Somebody call for a dreamer?

Edit: Did some spellchecking and moved some stuff around.

---

Right now we don't know much about what the developers are planning but we do have enough info to get the gist of it. Basically there was a world once, a sandbox if you will. There were a bunch of gods who acted like children and set the sandbox on FIRE. A long time later us ants poked our heads out of the sand and a few smart individuals discovered that they could use the tools the gods left behind to shape the land and build castles in the sand.

Or thats how things sound in a nutshell. Apart from that we know that the world is still inhabited, in small pockets of life there live isolated groups of people left over from the wars of old. Alongside them are various magic beasts, some sentient. That whole small pockets mechanic gives me an idea.

1-1. Scale and patterns of growth:

Basically, every forest starts from one seed. At the beginning of the game it sounds like you start out with a small group or tribe of people. Along with that is at least one node. You must have a node or at least previous contact with one because otherwise how would you know you have the power the manipulate magic? From the sound of it this group is meant to grow into an empire of people, possibly assimilating people of other cultures.

This pattern of growth has many milestones. A group of people is a family. Many families combine to make a tribe which inhabits a village. A village can grown into a town, after they reach a certain size towns change into cities. Many cities and towns together become a kingdom. Many kingdoms united under one banner is an empire.

Each of these stages have huge effects on all aspects of living. For example, unit creation.

If you live in a tribe of 50 people then you can't simply "hire" a unit fo spearmen. Instead you have to pick Joe the hunter and give him a spear along with the best armour your technology can supply. Joe is now a militiaman/hunter for your tribe. Your people are not numerous enough to support career soldiers just yet. You happen to come across a dangerous bear and recruit 2 more people giving you a small squad. The added soldiers allow Joe to practice flanking tactics and he gets a new bearskin cloak.

Fast forward a little bit, your tribe has grown into a town of 200 people. Instead of hunting for food you have turned to farming. This surplus of food allows members of your people to practice professions that they simply didn't have time for back when every minute is taken up either eating or finding food. At this point you can start to create units of real career soldiers, perhaps supplemented by militia when danger threatens. Joe the militiaman is now the leader of a unit of 10 spearmen. Thier equipment comes from the new town smithy. Its worth mentioning that population is still a concern, you can not recruit more soldiers than you can feed. And the more soldiers you have the less manpower is available for other jobs.

Fast forward again. Your town peacefully merged with several others and the combined population moved to a valley to build a city there. Your population is now counted in thousands of people instead of hundreds. Your territory borders that of a another city, this one full of hostile inhabitants. Its time to raise an army and kick some ass. Joe the spearman captain is long dead but he tought his son all he new and his son serves as your general. Raising units now is fairly simple, food is still a concern but your population is probably underemployed making manpower less of an issue. Units can be recruited singly or as part of armies. Your newly minted general Sam is tasked with founding an army. Instead of ordering your blacksmith to spend time making spears you simply tell Sam to found 2 units of spearmen. You can micromanage if you want but the logistics and management are in place to speed things up.

--

Understand what I am getting at so far? This scalability can continue for as long as you want it to. Battles could happen at any stage of the game. Combat could involve as little as two combatants or many thousands in organized units using formation fighting tactics. Your channeler could be everything from a lone hunter to the leader of multiple armies. This is something I had hoped for in MOM2 but it could probably work just as well here. As well as combat this could apply to other parts of the game as well, magic not the least of it. A young channeler could fry a mosquito with a whisp of fire and years later rain fireballs on opposing armies.

More ideas as I think of them. If you want me to go into more detail on something I could spend some more time on it but beware that I am allergic to formatting. :p

1-2: Effects of scale on warfare

Some things in warfare remain constant. A spearman is a guy with a pointy stick that pokes holes into his enemy until that enemy is dead. This basic plan of attack never changes so long as the spear is his weapon of choice. However the numbers in which his kind is deployed and the quality and design of his equipment greatly affect how the spearman performs on the battlefield.

Lets start from the very beginning.

Assuming we begin the game with a tribal existence its quite likely that your people are hunter-gatherers. The technology of agriculture has yet to make an appearance, so domesticated animals, foraging and hunting are the main means of subsistence. The list of weapons you can make with cord, wood and stone is quite vast. The first weapon was probably the rock, held in hand to increase the impact of a swing. Attaching the rock to a stick created the club. Sometime after this process we learned that hitting rocks together sometimes created sharper rocks. Some time later somebody attached a sharp rock to a long stick and the spear was born. The spears main advantage over just a sharp rock is reach, a spear allows you to strike something beyond the reach of your arms alone. This made it a good hunting weapon for attacking dangerous animals.

