Redesigning the total war battle system from scratch

[ray245]

I have posted this idea on another forum, and given the fact that many members on SD.net are fans of the total war games, and at the same time, criticize the games for many of its flaws, I thought that it will be wise to post this thread here as well.

If you are given the choice to re-designed the total war series' real time battle system from scratch, what changes will you do, and what things will you keep behind?

Besides the AI issues, is there any core gameplay issues that needs to be fixed, even when you are fighting an online battle?

[Sarevok]

- Remove "godview".

- If main general dies player loses. This reinforces the point YOU are leading the battle.

- In Total War games a unit with 240 men is really just one unit. Every soldier in the unit is part of a hive mind that acts in identical way. Scrap this. Give every soldier rudimentary AI. This is not impossible techwise since occasionally Total War units do display independent thinking. In one memorable city fight a lone Scipio cavalry made a pretty epic and damn heroic fight against my Velites using hit and run tactics.

- No burning pigs, screeching german women or other similar crap.

- No magitech city square that flips the outcome of the battle.

- Ditto for smart guns I mean city towers that seem to have automated arrow launchers with radar targeting and fire control computers.

- Same for city gates that automatically open via act of hidden lift components brought by time travellers.

- Basically limit SoD breaking shit as little as possible.

- Also make Cavalry fucking more expensive, the way I was spamming Auxilia it seemed the Horse population of Rome was far more than entire human population of Italy.

- Lastly unit strengths reflect what the unit look like. Bunch of shirtless naked Barbarians invincible to arrows my Crete mercs are raining down on them are instant no. Similarly I expect Legions armor to actual work instead go kaput the moment some Rodian slinger hits them with a pebble.

[Sarevok]

Also Carthage must be destroyed.

[Thanas]

- If main general dies player loses. This reinforces the point YOU are leading the battle.

No. In history armies do not magically lose when the general is killed. The battle should go AI vs AI at that time instead.

- In Total War games a unit with 240 men is really just one unit. Every soldier in the unit is part of a hive mind that acts in identical way. Scrap this. Give every soldier rudimentary AI. This is not impossible techwise since occasionally Total War units do display independent thinking. In one memorable city fight a lone Scipio cavalry made a pretty epic and damn heroic fight against my Velites using hit and run tactics.

Please show me how that can be done with current resources.

- Lastly unit strengths reflect what the unit look like. Bunch of shirtless naked Barbarians invincible to arrows my Crete mercs are raining down on them are instant no. Similarly I expect Legions armor to actual work instead go kaput the moment some Rodian slinger hits them with a pebble.

That is actually historically accurate for the most part, slingers were deadly. They should be less effective when your soldiers are in the crouch position and ineffective when the testudo is formed.

[Maxentius]

I agree with Thanas in that if we're going to penalize the player when the General unit dies, then as opposed to an instant loss your entire army should revert to AI control, with an option to either immediately autoresolve the battle, or continue to observe the engagement as a spectator. The latter is well within possibility, as RTW (don't know about M2TW, never played it) has the option to put a group of units under AI control.

I agree, no silly city squares. I'd also like to see some more retooling to sieges, mostly dealing with reworking fortifications to include double walls and the like.

I'd love to see some actual logic to naval battles. I cannot count the number of times my magnificent, fully stacked Byzantine Imperial Armada has been wrecked by a pair of pirate biremes off the coast of Jutland. Stick in technological modifiers or something based on the civilizations "Advancement" rank, perhaps.

Breastworks, earthworks, rudimentary palisades, etc.

That's all that really comes to mind off the top of my head. I'm quite satisfied with the battle system; more often than not it's the content (e.g. units) that fill it that vexes me.

Quick edit: One more. Remove the ammo limit for defenders during sieges. The besieger may do well to benefit from this also.

[Sarevok]

No. In history armies do not magically lose when the general is killed. The battle should go AI vs AI at that time instead.

That's a brilliant idea. My mistake for missing that possibility.

Please show me how that can be done with current resources.

I am not sure actually. But RTW already does most of the grunt work (no pun) for individual soldiers from pathfinding to hitpoints. It's just that they are bound by silly group morale variable. When a unit routs and the hive mind mentality is overcome you can see individual soldiers behaving pretty spectacularly.

That is actually historically accurate for the most part, slingers were deadly. They should be less effective when your soldiers are in the crouch position and ineffective when the testudo is formed.

