.

The whole idea here is to give better chances for units to face other units in battle where they obtain some kind of advantage (Wizard vs flier). If it's going to be complete random chaos we are better off just staying with the system we have now. At least it has millions of combats done on it for balance purposes from War2-DLR. The new system is going to take at least a year to balance and do properly. That's because it's going to take a LONG time and many iterations to get enough trials to figure out if it works. I don't see the upside in a 1 year long system.

KGB