I Want to Have Wars Between Disparate Technologies

[Cheimison]

I would really like to be able to have armies of vastly different time periods fight one another, and have their differences meaningfully reflected in game. For example: high Byzantine armies v. Makedonian phalanx. Where the differences in armor, weapons and material quality are so great as to make it very difficult for the other side to effectively engage and injure. I want to watch Burgundians in full plate (a bit beyond the current expansions in tech levels) tear into a Roman army whose soft pilums and gladii are virtually useless against a man and horse both in articulated plate armor.

Obviously this would be unfair and easy (at least if you were the Burgundians) but I like curb stomps as much as tricky battles. Sometimes it's fun to just run people over, like a TL32 European army mass-murdering TL24 Chinese mercenaries by the millions in Europa Universalis 4.

I would also love to create custom army lists with all the units I want (cataphracts, steppe archers, Makedonian phalanx, Roman legionaries and Indian archers would be a great leg-breaker army that could take just about anyone else on).

[pinwolf]

Too much work effort (development of rules, coding, ai etc.) for too little gain ("sometimes it's fun to just run people over").

[Cheimison]

Too much work effort (development of rules, coding, ai etc.) for too little gain ("sometimes it's fun to just run people over").

It would also make for good unequal matches, i.e. a realistic-sized medieval army is smaller than a legion and its allies. Having a small, extremely tough force fighting a much larger and more versatile one creates a lot of tactical possibilities. I understand the point of army lists for historical and matchup reasons, but in single player that really isn't an issue.

[SnuggleBunnies]

Well, you can turn off the date and geography filters in game, and fight any army against any army. However, this won't really accomplish what you want, because unit statistics are based on their capabilities vs contemporary foes. So, both 15th century gendarmes and 3rd centuryBC cataphracts will be treated as 'fully armored' by the game, while in reality of course, great advances in armor making had been made in the intervening 1700 years. So you can play whatever matchup you want, but the game will not take into account the advances in weapon and armor technology. So a battle of Classical Greeks vs, say, Hundred Years War English would end up being far too favorable to the Greeks, as they are balanced against ancient Persians and the like, not Longbowmen and plate armored men at arms.

[MVP7]

With the system FoG2 is using you can basically have a battle between any two armies from any eras and they will be evenly matched and balanced gameplay-wise.

Modeling the difference in equipment quality over the history would require a huge task of rewriting the rules and manually re-balancing every unit in the game and further dividing some units and list into multiple versions to cover different eras. Massive amount of work that would ultimately just reduce the amount of real playable content in the game.

[TheGrayMouser]

I would really like to be able to have armies of vastly different time periods fight one another, and have their differences meaningfully reflected in game. For example: high Byzantine armies v. Makedonian phalanx. Where the differences in armor, weapons and material quality are so great as to make it very difficult for the other side to effectively engage and injure. I want to watch Burgundians in full plate (a bit beyond the current expansions in tech levels) tear into a Roman army whose soft pilums and gladii are virtually useless against a man and horse both in articulated plate

I suppose the romans would deal with the time traveling burgundians the same way they dealt with Persian cataphracts, bashing them with clubs....

[Barrold713]

I want to be taller

BDH

[sIg3b]

With the system FoG2 is using you can basically have a battle between any two armies from any eras and they will be evenly matched and balanced gameplay-wise.

Modeling the difference in equipment quality over the history would require a huge task of rewriting the rules and manually re-balancing every unit in the game and further dividing some units and list into multiple versions to cover different eras. Massive amount of work that would ultimately just reduce the amount of real playable content in the game.

That any two armies from an era are evenly matched and balanced gameplay-wise is perhaps a bit of an overstatement , but otherwise I agree.

[Latro]

I think that the biggest advances over time have practically only been in the quality and completeness of the armour.
So basically whith an expansion of the armour classes a lot could be achieved in this direction.
Alas It is probably too late to also make shield sizes/designs a factor in the game but adding more diversity in armour might still be feasable.

[MVP7]

I think that the biggest advances over time have practically only been in the quality and completeness of the armour.
So basically whith an expansion of the armour classes a lot could be achieved in this direction.
Alas It is probably too late to also make shield sizes/designs a factor in the game but adding more diversity in armour might still be feasable.

Shield size is already a factor in unit stats. Unit with large shield is usually at least protected.

[Latro]

Yes and it makes it rather more complicated to establish a unit’s ‘protection value’, espescially when there are only 5 or 6 values.
It makes it harder to differentiate between say a cretan archer, with a small shield, that would have an edge over slingers without a shield. While a Velite would have an edge over the Cretan, because of his bigger shield.
Likewise, there is now no distinction to be made between equites mauri or equites scutarii, where a scutarius would have much better protection from his shield.

[MVP7]

Yes and it makes it rather more complicated to establish a unit’s ‘protection value’, espescially when there are only 5 or 6 values.
It makes it harder to differentiate between say a cretan archer, with a small shield, that would have an edge over slingers without a shield. While a Velite would have an edge over the Cretan, because of his bigger shield.
Likewise, there is now no distinction to be made between equites mauri or equites scutarii, where a scutarius would have much better protection from his shield.

On tactical level it would be very hard to come up with more than about six different levels of protection that would have meaningful gameplay difference and be based on reality. It's unrealistic to presume that Cretan archers would have a tactical advantage over slingers mainly because of a small shield. If a unit of equites mauri ja scutarii fought it's unlikely that the main deciding factor in that fight would be the shield size. If having a slightly larger shield was a major deciding factor of ancient battles then everyone would simply have used the largest possible shield or at least a bigger shield than the opponent. The problem with trying to model every possible level of protection is even more obvious when you consider units like Warbands that consist of men with equipment ranging from nothing but a shield to shield, hauberk and helmet.

