Bay 12 Games Forum

In this post I would like to present my ideas for the upcomming military & siege stuff. And also hear your ideas. English is not my first language so sorry if anything is badly phrased.

I am assuming here that armies will be entities moving around on the map. Made up of military squads as the smallest unit. I think there should be a chain of command, using a modified version of the villains system and allowing enemy agents or assassins to interact with it. Maybe something like:

Squad leader < Officer(Commanding 5-10 squads, also a squad leader himself) < General (Commanding the entire army and has a personal squad he commands as his bodyguard unit) and maybe a sort of commander in chief, commanding all armies of the civilization. This could be the ruler by default, or a separate position. The commander in chief could be leading an army as a general personally or just stay in the capital, sending messengers with orders to his generals in the field.

Food, water and morale could be tracked, though it may be easier to do so in an abstract manner. Moving armies would need to have acces to water sources and get food from supply caravans of their civilisation, or forage for food.

Armies should be able to send out squads, diplomats and agents on missions. In adventure mode, the player could be hired for missions. Missions could include:

Squads: Scouting to find enemy settlements, agents, squads and armies. Foraging for food. Raiding less protected enemy settlements. Intercepting enemy scouts and raids. Skirmishing enemy armies. Attacking enemy supply caravans and foraging squads to starve them.

Diplomats: Negotiating the surrender of enemy settlements or making them pay one time tributes so you don't attack them (Like people in the middle ages paid vikings to leave their territory), sending information/orders back and forth between allied armies and settlements, convincing enemy armies to retreat/surrender/make peace.

Agents: Spying to get information on enemy armies, assassinating enemy position holders, using villain mechanics to turn enemy generals/officers, spreading rumors in enemy army to lower morale, sneaking in and destroying enemy supplies.

I also think it would be cool if armies could set up camps while not moving. Either while waiting for orders or during a siege. Using tents, digging trenches and setting up temporary wooden fortifications as roman armies used to do. Especially for sieges I think it would be cool if armies would set up a camp just outside of a settlement and attack in waves. I think the idea of longer lasting sieges was mentioned before and this would help. Both attackers and defenders could send out squads to raid eachother as well as agents and diplomats to do the things described above. Also defenders could try and send out messengers to call allied armies to lift the siege, as it often happened in real wars.

I am playing fortress mode currently and there aren't any nearby settlements I can conquer as I choose a somewhat remote location. I know your civ can build holdings around you if the biome is right but it would be cool if I could send out people to build colonies in a location of my choosing. Especially considering that my fortress is getting a bit crowded.

Also, with the army stuff that is planned for the next bug update, it would be cool to add more interactions with your holdings as well as your parent civilisation. More political, economic, militaristic and intrigue interactions would help make the outside world feel more alive. Feel free to add your ideas if you have any.

Great ideas. If this is supposed to be a thread to collect small ideas for adventure mode, I also have some.

Survival Stuff:

- Tents, bedrolls and other stuff to build mobile camps. Maybe a pot that works like the kitchen in fort mode when combined with a campfire.
- Ability to craft writing materials. Parchment from animal skins, ink from blood or coal from a campfire. I want to be able to write more stuff down. The development page mentions exploration related stuff like making maps of unknown regions an selling them.
- Crafting with pelts and leather in general. Maybe requires some tools that you have to craft or buy at a settlement.
- Work with stone and metals. Making it posible to pretty much play fort mode in adventure mode. I think they mentioned somewhere that in the far future all game modes are supposed to be one mode where you switch between different layers of the game. I love the idea.

Sounds like dragons from D&D. Love the idea, especially the part about knowing and teaching magic. Considering that people worshipping megabeasts is a thing already, having a dragon as your patron granting or teaching you magic would be pretty cool.

This is a great idea, especially the CKII and Vicky III references. I also think there should be the possibility of groups of settlements (ideally in the same region) to rebel against their parent civ and form their own state (under the same culture as their parent civ or a different one depending on the population) and even being able to take over the parent civ and either end that civ or assume its name and history as its own. To do so you could divide civil war into two phases. First being Civil War and the second being Secession War. In a Civil War, the one who wins becomes the leader but there is no break in continuity. The histories of both entities are merged in the end of the war and the entity that won becomes the new civ (or retains its contested position). But from the get go (or if a civil war takes too long) the entity could shift to a Secession war, and in such a war the goal then becomes to become an independent state separated from the original entity. If the rebel entity wins it becomes its own state. If it loses, it is destroyed. After a successful Secession War, the new entity should have a casus belli on the rest of their parent civ for a while, but if it actually manages to take over the entire civ it does not then become said civ but retains its separate identity, the parent civ then just dies off.

