How would a Real Time Tactical game on a 1:1 scale play?

[Duke John]

Personally, I would prefer turn-based for such a game - the BG-system sounds very intriguing, though.

Using a turn-based system raises the question in how many turns should a typically battle be completed? Players have all the time they want and some might even spend ten minutes on 1 turn. If a battle would be finished in 6 turns (as most miniature wargames) you would lose finesse and have a more crude system in which a melee can end in just one turn. 40 turns could be absurd, but it might not be. In BG you usually finished your turns fairly quickly as the interface was easy to use and the options were easy to oversee and reach.
The BG-system should be seen as an extra that allows the game to show the changes of the battleline in realtime. There won't be the need for frantically clicking buttons as the amount of orders you can make is probably limited.

And thanks for the encouragement!

I think that one thing that should be included in such a game would be subordinate commanders.

These features are certainly something I want to put into the game. But one must watch out for taking too much control out of the player's hands.

Before the battle you, the commander-in-chief, would "discuss" the strategy with your subordinate commanders and advisors

Planning the tactics before the battle can be interesting and is certainly more realistic, but could also take too much from the actual battle as it results in the player looking at a movie with little interaction.

How your subordinate commaders follow these orders would depend on their tactical ability, self-control(maybe merge self control and tactical ability?) and loyalty.

The tactical ability will certainly not be translated into a bonus on combat stats. It should translate into how the commander is able to handle different situations. For example during the battle of Towton, Lord Fauconberg (high tactical ability) ordered his archers to loose one volley and then take a few steps back. The Lancastrian Commander (low tactical ability) responded and let his archers loose their volley but as the wind and snow was blowing into their direction their arrows fell short and hit nothing. The commander did not realize this and all arrows were spent. The yorkists stepped forward to shoot their and the lancastrians arrows resulting in the Lancastrians moving forward abandoning their prepared positions. Writing an AI to simulate this will definitely be a challenge, but so is accepting the state of R:TW's AI

Within your own force you should have a sort of "area-of-command"[...] What do you think of this "system"?

I will need to think about this. As I said in the beginning this could result in taking too much out of the player's hands.

[Ser Clegane]

Using a turn-based system raises the question in how many turns should a typically battle be completed? Players have all the time they want and some might even spend ten minutes on 1 turn. If a battle would be finished in 6 turns (as most miniature wargames) you would lose finesse and have a more crude system in which a melee can end in just one turn. 40 turns could be absurd, but it might not be.

Yep - 6 turns would probably be way to short and not allow for much tactics. 40 actually sounds more realistic - could become cumbersome if you have many battles, but IMHO the TW games tend to have too many battles (personally, I would have loved RTW to have a significantly lower number of battles, with the individual battles being more important and epic).
So, as long as there are fewer battles, it might not be as much of a problem if the individual battles take longer to fight.

If you have something like a battle that takes e.g. 20-40 rounds, each unit could receive e ceratin number of "action" points per round that could be used for e.g. movement, change of formation, reloading (casualties and effects on morale in e.g. melees could also be calculated per round in a manner that it could take several rounds to resolve a melee between units).

Note, that I have no clue about programming such things and that I am just throwing some thoughts around , but in principle in think that turn-based battles have a lot of potential...

[English assassin]

IMHO turn based has quite a bit to recommend it in terms of game play.

As far as I can tell from reading historical accounts, an army commander doesn't actually make all that many decisions in battle anyway. It simply wasn't possible to exercise that sort of command across the battlefield, and of course in real life the general doesn't have to worry himself with micromanagement of issues like "hang on, those idiots are getting ahead of the line, they are going to be cut off and massacred, slow down you fools". (Well, he may well worry, but he can't do anythign about it)

Of course a player does need enough decisions and involvement in the action to make the game fun, so simply setting up the initial deployment and some overall orders and more or less letting things evolve from there wouldn't be viable, even if it might be reasonably accurate.

IMHO the suggestion of something a bit like combat mission was a good one. So, you have a "paused" orders phase where you can instruct each unit as you wish. Then when you hit go, first, there is a delay while the orders make their way to the units, (or you can build in a delay to get all units starting to move at the same time) then the units all move according to the orders AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO UNTIL THAT GAME PERIOD ENDS (in CM it was a minute at a time IIRC, here it might be, say 10 minutes, so a two hour battle would give 12 turns. I would guess you could make that variable reasonably easily, so the player who wanted 12 turns an hour or 24 turns an hour or whatever could just adjust it themselves?)