On tactical level, some minute differences in shield size are negligible on their own when compared to other physical properties of the shield, the tactics and techniques of using that shield and the overall combat skills and role of the shield user. Trying to model all that with dozens of different armor levels wouldn't ultimately be any more realistic than the current situation as it would be highly arbitrary and heavily based on conjecture.

[Paul59]

Yes and it makes it rather more complicated to establish a unit’s ‘protection value’, espescially when there are only 5 or 6 values.
It makes it harder to differentiate between say a cretan archer, with a small shield, that would have an edge over slingers without a shield. While a Velite would have an edge over the Cretan, because of his bigger shield.
Likewise, there is now no distinction to be made between equites mauri or equites scutarii, where a scutarius would have much better protection from his shield.

On tactical level it would be very hard to come up with more than about six different levels of protection that would have meaningful gameplay difference and be based on reality. It's unrealistic to presume that Cretan archers would have a tactical advantage over slingers mainly because of a small shield. If a unit of equites mauri ja scutarii fought it's unlikely that the main deciding factor in that fight would be the shield size. If having a slightly larger shield was a major deciding factor of ancient battles then everyone would simply have used the largest possible shield or at least a bigger shield than the opponent. The problem with trying to model every possible level of protection is even more obvious when you consider units like Warbands that consist of men with equipment ranging from nothing but a shield to shield, hauberk and helmet.

On tactical level, some minute differences in shield size are negligible on their own when compared to other physical properties of the shield, the tactics and techniques of using that shield and the overall combat skills and role of the shield user. Trying to model all that with dozens of different armor levels wouldn't ultimately be any more realistic than the current situation as it would be highly arbitrary and heavily based on conjecture.

I completely agree with you there MVP7, but I think I should correct you and Latro on one small point. In FOG2 the Body Armour rating goes from 0 to 300, so there are actually 301 different levels of protection! In game the armour an armour rating of 0 is displayed as Unprotected, 50 is Protected, 100 is Armoured, 300 is Fully Armoured and so on, but if a designer wanted he could allocate any number between 0 and 300 to a particular unit.

[MVP7]

I completely agree with you there MVP7, but I think I should correct you and Latro on one small point. In FOG2 the Body Armour rating goes from 0 to 300, so there are actually 301 different levels of protection! In game the armour an armour rating of 0 is displayed as Unprotected, 50 is Protected, 100 is Armoured, 300 is Fully Armoured and so on, but if a designer wanted he could allocate any number between 0 and 300 to a particular unit.

Yeah. Currently only the named values are used in official units though (unless I have missed something). It's definitely a design decisions rather than a technical one. I wonder how the game would currently handle the naming of non-standard armour levels and stuff like ranged efficiency against different armour levels if other values are used.

[Paul59]

I completely agree with you there MVP7, but I think I should correct you and Latro on one small point. In FOG2 the Body Armour rating goes from 0 to 300, so there are actually 301 different levels of protection! In game the armour an armour rating of 0 is displayed as Unprotected, 50 is Protected, 100 is Armoured, 300 is Fully Armoured and so on, but if a designer wanted he could allocate any number between 0 and 300 to a particular unit.

Yeah. Currently only the named values are used in official units though (unless I have missed something). It's definitely a design decisions rather than a technical one. I wonder how the game would currently handle the naming of non-standard armour levels and stuff like ranged efficiency against different armour levels if other values are used.

The names are only for display purposes. In all combat calculations the game uses the numbers. The game will handle any armour rating value between 0 and 300.

These are the names displayed for the various possible armour ratings:

Unprotected 0 to 24
Lightly Protected 25 to 49
Protected 50 to 66
Some Armour 67 to 99
Armoured 100 to 149
Well Armoured 150 to 299
Fully Armoured 300

I got this information from the games scripts, to be specific the Data/Scripts/UITools.BSF file.

Unit quality is treated in the same manner, you can have any numerical average unit quality value from 0 to 300, but the game displays the appropriate name. The game uses the numbers in it's calculations though. See this reply from RBS to a query about the Unit Quality:

http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... 92&t=88339

Obviously a design decision has been made to standardise the units armour ratings somewhat. When the game first released we only used armour ratings of 0, 50, 67, 75, 100 and 300. The Irregular Foot were changed at some point to 25. The Sassanid Clibanarii in my TT Mod have a value of 150, and are displayed as Well Armoured. In future DLCs we may see other values being used.

You can see these values if you open the Squads.csv file, it is column AF.


Cheers

Paul

[Paul59]

To illustrate my point; the Imitation Legionaries have an armour value of 75 and the Well Armed Slaves have a value of 67. So both will be displayed as "Some Armour", but in combat the Imitation Legionaries will have a slight armour advantage.

[Latro]

Ah OK. That clears things up ratherr nicely.
So could we then say that 300 would be full gothic armour with horse protection?

[MVP7]

Thanks! That's what I was wondering, whether the armor name and POA scripts are checking for specific integer or ranges of integers. Armor modifiers to ranged POA seem to be using the same ranges as well. That should make it easy to mod in much larger range of armor values, if someone wanted to do that, without any technical issues.

I didn't know about the well armed slaves' special value, that's the one exception to every level of protection having one used POA value so there's actually 8 rather than 7 armor levels in the game currently.

[Paul59]

Ah OK. That clears things up ratherr nicely.
So could we then say that 300 would be full gothic armour with horse protection?

Well they will be, but so are the ancient era Cataphracts that we have in the game now.

[Paul59]

That should make it easy to mod in much larger range of armor values, if someone wanted to do that, without any technical issues.

Yes, it is very easy to add in a unique armour value, just as I did with the TT Mod Sassanid Clibanarii. You just change the value in the Body Armour column, and then work out the points cost of the new unit. The game takes care of everything else.