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Post by Kliment Jefremovitš Vorošilov on Oct 3, 2022 20:52:52 GMT
Firstly, not to scare anyone off, the title is quite dramatic, but the topic not so much. Right now in spite of my inactivity, we've got the African Comedy of Errors sort of going, although it'll need more activity. However we're desperately lacking a serious RP now that 500 BCE is sort of gone. We can always start another one, but instead of a yet another same old Napoleonic Wars, I'd like to propose something new, or rather old. When we had the great 1942 Army Group RP going on Darth Nihilus talked about a more fixed battle system. However I was a little reluctant, for I thought it could be a hard thing to do. However recently I thought that maybe it could be a good idea to try to implement a fixed dice battle system. Doesn't mean it has to be in every RP, but just something that could be an option just like having an AG RP. It'd really be a counterweight for Gerd von Rundstedt's comedy RP's and maybe could spark some interest in other types of players, shifting the balance more towards a war game from a role play. |
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Post by Kliment Jefremovitš Vorošilov on Oct 3, 2022 21:00:24 GMT
Saltin, also, I thought, would there be some ways to advertise the RP board? Like a section in the news tap or something?
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Post by Darth Nihilus on Oct 3, 2022 23:14:37 GMT
When we had the great 1942 Army Group RP going on Darth Nihilus talked about a more fixed battle system. However I was a little reluctant, for I thought it could be a hard thing to do. However recently I thought that maybe it could be a good idea to try to implement a fixed dice battle system. Doesn't mean it has to be in every RP, but just something that could be an option just like having an AG RP. It'd really be a counterweight for Gerd von Rundstedt 's comedy RP's and maybe could spark some interest in other types of players, shifting the balance more towards a war game from a role play. Yay, it's my time to shine! (jk I'm gonna list some recommendations below and see what everyone else thinks) So going through the 1942 RP I found a few things that REALLY detracted from the overall "gameplay" and actually kind of resulted in the RP dying: - The ability to spontaneously build fortifications, bridges, etc. -> The entire Atlantic Wall was recreated within the span of like a week and as a result no one could launch any attacks on each other - The ability to spontaneously move troops around -> I'm talking like moving entire armies from Norway to Germany within a day, instantly retreating, etc. - The extremely high attrition rates -> A lot of players lost their entire navies and air forces within like a month of the RP starting so as a result no one could launch any attacks either cause they couldn't risk their entire army (which was 2000 troops or so) dying - The ability to lose your entire military in a single battle (I'm talking battles with death tolls in the millions after just two days of fighting) - Most strategies basically being just to wait for your enemy to make the first turn and then be like "Well ackshully I made this counter-move right away and encircled all 2000 of your tanks" (ngl I abused this one a lot) So the first thing I'd like to see implemented are simply just reality checks, kind of like the ones we tried out in the 1942 RP (like capping airforce losses at 30% per sortie, for example). I think once overpowered moves like instantly destroying entire armies are phased out, then calculating damage won't be as big of a problem. Here's a few examples: 1. A failsafe for army casualty totals. You don't see an army of 500 000 lose half its force within an hour and continue to fight. I'd like to see battles automatically end or an army automatically retreat after it loses a certain amount of its troops, unless it gets fully surrounded of course (something like 25% maybe). 1a. Speaking of casualties, capping airforce losses at 30% per sortie really helped everyone to not lose their airforce right away. Other damage caps include artillery barrages, landmines, defensive structures, coastal artilleries (anti-ship), etc. 2. Army travelling speed caps. I think this is the most important one and will prevent things like instant encirclements, moves towards the capital, etc. and forces you to use your armies more dynamically. Just to start I think we can ignore terrain, morale, health, etc. and just set it at like 25 km/h or something 3. Building speed/amount caps. You should be limited in the amount of fortifications you can build, at once and in total. This could either be implemented by a hard time cap (like a few kilometres per day) or a budget (like building x amount of fortifications costs y amount of money and you have a small income). Also fortifications should be nerfed a lot in terms of dealing and reducing damage, but idk how that's gonna be implemented yet. This could also apply to things like barrage balloons (they were super OP in the 1942 RP), trenches (instantly dug somehow) and bunkers, anti-air guns, etc. 3a. Also the fact that we could instantly mine the entire Baltic Sea was kinda terrible for gameplay. It was funny though. 4. More accurate strategy usage. Take this common scenario in RP's for example. Bob has an army of 2 000. He somehow manages to surround Joe's army of 50 000 and completely destroys their morale, reducing their damage output by 95% and resulting in them surrendering after a week... This isn't WC4 lol you don't just surround an enemy and instantly kill their morale. I think the whole "surrounding an enemy" thing should be improved. Speed caps obviously help, but maybe a condition on the amount of soldiers you'll need to encircle an enemy. 