Okay maybe were not that far back in history. But its perfectly reasonable to imagine that your civilization's first taste of combat is between a lone hunter in the woods (possibly the channeler himself) and some dangerous beast. One on one combat is a simple matter. Your hunter has extended reach over his opponent which in this case well say is a wild boar. The boar is armed with tusks and can gore your character with ease if he gets into melee. Because your hunter is alone his options are limited but still quite varied, you could for example:

A. Charge the wild animal and attack it with your weapon. B. Stand your ground and wait for it to charge onto your spear. C. Move to a spot the boar can't reach (such as up a tree) and throw the spear at him. D. Sneak up on the boar and attack it in various ways.

A little higher on the scale we have groups of hunters. Groups have many advantages, one member can flush wild game into traps set by the other hunters. Multiple hunters can attack a dangerous animal from different sides. Having more hunters on hand means you can drag home bigger game. Etc. The dynamics of combat change a lot because the range of tactics that can be use increases exponentially with each member added to the group. Two fighters can fight back to back, 3 fighters can form a defensive circle, 4 fighters can form ranks with two in front and two behind.

--

Pausing here for a minute now. It seems quite likely that Elemental will see combat on these small scales. And even when combat moves into broader arenas, armies will still have small units as components of the whole. At the empire level its easy to imagine founding armies composed of thousands of spearmen. But if were going to be realistic, then we would not be able to just say that every single unit of elite paladins is going to have 4 members in it. Elite units are not something that can be trained en mass and the number of members within each unit is going to remain small. At the pinnacle of this is your channeler. You are more or less unique among your people and unless you are a diplomat supreme it would be impossible to form a "unit" of channelers. This means that when you take to the field you will be alone, perhaps with an honour guard, or part of a larger unit you fight within.

The challenge here is to realistically link combat of different unit scales together into a seamless whole. The key to this problem is to add detail in the form of unit statistics and have these statistics interact in realistic ways. But its really more complicated than it sounds. To make it work you have to flesh out many subsystems. Ground combat alone would require many, some more simple than others. Major ones are things like: weaponry, armour, material, anatomy, creature size, tactics and very importantly leadership.

--

If anyone is wondering why I ramble on like this, well it comes with the territory. It was said once that very few gamers actually know what they want in a game. Its easy to say "I wan't X feature, make it so" but you have to follow through or what you actually receive might not match your intent. In essense, I know what I want, what I need to know is if that is really what I want. It might sound strange at first but trust me it does work.

Will continue tommorow where we left off at small unit tactics.

Have you perhaps played King of Dragonpass? It is remarkably similiar to what you have described.

My vision of the game is quite different, though. What I envision is a fantasy world that is already developed, unlike Civilization 4 where you start from the neolithic age, here there already exists a multitude of kingdoms that have existed for as long as a thousand years, for example. The idea of starting from such a small component doesn't really fit the theme, in my mind at least. It would possibly be tiresome that every time you start the game you'll have to guide a small tribe of people that eventually grows to be large, if the "real game" only starts later on. And what of the fact that the players would develop at different rates? How do you balance a single spearman against a group of ten?

The idea is a good one, and would fit a different game(as can be seen in King of Dragonpass, which is a truly superb one), but I'm thinking Elemental is looking for a Silmarillion/Lord of the Rings kind of theme. And to me it means large empires and large armies, lead by powerful figures wielding strong magic. This is constant in all the ages of the story.

Well, the world has been nuked, but I kind of expect that the developers mean to start us off with a small town, if it's anything like MOM. The developing tribe mechanic is cool and interesting, but perhaps it would steal focus from the epic wizard battle aspect of things.

On the other hand, I love the idea of starting off as a shaman or witch or something, and helping your clan take over larger and larger parts of the world with your magic. Again, probably not this game though.

I'd have to majory disagree.  Same equipment for Joe the spearman (and his friends), simply his 'normal' clothes (low-encumbrance, please!) and a long, sharp stick.  You have standard 'just run forward and stick'em till they're dead!", you have "Martial arts mo-fo" who uses the spear as much as quarterstaff as anything else, and once you have enough people you can start placing games with hedgehogs / phalanxes.

