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Author Topic: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites  (Read 2128 times)

Orange-of-Cthulhu

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A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« on: February 16, 2021, 08:42:17 am »

The game is ALMOST a civilization type war game at the end game, where your fort is set up and you have an army to send out to conquer and raze and so on.

But there's some things missing.

One is: when you send your army out, you have zero idea of their chance to win the battle.

The only information the game gives you is "population of site", but you can't know a) how many of these are actual soldiers and how many are say poets b) how good is their general c) how many non-intelligent beings like trolls or animals do they have.

So it has happened to me that my dwarfs can slaughter with impunity on a 3000? site, but get beaten by a 300+ site.

That's cool, a 3000+ site might be populated by poets and a 300+ site by elite lashers. It's great you can't just look at how big it is and that is how strong it is.

But the player needs to have a way of making an educated guess at the outcome instead of it just being a black box. For a game to work as a conquer-and-expand game, you need to have a way to estimate the outcome of a battle in order to play it with satisfying war mongering.

If you want to conquer a site, and the report says "an army of less than 40 lord dwarves have no chance, an army of more than 80 lord dwarves would win", then you can make a plan and a strategy. Either you wait and build an army that is big enough, or you postpone this site for later and do smaller sites instead. Or you chance it with 41 lords.

But when you have no information, it removes all this joy and fun of meticuously planning your campaign. And it becomes gamewise more "like you throw a die, I throw a die". And you care less about making a cool army, since you don't know if you even need it.

I think some mechanisms for the player to get information about military strenght of other sites should be:

æ) You should get some information for free. As it is, you don't even know if you're trying to invade Pentagon or Las Vegas. With the info the players gets in DF, Las Vegas would look very strong and Pentagon like a walk in the park "barely even defended".

It should just be common knowledge that Mordor is militarily stronger than the Shire, and this should somehow be conveyed to the player. You shouldn't even have to send spies to Mordor, in order to find out that they probably have a decent army :)

a) Sending spy missions to the site in order to get information of number of soldiers, quality of the general, etc. Spy missions should have a chance to fail (the dwarf dying/being imprisoned), information should be sometimes inaccurate, maybe they declare war on you if they catch a spy

The correctness of the intel depends maybe on the skill of the dwarf and dice rolls - so maybe you want to send more than one spy mission, maybe you train spies by having them spy on random elf sites, and that creates a lot of a gameplay choices.

b) Information should tricle in through travellers and caravans. A traveller that has been to a site should have an idea if 2000 trolls are there or not. You should sometimes get random information from travellers and when newcomers become citizens. Maybe also from caravans and diplomats.

c) You should get information from the battle reports. The commander tells you if he thinks it was a total walkover, and he needn't have brought half the army he had with him, or he thinks they got lucky and won bit it was totally reckless. To give the player an idea of how many dwarves you need for what sort of battle.

At the very least, you should have an overhead mentioning: the strenght/number of your army, the strenght and number of opposing army, number of dead, wounded, prisoners, fled. So you can tell "X dwarves beat X elves this time, looks like they should have a bit more guys with them".

Like You: 10 hammer lords, 10 hammer dwarves. Them: 10 lashers, 5 spear goblins, 10 recruits. Dead: You none. Them: 3 lashers, 2 spears, 9 recruits. Rest fled.

d) If you conquer a site and some of a civ's member become your "subjects", all the info about that civ should become available, reflecting you have control over a number of individuals from that civ. (It generates a strong motivation to conquer small sites, in order to get the intel.)

e) Razing/raiding a site should give some info on the civ - your dwarves go through their records and books, they hear stuff from dying enemies and suchh. It should get you some random info about random sites from the civ.

f) Information should be possible to be outdated. Say a traveller visited a place and says "it has 10 goblins and no trolls", but it's been 3 years since he was there and in the meantime they got 2000 new trolls. It creates a player choice of how fresh you want your intel to be.

g) Information should be able to be wrong. A dwarf spy might have been drunk or whatever so his numbers are bs, or a double agent might give you false reports. (So it creates a sub-game of spying.) Or a traveller lies and tells you a site has just 20 recruits where they have 400 elite lashers. It creates a player choice of how many different sources of information you want.

h) The information about a site should be visible in the c screen. Like you go on a site and it says "report from date XYZ says they have 200 soldiers, a traveller said they have 150 soldiers, a spy report says they have "quite a few trolls".

i) Even better - if off site battles eventually becomes so detailed that it matters if your dwarves are armed with the best weapons for fighting this particular enemy or not, you could get reports saying you should have 20 marksdwarves and 30 hammerlords for quaranteed success, but 20 marksdwarves and 30 spearlords might loose. It would make the military planning part of the game very satisfying.

