Hot posts in thread: Ground combat

Greetings gents,

First, let me extend my thanks to anyone that has taken the time to vote or leave a comment on this it is appreciated.

My opening post was more about the concept than anything specific but I do have a well thought out idea behind this which is motivated and influenced by six different games I have played over the years, one of those being Moo2.

Today, I will leave a general outline for your consideration and hopefully we can have some fun with it, if nothing else it should be a fascinating exchange of ideas and I always welcome that.

Let’s start at the strategic level, or rather what stays the same. Here I envision hardly any changes from Moo2. The player would still have a variety of buildings to choose from such as marine barracks and armor with one or two additional new buildings (eg. Special forces, Mercenary)

Transports would also be built in the same manner as Moo2 so up until this point there is nothing new, rather an enhancement of the core game.

The changes would all be reflected at the moment that combat is actually about to take place, in this instant I would propose that the player be given the option of auto resolve (same combat as in Moo2) or manual combat.

Should manual combat be selected, the player would be presented with a secondary screen depicting the world he/she is fighting over in a simplified form. This would still leave room for terrain to be a factor which would take form in the shape of plains, forests, mountains, hasty fortifications, fixed fortifications, rivers, bridges, etc. (there should be several default maps for each planet type that will be randomly chosen to keep the combat from getting boring)

This map, in keeping with Moo2 should be defined by a number of squares and not hexes, the reason will become clearer as you read on, the map should also be somewhat small.

The number of units in play would also be quite small. Currently I have two separate ideas on this.

One idea is to limit the number of units to six maximum. The units however would vary greatly in how powerful they are. (Think divisions and corps size units where more transports would equal larger units)

The other idea is more units but with fixed strength (more transports equal more units)

In both cases, unit facing would be a factor meaning you could execute flank attacks etc. and would stay within the flavor of Moo2 (four sides to consider, just like ship combat), winning would be accomplished by either eliminating the opposing units or capturing the opposing command post, losing would be the opposite. The ability to withdraw or surrender should also be present

By keeping the map and number of units small I would be looking at accomplishing two goals and they are both critical.

A small map with limited numbers of units would become far easier to code and the AI, which would be faced with a very finite number of choices would be very effective.

The length of ground combat would also stay reasonable with a fairly large battle taking only about five minutes to resolve. (This would avoid the mechanic becoming tedious)

Some unit types would include

Infantry (slow movement fair attack and defense, basic unit)

Artillery (slow movement, fair attack, poor defense, ranged fire, basic unit)

Armor (medium movement good attack and defense, available with armor barracks)

Jump troops (medium movement, fair attack and defense, ignores terrain, advanced unit)

Hover tanks (medium movement, good attack and defense, ignores terrain, advanced unit)

In all cases (except ranged units) units must be adjacent to an enemy in order to initiate combat.

Leaders could play a role

Cut scenes can be included as I have seen something similar but the option to disable them should be present.

Turns in ground combat would be similar to space combat, in other words…

A turn is strategic, one turn is a length of time that is not affected by how many turns (tactical) are used in combat. This would not allow for multiyear ground wars but personally I believe it is better for the player to not have unfinished business from turn to turn. For me, a TBS game is similar to a board game and this would keep that feeling.

Anyhow, this is just a broad outline but I do have quite a lot of material ready on this, especially the logic behind it. As the poll numbers are really too small for me to gain any insight however, I will put this on the back burner for now but would be willing to continue the discussion as needed or entertain any thoughts or ideas you may have.

 

Well, map-in-a-map, you get that in MoO2 too: each star system is a map in a map, even the tactical space battles are a map in a map.

The way I could imagine a relatively simple, multi-turn ground battle system: you have a progress bar (underneath the planet?) which is slowly filled (turn by turn) from two sides: attackers and defenders (in their respective empire colors). The length of the progress bar is determined by the planet/population size, the number of attackers/defenders and their technological capability decides how fast the progress is. Once the two bars of attackers/defenders meet somewhere in the middle of the progress bar, the battle is instantly decided by a dice roll weighted according to the length of the two bars at that time. This would make it possible to send in re-inforcements if you see that you are about to lose the battle - or retreat your troops before its too late. You could even have allies helping you with the attack/defense.

Here's a turn by turn example how that could work:

Turn 1: attack of a planet with 10 population => Bar length = 100. (the exact numbers don't matter, just as an example). The attacker has 5 troops which have strength 2 each. The defender has 3 troops which have strength 4 each.

Turn 2: Attacker arrives at a length of 10, the middle 68 unit lengths are still empty, the last 12 are covered by the defenders. The attacker realizes that the defenders will have a slight upper hand. Reinforcements of 5 additional troops (strength 2 each) are launched from a near-by system, will take 2 turns to arrive.

