Beware the killer stack!

yeah, I know what you mean.   I'm sure we'll get that down in the beta feedback.

You complain about killer stacks and then suggest that killer stacking should be the norm and not the exception? The reason we have killer stacks at all is that there is a cap on army size. Its possible to overwhelm elite troops by drowning them in grunts. After a point its possible to deploy so many units that the skills and capabilities of your enemy are meaningless. Once the cap is there this is no longer possible.

Bleh too many uses of "possible", anyone got a better word

But in any case it seems we probably won't have this problem with elemental. It sounds like we won't have many elite "units", or if we do they would be hella expensive. Instead we would have elite soldiers or squads. Like the dragon for instance, you will only ever have one if at all.

I believe that is what your channeler is for.

i.e. You see a massive stack coming your way. From the map view have your channeler cast a spell to slow/stop movement of units within area. You then start unloading on it with splash damage spells. This basically makes huge stacks a liability but it also requires that you have a large stockpile of manna. Alternatively, the game could include collateral damage units similar in implementation to artillery in Civ 4.

Ideally, both options would be included b/c not everyone will be blessed with an overabundance of manna at all times.

16 capship fleet in SoaSE is my stack of choice. IMO, if there are extremely powerful units they should be one per army. Give them all huge egos so they refuse to work with one another. Or something.

To deal with the "huge omfg 10000000 troop" armies, have logistics effects based on size. Army speed for example. 10,000 people can't move nearly as quickly or efficiently as 10 people can. Also logistical things such as commanding units who need to be payed more. So if you make a huge unkillable army, it will be so slow you can't go raiding enemies or defending your borders effectively as well as having a huge upkeep cost due to the army beaurocracy.

But then quick raiding will become dominant, and speed kills more the strength- especially if razing is easy.

The best counter to stacks of doom is quick armies doing economic damage behind it.

The thing is though, economic damage doesn't matter when they already have a stack of doom.

The killer stack problem in MoM does not sound like the problem was with the killer stack, but more a problem that the AI lacked the skill to cripple and then stop the killer stack.  In AoW:SM human players would stop killer stacks with a combination of map spells and then battle spells while taking out key units within the stack.  As you might have expected the AI opponents had less skill at stopping the killer stacks.

So I would say the key is having a skilled and moddable AI personalities.

One option to killer stacks is some sort of local supply rating, perhaps with buildings/improvements/spells you can use to help that out.  A big army takes resources to maintain in the field. You can port all those with you or forage from the surroundings.

I can see "porting supplies" in the form of caravans of supplies having to be purchased or some sort of production penalty to nearby towns if you exceed their supply. Which in turn means your inherent supply is better near your towns than in the midst of an enemy.

It would also place emphasis on quality versus quantity. Say it's cheaper to build a powerful stack of cheap units, but the supply issue can be crippling if it gets away from the premium supply zones. Where as that really expensive to create stack of elites doesn't have a supply problem, but takes longer to build and costs more.

I wouldn't want to delve too far into an entire supply economy, but I can certainly see the idea of supply caravan units supplying an army. Either prebuild enough for your army's trip or wagon train them there and risk your supply line being intercepted and killed. That would certainly make fielding a killer stack a more significant strategic effort.

I think Sun Tzu sums it up pretty well. Something to the tune of 'An army in the field requires massive resources and so impoverishes the peasants. An army in the country drives up prices and so destroys the livelyhood of the peasants.'

It can if the troops desert/rebel due to lack of pay.

Or starves, or suffers equipment degradation due to supply losses (carts wear out, horses die, etc. and no way to replace them).

Ok I'll be the voice of dissent... I like the killer stack.  Let's say I spent the time and money to research the "storm giant" spell, and I have the mana to cast it 5 times, so why not let me use them all in the same place.  Let the AI be smart enough to make their own killer stack, or better yet have it start producing counter units.  Sounds like fun to me 

I don't really see the problem, as long as the cost of units (whether economical or magical) is well-balanced. True, in MoM you could beef up a few heroes and make them almost invincible but then again with the same kind of money you could have trained and maintained hordes of berserkers / paladins / ...

And if you manage to get a superior economy up, you should be able to pour that into military might, with a good time delay of course.
Troop composition can be a tricky thing to implement nicely; however I fully agree that tactics, strategic placement and such should get a bigger role than they normally do. Just look at history where in some legendary clashes, vastly outnumbered armies have defeated superior numbers just through tactics.

Stacking units is not just a means to build up an army but also a way of conveniently moving a number of units at the same time.

If game mechanics are such that damaging units in a stack is more effective (because of splash damage) than damaging unstacked units, the obvious work-around is to spread units out. This, of course, means you have to move more units each turn, making it a lot less convenient than moving stacks of units. 