This is an interesting thing to do because it will make it so that after 1500 years of history, not all civs that are around are from year 1 (most of them actually probably won't be!), Making old civs actually something special, akin to China, Egypt or Iran.

Civil Wars could be caused by many different situations. It could happen because of a claiment (a prince claiming the throne), it could happen because of unfair taxes levied from a specific region or because of general or regional corruption causing life to be unbearable or giving a villain the opportunity to strike and take over in a coup, it could be because the king is horrible in general and a rando manages to get enough of a following to contest him, be him a noble or a commoner. Secession wars would usually either happen because a civil war was taking too long and the rebels decide to cut their loses or it could happen because of specific grievances of a specific region, either because of unfair taxes or because of unattended corruption in the area making either life unbearable to an honest population or become an opportunity for a villain to assert direct rule in the area he corrupted (here the villains update can be employed).

Excellent idea, I was thinking of something similar and was planing to make a seperate thread for my ideas regarding nations and governments. My idea included splitting every culture/civilization into multiple states from the very beginning, like ancient greece and creating a more dynamic system of ever changing forms of government, nations splitting, uniting and emerging and stuff like that. If I find the time I will write a more elaborate thread on that.

Great idea. The world needs to be more dynamic anyway. I think Toady mentioned sites becomming ruins and buildings sinking into the ground over time or being covered by earth. Aside from nature doing its thing, the influence of civilized races and magic on the environment needs to be considered too. Civilized races should be able to terraform. Moving earth to create a hill or flatten terrain, digging tunnels through a mountain to build a road, building dams or redirecting rivers, draining swamps, etc. And magic should influence things too, as described in this http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173189.0 thread.

You're right diplomacy (along with public law) needs to be more detailled.

And I would suggest the system planned for Victoria III: a polity would have disagreements with another, and both parties might try to solve said issue, whether by treaties, tributes or, if all esle fails then war. Resolution should depend of how valuable are the prizes to each contestant, the strength, whether collective or individual, and peculiar ethics (for exemple aggressive polities might use war more eagerly than others).

Interesting suggestion. I am planning to write to more posts relating to this, one suggestion on the separation of civilizations and states and another on the internal structure of states. I was planning to use crusader kings as an example, so funny that you mention a game from the same company. Dwarf fortress creates such wonderful large worlds like no other game and I like the idea of fleshing out nations and how the interact both internally and externally.

Hello everyone,

I would like to make a suggestion regarding territorial claims and casus belli.

As I understand, claims on sites that used to belong to you are already a thing. I think it would be interesting to expand this to regions. Giving any nation or nation level entity as well as individual nobles a claim to any region that they have at least one site in. Of course such claims would need to be enforced. This could happen through diplomacy, trying to make other entities agree to not build sites in your region using the same mechanic with which elves ask you to not harm trees. Maybe you could even convince them to hand over existing sites, by negotiation, bribes, threats or blackmail. Or, if diplomacy fails, through war. Such wars would then be limited to destroying or conquering foreign sites in the region and/or pushing out foreign armies from your claimed region.

This brings to my next idea: Casus belli (Latin for “occasion for war”). As things are right now, I think that wars are often way too destructive. Nations often end up being wiped out after losing 1 or 2 wars, or they just lose so many people that they never recover. In order to limit this, and make wars more interesting, I want to suggest the implementation of a system of war goals. Basically, the attacking nation provides a justification or states a goal for their war. And that justification then dictates what the attacker is aiming for, what actions are taken during the war, and under which conditions peace can be negotiated. Using the example of a territorial claim, the fighting would be (mostly but not necessarily entirely) limited to the region in question, as I described above.

A wide variety of casus belli could be added for such a system. Claims to regions, sites, even artifacts. Personal grievances between rulers. Economic or trade conflicts. Religious wars to spread a religion or fight someone over religious grievances for persecution in the past. Raids for slaves and loot. Wars to vassalize a nation or make them pay tribute. There are many possibilities. Using the new intrigue system, it might even be possible to fabricate claims or make a target nation provoke you, so that you can “rightfully defend yourself”. Also attacking without a casus bello should be possible but have consequences for the ruler who gave the order. Both external as well as internal.