RE: Tactical Battles

I am looking forward to see what you have in minde for your tactical battle AI improvements.

In a game last night I was able to steamroller the AI with my standard battle tactic - using: 4 heros with magical armor and sword, Spell Blast and Pull of Earth. With this strategy I was able to destroy all armies I faced in Tactical Battle.

From my point of view the 3 problems with the tactical battles are;

01. AI never uses magic. I would really like to see some sovereigns adopt a Magic Centered Leveling Up Strategy (i.e. At game sovereign picks a strategy to follow: 25% that AI sovereign follows Magic AI Strategy, 75% follows melee strategy). to add some variety.

Magic AI strategy = Sovereign increases intelligence with each level and ultimate research aim is magical armor and weapons that he can use to equip his champions. In battle sovereign following this strategy will use magic to support his forces.

02. AI chases my champions, never targeting my spell casting sovereign.

03. AI never uses bows or catapults or mounted units. The whole AI battle line is too predictable. And where are the lances for horsemen? No racial specific weapons - such as extra heavy maces or extra heavy two handed swords for Trogs - that only trogs can use due to their greater strength.

From my perspective there is a lack of tactical spells - spells that can really make the tactical battle more interesting and less predictable. Now I can use just three spells to secure victory - Spell Blast, Pull of Earth and the spell that drains 30 points from an adjacent enemy. I would like to see the enemy sovereign cast Fog; a spell that reduces line of site and attack range for all units to 2 tiles or Darkness, that reduces line of site and attack range to 1 tile to really change the dynamics of the tactical battle. I would like a tactical mass healing spell and I would like to see an enemy sovereign use it to heal units I just hit with Spell Blast, Etc. I would like to see a tactical magic shield spell that an AI sovereign would use to shield a unit from the magic I cast. (I.e. Magic Shield blocks level 1-2 spells, Greater Magic Shield blocks level 1-4 spells) and tactical summoning spells that would summon packs of creatures to the battle.

I have to say I am really liking this game now! Even know the Alt-Tab crashes it and it crashes here and there also some slow downs here and there too...but I have to say the game is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better then it was. Really good job you guys did.

Glad to see you're yanking the specialist system. I like Sethai's ideas on the city building aspect best; give a limited number of new tiles to build on at level up, have buildings generate a certain amount of something per person living in the town, and make some of the more interesting buildings available only on higher levels. This will promote building a few large cities, with a few small towns mainly for resource gathering. Most of the code for this system is or was present in the game at some point, so it shouldn't be to hard to implement.

Some thoughts and options that this system opens up;

*I'm thinking houses should not count towards the tile limit, this will make life easier for both the player and the AI. It also allows for easy level scaling (to get to level 2 requires 1 house, to get to level 3 requires 2 more houses, etc). If food is still limited big cities will require a relatively huge portion of your food supply, but on the other hand be able to produce much more resources/gold/research/etc.

*You could easily add some faction variety; certain factions prefer big cities and get more tiles (and thus more production) in the bigger cities, while others prefer small towns and have a more distributed production. This also means different war strategies, because losing a single city would be a huge loss for the former faction, while it would be less so for the latter. On the other hand the former would be able to concentrate his defenses, while the latter would have to spread them out.

*You could mix in some buildings that produce a fixed amount of resources and buildings that produce a certain amount per citizen. For example; I'm playing the Planetfall mod for civIV at the moment. There you can build a network node that produces 2 research, which is great in the early game. But later on when techs cost thousands of research points and cities produces maybe a hundred points each because of their large populations it becomes nearly useless. Then it becomes much more interesting to maximize your food production to grow your population further.

I like this idea. Wriaths might fewer favor larger cities, receive a bonus to the number of tiles they receive and pay more in maintenance the more cities they control. 

Example:

Wraiths; each non-wraith city they raze increases the number of tiles for their capital city by 5. Each non-wraith city controlled increases the maintenance costs for each non-wraith city by 10% due to sabotage by your new subjects/serfs/slaves. Control 5 non-wraith cities and the maintenance costs for each of these cities increase by 50%.

Of course, Wraiths would then need unique AI instructions to take advantage of this.

Nah, "DPS" has become a generic term these days and people know what it means in this context. No need to change it to DPT.

A few thoughts on city spam reduction.

The number one problem with city building has been how cheap and effective those spammable buildings are.... Even early game the only real constraint on them is build time, late game they cheaper then dirt. Or simply put....

