There is another way... but it is MUCH more complex... something I would like to find out if it works when I go to college for game programing...

If some sort of simulation could be used to determine the properties of a mixture/compound of elements and then how those mixtures react when certain forces are applied such as temperature or other materials...

Imagine this:
Player digs Rock X out of the ground. Player reads description card which appears stating the composition of Rock X. Player refines Rock X, which contains 85% iron, to purify the iron. Player creates Alloy Y by putting Iron and Rock W (50% copper, 25% iron, 10% oxygen, 10% tin, 5% trace amounts of varius minerals). Player uses Alloy Y, who's physical properties such as malleability, temperature data (how it reacts to various temps), hardness, conductivity, ect, and creates Armor Set Z. The stats of Armor Set Z are then calculated based on the properties of Alloy Y and the thickness of Alloy Y on various areas of the armor(since 1mm of metal stops a spear much less than 10cm of a metal).

As I said, very complex, and probably requiring to much computatonal power... for now anyway... But I figure computational power will be sufficient, or begin to become sufficient, about the time I finish college.

Generic in what way exactly? That different suits of armour would end up looking too similar? Remember, the design and visual look of any armour would depend entirely on who ends up wearing it. "Heavy" armour on a human would equate to full plate armour. Heavy armour on a bear paladin (yes, I went there) would also equate to plate armour. But the plate armour that the bear gets would be much larger and thicker than one worn by any human.

The amount of protection you get is is relative to how much protection the user has to begin with. For us humans we have nothing in the way of natural armour. In fact as it stands now we are the only species on earth without any purpose built defensive or offensively defensive mechanism short of our intelligence. So when we use our smarts to design, build then wear plate armour we gain a huge benefit in terms of protection. Bears naturally have a tough hide, adding plate armour to a bear stacks with his natural armour and amounts to a ridiculous level of protection.

What you make the armour out of has a big effect on the armour generation system as well. If you wanted to use plain stone as a material you would not be able to articulate it very well because stone is somewhat hard to shape. So stone plate armour would be horribly impractical. But then if you make stone scales instead you could create practical scale armour. If the weight seems a bit extreme just remember that it could be meant to armour something inhuman.

I can think of plenty, but the one that tops the list is armour. If no one calculates where on the body you actually get hit, then any and all armour you wear is essentially a free lunch. Without hit detection you could put on your helmet of +9000 armour class and then go walk over spike traps without taking any damage. How does that make sense? The whole reason spike traps are effective is because they only have to deal with the armour on feet which is usually far less tough then that worn on the chest.

Roman soldiers in ancient times are a fantastic example of tradeoffs in practice. Your typical Roman soldier was equipped with banded armour, an open faced plate helmet, greaves and a large curved tower shield. When you look at an individual soldier he seems to be very vulnerable, all of his limbs are mostly unprotected. Whats makes this soldier effective in combat is how he is deployed. Roman soldiers were masters of formation fighting. Each soldier used his shield to protect himself but also the soldiers beside him. The weight saved by not completetly armouring each soldier was put to great effect allowing the soldiers to march farther and carry more gear.

Hit detection can be as complicated as deciding whether or not an arrow hits the left eye or the right eye (the dwarf fortress model) or as simple as recognizing that a unit has a shield and any arrows must make it through the shield first before hurting the bearer.

If I were to go back and redo it I would probably get rid of distribution and replace it with balance. Balance represents how well the user can distribute the load of his equipment around his person. Having poor balance will make you easy to knock down. But balance can only be calculated when you factor in everything the person is wearing, so distribution is sort of irrelevant. It might be worth keeping just to indicate the degree to which armour is helping or hindering balance.

Other need to be changed or at least seperated. Some of the listed factors are entirely user dependant and vice versa.

Arguable, but remember what I said about complexity? The difference between good and bad complexity is how much of it is relevant at any one time. The dice rolling in the background should be invisible when there are more important things to be considered. Just think of it like chess. When you move a pawn one space forward, you didn't have to look up in a book the abilities of the pawn. You already know its capabilities and how it will interact with other pieces.