Units aren't stupid, of course, they do respond fairly sensibly to the situation around them as it changes rather than just marching blindly forward because that's what your orders were, while the hidden machine gunner takes them all out. And of course you can order a depleted unit to advance at the charge up a steep hill towards a fresh dug in unit, but it doesn't mean they will.

Then you have another order phase and it starts again (you can order units todo things that take more than one period to complete in which case you don't need to repeat the orders of course)

Duke John if you can pick up a copy of CM cheap (it should be remaindered by now) it would be worth having a go or two to see how it worked. The clincher was the range and subtlety of the commands you could give, so you really could try to pull off some pretty sensible infantry tactics.

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

MHO the suggestion of something a bit like combat mission was a good one.

The new Combat Mission engine is taking a 1:1 approach. It looks great.

Unfortunately, the first game they're releasing with it is a hypothetical US Vs Libyans scenario, which sounds decidedly dull. I think I'll hold off until the WWII game.

[Efrem]

Well someones described the combat mission system for me. I loved the system but I hated the game with a vengance. Was a total waste with the horrible scale and terrible graphics.

[English assassin]

Well someones described the combat mission system for me. I loved the system but I hated the game with a vengance. Was a total waste with the horrible scale and terrible graphics.

Yeah, I didn't want to put DJ off but I must admit I didn't like the game that much. I think the trouble was it was actually too good a simulation of how difficult that sort of small unit tactics is. Also possibly the scale of the game was a bit small, after all, I'm all for ordering my armour to pull back from a village and sending in the Black Watch to clear the houses hand to hand, but actually having to manage each squad as they did it was too much work. And trying to work your Sherman round from hull down position to hull down position might have given you a really good tank commander level insight into the difficulty of fighting armour, but it was more like work than fun.

The principle of how the system worked was very good, but you'd need to strike a balance that involved a bit less ordering small squads of men to crawl forward under fire a minute at a time and a bit more ordering large groups of cavalry to smash into each other.

Yeah, I know, I'm shallow.

[Crazed Rabbit]

I must throw my support to the real time, and not turn based battles.

I believe real time makes it much more realistic. In real war, of course, there were no stops for turns during which the commanders could take their time deciding what to do. It would be much more fluid than a series of stop and go decisions.

I think that that fluidness is important to the 'suspension of disbelief'. Yes, you can make an accurate game using a turn based system, but a real time game allows much greater power and control over when to respond. With a certain amount of delay in orders, this could force players to not micromanage units too much.

As to graphics, I think it might be beneficial to have soldiers be made up of 3d boxes or simple red or blue sprites instead of whole units being a solid box. You'd be able to represent sparse formations to minimize artillery causulties, units going from good order (straight lines and whatnot) to disorganized masses, to fleeing routers running everywhere, and not just a box running away. And I don't think it'd be too much more work (compared to making good looking sprites), but I don't know much about that.

As to your combat mathematics; they seem somewhat like just lining up the lines in medieval total war and having them slug it out, but lines being pushed back or forward depending on who's winning. It seems very good to me, as long as its not too abstract (I worry unnecessarily most likely, due to the fancy lines respresenting the battle in those pictures).

As to orders, I think it'd remove most of the point of the game if you only allowed people to set up the armies and do little as the battle unfolded (which you don't seem to be leaning towards). I think we should be able to order units about as in Medieval, if with a chance of time delay, etc. But I think that allowing the player to command some cavalry to go and flank the enemy by moving them point by point around the enemy's lines should be allowed, and that your final orders to charge into the flank should not be hindered because the game has calculated your general is too far away to give effective orders.

Why? Because this ability would represent prebattle plans to do something like that based on a signal, or complex orders given at one time durig the battle.

Issueing commands will be differently from TW. Delay in execution, misinterpreting orders, orders not arriving at all or units taking action on their own are all methods to make the game more realistic. But they should be used carefully as they can easily frustate the player, although that is not entirely unrealistic either as when the battle of Tewkesbury was lost the duke of Somerset killed Lord Wenlock for not supporting him.

I wouldn't mind a little bit of the above, but it should, as you said, be used delicately. And we should have at least a chance to call back an impetous charging unit. And I want to be able to execute commanders I don't like. If your doing an attribute system like the TW games, you could have a 'Kills impetous or disobediant subordinates' trait which would lower the chance of subordinate captains charging off.

Crazed Rabbit