5. Speaking of morale, I think the way we dealt with it was pretty arbitrary as well. We could either give a score for it (like in EW7) that goes down when you're retreating, surrounded, etc. or just a scale (like high, low, etc.), but how it affects damage, defense is something that's gonna take a long time to resolve. 6. I found that small countries basically didn't stand a chance cause they would just get curb stomped by larger countries, even if they straight up just got zurg rushed. Something that prevents larger countries from pretty much instantly killing small countries would be nice. As for a dice system, I've been thinking about it and I think if we are gonna implement one we can just start really simple, like maybe what Risk does where all they do is just roll two die and see who wins (of course if it's one die per person then a battle involving 100 000's of soldiers would need a lot of dice lol). But I think the leader of that particular RP should have their own discretion. Maybe we could even have something where at the start of a battle the two players just list their tactics, amount of soldiers, etc. and the RP leader arbitrates a result or something. |
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Post by Saltin on Oct 4, 2022 1:53:59 GMT
Saltin, also, I thought, would there be some ways to advertise the RP board? Like a section in the news tap or something? Sure we can do a few things to highlight the RP board. There is the -News- option and the -marquee- as well and possibly we could add an icon on the bottom of the main forum home page but these things can only be seen on the [pc] version of the UI not in [mobile] and the majority of the player that visit our site do it via mobile view. In the next version of proboards software both mobile and pc versions will be the same and these issues will go away but that's still in beta now and likely to remain so for quiet some time. |
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Post by Kliment Jefremovitš Vorošilov on Oct 4, 2022 6:15:14 GMT
Darth Nihilus, great points. I think movement and building time could also be helped by a dice system. For example you want to move from point A to point B, you look at the distance (it has to be discussed how it's done) and then you roll 2 dice and depending on the distance you need to get a certain number sinulating weather conditions etc. As for battles, I think the system should definitely take into account more stuff than just shear numbers, like morale and supplies. Also, I'm not sure if it would be too complicated but I'd like to have a roll for actual combat and a roll for morale that would influence the combat.
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Post by Darth Nihilus on Oct 4, 2022 16:23:22 GMT
Darth Nihilus , great points. I think movement and building time could also be helped by a dice system. For example you want to move from point A to point B, you look at the distance (it has to be discussed how it's done) and then you roll 2 dice and depending on the distance you need to get a certain number sinulating weather conditions etc. As for battles, I think the system should definitely take into account more stuff than just shear numbers, like morale and supplies. Also, I'm not sure if it would be too complicated but I'd like to have a roll for actual combat and a roll for morale that would influence the combat. I think a good way would be to start simple and then tweak things as we go along, that way the learning curve for damage outputs etc wouldn't be too steep for new players. I also think the algorithm that decides how much damage is dealt can be as complicated as we want it to be as long as player inputs are relatively simple. Like for example it could be a really long equation (but that won't happen just yet) but all the player has to do is just roll a die and the system automatically calculates damage or something. And to keep things diverse maybe different RPs could have different dice settings, as long as they keep to a relatively similar formula. |
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Post by Josip Broz Tito on Oct 5, 2022 23:27:44 GMT
I don’t play wargames, even Axis and Allies is too complicated for me. Doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but I wouldn’t join it.
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Post by Gerd von Rundstedt on Oct 6, 2022 1:29:24 GMT
I don’t play wargames, even Axis and Allies is too complicated for me. Doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but I wouldn’t join it. Really? You don't like Axis and Allies? That was my childhood, and actually what got me into ET. I was looking for an A&A clone on Google Play and I ended up getting WC2. |
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Post by Josip Broz Tito on Oct 6, 2022 8:17:29 GMT
I don’t play wargames, even Axis and Allies is too complicated for me. Doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but I wouldn’t join it. Really? You don't like Axis and Allies? That was my childhood, and actually what got me into ET. I was looking for an A&A clone on Google Play and I ended up getting WC2. Axis and Allies is really complicated for someone who grew up with Monopoly and Ticket to Ride. TBH I have never played a physical wargame, and the closest I have come is Twilight Struggle. |
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Post by Darth Nihilus on Oct 6, 2022 18:44:49 GMT
Looking at how a lot of different grand strategy games handle combat, it seems that there's two factors to controlling armies: Big picture and small picture.
Big picture means you can see the entire map and territory control, as well as move your armies around, but you can't attack anyone else.
Small picture is usually focused on a specific area and is where a battle actually happens.