When you send your troops into battle wearing plate armour you already know how it will affect thier performance. If you look at the unit statistics you will find very few numbers. Armour will be summed up by its class, in this case heavy. When you look to the other side of the board the most information you will get about your enemies armour is its class. Until the fight is over and you take a set of enemy armour home to do constructive testing, you would have no idea of its true capabilities. But just by looking at the armour something wears and how he moves inside it you can get a general idea of how it performs.

When two units meet and start fighting then the dice start rolling. They compare the properties of weapons against armour to determine who lives or dies. But unless you are on the front line fighting with a sword these numbers will be invisible. All you need to know as a general is that you just deployed maces against heavy armour and your guys are winning.

The way I envisioned it, equipment would have a durability rating and can be destroyed or damaged in the course of combat. In other words, it can break but will never degrade. As long as your units are well supplied this equipment would automatically be repaired and replaced. Makes sense right? The more expensive the equipment the higher the upkeep cost. If upkeep gets cut off then your soldiers would have to go into combat missing pieces of equipment.

Using a unit of spearmen as an example. Over the course of the battle 5 spears get broke, when the battle is over 3 of them get fixed and two are removed from the supply cache. The invisible supply camp that follows this unit everywhere but is never seen carries a store of replacement equipment. When stuff breaks the replacement items come from this pool which is automatically refilled at upkeep cost. So the loss of supply is not a sharp cutoff, there will be a buffer. The size of the buffer can be chosen by the player, the more spares you take with you the slower you travel.

If for whatever reason the unit gets cut off from home supply for too long then it could happen that your spearmen get sent into combat without enough spears to outfit them all. If that were to happen you have a choice of sending those men into combat with backup weapons or having them sit out to maintain unit cohesion.

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Now even I will admit that could end up needlessly complicated. But if you don't want to deal with supply issues, you could make equipment breakable in combat and replace it for free after every fight. This would still allow for a lot of fun stuff. Send soldiers armed with battle axes against soldiers defending with wooden tower shields and you would get to see shields breaking and splintering.

Most strategy games make use of army upkeep costs, which pretty much is the most simple and efficient way to simulate weapon and armor upkeep, feeding and clothing the soldiers, paying the soldiers, and all other costs associated with having an army. This is why durability is not taken into account in most games, since it is assumed the upkeep costs cover repair costs. If the player is required to send supply caravans which I would assume the player pays for, you must also make sure the upkeep cost is fairly low, since you will be providing supplies which traditionally would be covered by upkeep costs.

As far as hit detection, they are using physics to simulate the look of objects, so (I would assume) it is a fairly small jump to go from simulating how a weapon looks when being swung to how the weapon does damage when being swung, since one already has most of the variables required for said damage calculation. Mass of armor and weapon, velocities of armor, weapon, and creature. All thats really missing is a some collision detection and armor mitigation values.

Mount and blade had physics that work exactly like that. Soldiers and weapons both have hitboxes, but the hitboxes are the actual 3d models used in game. If the tip of your sword misses by an inch, you missed by an inch and no damage is done. The damage calculation is heavily dependant on what speed your weapon is traveling at relative to your target. Riding a horse makes even relatively weak weapons extremely deadly because the speed bonus imparts damage to your strike.

Mount and blade might not have the same number of units as the total war series. But it is still capable of modeling over 300 seperate entities with full physics.

Ya, from what I understand, the models already have hitboxes due to the physics stuff mentioned in the dev journals, its just a simple matter of letting the collision detection deal with the collisions between weapons and armor on separate units and figuring in damage based on angle, velocity, and armor thickness.

On another note, for item stats I hope they use non-integar amounts... A soldier is never carrying exactly 50 kg of gear, it is always something more like 50.487kg... Integars just seem to be to far apart for their application in most games.

Thing is, while that would work perfectly in an RPG setting as demonstrated by mount and blade, we would have to rethink it for an RTS setting.

But not by much, when you send a formation of 100 to attack another formation of 100. Not all of the soldiers in the unit fight at the same time. Unless someone attacks them with arrows they just stand in the center of the formation doing nothing until its thier turn to fight at the front.