----> As you advance through the game improvement production rises steadly but costs do not! <-----

1. A simple boost to high level buildings would help. Reduce the effectiveness of the basic spammable buildings and boost the bonuses given by the high tier buildings. That way small cities would be less competitive with large ones and people would have a reason to level cities. Also dramatically increase the cost of those late game buildings.  A simple thing but very effective.

2. How about instead of increasing population costs, you increase upkeep or even building costs. It should not be possible to spam one type of building without also increasing the amount of basic infrastructure buildings you have. Basically if you want to build more libraries you should have to build more workshops and etc.  Cost wise every single improvement in the game may as well be free... You build like 5 workshops at the star t of the game and then never bother with them again until you start spamming unit groups. Materials and crystals need to be better integrated in to the game economy.

3. While the increasing civilian costs limited basic improvement growth it had tons of problems because it dealt with food which which was already really limited and inflexible. It was already the only real important resource so I'm not sure why you increased it's importance even more.  I suggest either an increase in gold upkeep to like 2-4 gold or a material upkeep. As it stands the 1 gold upkeep on libraries and other buildings is a bad joke. A material upkeep on buildings would make a lot of sense and add a lot of depth to the economy. 

4. Maybe a cap on resource production until a certain building is built. This could represent technological limits. Maybe the ability of the small spammable buildings is limited. i.e you can't do advanced research without advanced tools. If you don't like artificial caps you can tie it into suggestion 1 by making the cost of things increase exponentially in correlation with their tech level and really boosting the bonuses gained from high level buildings.

5. Maybe get rid of the spawn monsters city level bonus and replace it with a build farm option. (ya kinda off topic but it came to me as I was brainstorming) This would help with limited food and still require city specialization. Have a large area with no resources(really common in most games) that until now would be pointless to go near let alone build on, well then just build a city there and spend enough time and money to level it to level two and then you can start a small food production town there.

6. Most resource locations are very pointless beyond the very beginning of the game. +3 materials or research isn't really relevant for very long. An additional % bonus would help them stay significant.

Currently cities have a certain fixed amount of space to build on. I havnt played elemental since I found that out; all through the last game I was playing, I was expecting my cities to aquire more building space when they leveled up.

Making cities start with only a small amount of space to build on, and letting them use more space as the city levels up would provide a significant incentive to level up cities. You wouldnt be able to build crazy amounts of a resource producing building without leveling up your city.

To encourage specialization and large cities you could have buildings that have an effect aura (perform based on what is nearby, or boost the performance of other buildings nearby).  That would take more work to implement than some of the other great suggestions though.  Having a limiter on the number of build lots based on city level would probably work well for controlling several issues at once tile limit and city sprawl most of all.  If housing is an aesthetic piece that the computer puts around your town to represent your population it might make that many more plots available if needed (or their capacity per type could be changed).  Or have each evolution of housing use a 2x2 space with increased caps and then needing to be upgraded (built) individually instead of automaticly when your city levels (abstracting the housing amount further to free up tiles/resources/plots- they probably wont recieve as much attention as the other city improvements when inspecting a city (yours or an opponents).

Make some kind of outpost buildable that you can use to improve your line of sight (lift the fog of war) and/or area of control.  That way you wont need to build a city to claim the benefits of resources or improve the area you can keep an eye on for threats.  I'd say lift the restriction of building only in your area of control, but it would have to be in relation to something you control (within a distance) or you could claim everything you can see or a work crew can get to. Make sure that the prestige adjustment to population opperates on a faction level vs. local (ie having 1 city you get 1 person a season, but with 2 cities you dont get 1 person at each city).  The prestige bonuses could be used in smaller increments to effect your faction prestige (per turn population growth) and/or population distribution.

About cities:

To me, cities in an empire are basically like nodes on a spider web. A tightly knit spiderweb allows efficient use of the surface while a few knots of large sticky string defies the purpose of the web (in spider terms). Normally, however, there are nodes which are more important than others, while most are simply there to help cover the surface. I personally tend to try to cover everything and exploit the land as much as possible in a game like this.