That should be kept in mind then. In vanilla Rome slingers had more stones than a riflemen in many armies has bullets and each stone had roughly same effectiveness lol.

[Maxentius]

I am not sure actually. But RTW already does most of the grunt work (no pun) for individual soldiers from pathfinding to hitpoints. It's just that they are bound by silly group morale variable. When a unit routs and the hive mind mentality is overcome you can see individual soldiers behaving pretty spectacularly.

There's already a basis for this; at least in RTW. When a unit breaks and sees little chance of escape it goes into "Fight to the Death" mode, and can subsequently rack up some pretty impressive kills. The downside, of course, is that you can't control it any longer.

[ray245]

My ideas:

While the idea of a separate Battle map and a strategic map has its merits, it does has its flaws as well.The battle is now completely cut off from its environment. In ETW, CA has addressed the issue to some extend by improving the AI behave.

However, things such as constant harassment, wrecking the army campsite and their supplies stores. Other than that, speed issue has never been addressed where actual physics has been applied.

For example, the effectiveness of a charge is determined by the speed and momentum your units gain over time. Their speed will increase as they run, making a charge more effective at certain times. However, if they charge for too long, they will lose their momentum and slow down.

This is one way to prevent micro-managers from winning the battle. Controls over your troops is also too easy. Orders do not reach units so easily until you have the ability to micro-manage the battle. Sometimes, the units should attack in ways you do not expect them to, if the unit is not properly trained for example.

Sometimes, the AI needs to be able to reflect how a unit will behave if you fail to take notice of your unit. Bear in mind that not only should the AI General be human-like, the units you are commanding are supposed to be humans as well.Will any unit in real life be so dumb to let their flanks be attacked? Most likely, the unit commander would detach some units to secure or protect their flanks to some extend, until support arrive. A unit that can be independent and aware of the threats they faced, and respond as a logical person should.

In the mist of fighting, do you think the unit will just stand there until their general ordered them to react? They will react, but sometimes in a manner that is not effective. Some times a unit can flank the enemy on their own, while other time, they will let themselves be surrounded, due to the different units being unable to coordinate with each other.

Moreover, the units in the game does not display agent like behavior. Units don't behave as a group of men, and behave more like a unit. When a rout occur, some people in the unit will rout, while others will stay. A unit in the army does not rout as one unit. They routed as a person, routing one by one.

If the commanding officer of the unit is killed, the unit will be affected. Some may choose to rout, while others will stay back and form a solid line. You can't order your troops to give ground. You can use units that is flexible for instance, and being able to adapt them to different situation and etc.

Nor does the unit interact their army with the environment to a full extend. While rocky terrains means your entire army can't stand on that rocks, a defender should have time to deploy sub-units to scatter themselves all over those rocky terrain. Huge gush of sands does not disrupt the unit ability to understand orders.

You can't expect help from outside the battle box, such as having supporting troops bringing in fresh ammo for instances. Your troops can't re-equipped themselves with weapons and armor stolen from the enemy for instance. Your troops for some reason cannot be trained to use a large number of unit formation available.

Can a infantry unit make use of multiple formation?

In the next CA revolutionary game as compared to their evolutionary game, they need to factor all this issue in, and re-design the total war system from scratch if they have to. Many of those stuff that cannot be represented by a mod.

So total war fans, instead of complaining about realism issues such as uniforms, complain about the hard-coded realism issue in the game engine itself. I do not want a block of chess set wearing historically accurate uniforms and armour. If I want that, then I would play a Computer chess game. I would not be playing a total war game where I can see them not just as a bunch of units, but as an individual men.

Hey, the AI is not supposed to be around to ONLY represent the enemy general, the AI can be used to represent the environmental challenges, and the individual units and men under your command. I want to command an actual army, not chess pieces. I also want to limit people from further abusing the game system by taking detailed notes on the units stats. In a real battle, you don't have such a detailed information available to you.

Commanding a chess set and an army is two different thing. We have a computer for a reason, instead of using the computers to give us better looking units, how about giving us an actual and accurate depiction of an army?

My idea does has numerous flaws, but I do believe some ideas can work, and provide a more realistic depiction of massed fighting in the past. Feel free to tear apart any stupid ideas, as always.

[Sarevok]

I dunno. After reading all that it sounds like a personal pet idea for a mod rather than an improvement to Total War battle system.

