Army with personal touch

[Chris]

I think armies are having no personal touch at all. They are just numbers... You don't have your favourite elite regiment, you don't train them, you don't select specializations... I recall old Supremacy, where you could select equipment for each regiment and had to train them before sending to battle, that was nice.
How to make something more personal?

Limitations:
- army acts as a whole and fight always together, can not be separated (one unit on strategic map, or an army as abstract military force that always do any task together)
- combat if ressolved automaticly, player can not give orders during combat


How it could look like:
- There should be probably limited number of regiments, because if we want them personalized there can't be many of them. Let's say army consist of 10 regiments.
- Each regiment have number of soldiers, that how you increase your army over time, you don't increase regiments number since this is fixed.
- There should be some incentive to make some specialization among regiments.
- Actually, we could say that these regiments would be like heroes, just not presented this way. You have your 10 "heroes" and they "level up" (not by experience but by giving them more soldiers, althrough they could accumulate experience spent later for upgrades too).
- Some regiments should be "elite", because everyone have their favourites. There should be some mechanism for a few player selected regiments to earn upgrades faster (it's important to not make it "more soldiers" since this would be boring, the fun is from having the smaller elite force that do well on battlefield rather than the biggest regiment doing ther best).
- Which brings me to point that there should be some limits how the player assign soldiers to regiments (avoiding one big elite regiment to get all the soldiers).
- Forced specialization would mean limited number of "specialization slots". Like you could have "gas masks" + "grenades" but if you wanted to add "noctovisors" you would have do discard one of the two listed previously.
- There could be some stat that is accumulated over time but decreased when you add more soldiers, so keeping some regiments smaller could be smarter in some cases.
- Maybe each regiment has an officer that has 2 stats (from time to time you select 1 to increase) first is how many soldiers he can command effectively and the second is skill.

[pixlepix]

What about this:
-Conventional army as your main army
-Unlock up to 5 officer slots
-Each officer has a base skill out of 10 different ones
-Officers lead armies
-Smaller army is, the weaker officers powers, so a small regiment would be more specialized
-Officers level up
-some specialization skills for each officer base skill, you can only have half of the total number
-can boost your specialization skills when you level up
-Officers can be captured if you lose a battle
-Capturing party can kill, or make ransom


Great ideas, trying to find a way to put them in my game.

[Chris]

- There are lines. 4 regimens are front line, 4 are second line, 2 are support. Those from first line give 100% of their power to the battle, second line gives 50% and support gives 10%. Therefore you would put best units with best equipment on front line, then average ones on second line and the ones with obsolete equipment but a lot of "global bonuses" (like medics, fire control, field headquarters) as support. It would be crucial to make limits of regiment size (otherwise everyone would put most soldiers to frontline regiments), not sure how to do it.
- There are several levels of equipment, these are assigned to regiments, one regiment can have only one weapon level (or maybe two to make the upgrades easiers since they could keep the obsolete ones for a while?). You would want to make a shift of weapons from frontline to support as new better weapons become available.
- There is morale break check (negative) which depends on difference of frontline to secondline soldiers count. So, if your second line is bigger you get less power but you never risk morale break (therefore you won't want to put everyone on frontline).

[CygnusX]

My all time favorite system for this was the first Ogre Battle.  Some parts of the mechanic were broken, but the overall system was quite amazing.  See here for visual reference:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/ogrebattle/sheet/6484

In this, you have many unit types.  Each unit type was special as it could level up, or even upgrade to another unit.  You could also give units items such as HP++ (one time use that gives a permanent HP boost) and you could assign each unit 1 weapon or armor.  Units had stats such as luck, power, HP, etc... all of which increased automatically as the unit gained experience.  Weapons/Armor gave a buff to these stats.  So, even though you had a large army (~60 units), each unit was special.  It was so special in fact, that I got to the point where I knew all my units by name.... (even though names were assigned one at random.. and each name was foreign to me). 

What was neat is that you had to group units into small teams, and each team had to have a team leader. You had to be careful in designing your groups as each group served a different purpose.  For example, I'd often stack 2 tanks on the front row (1 Golem, 1 Dragon) with a healer in the back and use this as a shield against incoming melee attacks.  I'd then have another group that fought spell casters (mostly undead units that were immune to everything but holy attacks).  I'd have a 3rd group with many beast masters (guys with whips) that I'd send to fight incoming groups of Animal tanks (dragons, hell dogs, etc). 

The goal from here was to secure resource points on the map and to play against your opponents weakness.  The game would let you deploy just about as many teams as you wanted, but you had to pay upkeep for each unit.  As units became more valuable, their upkeep increased.  This lead to a tricky balancing act of having a powerful force that didn't cost much to maintain. 

I believe your real problem though won't be in making an army with a personal touch, it will be in communicating the outcome of combat.  The game had an option to 'remove animation' and 'quick combat' features which resolved combat at a far quicker pace.  However, it was almost impossible to know why you won/lost a battle without watching the full animation of what was going on.  Thus, customization becomes irrelevant if specific changes in outcome cannot be observed.

[saljutin]

- how about this - more soldiers that are in regiment bigger are upkeep costs? function to describe this should be some Z=X^Y function where Z is upkeep, X number of soldiers, Y some constant, so people would "fill" regiments evenly
- player choose elite squad and he can "put" 3 (instead of 2) specialization slots but their Y would be bigger then normal?

