The Battle for... somewhere - Provisional Signups

[WaterMonkey314]

I think I've got a decent chance of getting knocked out of the Erfworld Empires game after Lt_Dave's treachery... which would then leave me with a bit more free time. So... I'd like to see if there's any interest in running a sequel to tBfGB2, preferably without an enemy deus ex machina.

I'd like to base the rules off Lt_Dave's, but adapt them slightly (possibilities include adding casters, changing unit cost formula). To test the new changes, I'd like to first run a few mini-skirmishes before launching a major campaign.

I'm also hoping to set up a method through which unit locations can be tracked by a computer to reduce load on the mod (and make things easier on the players).

Finally, I'm unsure how much time I can guarantee in the future; I'll need someone to help co-mod (Nihila, you get first dibs if you're still up. )

Oh - and as the title suggests - I'm open to suggestions for where these skirmishes should happen.

[Crovius]

Also, make its so that if an enemy can't croak all defending units in a city, then tough noogie, the enemy holds their city and the attack has to try again next turn. I just don't see people retreating from the capital when they KNOW that doing so is the end of their side. This woudl be in game knowledge.

Also, more casters, more use for casters, and more troop variety. Kaed's game is actualyl a very good example of making it work, also using a larger map with about 6 or 7 terrain types instead of just open, forest, and water. I could help a lot with number crunching and such.

[Twoy]

I'm in.

How about Assault on Drhystone or Battle for Oshkosh? See http://www.erfworld.com/wiki/images/4/44/ErfworldMap2roughD-1.jpg.

I think you're going to have to do something about the "almost invulnerable"cities rule.

[Crovius]

That's the thing, cities ARE NOT invulnerable. Get some siege and have more units and you're pretty much guaranteed a victory. It's the "even if the enemy still has people, if I get a combat "victory" it means I oust his remaining forces automatically. Adding HP and things like walls or city zones could help make city combat depend more on strategy and less on "have siege and lots of units"

[Twoy]

That's the thing, cities ARE NOT invulnerable. Get some siege and have more units and you're pretty much guaranteed a victory. It's the "even if the enemy still has people, if I get a combat "victory" it means I oust his remaining forces automatically. Adding HP and things like walls or city zones could help make city combat depend more on strategy and less on "have siege and lots of units"

In the Battle for Gobwin Bump 2, there were no siege. Also, units did not retreat when they lost a battle. You're confusing Gobwin Bump with Erfworld Empires. Two completely different sets of rules.

[BLANDCorporatio]

Me-me-me-meme-meeeee!

But hey, what happened to that "RPG"/few units thing? Because I for one do not welcome the prospect of keeping track of even 30 units.

[Crovius]

I actually hav no issue keeping track of 20, 50, 100, 1000 units if necessary. What we need is a game with a central GM, like Kaed's game.

Also I'm just saying we need to avoid Erfworld Empires rules. And We do have siege Goobwin bump, they just don't have as big an impact as in Empires.

[Twoy]

Also I'm just saying we need to avoid Erfworld Empires rules. And We do have siege Goobwin bump, they just don't have as big an impact as in Empires.

Yes, officially we had units that were called siege in Gobwin Bump 2, but they had no affect on fortifications in the manner that siege units typically have. We probably should have just called them very heavy infantry.

[Crovius]

Yeah, my "Siege Tank" is just an artillery piece, a very heavy ranged unit.

[WaterMonkey314]

Me-me-me-meme-meeeee!

But hey, what happened to that "RPG"/few units thing? Because I for one do not welcome the prospect of keeping track of even 30 units.

Nor do I - hence why I want to computerize that part. If I succeed, then we can go all out with that (and maybe even bring in indiv unit levels and xp). If not, we'll just stick to a smaller number.

And yeah, I want to add all sorts of stuff - but slowly. Hence the need for "skirmishes" to test them without such a huge endeavor as tBfGB.

[Nihila]

Finally, I'm unsure how much time I can guarantee in the future; I'll need someone to help co-mod (Nihila, you get first dibs if you're still up. )

I can guarantee some time on weekends (U.S.A. East Coast time), and I can drop in throughout the week.