[ray245]

I dunno. After reading all that it sounds like a personal pet idea for a mod rather than an improvement to Total War battle system.

Perhaps you can point out some specific ideas? Some of my ideas was inspired by Stark's comment.

[Sarevok]

The fact that you are merely addressing features you would like to see added to Total War instead of explaining how they make the game balanced or challenging ? You are almost thinking like a tacticool tom clancy FPS game designer who adds a hundred plus guns without ever thinking what difference or lack of difference it makes. To elaborate further Total War is running a very fine line between number of units possible and detailed simulation it can support on today's computers. It was and never will be an accurate "wargame". The best it can strive for is being challenging and entertaining. Unfortunately you don't seem to realize this and suffer from a case of featuritis. Do you not realize how broken games with too much detail like Battlecruiser 3000 was ? The more "features" you try to add to a game without heavily weighing how,where and why it should be there the more likely it would be a buggy and hilariously exploitable product.

[Darth Wong]

My ideas:

While the idea of a separate Battle map and a strategic map has its merits, it does has its flaws as well.The battle is now completely cut off from its environment. In ETW, CA has addressed the issue to some extend by improving the AI behave.

However, things such as constant harassment, wrecking the army campsite and their supplies stores. Other than that, speed issue has never been addressed where actual physics has been applied.

I find your language difficult to decipher. But yes, I think it would be nice to give each army a camp, thus forcing them to defend it.

For example, the effectiveness of a charge is determined by the speed and momentum your units gain over time. Their speed will increase as they run, making a charge more effective at certain times. However, if they charge for too long, they will lose their momentum and slow down.

The game engine already does that.

This is one way to prevent micro-managers from winning the battle. Controls over your troops is also too easy. Orders do not reach units so easily until you have the ability to micro-manage the battle. Sometimes, the units should attack in ways you do not expect them to, if the unit is not properly trained for example.

Sometimes, the AI needs to be able to reflect how a unit will behave if you fail to take notice of your unit. Bear in mind that not only should the AI General be human-like, the units you are commanding are supposed to be humans as well.Will any unit in real life be so dumb to let their flanks be attacked? Most likely, the unit commander would detach some units to secure or protect their flanks to some extend, until support arrive. A unit that can be independent and aware of the threats they faced, and respond as a logical person should.

In the mist of fighting, do you think the unit will just stand there until their general ordered them to react? They will react, but sometimes in a manner that is not effective. Some times a unit can flank the enemy on their own, while other time, they will let themselves be surrounded, due to the different units being unable to coordinate with each other.

Moreover, the units in the game does not display agent like behavior. Units don't behave as a group of men, and behave more like a unit. When a rout occur, some people in the unit will rout, while others will stay. A unit in the army does not rout as one unit. They routed as a person, routing one by one.

If the commanding officer of the unit is killed, the unit will be affected. Some may choose to rout, while others will stay back and form a solid line. You can't order your troops to give ground. You can use units that is flexible for instance, and being able to adapt them to different situation and etc.

What a waste of text. This could all be summed up as "make the units smarter". Much easier said than done.

Nor does the unit interact their army with the environment to a full extend. While rocky terrains means your entire army can't stand on that rocks, a defender should have time to deploy sub-units to scatter themselves all over those rocky terrain. Huge gush of sands does not disrupt the unit ability to understand orders.

Again, much easier said than done. You might as well ask why you can't custom-design fortifications for each city, with unlimited design flexibility.

You can't expect help from outside the battle box, such as having supporting troops bringing in fresh ammo for instances. Your troops can't re-equipped themselves with weapons and armor stolen from the enemy for instance. Your troops for some reason cannot be trained to use a large number of unit formation available.

Can a infantry unit make use of multiple formation?

In the next CA revolutionary game as compared to their evolutionary game, they need to factor all this issue in, and re-design the total war system from scratch if they have to. Many of those stuff that cannot be represented by a mod.

So total war fans, instead of complaining about realism issues such as uniforms, complain about the hard-coded realism issue in the game engine itself. I do not want a block of chess set wearing historically accurate uniforms and armour. If I want that, then I would play a Computer chess game. I would not be playing a total war game where I can see them not just as a bunch of units, but as an individual men.