While I agree that cities should be unique in their own way and that bigger cities are better for everyone, I think the way a city evolves has been forgotten. In the first stage of conquest, when you start a game, the goal is to establish yourself as firmly as possible as fast as possible. The location of the first city is often crucial to a lot of the aspects of the game later on, because they usually define the resources available for growth. But once that first city is set, the second stage of conquest begins. In terms of philosophy, it has always been consolidation. When the advantages of expanding outweigh the benefits of improving the starting city, it is obvious everyone will expand in the most efficient way possible. Including city spamming. In our world, many factors prevent humans from gratuitous city spamming, the foremost being limited resources. If the cost of spawning new cities is negligible, new ways must be devised.

If bigger cities are more profitable, by providing some kind of synergy bonus (an advantage due to increased size), it will become a very profitable long term investment to spawn as many small cities as possible to eventually get as many big ones as possible. Especially if small cities grow faster. Which means that spawning cities must be limited either logistically or economically or both. I personally don't see how it would make the game more fun to limit spawning so much that the user will just have to end up with 5 cities that produce everything, each one specializing in its own domain, especially if those large cities are fairly easy to loose.

We all know in general, a city has its growth phases. In the first phase, the town basically can only produce raw goods. There is few people, they are having trouble surviving and need the protection of a bigger city if they ever hope to flourish. Then, as the town grows, more services are provided to the population which starts to look down upon menial tasks such as "farming", and "sowing". Which in turns means they require more than they produce, in exchange for more advanced production. Of course, this would mean that each capital city would need a bunch of small villages to provide for it the resources it needs to be grand. And the user would also need to limit growth to those villages for fear of lacking resources. And that's not fun either.

So there are very few ways one could hope to have only a few large cities and be content. First, logistics need to be considered. If resources are acquired exclusively through population, the population cap of each city should never be reached, because sooner or later, the user will want more cities. And if resources are acquired through buildings, and that amount of space is fixed, there simply isn't any viable solution to keep the number of cities at a respectable level. Having that amount of space vary in relation to city level would help alleviate that, but sooner or later, the user will want more cities. And if the short-term tradeoff for founding a new city is too low, spammage will be on the way. So resources obviously need to be generated by something other than cities directly. It could be population, as people suggest, or area of influence or both, preferably. Meaning the user would still have to expand physically, which he would. And if the most efficient mode of expansion is something other than building cities, that's exactly what he'll do.

Growth in small cities should be very limited. The concept of area of influence would also need to be revised, because users like me will want to use and abuse all of the map surface. Meaning those 5 cities would need to allow total map control. Obviously, there could be "influence nodes" which could provide influence over large and distant areas cheaply and efficiently. They would have to allow troop movement, too, maybe something like a nydus canal. This is needed to prevent using cities to accomplish that same goal. Simply crippling city spawning is just a way to reduce fun. While having the establishment of a new city become a major event (in terms of cost and planning) is what I think FrogBoy is looking for.

Growth should be favored in large cities. Too often do we see an arbitrary population cap at which point the user, wanting more growth, has no choice but to settle more. By anticipating this and accepting a harder start of games, most megalomaniac users will spam as much cities as they can, always trying to optimize long term growth. On the other hand, if there are no caps, there is no reason for the user to have more than one city other than good production, and that defies the purpose of cities. By putting a limit on production based on area of influence (say 100 population per tile), we can remove the desire for new cities in terms of growth. They could and should contribute to area of influence, but other cheaper means should be provided to allow user to increase their area of influence. Also, limits to what you can sustain should be dependent on area of influence and/or money, but preferably both. As in free upkeep based on area of influence. By making economics and many other aspects of the game dependent on area of influence, we insure motivation for physical expansion and physical protection. We also insure that cities won't be spammed as they don't provide any real bonus just by being there. Ultimately, the user could choose to only have 1 capital city, to specialize in whatever he wants to specialize, and still be competitive, but not as versatile as someone who has 2 or more. If the specializations are limited (say 5 city types), so are the efficient cities.

Here is a bullet point summary:

- Turn major cities into hubs that could do anything, but can do only a few things well. Have them be self-sufficient, unlimited population growth centers. Capturing one should be a very hard blow to your enemy.

- Make small cities be a major and risky investment. Growth and profit should not be generated from these. Capturing one should also be very expensive. Only immensely rich users could ever hope to sustain two at once. (This point needs factoring from something like (total_city_level + (city_count - 1) * 5)). Meaning the first city could be really cheap to expand while the second one could really put a dent in your economics.

- Provide an alternate method of expanding area of influence (other than cities).

- Make area of influence something like a resource. If there are limits to be set (population, buildings, troop count, whatever), they should depend on this. This would be the equivalent of upkeep.