So there's multiple ways to consider both big and small picture, ranging from complete lack of player control to full player control, which is probably much too complex for a casual RP.
1. The WC and EW series, where big and small picture is combined: ie. you can move army groups from region to region and attack simultaneously.
2. GOG3 conquest, where there's a separate big and small picture; you move your armies around regions, and then when you want to attack a separate map is created for that
3. Risk, and HOI4 to an extent, where players only control the big picture. The result of a battle is decided by RNG or prior circumstances
4. Simulation wargames, where players have no direct control at all, and can only give units a general objective and strategy. Big and small picture is automated
I think for the purposes of an RP, 1 might be too simple for some, and 2 might be fine for some players but too complex for others, while 4 might leave some people frustrated since everything is automated. While the UI of HOI4 might scare off a lot of players, we're only focusing on combat here which is pretty much just moving troops from region to region and letting them automatically fight.
In terms of big picture combat, everything else becomes pretty simple. Spend x amount of money to build forts, air defense, etc. on a region and then those forts show up during small picture combat.
So now we have to solve small picture combat. I'm gonna list some issues that we're gonna need to solve in order to make things simple but not super arbitrary:
1. How is the small-picture map going to be shown? Will it be a hex-grid, a cartesian grid, or no grid at all and just Google Maps?
2. How much user input do we want to include in small picture combat, on a scale of 0 (Risk, full RNG, zero strategy) to 10 (classic war-games, full user input)?
- I think we should keep the score as low as possible without making it completely RNG, so probably a 2 or so.
- Possible solution: Make the combat rock-paper-scissors-esque, so each player chooses one out of 3 or 4 given strategies and the better strategy automatically wins out?
- Another possible solution that scores higher on the scale: Each player lists their objectives and strategy simultaneously in secret, and the RP leader arbitrates a result?
3. Will there be fog of war? And if yes how would it be implemented?
- I think fog of war could spice up gameplay but it would be incredibly hard to implement and to make sure that players don't cheat. So the answer's probably no.
4. How will we handle morale, flanking & surrounding, and supply lines?
- These are a lot easier to implement on a grid, but one thing I don't like about grids is how static they are
5. How much RNG is too much? And, how much player input is too much?
6. How do we make combat realistic without it being too time-consuming? We should be able to resolve battles within a single forum page.
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Post by Kliment Jefremovitš Vorošilov on Oct 7, 2022 8:47:22 GMT
Darth Nihilus, I think this heavily depends on the RP setting. For example in a WW2 the big scale is the main thing and confrontations could be resolved with maybe a single dice roll. Then on the other hand, in a setting like the Peloponnesian War, battles happen rarely and they are often decisive, so the players should have alot control on the small scale.
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Post by Darth Nihilus on Oct 7, 2022 15:30:46 GMT
Darth Nihilus , I think this heavily depends on the RP setting. For example in a WW2 the big scale is the main thing and confrontations could be resolved with maybe a single dice roll. Then on the other hand, in a setting like the Peloponnesian War, battles happen rarely and they are often decisive, so the players should have alot control on the small scale. Yeah, good point. I agree that the bigger the RP, the more significant big picture strategy is and so the more static we can make small picture combat. In terms of morale, I think the easiest way to implement it would be for it to just linearly reflect damage dealt. Like if you're flanked or surrounded your dice rolls are capped at a lower number or something. Of course this would be done in a program. Here's a test program that I just made. Basically it uses a d10 and whoever's flanked has a d8 instead. If your dice roll is at least 2 higher than your enemy's, then you get the kill. What the user's gonna see is on the right, so instead of a bunch of confusing code it's just a couple of prompts and then damage is automatically calculated.  |
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Post by Darth Nihilus on Oct 9, 2022 19:02:31 GMT
Kliment Jefremovitš Vorošilov, I decided to add a tiny bit of strategy to the code I made so it isn't complete and utter RNG. The user can choose a high, medium, or low risk attack (the higher the risk, the higher the amount of casualties on both sides) as well as retreat, which will cost them a few casualties. I think that this is still very simple cause the user only has two decisions to make. Here's the source code just so you can run it and see what happens: app.codingrooms.com/w/fksezpzC9QvIRight now the enemy's strategy is RNG dependent but in an RP it'll just be controlled by a second user.
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Post by Manfred von Richthofen on Oct 13, 2022 2:23:32 GMT
Should we revive the AG rps? (I'm too lazy to read all of that pile of guides lol  ) |
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Post by Kliment Jefremovitš Vorošilov on Oct 13, 2022 5:00:11 GMT
Should we revive the AG rps? (I'm too lazy to read all of that pile of guides lol ) Read the first post. |
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