[Strategy / Risk] Battle realism

[ultrapro]

What's needed to make a strategy more real?
First part of any strategy is STATS. How fast should one unit kill other? If it's an upgrade chain? How strong should be archers compared to melee? What's advantage of horsemen?
Second part is tactical. What relief would it be very interesting to play? Apparently that every1 knows basics: if you have more melee, fight in a wide field, if you have more archers, you need a thin passage to put melee and widening for archers and reinforcement. But the world of battles is much more rich than simple wide and thin places.
Third part is control. What units and when should be ordered and what order should they have. Captain helps me to explain.
The most interesting is the fourth part: psychological. Does any1 know any spell or ideas about it? Just imagine, how to make a spell that makes e.g. 50 swordsmen to flee with speed 400 from a 12-knights manor only because somewhy feigned retreat turned to real.
If you have ideas about any point, please, reply. Even if my explanations seem too apparent.

 

[Awsan]

Fear could be something to experiment with to make strategy more real. Maybe base something on the WoW fear spell so that Fear happens when soldiers fight greater/stronger/more fearsome forces?

 

[ultrapro]

Maybe... to make it connected to mana or intreger value. if the unit is attacked, he loses 5 mana, allies recover .05%/sec (e.g. 2 mana). If the unit gets mana 0, he loses mana-recovery skill and flees. He may appear later next to the base. What do you think?

 

[Xonok]

One thing that tends to haunt many games is that ranged units are almost always more important than melee.
There's multiple ways to fix it, I thought about simple anti-gank measures.

1. When a tank unit takes damage then it gains X armor for Y seconds. This bonus stacks if multiple units attack, meaning that once all enemies have done one hit, the next ones will deal considerably less damage.
This solves the problem of even the toughest melee units being focused down before they reach the enemy.

2. All damage taken by a tank is reduced by diminishing 10% per 100 distance. Distance is considered 100 less all the time.
This means that at 100 distance(melee) the unit takes full damage.
At 200 distance the damage is 100*0.9, meaning a 10% reduction.
At 200 distance it's 100*0.9*0.9 = 19% reduction
300 distance - 200*0.9*0.9*0.9 = 27% reduction
400 distance - 300*0.9*0.9*0.9*0.9 = 35% reduction
This way the damage gain from using more ranged attackers diminishes when you have more of them, due to having to make more and more units for the same amount of extra damage.

3. Just like nr.2, but applied to buffs. Any slows/stuns from longer ranges will either last less or are weaker. This has the risk of making the slows/stuns useless though, if too harsh.

4. When a tank is on 100% health, it soaks(ignores) X damage. This is especially powerful if combined with nr2. The point is to make some units much harder to poke without starting a real fight.

Not sure if any of this is related to realism, but it sure makes a better game when the common pitfalls are avoided.

 

[ultrapro]

I don't think that melee is more important. to balance melee-arch proportion you need to do only 2 things:
a. set normal stats.
E.g. hp/attack/:
melee 100/50
range 10/75
b. make places with wide/thin places, so every player will have to build as many melee/arch as tactic allows.
Another deal with knights: what's difference between infantry and knights.
But your idea is quite remarkable, the only problem is it's hard for me to imagine. Thanks.

 

[Awsan]

i once thought of something like a shield formation. For example you have footmen with Defend, when multiple use Defend they form a shield wall, increasing armor for each of the footmen. This bonus stacks and increases as more footmen combine the shield wall.

Thoughts?

 

[ultrapro]

Too hard spell... It's a lot of more simple ideas which work more reliably. But... if that worked... would be good.

 

[Xonok]

I don't think that melee is more important. to balance melee-arch proportion you need to do only 2 things:
a. set normal stats.
E.g. hp/attack/:
melee 100/50
range 10/75
b. make places with wide/thin places, so every player will have to build as many melee/arch as tactic allows.
Another deal with knights: what's difference between infantry and knights.
But your idea is quite remarkable, the only problem is it's hard for me to imagine. Thanks.

Let's assume that each unit takes up a 100x100 circle.
With that implementation, a ranged unit with 600 range can already be stacked 5 times in front of a melee unit, not considering any other sides.
This is a huge imbalance, because to fix it you would need to already make melee units that:
1. are able to catch up to archers
2. deal 5 times as much damage
3. can survive long enough to deal the damage
It simply shifts the imbalance away, so that melee units are overpowered instead.

The practical and ugly reality is that for each melee unit you can place at least 5 ranged in the same space, while not losing any firepower.
Then again, melee units will get stuck behind eachother and thus, lose some of their effectiveness.

If you make melee and ranged units equally powerful in 1v1, then ranged units will dominate in groups.
If you make melee units able to resist archer groups, then they become OP alone, unless ofc you require them to be in groups, which again makes them too weak in 1v1.

It's bad no matter which way you look at it.

So since high range allows much better damage scaling for groups, then melee need something comparable. My suggestion was to make their defense scale if the enemy tries to overpower them from range.

i once thought of something like a shield formation. For example you have footmen with Defend, when multiple use Defend they form a shield wall, increasing armor for each of the footmen. This bonus stacks and increases as more footmen combine the shield wall.