Never played Kings of Dragonpass no. The key to the system is the scalability. We don't know for sure but it sounds like thw world has been bombed back to the stone age. All the magic was concentrated into crystals after the cataclysm and apart from isolated pockets the world is completetly uninhabitable. We don't actually know how isolated or large these pockets are. But like you said, its perfectly reasonable to come across a fully developed kingdom. But not all civilizations have to progress to the same level of technology.

The hard part is balancing that single spearman against ten. All I can say right now without writing many pages is that it depends on a lot of things. A single hunter with enough experience could run circles around a hundred enemies, let alone one.

The Silmarillion is a bad example. Try the hobbit!.A simple man in a little backwater town suddenly has in his possession the ability to change the world. Gotta start somewhere!

Well unless you configure the came for an advanced start, your channeler will have to build his way up from the bottom. I don't see why your civilization would not have to do something similar. But yes, I was digging rather deep when I included the tribal level of existence. More likely we would start off with a single town. But that said, starting as the shaman o a tiny tribe and working your way up would be very cool. Consider that a big part of your channeler's personality comes from where and how was raised.

If you start using your spear as a quarterstaff then you are DOING IT WRONG! Quarterstaffs are very effective weapons because they are balanced, having a heavy stone or metal spear spear tip throws off this balance. To compensate you have to hold the spear offcenter and this means that one end of the staff will be longer. You are not going to bring home the bacon by wacking boars across the snout. A spear is a first strike weapon and the staff was invented as nonlethal defensive weapon. That is not to say that you can't use them in different ways, but these will be limited by the quality, design and balance of your weapon.

--

So back to small unit tactics.

We left off at the "group" stage of combat. Why group and not unit or squad? Calling them a unit indicates that they are a standard unit of say 4 people. This title only works when you can consistently recruit other units of the same size. Calling them a squad indicates that they are a smaler portion of a bigger whole. Which they are not, its just your merry band of hunters. In fact calling them a group might not fit the bill either, consider:

Scale affects everything and that includes what you call a number of people. One person is a lone figure. Two people form a pair. Three is the threshold for making a group. Generally four is the minimum for forming a unit of people, but depending on a number of other factors, physical size especially, then units can be formed out of even one individual. The amount of people a unit contains depends on the scale of our combat, a unit could mean a regiment of many thousands, but right now we are still talking about lone individuals.

As soon as we can raise multiple units to send into combat, the combat system must expand greatly to accommodate them. Lets say Joe the hunter is joined by two friends to fight a single enemy. When Joe was alone the only thing your system of battle had to track was how far apart Joe and his opponent stand and upon what ground. With 3 or more entities involved in combat you must now have a "grid" of sorts which is required as soon as there is more than two entities to keep track of. This grid can look like anything, it doesn't matter if the tiles are square or hexagonal. What matters is that the grid keeps track and displays the X and Y coordinates of seperate entities both alone and relative to each other.

--

The first question asked in combat involving groups or a group is what kind of group is it? A group of people is a number of people who agree upon the direction the group is to take, either by previous agreement or through elected leadership. A good example is total strangers riding the elevator, another is you and a group of friends walking to a movie theater. A group without direction is a mob. Mobs form and stick together through convenience, either through a common goal or for the instinctive safety in numbers.

The distinction between the two is extremely important. Groups in combat will stick together through common loyalty. Groups of soldiers have leadership and discipline, mobs do not. Imagine a grid like the one I mentioned above. If you have played Master of Magic you will find it easy to visualize an isometric grid of squares. For now keep things two dimentional.

Lets say you have a unit of 8 swordsmen who form a line. They occupy a stripe of land within thier grid tile. Opposing them is a big mob of people who ate bad mushrooms (or something like that) these people are armed with random objects, mostly wooden clubs. Instead of fitting neatly within thier grid tile they spill over the edges in all directions forming a circle shaped cloud. When your swordsmen charge into the mob, the shape changes. The members of the mob that would normally spill over into the tile the swordsmen occupy are pushed back into the main group. This packs them tightly together and without discipline they will have trouble fighting in close ranks. The swordsmen being trained soldiers have no such disability.

If the swordsmen call for a retreat then they will withdraw in an organized fashion, each soldier protecting those beside them. If the crazy mob bites off more than they can chew they will instead form a rout. Individual members will flee in all directions and they will impede and trip each other.

In this fashion the swordsmen can defeat a force more than twice thier size. This is the value of discipline.

