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Total War Type Battles

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Total War Type Battles

To Grid or not to Grid

from Elemental Forums

I'm gonna guess the battle field and unit placement will be handled in grids and units formations will be standardized. I think though it would be far cooler if the battles were more free form like the Total War series does them. This would be amazing. How you position your troops and spread your lines could make a huge difference on the outcome of battle. Troops designed to stand and defend could be spread in a line that is two or three flanks deep depending on how many men you have available. Mounted units could charge in wedge formation instead of as a square all the time. I love games like this but it gets lame telling a unit to attack and the men you have left in that unit attack the same way again and again. Look at a game called Elven Legacy to see what I mean. I thought this game would be more of a Fantasy Version of Total War when I first saw it but sadly even though the battles look cool it's standard unit attack unit in the same way. Formations count for nothing...

By eliminating the Grid type battle field you free up your units to much better control and strategy can stand a lot more use in combat. A weaker force can out match a stronger force by using better formations and using the terrain to it's advantage instead of "I click on this unit and it attacks in the same formation every time". Thoughts?

28,485 views 30 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Goodmoring all

Most of the reports from Frogboy and company have suggested a 'real time' battle scape with a pause and direct funciton, all units have orders they all act at the same time. But at any time you can stop all the action and give whole new sets of orders to all your troops.

In multplayer this may become that the game auto stopps every 7 seconds, and both(all, battle of 5 armies anybody) players can give new orders. or something like that.


Take care all

Robbie

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Just a note, people talk about how easy the Total War games are in battle and how it's possible to take on much larger armies with minimal casualties.

However, the AI is actually a lot smarter than most games with turn based battles. The easiness of the game is largely due to the morale system. If units fought to the death, then Total War would be a much, much more difficult game.

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Translation, the AI would murder us all in our sleep because it cheats like a bitch and produces more troops than reasonable. :)

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

Personally, in terms of how mechanics play out for execution, I think something like a controllable dominions meets total war style would be awsome (obviously it would have to look closer to total war).  Removing the morale and fatigue (especially the morale) mechanics are NOT, I say again, NOT the answer.

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top
A big part of WoM will (I hope) be insanely powerful heros who can zap a enemy unit with a single thunderbolt. So even if they tried to make battles like in Total War, it wouldn't play out that way. I agree with what pigeon said about the emotional involvement we might feel in TW-like combat with any enemy dragon bearing down on us. But I really, really agree with what others said about TW battles taking too long and getting boring. And I agree with Demiansky that MOM battles are still fun after all these years. Maybe if they make autoresolve NOT be "auto-lose", and made the AI less stupid, battles might be more fun and more possible to avoid, so they could do anything they want with the details of the battle system without ruining the game. Meanwhile, the dev journal said back in July that battles would be "continuous turns", not RTW. I *guess* that would fit better into some sort of grid.