I recall our matches in official Slitherine tournament between Indian and Macedonian.SnuggleBunnies wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2019 12:40 am I fall somewhere in the middle on this issue. It IS annoying when somebody just camps some ridiculous terrain, or runs away the whole time; I think that is pretty rare though. Much more common are standoffs where neither side wants to move into terrain that advantages their foe. Sometimes these end with skirmishing causing one side to feel they have to move, but sometimes they end in a draw. I can understand situations where, for example, you have an army with no cavalry and you don't want to move into the open, or an army of squishy medium foot and you don't want to maneuver into an open plain.
Still, just hiding in the corner in a forest is lame, and a waste of time; it takes half the game just to march over there! This sort of thing is kind of why I think I might enjoy casual skirmish games more than League games. League games are fun because I get matched up against a bunch of skilled opponents who will play their matches through and not just surrender; the downside is that everybody is so concerned about their overall points that this sort of thing is more common. To be fair, I see that in my own play, too - it's overall rather more cautious in League games than casuals.
One is that my Indian archers rushed to the high hill, occupied it and camped there, waiting for your Macedonian to advance, while the Macedonian army just moved away from the hill and lined perfect battle array in the open, waiting for my Indian archers to come down. We exchanged turns quickly until the end, finally, small scale skirmish happened in the marsh on the corner of the map!
The interesting thing is, under the rule of the Slitherine tournament, that we both know that scoring some is dominantly better than scoring nothing, we are still reluctant to risk our army to guarantee a lose, let alone DL tournament that in-game scoring doesn't mean much to the final result.
What shall we do then? FOG2 has such feature that terrain greatly affects the battle(not a little), and this is the feature I love comparing with other ancient battle games. But this feature also makes the game running like such that we are discussing. Forcing the India to go to so-called middle ground to line up and clashing with pikes? Or if the hill is in the middle, forcing the pikes to rush uphills? Then the game just becomes terrain luck rolls - let's play what's in the middle. In current FOG2 map generation algorithm, with large probability, middle ground is open, which means middle ground fight constraint favors heavy foot army too much.
Another question is that how can we distinguish the behavior as cowardice or tactic? Heavy foot or cavalry in woods may sound cowardice and passive play, but maybe they are waiting for the right moment to rush out. E.g. One can place 7 squadrons of cavalry to a woods almost on the edge of the map. When opponent's battle array wheeled, his cavalry rushed out to threaten the back of the array(It's an example from my experience). And I have to say, in FOG2, if one wants to use ambush tactic, he has to position his visible units far back to the edge, because he can't deploy his ambush troops crossing the initial deployment line. That's why in Total War, some unit has ambush characteristic has no restraint to the initial deployment zone, in order to give them more space to ambush. Or, shall we rule out the ambush tactics?
The objective of FOG2 match so far is very simple, to destroy the opponent's army. So player tries to destroy the opponent's AND not to be destroyed. So if one doesn't think he can destroy the enemy, he immediately picks "not getting destroyed". It's human nature to think in this way because of the setting of the objective. Shall we alter the objective to be more complicated but fair one or ones?