Sort of. It's not so much that Group A feels that they can back off more, it's that they will back up. Pretty much involuntarily.
A well disciplined group, of course, is much more resistant to this sort of thing. It's one of the defining differences between professional soldiers and militia/levees. The militia starts to back up and it all goes downhill. The professionals will hold the line until actually ordered to back up, which can them be done in an orderly fashion without hurting morale any.
Got it. Interesting. I'll definitely implement that kind of difference (I do intend to have militias as an alternative option when in cities, and maybe they can also be recruited when on the march too?).
This sounds like it's going to end up like Dwarf Fortress, it's going to be a crapload better than most games now, but I'm going to have to wait hilarious amounts of time for new stuff.
Anyway, what I was wondering was how you are going to handle stealth, like using guerrilla warfare and such.
Haha, yes - combat/skills this November (0.2.0), then some time early next year for history generation (1.0.0) then I'm going to move onto generating ruins, temples, tombs, catacombs, and also bandits and similar (1.1.0). There won't actually be a lot of combat before then - the world generation is such an important part I feel I have to get all of that in place first, otherwise I'd make some AI, make world generation, then have to change it to reflect the world. Stealth - well, currently there is a 'stealth view' whereby you can see what direction every human in your sight range is facing, and whether they are unaware, suspicious, or totally aware of your presence. Stealth is going to take account of both sight and sound (there are things for both of these in the stealth tree); guerrilla warfare is an interesting one, and that falls into the category of revolutions/uprisings/rebellions ever, which I have a file full of ideas for and am working out mechanics for. Stay tuned on that one
So will we have randomly generated speeches?
I love how Rome: Total War did it, where having better command will cause a longer speech and certain traits will cause your general to sometimes say different things.
I vote "hell yeah!" for procedurally generated speeches.
Yes, I think so, but I'd like to make it more complex than "We are gathered here to defeat [Enemy X] because they threaten [City Y]" or whatever, because that gets dull fast, I think. I'm not sure HOW, but I'd like things to be more interesting. Possibly a mechanic whereby different speech options will result in slight buffs to some of your troops in certain ways. Maybe.
Even though I can't currently play (my experiments have not yet come to fruition), I keep an eye on what's going on over here, and I thought I'd add my two pence, garnered from LARPing and study:
The hardest bit of keeping a shield wall intact is convincing the guys at the front to ignore whatever gets through and reform. If someone breaks the wall, there are ranks behind whose job it is to down whatever did it. When the front line gets panicky and tries to do the job themselves, they cease being a shieldwall and become a tightly packed mess with no front, and from there it's all pretty bad.
Unfortunately this next bit is based purely on texts and accounts, so I can't be quite so sure of it, but apparently witnessing a successful cavalry charge does wonders for infantry morale, but not very much for other cavalry. Perhaps it simply goes without saying that the other guys on hoseback feel pretty good, but there have been a fair few mentions of it that seem limited to infantry (including making a note on it in pretty much every book on war ever written).
As for speeches, I reckon procedurally generated would be pretty cool, as Devling said. The various skills could have a minor effect on the speech, even down to whether you exhort your troops to hack them down, or crush them.
Damn, sorry it's still not working! I'm going to revisit Linux this time, so *hopefully* that version might be more workable. Interesting - I'm actually trying to figure out the special ability for the "Rider" class (see tomorrow's blog entry) and that's given me a few interesting ideas. Very interesting about shield walls etc, too - I really want battle tactics to be a big part of the game, both in terms of realism to an extent, but also trying to allow for as many possible interpretations and unique approaches as I can. Morale should be very flexible, various special units will buff specific squads in certain ways, certain terrain will be better for some forces than others, etc. I like the speech idea very much, too - have as much variable as possible down to the weapons, the terrain, the weather...
Makes sense. Most cavalry feels pretty safe. Either they're light cav and can ride away from most threats or they're heavy cav and used to bowling things over. Since they don't usually have poor morale, they don't react as much as the infantry does. Especially when you get to much of the middle ages where Cavalry were Knights, and therefore professional soldiers, and most Infantry were levees who had little training or skill.
Speaking of Knights, one thing that might be interesting to model is capturing opponents for ransom. We always think of Knights as using swords, which is very true, but most people forget that swords aren't that great at killing an armored foe. Even if it's just chainmail, a sword is going to be worse at actually killing the other guy than a mace or axe would.
However, swords are great for killing off those worthless peasants that make up the bulk of your opponent's forces while generally keeping the valuable armor wearing prisoners alive.
It's not until later period, when ransoming became less practiced, that all of the real anti-armor weapons got developed and used extensively.
I like the idea of some kind of rock-paper-scissors system.
So my sword is less effective against a guy wearing a breastplate(if I hit his chest) then if I smack him with a mace or something.
Ransoming is also a good idea, but I would like to see POWs and defeated soldiers become slaves and the like.
I want to turn prisoners into gladiators and give them the opportunity to fight for their freedom.
I've actually just split up "Cavalry" and "Knights" as unit types - the former are going to have swords/gunpowder, the latter are going to be more heavily armored and 'medieval'. Horse archers will feature too, but they will probably be down as 'a' for Archer (cavalry show as 'c', knights as 'k'). Very nice idea about anti-armor/anti-infantry weapons; I'm in the process of working out the balance between the four weapon types (slashing, short, heavy, long) for 0.2.0 at the moment, and I *really* like some being more effective against armor, and some being more effective against the unarmored. I might have that done by the blog entry after tomorrow's, actually.
Ransoming and captives - definitely, I like that a lot.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023 (Read 598362 times)