And yeah, I want to add all sorts of stuff - but slowly. Hence the need for "skirmishes" to test them without such a huge endeavor as tBfGB.

What kind of skirmishes were you thinking? I would start with just units in one hex, to test out Combat/Defense balance, then move on to multi-hex flatland, to test how movement affects it, then add in terrain, to see how terrain capable units affect things, and then start a larger campaign.

Oh, just to throw more city names out, how about The March on Warchalking or The Attack on Unaroyal City?

[WaterMonkey314]

I was thinking units in a generic flat plain, then maybe short set-pieces (similar to a single turn's worth of movement and combat from tBfGB2). I'm hoping we won't need to test basic combat/defense with a whole group of people.

I'll also collate suggestions and city names sometime soon.

[Crovius]

Don't forget turn order. Different gammes each have a very different view on turn order.

Kaed's game basically has it that until two sides are close to running into eachother, one side can be several turns ahead, then pause to let other sides catch up. If a person goes absent any standing orders continue and production finished up but new things only happened if the cities could support them. Cities included a central hex with 6 "wall" hexes arround it, which terrain coudl give defense bonuses, a nd hexes within a certain radius (radius determined by city level) coudl be utilized as farms, lumber mills, mines, and ports, the 6 hexes counted as having walls on the side touching the central tower and the outer edges,a dn each hex coudl have some structure built (like a barracks, a bank, a smithy) to improv the troops or something similar. Lv 1 cities had no walls, and had only the garrison and either a tower or dungeon. Lv 2 gained walls, and added tunnels if they had a dungeon or add a dungeon is they had a tower. Lv three walls become stronger and the city gains a tower or tunnels, whichever they don't already have. At this point one or more hexes could have "gates" which lowered the HP of that hex's outside walls but allowed heavies to leave the city becuase at Lv 3 heavies cannot leave these courtyard hexes through the outside walls without a gate. Lv 4 strengthened the tower, garrison, and dungeon, expanded tunnels to 1 hex beyond the walls (at the Ruler's choosing, they can decide no tunnels expand or they expand to one hex, or to all adjacent hexes) and tunnels could then be used for mining. The walls also could gain additional upgrades such as crenalations, trebuchets, defensive towers, etc. The Gate could be upgraded to be stronger and have extra defenses. At Lv 5 a city would have a number of upgrades, including moat and drawbridge upgrades (seperate, as you can choose to have no drawbridge to make attacks from enemy infantry especially difficult), arrow slits so you could allows archer infantry to attack from the wall hexes to enemies in adjacent spaces, and so on.

In this version the edge of the hex is the wall, which the enemy needs to drop the HP of that edge to be able to get through. The wall does not need ot be reduced all the way to 0 except of course to let heavies with no special movement through. Combat was complex but a GM managed it much liek a RTS when it happened, usually by going through phases, including initial charge, a number of phases of backa dn forth combat, and then the attacker coudl choose to press the attack and keep trying or retreat if enemy units still remained (retreat was a concious choice unless units were unlead, then they fought to the death). It's very complex, yes, requires a lot of amth (which makes perfect sense to me) and uses force multipliers and is designed with units having Health and attacka nd defense values, using stacks and special bonuses, and witht he idea that each side has cities several turns away from eachother with hundreds if not thousands of units.

To me, handling these numbers is easy... and complex and all that but I like it that way. I do trend analysis for a living and monitoring and processing thousands of numbers and cross-referencing equations ona daily basis is simple for me than trying to make arbitrary and vague rules that can be heavilly abused once a flaw is discovered.

[Nihila]

To Crovius's post: Okay, that's Kaed's rules, correct? Or is that your thoughts?

Don't forget turn order. Different gammes each have a very different view on turn order.

I thought that WaterMonkey just meant for this to be a two-side battle, the GM side and the Player's Alliance.