Thoughts?

This would work quite well, except that it requires either a lot of different armor buffs(which is spam-ish) or a custom stat system that lets you create new auras.

 

[ultrapro]

You must adjust your tactic to unit's training and unit's training to tactic.
If you have more knights and less archers than ur enemy, you choose a wide field, leave a reserve and make him fighting there(e.g showing him only archers and weak infantry).
I've been mistaken, sry, talking about stats.
Melee: 400 with regeneration / 40 damage / heavy armour(damage value against light armour is higher).
Archers: 100 with smaller regen/60 damage/light armour(damage value against heavy armour isn't higher/lower).

 

[Xonok]

You must adjust your tactic to unit's training and unit's training to tactic.
If you have more knights and less archers than ur enemy, you choose a wide field, leave a reserve and make him fighting there(e.g showing him only archers and weak infantry).
I've been mistaken, sry, talking about stats.
Melee: 400 with regeneration / 40 damage / heavy armour(damage value against light armour is higher).
Archers: 100 with smaller regen/60 damage/light armour(damage value against heavy armour isn't higher/lower).

My point is that you can never fully solve this problem through stats only, because range is a mechanical advantage that is hard to counter in most cases.

 

[ultrapro]

You can add to melee units an "avoid" skill, and to ranged arrow skill, so only ranged surely hit melees. Otherwise melee r too strong compared to arch.

 

[Xonok]

You can add to melee units an "avoid" skill, and to ranged arrow skill, so only ranged surely hit melees. Otherwise melee r too strong compared to arch.

Usually it's the other way around though.

If melee are tanky enough to tackle ranged - then there will be thin melee walls with thick ranged behind them.
If melee deal enough damage to fight ranged, then they are simply better.

The usual warcraft III game has these problems as well, but partly reduced them by having a rock-paper-scissors system.
I would do something similar, but a bit more extreme.

For instance, you can make it so that melee are weak to ranged, because they are too slow and easily get hit.
Then you can have another group of units called assassins - They are as fast as ranged and have a high resistance to piercing damage.
Assassins would again be pretty much unable to fight usual melee, due to armor types or something.

This doesn't solve the fundamental problem, but would at least fix the results.

 

[ultrapro]

Im not sure but i guess u dont get what certain difference i mean
archer is normally weaker 1x1
horde of archers is weaker than horde of melee
but horde of archers + melee easily destroys horde of melee.
Archers have 1 advantage: more archers can attack at 1 moment.

 

[LordDz]

Age of Empires deal with ranged quite good, if a melee unit gets into melee range with a ranged unit, the ranged unit is usually dead in a few seconds.

So set the health of the ranged units to be very low, and melee and especially cavalry units will counter.

 

[Xonok]

Age of Empires deal with ranged quite good, if a melee unit gets into melee range with a ranged unit, the ranged unit is usually dead in a few seconds.

So set the health of the ranged units to be very low, and melee and especially cavalry units will counter.

Low HP will just make them hilariously weak to other ranged.

 

[ultrapro]

Btw. the main question was about retreat.

Good point, Tickles! Must be combined with minimal range. What about using multipleshot instead of arrow/artillery?

LordDz, i know loads of maps with balanced melee-ranged, but they have just 1 problem: archer kills melee in 30 hits.

 

[noob]

If what you want is more mixing of archer and melee perhaps you could add random melee friendly aura to archers for making more interesting to have a good number of archer in you melee horde and make interesting to compact units and you could give random archer advantaging auras to melee.
and you could add aoe units for not having players always clumping all theirs units they should spread when aoe is coming.
If you want only realism then know in real life archers have often unfair advantage in hudge area and are really disadvantaged inside of an house or small place with no long line(after bow second best weapon in exterior is spear).

 

[Dr Super Good]

The problem with ranged is the same as in real life. Trying to knife something requires you to be so much closer than trying to shoot them. Thus why modern warfare uses guns.

In the old days this was not really the case. Only particular types of bow posed serious threat to heavily armored people. Bows were mostly used against "trash" which consisted of very poorly armored troops or to apply pressure. Most fighting was done at melee range.

This sort of old combat translate very well into rock paper scissors style gameplay like age of empires had. Cavalry was good against archers, archers was good against anti cavalry and anti cavalry was good against cavalry. Maybe not exactly that with different branches but the idea remains. You need to give archers a weakness and melee a strength or it becomes the famous Longbow spam Age of Empires 2 had where the bowmen were pretty tough to stop due to their unusual properties as a elite unit.

The biggest problem WC3 has is that you cannot break ranks and mauve around the play field. In Total War series of games you could plow cavalry into the enemies ranged stuff by sneaking them around them if they were not careful. In WC3 you can exploit narrow passageways to funnel stuff against an army of ranged troops with no way for them to break through unless they kill your heavies blocking them.