From what I understand, there is often a lot of shoving going on as well, as both sides try to push the other back and gain ground. This would often make larger weapons (like a mace or 2 handed sword, which require a big area to swing them) useless in formation combat, and is why most of the soldiers in formations would have short swords and daggers. Hehe, come to think of it, battles would have been rather like shopping the morning after thanksgiving, except instead of women they had really smelly, often drunk, men with weapons.

Units really need multiple weapons to deal with formation fighting; a longer ranged weapon such as a spear for the first contact and for fighting from rows 2-4, and smaller weapons for close quarters fighting in the front row. A spear is pretty much useless when you are standing in the front row, a fact which is not really seen in many games.

Hmm... I guess it would not work as well for Elemental. If someone pushes 'Auto-resolve' they don't want to wait 5 minutes for the computer to do all the necessary calculations.

It would still look awesome for all that. And different weapons do have thier uses. People with large two handed weapons can generally overpower people will smaller weapons. The disadvantage is of course that they preclude using a shield and if the other guy can back his formation tighter than yours he gains a significant advantage.

If I understand your idea right, you'll probably have longer to wait than that. It seems like you want a game that realistically simulates chemical reactions and the effects of weapons hitting armor. Even carrying out one of the latter simulation (which is simpler than the first) would probably require more computing power to do in real time than an entire, maxed out Medieval II:Total War battle. Not to mention it'd require significantly more detailed geometry if it were to be at all realistic...

No, I'm not talking about visually. It just seems like the slider game would result in armor effects feeling generic to me. I also can't think of how it would fit in with technology. I'm having trouble putting this into words, so I'll just concede my skepticism might be irrational.

Again, I still think that having so many different factors is overkill if the emphasis is large scale combat, especially in a 4X game. Like with calculating hit locations, I think narrowing down the relevant armor characteristics to a much smaller number can be done in such a way as to result in, on average, the same thing.

There's another type of bad complexity: the type of complexity that doesn't really add anything over a much simpler model. The result is just higher system requirements (or smaller scales) for no added effect.

See I don't understand. If armor will be summed up by its class, then why the heck do you need nine sliders within that?

You apparently missed the part where I said that it might make sense but that's no justification for it . No, I don't like the idea of having to deal with equipment breaking in a 4X game. I am convinced that breakage cannot be implemented well in a game where you'll be fielding thousands of units, especially when that is meant to be just one small aspect of the game. No, I'd much rather this be abstracted away into upkeep costs.

Yet another complicated scenario the devs would have to code, and yet another bit of micromanagement players would have to deal with. No thanks.

well, there are the spikes that shoot up from the floor (rather the kind that are in pits and you fall into them).  Like cheesy forbidden temple traps.   I mean, think Sonic the Hedgehog spikes that pop-up into you. There is no falling 1st

In general though, I feel armor should just follow the keep-it-simple-stupid rules.   Basic armor bonus + special ability or weakness.  I'm on the side that says most of the sliders and all that should be in the modding section, rather htan part of the base game.

 yeah, its unrealistic.  But its easy to understand and doesn't run the risk of losing 'fun' to over complexity.

But who is getting hit and when? If you do combat physics calculations for two battling units of soldiers 1000 strong. It does not mean that you end up calculating physics for 2000 people at once. When both sides meet the amount of people actually hitting each other with swords is quite limited. Depending on the formations involved the percent of active soldiers could be as little as 10%. The vast majority of the soldiers will simply stand around until it becomes thier turn.

Now on the other hand if you had a unit of 1000 archers all shooting arrows at once then you will start to have problems with scale. But if you realistically model armour you could cut that down to less than 500 hits in an instant. The majority of arrows will miss or get deflected. If the target lacks the armour to survive arrow showers, the problem of calculating too many hits against them becomes moot, all of them will be dead after the first volley.

The whole idea is based on what we know of the unit creation system. Want armoured knights? You need armour and a horse for every rider. From there its not much of a stretch to have to choose between making your plate armour out of copper or expensive steel (in comparison). If you had no access to metal at all you might end up using something exotic like bone instead.