[BaRRaKID]

How about:
- We start with a basic system in which we have 3 categories: attack, defense and support.
- For each of these categories we have "n" slots to which the player can assign a group of units (platoons). The amount of units in each group is fixed.
- When going into a fight the player needs to select one platoon from each of the categories.
- Each platoon has a leader that gives bonus points to certain stats of all the units in his platoon.
- Certain units also get bonus points from being in a platoon that belongs to a certain category
- You can also assign special items/techs to the platoons to improve certain stats.
- The player can upgrade his army by getting more platoon slots, or increase the amount or units in each when he levels up, or whatever system of upgrading is used in your game.
- The system allows the player to change units, leaders and items between platoons.
- Each platoon is rewarded whenever they win a fight, and penalized when they loose.
- Units can be created and not be assigned to any platoon, but obviously they can't be used in combat (they're just reserves).

So what we get is something like this:
attack
--platoon a1
---- platoon leader a1
---- unit a11
---- unit a12
---- ...
---- unit a1n
---- platoon a1 items / techs / skills
--platoon a2
---- platoon leader a2
---- unit a21
---- unit a22
---- ...
---- unit a2n
---- platoon a2 items / techs / skills
defense
--platoon d1
---- platoon leader d1
---- unit d11
---- unit d12
---- ...
---- unit d1n
---- platoon d1 items / techs / skills
--platoon d2
---- platoon leader d2
---- unit d21
---- unit d22
---- ...
---- unit d2n
---- platoon d2 items / techs / skills
support
-- platoon s1
---- platoon leader s1
---- unit s11
---- unit s12
---- ...
---- unit s1n
---- platoon s1 items / techs / skills
-- platoon s2
---- platoon leader s2
---- unit s21
---- unit s22
---- ...
---- unit s2n
---- platoon s2 items / techs / skills

This allows the player to create several different armies (for example you army can be a1:d2:s2 or a2:d1:s1, etc), and since we have four variables (category, leader, special items and win/lose ratio) that change each platoon stats, and since we can have 3 different platoons on each army, the armies become sort of unique.

[Chris]

What was neat is that you had to group units into small teams, and each team had to have a team leader. You had to be careful in designing your groups as each group served a different purpose.  For example, I'd often stack 2 tanks on the front row (1 Golem, 1 Dragon) with a healer in the back and use this as a shield against incoming melee attacks.  I'd then have another group that fought spell casters (mostly undead units that were immune to everything but holy attacks).  I'd have a 3rd group with many beast masters (guys with whips) that I'd send to fight incoming groups of Animal tanks (dragons, hell dogs, etc).

But the assumption is that "the army act as a whole", we can't make separate teams that are assigned to different strategic tasks. We have only one group that fights always together. How do we make the choice of that group composition interesting and meaningful and not too complex and confusing to the player?

So what we get is something like this:
attack
--platoon a1
---- platoon leader a1
---- unit a11
---- unit a12
---- ...
---- unit a1n
---- platoon a1 items / techs / skills
--platoon a2
---- platoon leader a2
---- unit a21
---- unit a22
---- ...
---- unit a2n
---- platoon a2 items / techs / skills
defense
--platoon d1
---- platoon leader d1
---- unit d11
---- unit d12
---- ...
---- unit d1n
---- platoon d1 items / techs / skills
--platoon d2
---- platoon leader d2
---- unit d21
---- unit d22
---- ...
---- unit d2n
---- platoon d2 items / techs / skills
support
-- platoon s1
---- platoon leader s1
---- unit s11
---- unit s12
---- ...
---- unit s1n
---- platoon s1 items / techs / skills
-- platoon s2
---- platoon leader s2
---- unit s21
---- unit s22
---- ...
---- unit s2n
---- platoon s2 items / techs / skills

Well, maybe it would cater to the most hardcore fans of realism, but for overwhelming majority of players it would be a monster. I would say 15 managable units at most (preferably less). If there is more human brain won't be able to personalize them and see them other way than numbers...

- how about this - more soldiers that are in regiment bigger are upkeep costs? function to describe this should be some Z=X^Y function where Z is upkeep, X number of soldiers, Y some constant, so people would "fill" regiments evenly
- player choose elite squad and he can "put" 3 (instead of 2) specialization slots but their Y would be bigger then normal?

Nice concept, but with such steep progression soon upkeep would become the only limiting factor with everything else being irrelevant.

[BaRRaKID]

In my example what the player customizes is the platoons, not the individual units. The idea his that the player creates a group of units, and then adds customizations to that group, the individual units are not important in this scenario, if for example a unit is moved from one group to another it won't keep the bonus from the group it was previously in since the bonus are tied just to the group.
In reality this is the same has just having 15 customizable units, the only difference in my example is that these units act as a container for smaller units.

[Chris]

In my example what the player customizes is the platoons, not the individual units. The idea his that the player creates a group of units, and then adds customizations to that group, the individual units are not important in this scenario, if for example a unit is moved from one group to another it won't keep the bonus from the group it was previously in since the bonus are tied just to the group.
In reality this is the same has just having 15 customizable units, the only difference in my example is that these units act as a container for smaller units.

Hmmm, if these smaller units would be like modules and not too many types of them and no upgrades of them and no experience/skill improvements then it should work...