Discussion: Tactical Battle Simulator

[Duke John]

I have been thinking alot about why I don't really like R:TW (and most likely M2:TW) and I think it is mostly because R:TW is not simulating battles, at least not to the extent that I can see in R:TW what I read in history books.

With this post I hope to get a little discussion about wether a battle simulator would be interesting, which compromises need to be made to keep gameplay interesting and wether a battle simulator is even sensible game to create.

In this discussion I talk about pre-modern warfare (ancient to Napoleonic)

Scale
Of course you could say that technical limitations limit the scale of armies, but I think more is at hand.

In real life armies ranged from a couple of thousands on each side to one hundred thousand and more during the Napoleonic period. With such huge armies you will need huge battlefields. Couple that with realistic movement speeds and kill rate you will get battles that can have a movement phase lasting several hours.
Forming square of a Napoleonic batallion was done in around a minute. The execution of that single order is considered fast if you know that hundreds of men were involved, but it is considered slow when you compare it to the battle phase of a typical R:TW game, which tend to be decided in just a few minutes.

With 1:1 scale you get the problem of needing to spread your attention across a battlefield that can be several kilometres deep and wide. You would need to zoom quite alot to get some overview of what is happening.
I have made renderings of 10,000 soldiers and it just becomes a big mass. The focus on detail would then shift from the soldiers to the battlefield as zooming in is not essential if you need to control formations that are several hundred metres wide.

Casualities
During the battle of Towton in 1461 the melee lasted for several hours, with the casuality rate no where near that of a TW game. During Waterloo 200,000 thousand men fought and someone calculated that on average 1,5 soldiers died every second. Implement that casuality rate in TW and gamers will complain about the dull combats.

Unit cohesion
Despite that you can use army/group formations, there is no true cohesion between units. In medieval times there were usually just 3 battles (groups) with perhaps a cavalry force detached for flanking. "Units" would form up into larger groups and act and move as a single unit. A battleline would deform as a whole and not fragmented as the case is with TW's system of handling units.

Tactics
Playing a TW game and reading a historical report of a battle is quite different. Battles were won by tactical decision making on a larger level. If you look for the deciding events or factor that decided the outcome of a battle you will rarely come across ones that you use or see in TW.

(Running out of time, so I'll just summarise and go on later, especially on command and control. Hopefully this has sparked enough interest for some replies)

In short, I would like to see a battle simulator in which I can see interactively why battles were won in real life and how it could have happened differently. Scale is a big problem as battles did occasionally last for hours on end (especially as the armies grew larger) and it is difficult to see how such a game could be interesting if seen as being of the same family of games were battles are played in 1 hour. It needs to be seen from a different perspective. Take Command (American Civil War) is doing that, but it still uses a 1:10 scale. The same with the upcoming Napoleonic HistWar.

And really short: Could a battle simulator with a 1:1 scale and historically correct rates of movement and casualities still provide the player with interesting and challenging gameplay from deployment to routing?

Cheers,
Duke John

[Fragony]

I don't really need all the units to be rendered, just give me the statistics. I never got enough of the unit descriptions in Medieval, the plain presentation in the battle never bothered me at all just because of that. If a truely realistic game could be fun, I dont know. Battles were just the finale, in the end it would become a game of getting your supplies where you want them in time. Not that much strategy involved in the actual battles, just superior numbers.

[Somebody Else]

From a book I've read on warfare... one proposal as to how these things were fought implies that much of the combat was decided in the first few moments of getting to grips with the enemy, one side or the other would generally break very quickly and run - even the TW games, with all their morale systems in place still essentially have men fighting in 'desperate last stand' mode, where really they'd see a much larger force and either refuse to fight, run immediately, or switch sides.

Wouldn't make for a fun game, the focus would shift to logistics and campaign strategy - tactics (the fun bit) are only a small part of warfare - the rest is, as Fragony says, getting the right men to the right place in sufficient numbers and well supplied.

[Samurai Waki]

Actually controlling logistics and supplying an Army whilst maneuvering my main force, sending out scout parties, skirmishes... etc, I would love that. I am a patient man, and at least half the fun for me would be the process leading up to that battle, rather than... perhaps the battle itself. In RTW, I get rather burned out quickly, because I like building up my empire, and not having to fight ten battles in one turn. It gets rather anti-climatic after awhile.

[Duke John]

Funny that all of you start talking about a strategic simulator. Does this mean that when it comes to simulating pre-modern warfare you are far more interested in the operational level than the battle?

I can foresee a few issues if the simulation would be truly historical (i.e. historical events can but do not need to happen ingame). For example, you control the French army during the Hundred Years Wars game leading to the battle of Poitiers. The French King pursued the English who could not join up with the Duke of Lancaster while the French are able to achieve that. The English are starved as their supply lines are cut. As a player you would then assume that victory is in your pocket but in real life it proved to be a disaster for the French army.

During the Wars of the Roses, forces were largely identical in composition. A game covering that period wouldn't provide you with any stats (I wouldn't like to see that anyway) so what would indicate the odds of winning? Numerical superiority didn't say a lot as plenty of battles were won by the smaller army.

So when fortune needs to be fickle if you want to simulate history, would it annoy you that you cannot control the outcome, just nudge it a bit?

[CBR]

And really short: Could a battle simulator with a 1:1 scale and historically correct rates of movement and casualities still provide the player with interesting and challenging gameplay from deployment to routing?

If Les Grognards will be fun then doing it 1:1 scale will be fun too. That game is supposed to use time compression of 10:1 at least in the beginning when armies are just maneuvering and then go down to 1:1 time. And AFAIK will be the closest thing to a Napoleonic simulator we have seen so far. A similar approach could be used in your 1:1 scale battle simulator.

Of course the simple linear warfare of ancient/medieval warfare is very different than Napoleonic warfare and would give the player less ability to command and control the army.

You mention: "I have made renderings of 10,000 soldiers and it just becomes a big mass." What do you mean by that? You have a simple but working battle engine?

From a gamers point of view the main difference between the Total War engine and a more realistic engine would be command and control, and how units actually could and did maneuver. Also there would no longer be this convenient birds eye view that enables the player to know the numbers and depth of enemy units and/or reserves.

Even using the not so realistic combat mechanics of the Total War engine you could get a long way by just implementing the lack of information and more limited manuvering and control.


CBR