Sure why not? If a soldier steps on a spike out in the battlefield, all you really need to know is how sharp the spike is and how tough is his boot. Not tough enough? You then have a wounded soldier. Even if the soldier does have one, you don't need a seperate detailed hitbox for spikes. When you figure out the angle at which he steps on it you can simply roll a dice. When soldiers fall into a spike pit trap you can simply shotgun them with random spike hits spread realistically over thier body. Targetting is not an important issue in this case, its *just* a trap. Save that proc power for something more important.

For appearances it would be worth it for any ragdoll effects to interact realistically with the traps, but otherwise this event is very incidental to what is going on. Unless a large portion of your army runs into traps at the same time you can simply sum these things up as "here be dangerous terrain". Its worth noting that once soldiers know traps are there, they would become far less effective.

There are numbers in the background but you don't get to see them. The bars are simply a visual to give you some idea of how the armour will perform in combat. If you could see those numbers you would be obsessed with optimizing them and the micromanaging comes back in full force. Its sort of like a pressure gauge with no numbers. You can watch the needle climb into the red zone indicating danger, but you don't need to measure the exact degree of danger, you should be running away.

This is the wrong way to think about it. Simple systems shackle us to simple mechanics. If you have the ability to imagine better mechanics and a better game, only then will you have the information you need to make a better system. Right now we are basically lighting our campfire with flint and steel. The amount of effort it takes to design and manufacture something like a zippo lighter seems like so much work when you already have the ability to make fire. But once you have that lighter in your hand you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Because without those sliders, what would differenciate heavy armour from other heavy armours? Nothing! If you rely on "class" to define what an armour is and how it works, no matter what you make of it they all end up the same. Instead of being able to create simply better heavy armour, you get stuck trying to attach buffs and bonuses onto the same vanilla crap that everyone gets. And I thought you hated micromanagement.

That said, what about equipment breakage in combat? Assuming free replacements once the battle is over. It would be realistic for units with broken shields no longer get protection against arrows. How is this any different from archers running out of arrows in the first place?

But then what happens if the upkeep gets cut off? The effects of a realistic supply shortage take time to happen. Current systems don't model those effects at all, if you fail to meet your quota, then whole units simply desert and evaporate. Doesn't it make far more sense for the decay to be gradual?

A well supplied unit will eventually degrade to the point where it can no longer act as a cohesive fighting force. If that force simply ran out of food, why not just order it to raid a village or something? Supplies don't have to come from home.

You misunderstand me. I don't mean upkeep costs in the sense that you need a supply route back to one of your cities or anything. I mean a per turn gold/food cost for every unit. If you can't afford to maintain your military upkeep then people will begin to desert. Again, "doesn't it make sense?" is a terrible argument. It's a game - if we implemented everything that made sense then the game would just become real life, and none of us play games to experience real life. There are plenty of "things that make sense" that should never end up in a game. In my opnion, equipment breaking in a 4X game with thousands of units is one of them.

What does that have to do with the argument? I'm not opposed to that at all. Raiding villages should allow you to loot them.

That is exactly what I meant. It doesn't matter how the "upkeep" gets to the soldiers, running out should not cause them to desert on the spot or starve and die overnight. In most wars soldiers got paid regularly on the spot. They then took this money and either spent it at home or locally. In Elemental, who said you soldiers were getting paid at all? They are essentially fighting for thier nations survival under your banner. Sure they might draw a wage of some sort, but why would you pay them hundreds of kilometers from home in the middle of hostile territory? They have nothing to spend it on and coinage would just slow them down and increase the chance of getting killed.

In this kind of setting money would either be paid when the surviving soldiers return home or directly to the families who have members in the army. This means that you still have to pay some sort of money upkeep, but running out for a short time will not make the army desert. Besides where the hell would they go? People are unlikely to defect and good luck surviving alone in this crapsack world.

Now on the other hand, if you were helping to defend a fort a couple blocks away from your home and are told one day that you boss can no longer pay you... In such a situation you would probably quit on the spot right? You do need that money and you can find another job without too much trouble. That doesn't mean you wouldn't pick your sword back up and fight as militia if duty calls. Even if you were not being paid to be a soldier.

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Why is this all relevant? Simple. Realism is no free lunch. This has multiple meanings.