I'd say you should study how some chinese martial arts use the spear. It is radically different from how you think it should be used. And I doubt the staff was invented as a non-lethal defensive weapon. Again, see how it's used in chinese martial arts. But I digress, Elemental is based on European fantasy stuff, so I guess it doesn't matter.

It does matter. In short the chinese spears you are referring to are often made of bamboo.  Give the same martial arts master a european pike meant for killing horses and ask him to pull off the same moves, it just won't work.

The design of the spear and the materials it is made of are what determines the range of movements you can do with it. The european version and certainly the sharp stone tied to a stick version are MUCH different from the one used in traditional martial arts. A shorter lighter spear can be used in the method you describe, but a spear long enough to give you a significant range advantage would be impractical for the same use. The longer a spear is the stronger the material has to be or else the spear will bend, if you do not have stronger materials you can compensate by increasing thickness, this adds weight. As someone mentioned on the forum, its all about tradeoffs.

Its possible to design a spear that serves dual purpose as both a spear and a quarterstaff. But to do so you need to balance the weapon in a certain way and make it our of lighter materials than you normally would. At this point the spear is "a spear designed so you can use it as a quarterstaff" and not simply "A" spear. There must be a distinction between the two.

I think that one other thing to consider in your combat model is morale.  After all, the goal of most medieval battles wasn't to kill every person on the other side, but to break their lines and make them run.  Once their force scattered they were no longer a threat to you.  Take the medieval time period, where heavy cavalry was designed to create a shock effect that would break the opponents infantry lines, winning the battle at a minimal cost in losses.  This shock effect was eventually negated by properly employed longbowmen, pikemen, and use of gunpowder.

Likewise Roman doctrine largely revolved around keeping formation until the enemy broke.  Maintain unit integrity and keep rotating personnel through the front line (so that being in the front rank wasn't a death sentence) until the enemy battle line saw that they weren't going to break you and would run.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that a good morale system where armies break and run is essential to replicating the feel of medieval battles, and a lot of turn based strategy games miss the mark by having the units fight to the death and not take morale into account.

About the spear-discussion:

Look at this. Then look at this.

To say that you could possibly pull those moves off with a spear like in the first picture isn't reasonable. The spear that the martial artist is using, is flexible and weighs only a fraction of the halberds in the first picture. Yet they are both spears. But, these different kinds of spears require different kinds of training to handle properly. The halberds would mainly be used to pierce knights and the like on horseback, whereas the martial art spear would break like a toothpick against that heavy armor. But used against relatively unarmored infantry, the martial arts spear is deadly, while the halberd is slow and clumsy.

There's a difference between spear and spear.

Not just medieval battles mind you. The ancient Greek phalanx is the pinnacle of discipline. Not only does your formation become vulnerable if its not perfect and indeed is inherently vulnerable, the concept as a whole simply falls apart if discipline is not perfect among its soldiers.

You make a very good point in that most conflicts are not fought to the death. In games like Master of Magic all of your units are loyal to the last and combat only ends when the enemy is dead. Which makes sense considering the army general is a very powerful spellcaster. But in real life combat usually only carries on until one side loses the will to fight. As a result losses on both sides are greatly reduced.

Morale is a huge part in all combat which I will probably get too later. I don't really have a plan for this thread but then innovation doesn't work that way. Upon reading or thinking of something have you ever had the excruciating urge to clap your hands and exclaim "YES! It could work!", pull out a notepad and write it down because that right there is an idea. If someting stands out to me as I write I usually pick it out and expand on it later. Well see how it goes.

In fact upon reading Frogboy's new dev journal I think I might have an idea...

You're right that you're going to need a different design of spear, but it's still a spear.  And you haven't even come close to addressing the basic point

Didn't you read the rest of what I said? See "THE spear" is a sharp object mounted on on the end of a pole that allows you to poke things farther than your arm and the sharp object alone could reach. This means that the spear has to be quite long relative to you. A spear that is as tall or shorter than you is not long enough to give you any advantage in reach over other weapons.

A stabbing sword (like the gladius for example) thrust at an enemy will extend the reach of your hand about 2 feet. I happen to be 5'6" tall so lets say I was armed with a spear 6 feet long. This is a pretty basic spear with a 5 foot shaft and a leaf shaped speartip 1 foot long. To use the spear I have to space my hands apart about 3 feet on the shaft. This means that when I point the spear towards an enemy I am able to stab something about 3 feet away. 3 feet of extra reach is enough to outrange the gladius and it is long enough to allow me to attack someone on horseback.