Call me lazy... but I don't really want to be forced to play in an inconvenient way to gain a tactical advantage

Stack limits are simply an arbitrary measure of how many "units" can fit onto the same map tile. In MoM map tiles are squares of nebulous size, the unit limit is 9. It doesn't matter if that means 9 dragons or 9 units of spearmen, they take up the same amount of room on the map. The whole reason the limit was included at all probably had to do with the limitations of the engine. With our modern computers it might be possible to up that limit to the point where any cap is unreachable or nearly so.

Uncapped army size opens up vast possibilities. A human army can only take up so much room and move so far. An undead army could pack in much tighter, require no supply train, and march without tiring. When the two forces engage in combat the undead army has the advantage of stamina and size.

If you cap such a battle in that you can only fit so many troops per square meter, then the undead horde would be far larger than the human army and many times as dense. If you capped it by stack size, then you would end up pitting 9 units of skeletons vs 9 units of spearmen. Spearmen are slightly superior so when deployed 1 to 1 against the skeletons they would have an artificial advantage.

Well in the world map it's turn based and if you finish your turn with the units spread out they're more vunerable to being picked off by small enemy parties hiding in stealth via the trees or magic.  So you may avoid most damage from a map spell such as those seen in AoW:SM, but it does leave you vunerable to surprise attacks.  For AoW:SM the ideal strategy becomes multiple groups where any one group is not a loss and it avoids most damage from map spells.  AoW:SM was a big success for fantasy TBS so I recommend the same method be used for Elemental.  If you haven't played AoW:SM I recommend playing the game before commenting to better understand since my few sentences doesn't cover the depth of strategy involved.

I agree with Tamren and Rhadagast...   one method I recall working really well was the unit placement of troops on the battlefield for  Lords of Realm_2 .   Yes that's an old game, but I  recommend the same type of stacking be done for Elemental battlefields.  Hopefully the developers can find the game and play a few battles to understand the design.

I don't like map spells though. If you cast "fireball" on my army stack. Am I to believe to that you just cast a fireball big enough to cover a square kilometer or more? If you can throw those around once a day then tactical battles would be over in seconds. Spell effects should not cover the entire army unless you had enough energy to make your spell big enough at a tactical level.

This isn't so bad in AoW because each unit is a single unit, one spearmen is just one spearmen. So a group of 9 units doesn't cover much ground. But when you scale that up to MoM and Elemental size it just doesn't make sense any more.

I wouldn't say that the limit was arbitrary or had anything to do with the engine. The number of units in a stack was the number of units you could bring into a battle. It was probably a very conscious decision to have a maximum of nine units per tactial battle for each side.

Great feedback.  NTJedi hit the nail on the head, at least where I was coming from.  The AI, was very inefficient at developing killer stacks which meant A human player could win as long as they survived for a while.  I'm a firm believer in having as many options for players as possible, it is important that each option has positives and negatives.  Its also critically important to have killer AI:)

I'm not totally against killer stacks, I'm against it being a game breaker.  There should be some negative to them built into the game design.  Regardless if it is an AI or human opponent, I don't want a race to the best killer unit to be the game.  I'm looking for more.

I'm not entirely sure how you can deal with killer stacks without making combat seriously downplayed.  Like the point of a killer stack is that... its a stack that kills everything other than another killer stack in combat, and without such a stack then what is combat then?

Multi-turn combats (like that go for more than 1 game turn) might do it though.    It would require some sort of turn limit be placed on combats to mark when a battle is pushed to the next game turn, and I know some people are apposed to that idea.

I guess you are talking about AI more than the stack itself, but still.  I mean it is what it is.

But it is arbitrary. It doesn't matter how much space the unit takes up or how many figures there are in each unit. The limit is 9 per stack. Put 36 paladins into a city and suddenly all other units produced must camp outside in the rain. How come you can't fit more than 36 soldiers in a city big enough for 120 THOUSAND people?

Killer stacks are the result of limits placed on the game engine.

An easy way of dealing with that is to make elite units hella expensive. Power must come at a cost, the same goes for spells and numerical superiority.

In elemental "expensive" means something different. We spend essense to empower our troops, the more power we give the more essense we spend. Since essense is finite then the system should balance itself as long as the amounts and figures are properly calculated.

Cost is an answer, but I don't think it is a complete answer.  It still is only a race, however, with the currency being essence it does create interesting tradeoffs.  That's what I'm talking about.  Creating tactical/strategic tradeoffs that players will have to make.  This is much more interesting than a race.  It also has to do with the criticality of losing a production space.  If only offense matters, it makes the Killer stack option much more attractive.  However, if your killer stack becomes weaker if you lose some important positions on the board, then it makes life much more interesting.  I could see a lot of these types of design elements built in to make player decisons more important and varied.

Well you could set up a system where each battlefield can field x number of population.(lets say the troops need food,tools/weapons/space etc).

Cheap units cost a low population and big units cost more. That way you could field a large army in a single tile, but you could not stack all your units in a single tile army, when you hold a large empire.

Another reason to do it this way, is to make it viable to have varied end game armies. And to make sure certain factions do not get screwed based on possible units they can make.