First of all, food is not free. When you deploy armies to the field you must feed them, and they can only march so far with supplies they carry themselves. This is very important because it limits where armies can and can not go. In games like master of magic food upkeep must be met per turn or else the unit will desert on the spot. Delivery of that food is abstracted, there are no supply lines or caravans involved. What this means is you can found a gigantic army and plop it down in the middle of enemy territory. You can keep it there as long as you want and they can do NOTHING to get you to leave short of killing your units with another army of thier own.

This is horribly unrealistic. Normally the focus is defending the borders of your territory. If something manages to get inside your defensive cordon, you can seal the gap behind them and cut off home support. For most armies this is crippling. A major cornerstone of offensive strategy needs to be making that gap and holding it open to allow the logistics flow of supplies and men into enemy territory.

Even if you modeled this mechanic to a heavy abstracted degree. What it lets you do is amazing.

1. Small units capable of living off the land can infiltrate enemy territory and stay there. The lack of a supply caravan going to them allows them to stay hidden anywhere. This is the entire point of having scouts and rangers.
   
2. Armies too far from home will stretch supply lines to the limit. To negate this they could raid or capture existing supplies in enemy territory instead of just burning them or looting them as "gold" which is completetly useless to them given that it can't be eaten.
3. An invading army that breaches the "great wall of pidgeon" could be halted simply by recapturing the wall behind them. An army without supplies from home might be unable to travel far enough to threaten any of your cities.

And so forth. Don't be so quick to discard the concept, a lot of things appear useless on paper but will dawn on you when you hold themi n your hands. And don't forget that anyone who accepts a free lunch forfeits all right to complain about its contents and quality.

See to me this just seems like yet another case of realism making for a horrible game mechanic. I keep telling you that I don't consider realism to be a good reason for implementing anything, and you keep giving me arguments based on realism. It's not going to sway me

To tell you why I feel this way about realism: imagine if someone were to make a game that completely realistically simulated the medieval life of a king. It would be a horrible game. It might make for a superb research tool, but it wouldn't be fun! It would be boring, tedious, and frustrating. Realism should never be a reason to implement a feature; it can and should be an inspiration, but no more than that. For example, if you decide that something that happens in reality would make for a great feature or mechanic, but the way in which it occurs would be horrible, then invent a new way for it to happen that will be fun but result in essentially the same thing.

You want the effects of army supply to be a feature of the game - ok. I can see why, the effects themselves could make for a lot of fun. But first you've gotta come up with a way in which to achieve those effects that aren't as horrible as the way in which they really happen if you want me to agree to it. That can be done by either completely different and unrealted means, or by just abstracting it to some level. The trick is to find that creative alternative or level and kind of abstraction. (And note that creative alternatives still need to make sense internally. It can't just be some mechanism that achieves an effect because the devs say so, it needs to follow logic that can be followed and accepted by the player).

First things first, it's not spelled 'pidgeon'! It's spelled 'pigeon'! You chronically misspell my poor name

But I agree completely. I would love for those effects to be in the game. They require more strategy, open up lots more options, and provide the good kind of frustration (ie, you launch an invasion of doom, just to see it flounder because your target masterfully disables your army without even fighting it). When the risk of an action in a strategy game is the good kind of frustration, all is well - that's what provides the excitement for me.

But so far I'm completely opposed to the mechanisms you've proposed in order to achieve those effects. Equipment breaking is off the table for me. I'm skeptical of supply lines, even abstracted ones, but even though I can't think of a detailed model for them that I would be happy with, I'll admit that there is some promise there. If I were a developer I'd be very open to at least exploring that route. But so far the route that no one has taken yet is to think of alternatives that aren't so grounded in reality. I'm sure a determined creative mind can come up with something

Sorry! I use a program called Pidgin for chatting and the internet as a whole has pretty much corrupted my book learned vocabulary. Thats just the way the internet works.

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Your completetly right in that development should happen in steps. You can't simply reach for the stars and get there tommorow. But then again, no matter how far you go, you will never get closer to anywhere without a destination in mind. Man would not have walked on the moon if he hadn't dreamed of doing it first.

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The funny thing is that both of us are equally correct. You make the point that it could go horribly wrong, and I hold the opposite view. But that said we will never know how things turn out until we try. Innovation is like this, you have to push on through the doubt because the end result *just might work*.