This is probably the kind of spear you are thinking of correct? This kind of spear is perfectly capable of double use as a quarterstaff, you simply have to account for the offset balance and the sharp end. The problem with this spear is that it is simply too short. Outranging a gladius isn't difficult, but you will also have to outreach things like two handed greatswords and rapiers and other spears, all of which can easily hit things beyond 4 feet.

Lets say I was in a fight and stabbed all 12 inches of the speartip into an evil orc or something. Ouch right? Problem is the impaled orc is still only 2 feet away from me and I am well within the reach of his hands let alone his club. If I was facing down a charging knight on horseback then 3 feet is pathetic. Its enough to hit the rider yes, but I'm more worried about the horse which can crush me underfoot. I would not be able to hurt the horse until it is 3 feet away, at this point the horse couldn't stop if it wanted to.

--

So this brings me to the kind of spear that I was talking about as the generic Spear, the kind used for hunting dangerous animals and fending off cavalry charges. Forget 6 feet long, that is far too short, try 10, maybe 12. Any longer than that and you have to start calling it a pike instead. For this example well call it at 12.

Again my hands are spaced 3 feet apart. However my back hand can't go at the very end of the spear because the weight of the spear would unbalance me, so I hold it 2 feet away from the end. (its worth mentioning that you can solve that problem with a counterweight the way the Greeks and others did but just not in this example). So I take up about 5 feet leaving me with 7 feet of extra reach, now were talking! 7 feet of reach compared to 3 makes a world of difference. If I get the first strike you would have to impale yourself 4 feet before you could touch me with a longsword.

For hunting this is essential. Back in the middle ages people hunted boars with long spears. The tip of these spears were blades instead of sharp points and more importantly this blade ended in a crossguard. The boar would charge and impale itself on the spear but the crossguard would prevent it from making its way up the spear to attack you. Or thats how it was supposed to work, boar hunting didn't get much safer in any case.

The spear is the essential anti cavalry weapon. The problem is that trained warhorses will not balk at running straight towards pointy objects. Having a spear will not prevent a horse from knocking you down and trampling you underhoof. What you need to do is physically stop the horse, either by providing it with an obstable that is "obviously" impassable such as a wall of pikes, or by avoiding the horse and killing the rider. 3 to 4 feet is how much extra reach you need to hit someone on a tall warhorse, if the horse is stationary thats not much of a problem for most weapons, and there is always the option of attacking the riders legs. With a 12 foot spear you have the ability to attack a mounted knight while the knight is still 7 feet distant. This might not sound like much but it does give you enough time to move out of the horses path which is a significant improvement.

Once spears get over about 6 feet long they start to become very specialized. Long spears are hard to reposition and if you can avoid the tip or flank the user you can render the weapon useless. This is why long spears are a crowd favorite for formation fighting but a very poor duelling weapon compared to the chinese bamboo spear.

So you can see why I balk at the idea of using the average "spear" as a quarterstaff.

--

And so ends the lesson on medieval weapon science. Aint history great? Its a tall order to have that much realism within a computer game but making the effort to include as much as possible. As players its our responsibility to make it known that we would enjoy it and desire more. So repeat after me: How much realism do we wan't in our games?

Only enough to be fun.

I read the entirety of it, but my basic point here is that you didn't "lock" the definition of spear into one specific design simply by adding the word 'the' to the word 'spear'.  All the designs we've mentioned can be legitimitely called spear, and since you didn't bother defining the nature of the spear in first post, you limited my options for what I'd call spear.  And even had you done so, you still didn't counter the basic point

I might not have set the definition of a spear in stone but I did make it overly clear what kind of spear I consider the standard. I really don't get what point of me countering your own point is and at this point of our pointy minded discussion were just argueing pointless semantics to resharpen tired point related puns. Get my point? (D-_-)--D (*_-)

However you did give me an idea! I'll make a new post to discuss it.

My point is that while some aspects of my post may have been slightly invalid, the basic concept behind the points was one hundred percent intact :P  (Oh, and pay attention to the part I quoted in my initial post, too -- I was addressing that part specifically (e. g. that someone with the same equipment might use it completely differently, so calling a spearman a spearman isn't really a good idea))

Yes thats right. Basically, we need detail where it counts. Question is how much detail can we stand before we overwhelm ourselves under a hailstorm of our own making?

Its quite likely that you could mod in agile unarmoured fighters armed with short flexible spears but how would you make these unique and something more than just poorly armed and underarmoured fighters? Magical agility perhaps? Also elite training of course.