Hey, the AI is not supposed to be around to ONLY represent the enemy general, the AI can be used to represent the environmental challenges, and the individual units and men under your command. I want to command an actual army, not chess pieces. I also want to limit people from further abusing the game system by taking detailed notes on the units stats. In a real battle, you don't have such a detailed information available to you.

Commanding a chess set and an army is two different thing. We have a computer for a reason, instead of using the computers to give us better looking units, how about giving us an actual and accurate depiction of an army?

My idea does has numerous flaws, but I do believe some ideas can work, and provide a more realistic depiction of massed fighting in the past. Feel free to tear apart any stupid ideas, as always.

You have absolutely no idea whether your idea can work. What you're asking is to make the game engine model more aspects of reality: a feat which is far easier said than done, and which may end up consuming vast programming and processing resources for very little gain in player enjoyment.

[Sarevok]

Well to be fair to ray245 you could simulate Roman era battles inside the Matrix and some of the players would still be complaining about balance issues. He is certainly not the only one. And this is why we have such things as modding tools to add every nitpick you may want but I may not like.

[Darth Wong]

Yeah, but he's talking about massive increases in the scope of battles and AI workload, and then casually declaring that it should be possible when he clearly has absolutely no idea whether it is, or how difficult it would be. That's what's annoying.

[Maxentius]

Well to be fair to ray245 you could simulate Roman era battles inside the Matrix and some of the players would still be complaining about balance issues.

Like who, the Gauls?

Another idea I had was rather simple. When I have a one or more Army stacks in proximity and a battle occurs so that reinforcements are involved, I'd like to be able to designate which units enter the battle as reinforcements first. I've actually lost a few battles at critical moments this way because I was fed a unit of auxiliary pikemen instead of elite cataphractoi.

[Artemas]

Another idea I had was rather simple. When I have a one or more Army stacks in proximity and a battle occurs so that reinforcements are involved, I'd like to be able to designate which units enter the battle as reinforcements first. I've actually lost a few battles at critical moments this way because I was fed a unit of auxiliary pikemen instead of elite cataphractoi.

This.

Especially since it was a feature in the original MTW.

As for the individuality in units, I think a appropriate intermediate step would be to give the option of subdividing a particular unit into, say 4 groups. So a 200 man unit becomes 4 50-man units. This allows tactical flexibility, while not totally breaking the tech capabilities of most computers.

The thing is, I don't think the total war battle system NEEDS "from scratch" redesigning. Improvement, to be sure, but I don't think there is anything fundamentally flawed with the system as a whole.

Some major problems with the battle system:

Routing, retreats and withdrawing: The current system doesn't really allow you to stage raids, or hit-and-run attacks. And if you try anyway, you get penalised as if you had lost the battle.

Casualties: One of the things that make battles so easy for the player are the mopping up operations as the enemy flees the field. This is how people regularly achieve 100% enemy kill ratios. The only obvious solution i can see is to disallow the "would you like to continue the battle" option. Or, alternatively, allow enemy units to rally even after the "enemy flees the field" notice, but if they do rally, they will still try and make their way of the battlefield, only turning and fighting when an enemy unit comes close. This might frustrate the efforts of the player in attempting to "clean up".

This isn't strictly battlefield, but allowing an army (even a defeated one) to recoup a percentage of their casualties would prevent completely destroyed armies except for rare exceptions.

[Duckie]

I am unsure of the practicality, but it would certainly change dynamics of the game if there were a small but steadily growing time delay on your orders based in the distance to the general/leader unit- you would actually have further incentive to have your general close to the action instead of hiding in some corner while your troops fight, and it would simulate one of my favorite aspects of Kriegsspiel in the orders system and delay with troops learning what to do. This delay could be reduced by bugles, drummers, horns, etc. via upgrades, perhaps, and would also give a significant bonus to having n leaders, as you can easily split into n units (such as a cavalry wedge and a main body) with absolutely no penalty.

It would however require a slightly better troop/battle AI to be able to take over the bits you're not ordering or react to stuff that happens without orders, especially for far away units like reinforcements or cavalry. And by slightly I mean a lot, because the Total War games are almost unenjoyable to me because of the awful AI that is dumb as a rock.

It'd be an interesting enable/disable option, at minimum, since many gamers wouldn't like it, just like "Restrict Camera to around General" (Most wargamers and RTS gamers like omniscience and absolute telepathic command and control of an ancient army, which confuses me since I rather don't.)