Games have a long history of stagnating because no matter what you change it will make someone happy and piss someone else off. Pretty much the only way progress can be made at this point is to say "screw you all! I'm going with plan C!". Thought of course, not in those exact words.

So whenever people tell me me "that probably won't work", the most I can allow myself to say and think is "duly noted". Anything less would quite literally defeat the purpose.

Haha, well 'Pidgin' makes sense in that context (it is a real word - it just doesn't mean the annoying fat birds that do nothing but crap everywhere and invite people to kick them in the streets of manhattan). A pidgin is a simple language developed to allow communication between groups that don't speak the same language. I think that's actually an awesome name for an internet chat application.

Yes, true. That said, I will not stand for equipment physically breaking! ( )

Most of the reason why I'm so argumentative on these forums is that I think it's the best way to draw out the gold from the veins hidden within a concept, even if the the concept as a whole isn't so good, or isn't feasible. Asking questions forces people to come up with answers, and challenging people about an idea forces them to come up with a reason for it or a better idea.

For example in this case you've convinced me that a more complex (or just different) upkeep system than just "this unit requires 50 gold and 10 food each turn or it will have a chance of deserting" might not be a bad idea by providing a great reason for how a different system could improve the gameplay. That said I'm still waiting for a fleshed out supply route system that wouldn't be a pain in the butt to deal with, or something different entirely that would achieve the same effect

Oh, and you haven't managed to make any ground at all on the equipment breaking front So you still have your work cut out for you!

So I was thinking about equipment breakage. There are varying degrees to which you can implement such a system. The first is to have no equipment breakage at all, the second is no equipment breakage outside of combat and so on. Having to deal with the weapons of your troops rusting away is far more attention to detail than players need or want. And even if we wanted that level of realism we could not get there in a single leap.

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So whats the advantage of equipment breaking? Im not convinced that equipment breaking outside of combat would add anything useful, so by breakage I am talking about weapon damage inside of a combat situation.

The first advantage that stands out in my mind is relatively simple. If your equipment has a chance of breaking you need to know how strong it is so you can measure the chance of that happening. Meaning in other words, there has to be some sort of statistic governing how strong your equipment is.

If you add such a score you would add depth in that the person with the stronger equipment has a quantifiable advantage. The material you make your equipment out of determines how it performs in combat. For example swords made of copper can hold a sharp edge. But if you go banging that edge against solid steel plate armour it will quickly become dull. On the other hand if you start using hammers made of stone, the plate armour will be the one to break and deform.

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A good example of this in practice was the spanish conquistadores versus the aztec warriors. The warriors used wooden clubs set with shards of obsidian. Historical recounts describe these clubs as capable of decapitating a horse in one blow. Whether or not the recount is true is up to debate. But consider that a fractured obsidian edge can be several orders of magnitude sharper than the best surgical steel scalpel we can manufacture today.

When the aztec met the spanish in battle they soon discovered that thier obsidian weaponry was not all that effecive against plate armour. A wooden club simply can't transfer enough force to be damaging against solid metal and the obsidian blades would chip and shatter on contact with metal plate armour.

Depending on who you ask metal armour (along with gunpowder and horses) is cited as one of the main advantages that led the spanish to victory over the aztecs. Even thought they were ridiculously outnumbered.

One word-snooty way to make your distinction is to say that you favor vigorous, constructive critique, not argument for argument's sake. However you put it, I surely agree with your point here. Having someone knock down what I *thought* was my idea only to leave me with one I like better is fun.

Re the Conquistadores, I'm somewhat sold on the idea that the evil trinity there, and in many other places, was Guns, Germs, and Steel. Disease killed far more people in 'the New World' than any military, criminal, or even slave-economic activity did.

Thats a great book! When I first read the book it suprised me how much of it didn't actually deal with any of those three.

When I brought up the example of spanish vs the aztec I was specifically talking about combat between the two parties. It could be that disease allowed them to "win the war". But without the advantage of guns and steel the spanish probably would have gotten fubared after the first battle or two. The aztec had more than enough troops to simply suffocate them by weight, but for whatever reason they didn't.