- Remove resource production buildings as they are the best incentive to spawn new cities. Make resource production dependent on population and/or area of influence.

- Make sure the only interest a user might have in a city is what it can specialize itself into. Also make sure redundancy is useless other than in terms of safety.

So basically, the point is this: allow the user to do all that more cities allows him to do, but without cities. Then you'll be done for good with city spamming.

Why not max out units per square from the start?  Say 1 per square for champions, drakes, catapults, and demons, 4 per square for larger units such as ogres, wolves, and giant spiders, and 9 for humanoid units--from the start without any research.  Putting more units on the battlefield in this way leads to bigger, cooler, more "epic" battles starting earlier in the game, that can get more epic still as squads gear up.

4 per square I always found the sweet spot for me in terms of power relative to training duration and cost, so my tactical battles never got particularly epic.

One thing you could do for cities is to give level 4 and 5 cities a unit creation bonus of 15-20% with those two level ups.

I just bought a new game called Storm: Frontline Nation today. It is set in modern day but the way they handle tactical combat could be a good example for World of Magic. I could definitely see the modern units substituted nicely for World of Magic units. It is on a hex map (which I think WoM should have had from the start) but this wouldn't be too much of a problem on the current grid.

Like WoM, Storm has a campaign map and when you have a battle you enter a special tactical combat map.

In Storm each player positions his units at the ends of the map. If you have more than about 10 units in a stack you can't place all the units - but as your units die on the battlefield the reserve units can be added.

The game is a WeGo system where each player plans the moves for all his units at the same time as the AI. Then the turn plays out. This sort of system would help the AI out a lot I think.

There are ambushes, terrain matters, units get flanking bonuses, there are disengagement penalties, victory points on the map give usable bonuses each turn, There is also a day/night cycle where attacking is diminished in the night, and combined arms also comes into play.

Basically infantry is good against air units, air units are good against armour, and armour is good against infantry - classic rock-paper-scissors stuff. Artillery can't engage units that are next to it but has a range of about 2 to 6 hexes. If artillery is on a hill the range increases by 1.

Attacks are simultaneous and units will attack where they can - so for the player the game is much more about controlling terrain and bringing numbers to bear in the best areas.

On top of all this, the tactical battles are actually very simple and can be played out in a few minutes.

In War of Magic the weapons would provide the attack types. Archers would be the artillery. Cavalry would be the armour, and foot soldiers would be the infantry. Swords and maces would provide attack bonuses while spears would provide defensive bonuses. Crude bows could have a range of 2 to 3 squares, Next one up 2 to 4, and longbows 2 to 5 squares.

Different sorts of terrain could provide penalties and bonuses to attack, defence and movement.

It is a great example of a relatively simple system applied in a very balanced way to make an engaging tactical combat game mechanic.

They should just copy or buy the tactical battles from Kings Bounty Best there is

exactly

Have to disagree with you on this one.  The most imortant stat is Int then Str then Con. Just about all heros I have I put most points in Int to make them efective casters and I do just about every champion into a caster....Why would you not?

As far as the Int/Char suggestion goes I would leave Int alon it needs no boosting. Now I like the Cha suggestion. But I would invent another stat for the amount of units that could be lead in an army

 Encountered an enemy army with an archer champion. This was a welcome surprise, as this single archer quickly slew two of my squad units and forced me to attack, rather than waiting for the enemy to advance.

In EWOM I use one of two strateiges that the AI can't counter.

01. My sovereign casts spell blast, my fellow champtions continually withdraw, the enemy units ignore my spell casting sovereign while chasing my champions and the enemy is vanquished = enemy destroyed with no losses = boring combat.

02. I develop Archers and enter into battle with 3 archer units and 1 spell casting sovereign and 1 champion that cast pull of earth on strongest enemy units = AI does not shield its units with Magic "Shield" = Victory = Boring Combat

I wonder if the AI in 1.3d will be enhanced to have some fractions research and build archers units while the sovereign will occasionaly use magic. This would be greatly appreciated and make tactical battles less predictable.