Turn 3: Attacker at length 20, the middle 46 unit lengths are empty, the last 24 covered by the defenders. The defenders develop a new technology, which pushes the strength of defense to 5 each.

Turn 4: Attacker at length 30. Reinforcements arrive and are landed (will affect next round only). Defender now gained 15 more unit lengths compared to before, arrives at 24+15=39 from end. Therefore, middle 31 unit length still empty.

Turn 5: Attacker would reach length in this turn 50. Defender would be at 39+15 = 55 from end. Since that is more than the length of the bar, the battle is resolved, and the attacker has a chance of 50/(50+55)=47.6% to gain the upper hand.

 

TL;DR: No.

My first association for tactical ground combat is Heroes of Might and Magic scene but with only one unit type. I saw that screenshot in one 4X in development, can't remember which one but I wouldn't be happy watching that scene every time I'd like to conquer the planet. Ideally I wouldn't want to juggle maps within a map but I'm open to surprises, if map is small enough and there aren't too many unit types it could be interesting. Anyone played UniWar (iOS/Android free game)?

Speaking of unit types MoO 2 missed opportunity of using armor/battleoids in offense. If transporters became automatically loaded with them (1 tank + 2 marines instead of 4 marines) then there would be an incentive to research them.

I'm for multi turn invasions. It could work in both tactical as well as in roll based system. Instead of rolling dice all the way until one side dies, limit amount of rolls per turn. If it is draw attackers go back to transporters.

Personally I'd just spice up MoO 2 ground combat with selecting invasion strategy kind of like in Galactic Civilization but not with all their baggage). Some strategies may employ bombardment rolls from ships in orbit (BTW bio weapons killed both population and troops), riskier strategies provide combat bonus but may cause collateral damage (destroyed building, killed population, maybe even friendly fire), safer ones would be free of collateral damage.

 

It's difficult to have an opinion on ground combat because it is always overlooked in 4x games. It would certainly be interesting to see an attempt at making it something other than an afterthought.

One potential problem is that, if it cannot be resolved in a single turn, planetary battlefields will become a "map within a map" that you have to keep checking on, which kind of goes against the MOO2 design philosophy of being clear and accessible.

There's the other obvious consideration that if the game allows heavy orbital bombardment - why even bother with the management headache when you can just swiftly destroy the enemy from the air? I'm not rejecting the idea of good ground combat, I'm just saying it has to be tied into the other gameplay mechanisms in order to work properly.

If done well, it could actually be an important mechanic in stopping snowballing and late-game boredom. If you have to pour resources into ground combat (rather than just glassing planets from orbit) and each occupied world becomes an ongoing drain on your army, then painting the map becomes a lot harder, and big empires run a massive risk if they overextend themselves and get hit by insurgents on the ground.

 

I think it might be worthwile to have more detailed ground combat. In particular, it always striked me as a bit unlikely that ground combat is decided in a single turn - think WW2, in which only a small area compared to the entire planet was actually fought over and which still lasted almost 6 years.

A multi-turn struggle over important planets (during which, I guess, all production on the planet would stop) would also allow you to bring in re-inforcements, or intercept your enemy's re-inforcements in space, etc., overall adding more strategic depth to the war. That doesn't mean that every ground combat would last many rounds, this would only happen in cases where the military might of the invading force is roughly comparable to the one of the defending force.

A full-fledged ground combat model (with different types of units at different technology levels fighting over different types of terrain tiles, population centers, and buildings, involving orbital bombardment and drop-ins of additional troops etc.) might indeed be interesting for an expansion pack.

 

Hello all, hope you had healthy and happy holidays.

Moo2 abstracted ground combat and while it was simplistic it was effective. That doesn't mean however that there was not room for improvement.
For example, when being invaded, I would often notice that my enemies fielded 9 transport invasion fleets that would allow them to take my planets intact. I on the other hand was always loath to spend that many command points on transports and rarely fielded more than two at any given time. This inevitably caused situations where prior to my own invasion I would bomb the planet in question in order to soften it up. The drawback here was that I killed a lot of the population on said planet and destroyed a considerable number of buildings. This usually meant that while I was able to take the planet it was seldom "intact"
As I pondered this it occurred to me that IG2 actually paid as much attention to ground combat as it did space combat, for me this was a huge plus.
With this in mind, I spent some time thinking about how this feature could be introduced in a TBS game such as this while remaining fun, simple and most important, quick.

I understand this feature, if implemented, would be a prime candidate for DLC rather than the base game and I'm cool with that, however...

Maybe it's a bad idea.

So before actually presenting what would basically be an entire design for a mini game and doing the work that would be involved, I would like to know how you all feel about it.