Well lets see.

As far as a blanked movement debuff goes. Sharp objects on the ground like broken glass, thorns and caltrops will force anyone moving over them to slow down. Assuming they realize the danger is there to begin with. So dangerous terrain like this could be used in two ways. An obviously trapped portion of ground will be avoided by enemies. Ground that doesn't *look* trapped may not be discovered until its too late. This "area" effect will slow down a hostile force, regardless of what size it is. If the danger zone is only 5 feet wide, people carefully stepping over it will slow down the people behind them.

Measuring the effects of these obstacles on the individual soldier is not that hard. Lets say for every step over a patch of ground has a 25% chance of landing on something sharp. The % chance depends entirely on how "dense" the sharp things are. Whether or not the entity actually gets hurt would depend on the strength of thier boots.

Lastly, how much of an effect any injury has depends on where it came from. Stepping on a thorn will make you limp around in pain and force you to stop and remove it. It is certainly not dangerous enough to cripple or maim. But a spike trap would certainly fit the bill.

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So to sum things up. Dangerous terrain slows down people who can't deal with it. In the case of thorns that means posessing strong boots. Troops can ignore the danger and move over such zones at full speed, but this increases the chance they will get hurt.

Individual members of a unit will react separately. One soldier out of 500 who injured his foot will start to limp. This reduces his speed for a while until the pain fades at least. This effects the group as a whole exactly as you would expect. If the group is ordered to move faster than the limping man he will not be able to keep up. If he is in formation the pattern will get disrupted as he falls back to the rear of the group.

Once he reaches the end you have to make a decision. Leave the guy behind (with all the risks and problems that entails). Slow down the entire unit to match his speed. Or use members of the same unit to help move the injured guy along, at the cost of none of them being able to fight.

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As far as player feedback goes, this kind of thing is very intuitive. Troops crossing dangerous terrain will slow down, unless ordered to continue ahead. Units which are immune to the danger will act normally. But they may not realize the danger is there which could be inconvenient for anyone following them. Individual soldiers in a unit will start to limp if they injure thier feet and they will slowly drop to the rear of thier formations. Even if you don't get little text warnings that these things are happening you can still figure out whats going on just by observing the situation.

Tamren, I can see your point and I understand that there are, in reality, a lot of variables governing how many soldiers are affected by difficult terrain.

However, what I am proposing is that all this is treated in a more simplistic, insightful manner. You describe into detail a system where there is a 25% chance per step to be affected by dificult terrain. While I do not opose a system like that - it seems sraightforward enough - I prefer a system that would just make this less complicated and more straightforward.

If we can agree that a single soldier walking in difficult tarrain of some kind has a chance of x per step to hurt himself, we can then calculate how big the chance is that the soldier gets hurt. We can then correct these calculations for the depth of the terrain and such. If a soldier has a 10% chance to get hurt in terrain five foot deep, then we can calculate how big the chance is for him to get hurt in the same terrain that is ten foot deep.

If we can find a system that is elegant in it's simplicity yet is yields results similar to a more complex system, would you then still prefer this more complex system?

Also where would the cutoff point be where we will stop adding variables? If boot strength is taken into consideration, would we also need to correct for slippery surfaces like when fighting in a muddy field? Would there be a need to correct for winter cinditions where the musles are more stiff then in mid-summer?

In the end we just need a system that does what it is supposed to do in a believable way, it matters very little if the method of getting there is realistic. In the game we can just look at the end result and say 'yeah I can see that happening in real life too.' Whatever method can get that result with miniml processing power and minimal code is the preferable one imo.

Yeah I agree with you, I think. Keeping track of status effects on every individual unit would get out of control way too fast without doing something like Tamren's suggestion, but I think Tamren's suggestion just opens up a whole new can of worms that's even worse than the original (keeping status effects for every individual unit getting hairy with large numbers). 

So really all you want is a "decay" function used by some (but not all) terrains. That seems doable.

Well, accoridng to Wikipedia, they can be used against most any type of walking or rolling thing. Even if the article is wrong, just the appearence of the thing indicates that it can be used against foot units:

A use-deacy system as well. Again, doable, but with a slightly smaller payoff. In any event, that sort of thing would soon be modded in if it wasn't in by default.

Well, I would argue that it depends on how big the caltrop is. Make it a foot high and put it in a shallow pit...

Well alone it would not be very effective. But you could improve on its use in a variety of ways:

• Instead of just 1 spike use 1000 and force your enemy to move over it.
• Form a shield wall just beyond the trapped area.
• Place these traps in a location where they can't be seen such as behind a wall or in a ditch. Anyone vaulting over the wall will have no time to react.
• Load them into a catapult and rain them upon your enemy.
• When defending a wall, dump buckets of them everywhere once your position is in danger of being overrun then retreat to the next strong point.

And so on.

Heh why not use fire magic to craft red-hot caltrops that never cool? Its hard to ignore one if just being close to it is enough to cook your feet.