Example of a system for assigning random AIs to various fractions:

Mancers (1-25 Magic Strategy, 26-50 Archer Strategy, 51-100 Melee Strategy)

Game 1 - (45: Mancer sovereign adopts an archer strategy, researches archery and builds archer units)
Game 2 - (89: Mancer sovereign adopts a melee strategy and builds melee units)
Game 3 - (57: Mancer sovereign adopts a melee strategy and builds melee units)
Game 4 - (2: Mancer sovereign adopts a magic focused strategy, casts magic during battles, and researches magic)

• Wraiths (70% Magic Strategy, 10% Archer Strategy, 30% Melee Strategy)
• Trogs (10% Magic Strategy, 10% Archer Strategy, 80% Melee Strategy) - A Trog sovereign will almost always (80% - 4 out of 5 games) select a melee strategy that takes advantage of their superior strength. Rarely does this AI fraction choose to develop magic or archery.
• Altairs (50% Magic Strategy, 25% Archer Strategy, 25% Melee Strategy) - An altarian fraction is 50% likely to select a magic oriented conquest strategy that focuses on magic research, forging magical weapons and armor and using magic in battle. With the magic oriented straitegy the Altarian sovereign will likely embue a champion with magical power so that two units will be casting spells each turn.

My top 4 AI wish list for 1.3 series

01. Some AI sovereigns will follow an Archer based strategy - researching and fielding archer units in combat (now no AI sovereigns field archer units) and using magic to support the archer units (i.e. Pull of the Earth against enemy melee units to slow their advance, shield to protect archer units from enemy archers, etc.)

02. Some AI Sovereigns faced by an archer oriented army will cast Shield to protect their units from enemy archers and/or use magic to target enemy archer units. (now no AI sovereigns use magic to protect their units from archer attacks or target enemy archer units)

03. Some AI Sovereigns focus on using magic during tactical battles (now no AI sovereign uses magic during battle).

04. AI will target an exposed sovereign unit. (now they pursue other army units while ignoring the adjacent spell casting sovereign unit)

My Top 3 Unit Wish List for 1.3 Series

05. Mounted Units move 4 tiles & gain a charging attack bonus when they move at 2+ tiles. (move 2 or 3 titles and attack enemy unit in 3rd or 4th tile). No bonus is they move 0 or 1 tile before attacking.

06. Vetern & Elite Units armed with spears gain a defense bonus vs Charging Mounted Units that moved 2+ tiles that turn.

07. New Weapons; Pike for Infantry (defense bonus vs charging mounted units) and Lance for Mounted Units (attack bonus when mounted and charging)

My Top 7 Tactical Spell Wish List for 1.3 Series (assuming AI is updated to use these spells)

01. Web Spell - Targeted champion Unit cannot move for 1 turn per caster level. It can attack an adjacent unit, but can't move.

02. Darkness - Line of site and attack range for all units reduced to 2 tiles. (Dispelled by Daylight)

03. Tactical Summoning Spells (Summoning) - Caster can summon units ( a pack of wolves, a nest of spiders) that remain for 1 turn per caster level. Example: Level 3 Sovereign summons a pack of wolves that remains on the battle field for 3 turns.

04. Dispell Summoned (Summoning) - Dispells summoned unit

05. Charm Summoned (Enchantment - Level 5) - Take control of Summoned Unit for 1 turn per caster level. Summoned unit vanishes when original summoning spell expires.

06. Break Summons (Enchantment - Level 3) - Targeted summoned unit goes berzerk attacking closet randomly selected unit. Summoned unit vanishes when original tactical summoning spell expires.

07. Fear (Enchantment) - Targeted unit is struck by fear. 100% to affect untrained Units, 50% to affect Experienced Units, 25% to affect Vetern Troops, 0% to Affect Elite Troops. Chance to effect champions is based on targeted champion's level: 80% level 1, 60% level 2, 40% level 3, 20% level 4, 0% level 5 or higher. Units struck by fear attempt to flee the battlefield. Courage (Enchantment) - Targeted unit is immune to fear for duration of battle.

 The new pop scaling system makes it very hard to play without spamming cities just for population. I find myself building outposts next to food resources and leveling them up just enough to cover the pop costs of my major cities, which is basically promoting city spam.

I don't see stopping someone from spamming small outposts or villages (or the need to) but increasing maintenance cost and making buildings take longer for a lesser developed town to build might help make large cities more important. Also increasing the bonuses provided by schools, Greatmills, etc, might help to encourage building bigger specialized cities. 

Just my 2cents 

No lets not. Kings Bounty is fun but the tactical battles are basically chess like battles. For WOM and E:FE I would like it to look more like figting in terrain that the untis meet in. Something more akin to AOW:SM but more modern looking.

I would prefer Final Fanatasy Tactics or Brigandine like battles please.