The specific mechanics matters less to me.

I just threw some up that could work and would create more cool stuff. The point is just, you can't have a conquer-and-expand game without giving the player a way  to judge what sort of army you need for what sort of job.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2021, 09:54:11 am by Orange-of-Cthulhu »
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Greywolf2001ca

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #1 on: February 16, 2021, 09:08:24 am »

A dwarf spy network? :)
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Orange-of-Cthulhu

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #2 on: February 16, 2021, 09:21:18 am »

I imagine it more like a mission. Working the same way as when you send a dwarf (well a squad actually) to demand tribute.

In Lord of the Rings spying usually works by sending some rangers out, and then they observe the army/site from a hill or something, and go back and say what they saw and that's it.

But I'd love to be able to send out spies to actually live in a site as a spy :) And maybe also poison their water and kill their chicken lol. And to open their gate when you send your army.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2021, 09:23:08 am by Orange-of-Cthulhu »
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Starver

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #3 on: February 16, 2021, 10:07:15 am »

Spies wouldn't (shouldn't) do that. Though they may recruit agents that do.

- An 'emmisary/trader/refugee' somewhere (s)he shouldn't be..? Pause for thought. Immediate aggressive stance towards their home site if bad activities discovered.
- Actual guard/worker/random local going about their business, the day after inoccuous socialising with all and sundry in the watering-hole..? May have nothing at all to do with some strange failure of infrastructure or defence. If it is, could be merely local crime/insanity/incompetence.

(Noting the possibility of counter-intelligence discovering/fostering such a relationship and thus keeping tabs on what might be being asked of. Then it gets complicated!)

Might not be feasible until the Economy returns for suitably insulting gratuities to be paid for such services. Unless it's a more emotional bargaining ("we have an artefact you desire", "a sibling of yours ended up in one of our cages", ...) or a suitable political promise.


Insofar as this suggestion: A tavern-bound mission to the remote site with the express purpose to 'casually' socialise and hear/provoke loose talk from the locals, e.g. indications of comparative military strength, etc? (Associated mission possibility: 'accidentally' divulge fake info about the home site... or maybe anywhere else useful to mention... either downplaying the threat/defensiveness to encourage an ill-prepared offensive or exagerating to discourage anything soon.)


It should be two-way though (i.e. it happens to you too) and fully integrated into the "rumours" system for possible infowars/maskirovka in all game-modes.
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Orange-of-Cthulhu

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #4 on: February 16, 2021, 10:48:44 am »

The other sites should be able to do it too.

AI of other civs seems to be very rudimentary. Like they just send of invading armies out randomly with no regard to it's chance of winning or any discernable reason for attacking.

But if that got improved it would create more challenges for the player

a) There might be saboteurs in your fort, who go and pull on drawbridge levers/destroy levers when you are getting invaded or just in general disable traps or assasinate militarily important dwarves, like legendary weapon/armorsmiths. This would force you to in fact have your military guard some places!

b) An Elf civ might send you a guy that tells you the nearby 4000+ goblin site is super weak and is ful of stolen dwarf artefacts. When in fact the site is uber strong and has nothing, and the Elves just want your soldiers to die attacking it.

c) If you're at war, you might get a lot of incoming spies/saboteurs/reconnaissance squads that just try to catch/kill fisherdwarves and then run away.

Furthermore

There should be different types of spy missions, giving the player some choice. From low risk to high risk, slow to fast and so on. So you have something to choose from. Maybe just two.

They can be picked depending on what is in the game. Since it is a thing with guests to taverns, it seems obvious to send a guy to just hang out in the humans tavern for some months and eavesdrop on conversations about your enemies. In a big central city, a lot of rumours should be around.

It should be possible to send out false information, like sending dwarves out to spread a false rumour about various things, say that you have a huge army (when you have none) in order to scare enemies away. Or that you have no gold!

The spy missions could be used to do other things than play the game as conquer-and-expand. Maybe some players just want to know what is out there, so they can defend themselves. Or to give the scholars something new to write about or whatever. Or you're simply just curious, or you're planning for where to put your future fort or for your adventurer.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2021, 11:01:43 am by Orange-of-Cthulhu »
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FantasticDorf

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #5 on: February 16, 2021, 06:51:51 pm »

The battles are mostly random with a couple of strengths swinging from one side to the other like size, equipment, weapons (natural and manufactured) and skills already so saying you will win is just a estimate and isn't fair if the player suffers a freak critical loss because the game would be misleading them or least giving a false sense of security.