General thought time (These are not official! This is just me thinking!):
Maybe when a wall has its HP at 75%, it is breached, but only 3 stacks can get through at a time. At 50%, 6 stacks, at 25%, 12 stacks, and at 0%, there's no wall, so as many stacks as you like can enter at once.
For combat, maybe each stack gets one attack, but when entering a hex a bit at a time due to limits (Walls), each entering stack can be engaged by up to 2 defending stacks. Ranged stacks would get one free round of combat against non-ranged stacks, in which the final damage output would be multiplied by 75%, to account for some of the Ranged units missing. Units with Breath Weapon would get the free round against melee units, but Ranged units would still get their free round against Breath Weapon users.
Also for combat, perhaps melee stacks could only attack ranged stacks when there were more ranged enemy stacks in a hex than melee enemy stacks, to represent the melee units guarding the ranged units. Maybe fliers could engage ranged units anyways, to represent superior mobility.
Maybe cavalry can eliminate enemy stacking bonuses, but led infantry have bonuses against cavalry.

[WaterMonkey314]

To Crovius's post: Okay, that's Kaed's rules, correct? Or is that your thoughts?

Don't forget turn order. Different gammes each have a very different view on turn order.

I thought that WaterMonkey just meant for this to be a two-side battle, the GM side and the Player's Alliance.

General thought time (These are not official! This is just me thinking!):
Maybe when a wall has its HP at 75%, it is breached, but only 3 stacks can get through at a time. At 50%, 6 stacks, at 25%, 12 stacks, and at 0%, there's no wall, so as many stacks as you like can enter at once.
For combat, maybe each stack gets one attack, but when entering a hex a bit at a time due to limits (Walls), each entering stack can be engaged by up to 2 defending stacks. Ranged stacks would get one free round of combat against non-ranged stacks, in which the final damage output would be multiplied by 75%, to account for some of the Ranged units missing. Units with Breath Weapon would get the free round against melee units, but Ranged units would still get their free round against Breath Weapon users.
Also for combat, perhaps melee stacks could only attack ranged stacks when there were more ranged enemy stacks in a hex than melee enemy stacks, to represent the melee units guarding the ranged units. Maybe fliers could engage ranged units anyways, to represent superior mobility.
Maybe cavalry can eliminate enemy stacking bonuses, but led infantry have bonuses against cavalry.

Yeah, I was hoping for just 2 sides to keep things simple. (I'd like to keep what little sanity I have ).

I'm not sure if I want to go to fortification specifics like walls quite yet, nor with too many specials. For now, I'd just like to concentrate on adding casters and/or removing unit size caps (and making bizarre mounting strategies like The Great March unnecessary). I'm also considering changing the unit cost formula - I think it penalizes high-move just a bit too much, though I could be wrong.

[Crovius]

To Crovius's post: Okay, that's Kaed's rules, correct? Or is that your thoughts?

Don't forget turn order. Different gammes each have a very different view on turn order.

I thought that WaterMonkey just meant for this to be a two-side battle, the GM side and the Player's Alliance.

General thought time (These are not official! This is just me thinking!):
Maybe when a wall has its HP at 75%, it is breached, but only 3 stacks can get through at a time. At 50%, 6 stacks, at 25%, 12 stacks, and at 0%, there's no wall, so as many stacks as you like can enter at once.
For combat, maybe each stack gets one attack, but when entering a hex a bit at a time due to limits (Walls), each entering stack can be engaged by up to 2 defending stacks. Ranged stacks would get one free round of combat against non-ranged stacks, in which the final damage output would be multiplied by 75%, to account for some of the Ranged units missing. Units with Breath Weapon would get the free round against melee units, but Ranged units would still get their free round against Breath Weapon users.
Also for combat, perhaps melee stacks could only attack ranged stacks when there were more ranged enemy stacks in a hex than melee enemy stacks, to represent the melee units guarding the ranged units. Maybe fliers could engage ranged units anyways, to represent superior mobility.
Maybe cavalry can eliminate enemy stacking bonuses, but led infantry have bonuses against cavalry.

Yes!!! These are the kinds of combat rules I was thinking of. Walls with Hp Are breached at a certain point but only some enemies could get through. Also maybe enemies trying to get in through the breach might have a penalty because they're being bottlenecked in, until the wall was like 25% down because by then enough of them are getting in at once for them to get through in formations.

