Combat model

What should ideally be modeled

• • Advantages of one unit type over another (rock, paper, scissors)

  • Terrain impact

  • Benefit of attack from multiple fronts (as per Advanced Tactics)

  • The benefit of outnumbering your opponent

  • The benefit of out-ranging your opponent (modern artillery can safely be miles behind the front line)

  • The fact that not all units can participate in combat at any one time

  • The vulnerability of archers / artillery when not protected by infantry (particularly to cavalry)

  • Flanking attacks

Assumptions to make

• • All ranged units can fire over the heads of the friendly units in front of them

Weaknesses of the Civ II unit/combat system

• • No way of throwing multiple units into combat simultaneously

  • A single unit can defeat an entire stack

Units don't stack design

• • Units don't stack (i.e. only one unit per tile)

  • Units are a balanced army / navy. For army, there would be Infantry (cheapest), Cavalry (fastest) and Composite force (strongest)

Weighted average damage system

Combat at end of turn design

• • discrete units like Civ II

  • units can be moved onto tiles with enemies in (ends their move)

  • combat is resolved at the end of the turn

  • units have hitpoints

Simultaneous movement design

• • During each player's turn, units are told their destination, but don't actually move

  • At the end of all players' turns all the movements resolve

  • Multiple units can be ordered to move into a particular location, which eliminates the Civ II single unit attack problem

Everything-attacks-everything system

e.g.

army1 = [

{type:"infantry",

quantity:100},

{type:"cavalry",

quantity:50}

]

army2 = [

{type:"infanty",

quantity:20},

{type:"cavalry",

quantity:100}

]

infantry does 0.1 damage to infantry per step and 0.05 damage to cavalry per step

cavalry does 0.2 damage to infantry per step and 0.1 damage to cavalry per step

Step 1

army1's attack

There are 120 enemy

Damage done to infantry by infantry = 20 / 120 * 100 * 0.1

Damage done to infantry by cavalry = 20 / 120 * 50 * 0.2

Weaknesses of the everything-attacks-everything system

There is no reflection of "size", i.e. multiple infantrymen attacking a single tank -> possible to modify with a size parameter per unittype

Not the optimal attack each round (unittype A may be effective against unittype B, but not against unittype C, but it's attack is spread over both B and C)

Range-based everything-attacks-everything system

• • Unit types have a DistanceFromFrontLine, which represents their deployment distance from a (potentially notional) front line

  • At the outset of combat all elements are arranged on a virtual line (perpendicular to the front line) according to their DistanceFromFrontLine

  • Each round elements attack everything that's in range, or move forward my their move per round

Concept of a front-width

The concept of a front-width allows a battle to be modeled in two dimensions. For example in CoE3, the front width is 20 units, so only 20 melee units can engage the enemy each turn.

• • Set global front-width

  • Front-width per terrain type

  • Front-width per tile

  • Several front-widths per tile, defender picks one (i.e. to their advantage)

When is combat resolved?

Within the turns: Civilisation, Advanced Tactics, XConq

Inbetween turns: Conquest of Elysium 3

The within-the-turn model allows units to do multiple attacks per turn.

Other notes

• • Possible method of handling different levels of experience: create different element types, and convert from one to the other. E.g. infantry, veteran infantry

Execution order property by unit type, unique

If have experience / readiness at a per component level, when there's potentially 100 million components in the game, how to a human player decide what to transfer when units are transferred?

• • Selection at random (BUT not deterministic)

  • Some arbitrary but reproduceable order

Hitpoints per element represent the ability of the element to take hits (e.g. a tank can take multiple hits) OR hitpoints per element represent the number of sub-elements within the element (e.g. the number of men, the number of tanks, etc)

Straights

If have naval units in a city (or base) that end a turn with unused action points then, if an enemy unit tries to pass this city, the player is provided with details of the enemy ships, and is given the following choices:

• • Attempt to blockade

  • Ambush

  • Attempt to charge a passage fee

  • Do nothing