[Covenant]

Restricting the camera to just your general, and making orders take some time, generally just decreases a feeling of control on the player's part. If you're going to do that, make it so the player has a first person perspective and actually has to give orders by shouting them out or sending runners. Then your players will have the joy of wondering how the enemy got behind them and wiped out their entire army, only to find out later that the runner was intercepted with the orders. At some point you need to ask if you want to make a fun wargame, or a fun simulation. Wargames depend more on control, simulations try to replicate reality. You could certainly make your simulation game, but I'm not sure if it'd be much fun. It'd sure make you care about your lieutenants a lot more though, since you'll need them to directly command 99 percent of your army.

[ray245]

Another point to note, why do they have to restrict our army to 20 units? When the size of our army is restricted, there is no point in outnumbering an enemy army.

If the AI is dumb, at the least it has an advantage by using a much larger army, which makes the game more challenging.

[The Romulan Republic]

Another point to note, why do they have to restrict our army to 20 units? When the size of our army is restricted, there is no point in outnumbering an enemy army.

If the AI is dumb, at the least it has an advantage by using a much larger army, which makes the game more challenging.

I've never been a fan of arbitrary army size limits in strategy games. Granted, from everything I've heard (never played it) Total War has much bigger armies than a lot of other games, but why should their be any limiting factor on your army's size other than the size of your economy and territory?

Also, the old Total War games don't have navel combat, correct? That must be rectified. A military strategy game that does not let you watch your fleet ripping into an enemy's warships isn't really complete.

[ray245]

Another point to note, why do they have to restrict our army to 20 units? When the size of our army is restricted, there is no point in outnumbering an enemy army.

If the AI is dumb, at the least it has an advantage by using a much larger army, which makes the game more challenging.

I've never been a fan of arbitrary army size limits in strategy games. Granted, from everything I've heard (never played it) Total War has much bigger armies than a lot of other games, but why should their be any limiting factor on your army's size other than the size of your economy and territory?

Also, the old Total War games don't have navel combat, correct? That must be rectified. A military strategy game that does not let you watch your fleet ripping into an enemy's warships isn't really complete.

Both CA and their fans have said it will be unfair to them, to micro-manage so many units, and it will be laggy.

Nevermind the fact that the game engine can spawn 8 different armies in one battle map.

Although I really want to hear Stark's opinion on this. He said that using morale to representing the strength and weakness of the unit is pretty simplistic. So is there a better way to represent it better?

[RogueIce]

I've never been a fan of arbitrary army size limits in strategy games. Granted, from everything I've heard (never played it) Total War has much bigger armies than a lot of other games, but why should their be any limiting factor on your army's size other than the size of your economy and territory?

I suppose you could blame GUI or something for that. At some point there's bound to be a limit to how many units can be in your little "selection box" based on screensize. Although with all these super widescreen HD monitors and stuff that may not be as much of an issue.

Still, some of us are stuck with smaller monitors, still.

And I think it's be rather a pain trying to control 100+ 'units' in a battle. Granted that may be a little extreme but hopefully you see my point. Unless you either A) make the units smart enough to fight effectively on their own or B) have a Starcraft click-fest.

Or I could be talking out of my ass here. *shrug*

Also, the old Total War games don't have navel combat, correct? That must be rectified. A military strategy game that does not let you watch your fleet ripping into an enemy's warships isn't really complete.

Empire: Total War will have naval combat. Go look up a trailer or preview, because they're definately advertising that aspect.

[ray245]

Still, some of us are stuck with smaller monitors, still.

And I think it's be rather a pain trying to control 100+ 'units' in a battle. Granted that may be a little extreme but hopefully you see my point. Unless you either A) make the units smart enough to fight effectively on their own or B) have a Starcraft click-fest.

Or I could be talking out of my ass here. *shrug*

Well, there is a group unit function. Moreover, we are not talking about controlling 100+ units, I am talking about allowing us to control 40-60 units, so that we can have the chance to outnumber the enemy army occasionally.

[MKSheppard]

I'd like to see a real AI; instead of the retarded Flank them = Win battle automatically one presently in the game.

[The Romulan Republic]

Also, the old Total War games don't have navel combat, correct? That must be rectified. A military strategy game that does not let you watch your fleet ripping into an enemy's warships isn't really complete.

Empire: Total War will have naval combat. Go look up a trailer or preview, because they're definately advertising that aspect.

Yeah, I know. I was referring to the older games.