Also stacking rules: A stack of 8 gets a better bonus of a stack with less units, and stacks that are all the same units should maybe get a better bonus that a stack with mixed units. And I forgot this was to be one big enemy vs an alliance, sorry. In that case there are only the 2 turns, the one side and the alliances, unless, of course, a third party are a rouge side could be interesting.

We need to find a way to make combat with stacks seem liek erf combat, which seems to be: A hex contains a certain number of units (unit cap for hexes outside of cities? are all hexes the same size on the inside? on a map they may look the same but could that be different when you actually get in it?) and those units form up in stacks, not of 20 and 30 or of individuals who screen for a big target. Maybe a stack of infantry could have that many, plus a leading unit (like a warlord maybe? we saw the alliance had different names similar to a ranking structure, maybe lower level warlords have different ranks, or a high level non-warlord could gain the command special if it's upgraded?), but if they have calvalry, that calvalry units might cost a certain number of infantry, and a heavy cost more. Fliers don't stack with ground forces unless they land, maybe they get penalties on ground? Archers and melee shouldn't mix for attacks or defense because a stack takes damage spread out across units (unless a warlord is with the attack in which case he can order to target specific units).

Like a said, we can go into incredible depth... we jus need someone willing to handle the crunching.

[Nihila]

Also stacking rules: A stack of 8 gets a better bonus of a stack with less units, and stacks that are all the same units should maybe get a better bonus that a stack with mixed units. And I forgot this was to be one big enemy vs an alliance, sorry. In that case there are only the 2 turns, the one side and the alliances, unless, of course, a third party are a rouge side could be interesting.

Okay, thoughts on this one:
Bonuses for a:
1 unit stack: +0
2-3: +1
4-7: +2
8: +3
9-12: +2
13-14: +1
15+: +0
Mixed stacks get -1, unless the mix is Mount and Mounted.
Thoughts on other parts of your post:
Flyers can land, with a -2 penalty in combat.
Cavalry would be a mix of Mount units, which would be faster than infantry units, and units with Rider, which would be like Kaed's game: Units without Rider get a -4 penalty while mounted, and Rider eliminates that.

Yes!!! These are the kinds of combat rules I was thinking of. Walls with Hp Are breached at a certain point but only some enemies could get through. Also maybe enemies trying to get in through the breach might have a penalty because they're being bottlenecked in, until the wall was like 25% down because by then enough of them are getting in at once for them to get through in formations.

That last part is actually exactly what I was trying to do by having a single stack be engaged by two or more enemy stacks in the breaching scenario.

I'm not sure if I want to go to fortification specifics like walls quite yet, nor with too many specials. For now, I'd just like to concentrate on adding casters and/or removing unit size caps (and making bizarre mounting strategies like The Great March unnecessary). I'm also considering changing the unit cost formula - I think it penalizes high-move just a bit too much, though I could be wrong.

Well, the walls we can steal wholesale from Kaed and Dark Arbiter. Same for many specials. On the other topics:
Casters should have a high cost and low stats. Maybe they take whatever their base unit cost would be, and multiply it by 5.
For unit size caps, we could have stats cost more as a unit's size increases, which would create a practical limitation but still allow huge units.
To prevent a second Great March, we might have a Cargo stat, which could cost... 29+(Unit capacity), or something.

[WaterMonkey314]

What I like best about tBfGB2 was that it was remarkably simple, yet still rather complex. There's no way I can handle Kaed's level of detail by hand, and I'm nowhere near talented enough of a programmer to automate it. I'm afraid this would get into a level of refinement and detail beyond what I can handle and what people can quickly and easily grasp.

[Twoy]

I think we need to take the Gobwin Bump rules and just tweak them a bit. The only two things I see that need to change are:

1. Invincible cities. (I have a couple of ideas to easily fix this issue)
2. Unit creation process. (Not sure how to fix this one)

[LTDave]

On 2, just add a quadratic to the calculator. So big units don't just cost more, they cost to the power of 1.5 or something more.
I'm in to play once we have a set of rules.