Splash is also a huge problem in WC3 as a boulder makes sense to hit a few units but when you only have a few units in overly crowded situations it becomes insane. Having a catapult damaging 5-6 units per attack is realistic but not mechanically great for a game of this scale as you have 1 catapult against at most 100-200 odd troops where as in real life thousands might be involved.

Siege weapons could be a great way of countering archer spam with their AoE damage but you would need to make sure that they do not become the new archer by giving them heavy damage reduction against every other combat unit. It is very important that siege units do little damage to most units otherwise you end up with the stupid Empire Earth situation where whoever built the most siege units and whoever shot them first at the other won (the infamous, often banned by honour, ballista/artillery which if you built enough literally became unstoppable).

 

[Arrr]

Or you can make the range units attack ground
Or also, give ranged units some kind of melee (128 or more) minimum attack range, and add some kind of weak spell with melee range to melee-fight

 

[noob]

Test map of my previous suggestion.(it is not so much efficient)
In real life heavily armored people became less useful when efficient crossbow were invented as it were an very effective weapon for piercing armor but archers were more efficient than crossbowman because they had an higher firing speed.
In a mod it would be interesting to have the cycle archer>crossbowmen>heavy armored>archer

frozen

Seems that I made something so much trolling and stupid that people had to flee from the thread

 

[Pinzu]

Just give all units artillery attacks so all attacks can be evaded. It's particularly effective for melee units trying to avoid a hailstorm of projectiles as shown in this map I'm attaching. Obviously sitting in one place (which is required for them to deal the most damage up close) can still get melee units killed in this kind of scenario, but they'll be able to use hit-and-run tactics by continuing to move after they attack.

Giving melee units artillery attacks also allows ranged units to evade, and giving the ranged units higher movement speed technically gives them more agile evasion. It's a lot more realistic than stacking more HP, damage, or adding evasion to a unit that just stands in one place. It's also simpler than using complex formulas for reducing certain types of damage.

I like this idea, but if you test it with armies instead. One army consisting only of footmen, and another of footmen and archers. The footmen army wins because when they advance practically every shot misses and when they are fighting I believe a lot of friendly fire is going on.

I liked the idea about doing less and less damage depending on how close the unit is to the firing unit. But I can't see that being done without triggering it every time a unit is shot. Which would seem like a really bad idea if you have large army sizes...

 

[Ragnoras]

How about ; (symbol)losing units < units with advantage

Ranged soldiers< Cavalry because cavalry can gallop fast and get a kill quickly.

Pikeman > Cavalry
Because pikemans can easily stab a man on a horse with their long lances

Swordman > Pikeman
Swordman can get near a pikeman easily and stab the pikeman before he knews it.

Seige units < Cavalry, Ranged units

Seige units are slow and cavalry can easily get to a seige unit while ranged units fire more rapidly to still units


A Tower( Such as a areher on a tower)< Seige units
Seige units can break a tower or building easily

A tower> swordman, pikeman, ranged unit
Will swords, pikes and arrows ever break a wall? In reality...

My ideas

 

[noob]

what does not works is that IRL the swordsmen are not stronger than pikemen in exterior as the pikemen have longer range and that spears deals heavy damage and that they will see the swordsmen easily what is needed for fighting an square of shielded pikemen is ranged attacks in high number what is given by bows.
The advantages of an sword over an spear is it does not break as often and that it needs less training so you can have more swordsmen.
crossbowmen is the way to take out heavily armored but it is not efficient against bowmen or huge masses of troops and they are highly costly and needs an squire to carry their heavy shield.
halberds are an efficient weapon against cavalry as it disable them and kill them easily but you can not have many of them as the training for using them is long
bowmen are the best infantry for killing anything except heavily armored people and people rushing toward them with an efficient shield or cavalry.
siege like catapults and the like are nearly completely useless against anything except buildings as they have an very low accuracy and shoot at an extremely slow speed.
All units can lit enemy wood buildings by getting near and staying some time (they find some stuff for starting an fire in the building and burn it)
Roads walls and watch towers are the most important buildings as they allows you to control the map and to have an huge tactical advantage
by adding all those changes to your stuff it could do an more complex unit rotation

 

[Pinzu]

Archers attack range decreases at night fall to 1/3?

Test map of my previous suggestion.(it is not so much efficient)
In real life heavily armored people became less useful when efficient crossbow were invented as it were an very effective weapon for piercing armor but archers were more efficient than crossbowman because they had an higher firing speed.
In a mod it would be interesting to have the cycle archer>crossbowmen>heavy armored>archer

frozen

Seems that I made something so much trolling and stupid that people had to flee from the thread

Not sure exactly what you are trying to acomplish here?

 

[noob]

I failed to do it efficiently.

Test map of my previous suggestion

Was referring to this suggestion

If what you want is more mixing of archer and melee perhaps you could add random melee friendly aura to archers for making more interesting to have a good number of archer in you melee horde and make interesting to compact units and you could give random archer advantaging auras to melee.

but that suggestion was pure fail.