Quote
a) Sending spy missions to the site in order to get information of number of soldiers, quality of the general, etc. Spy missions should have a chance to fail (the dwarf dying/being imprisoned), information should be sometimes inaccurate, maybe they declare war on you if they catch a spy

A more detailed headcount for having a few agents do a quick sum of the numbers of soldiers they've seen and smuggled the details out to you would be good. I dont think it needs so much of a specific mission, but rather a appropriate agent like a skilled book-keeper who is able to learn and count how many people are at a given site along with other important numerical data, and importantly the intact memory to return this information back home.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #6 on: February 18, 2021, 05:34:17 pm »

I'm all for expanding the missions system, as this has long been the sort of thing I've wanted to see in Dwarf Fortress.  Both having the ability to train and send out agents as spies (who would try to build spy networks instead of spy themselves Urist Bond style, so as to have plausible deniability, one hopes), and having enemy spies turn up and try to convince your own dwarves to slip their side information, and then having a counter-intelligence agency of your own would be a fantastic new set of layers of gameplay to add to Fortress Mode.

In the case of counter-intelligence, you could probably have Judge of Intent go to bat against Liar and then check Judge of Intent against Consoler or Persuader if the opposing agent fails their opposed liar check.  You could set your counter-intelligence agents up as simple informants that go about their normal jobs while reporting in, or you can set them up to actively surveil important locations where spies would likely meet with the agents they are trying to convert (like taverns).
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Orange-of-Cthulhu

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #7 on: February 21, 2021, 08:31:20 pm »

The battles are mostly random with a couple of strengths swinging from one side to the other like size, equipment, weapons (natural and manufactured) and skills already so saying you will win is just a estimate and isn't fair if the player suffers a freak critical loss because the game would be misleading them or least giving a false sense of security.

Yeah you should just get some odds. The info just should be detailed enough so the player has something to base a plan on, and the info is good enough so you bother to use it.

Note that we don't even know if we're fighting 10 recruits or 500 elite soldiers soldiers when we attack a site.

The info could also be as simple as just telling us how many and what kinds of soldiers the other site has - and then it's up to the player to get a feel for how many steelclad lords he needs in order to beat a force of so and so. That might in fact be a better solution.
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brewer bob

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #8 on: February 22, 2021, 08:12:35 am »

I'd really love to see more stuff to do with missions (and not just military-related ones).

One way to find out a sites strength could be a new sub-type of raiding: scouting. This wouldn't differ so much from the normal raid/avoid detection, except maybe a smaller chance of being spotted, and you wouldn't have the opportunity to steal anything. Once the squad returns they'd report an estimate of the military size (accuracy could depend on the observer skill?) at the site.

Alternatively this could be integrated to the raid/avoid detection option.

Also, spy networks & intelligence gathering would be nice.

Azerty

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #9 on: February 22, 2021, 06:09:37 pm »

Might traders and other travellers being asked for rumors they heard on their tracks? For exemple a trader might be asked to go to a community and do his work while parallelly trying to get as much informations as he can (hearing rumors, direct investigations).
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tonnot98

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #10 on: March 11, 2021, 02:51:29 am »

Might traders and other travellers being asked for rumors they heard on their tracks? For exemple a trader might be asked to go to a community and do his work while parallelly trying to get as much informations as he can (hearing rumors, direct investigations).
A trader could even discretely sell the information to the fortress as an authored "guide" to the site. That being said, guides written about sites already exist and would also probably be another good source of information for military matters, even if they're often filled with outdated information.
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RenoFox

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Re: A way of knowing the military strenght of other sites
« Reply #11 on: March 20, 2021, 01:19:18 pm »

Considering we have spies and corruption already in the game, having your own spies create networks too would make perfect sense. Send a squad to a spy mission, and they return with a combat report similar to a raid:

-Urist McSpy spotted 52 novice spearmen
-Urist McSpy spotted 12 skilled bowmen
-Urist McSpy corrupted Bowyer McHuman through blackmail
-Bowyer McHuman agreed to send a detailed report of site's military strength via Visitor McHuman
-Urist McSpy was forced to leave the site due to rising suspicion

and so on. Also, detailed reports like this would be a good way to catch corrupted people passing out information in general, whether in adventure or fortress mode.