Working on Mass Combat System

[ckafrica]

I'd tend to agree as well. You should be able to automate it pretty simply and still allow information to be inputted where desired so that the players can still roll the die and add it to the system which crunches all the details and spits out the results. One can even imagine having the ability to add new unit types

[tussock]

Mixed units suck, don't use them.

Your flank is just one group of swordsmen and one group of zombies standing in the same space. The have their own HD stacks and their own morale rating and their own special orders you can give them.

And most of the time when they're getting smashed the swordsmen scatter off the board and the zombies stand there and get destroyed which prevents the usual crushing of the rout and allows your swordsmen to check morale to re-enter like a reserve or whatever.

And it's all covered by the same rule that allows one very wide group (like a thin skirmish line) to attack many more concentrated groups across a wide front, which might just be auto-splitting the attacks or the group itself or whatever.

[Username17]

Mixed units suck, don't use them.

That's not even an option for a game that plugs into an RPG. You acquire your soldiers piecemeal over the course of adventures and they are donated by different characters who are themselves different races and classes. There is no chance that your army is going to be uniform in composition. None.

Everything you said after that was similarly stupid. A mass battle game where the armies appear arbitrarily like Warhamster or whatever can go ahead and have homogeneous units. A mass battle minigame that appends to an RPG can never ever do that.

-Username17

[Dean]

But why would your unit of 10 Lizardmen Halberdiers from the Lizard King and your unit of 100 Skeleton Archers need to combine to a unit of 110 Skeleton Archers and Lizardmen Halberdiers. Why wouldn't it be easier to make those separate things standing in the same rough area.

If the soldiers you're getting are individual Orc Barbarians and Thri-Keen monks and attack dogs then that's not something that seems relevant to mass battle mechanics at all, that's a group of other adventurers or something not a real platoon. By the time you have hundreds of thousands of Orc Barbarians and Thri Keen Monks and attack dogs you can totally segregate them into groups of like kind because their will be a lot of each. If your hundred thousand soldier army needs me to know each individual soldiers race, class, and weapon when looking at my army composition that would be extremely overwhelming.

[Username17]

But why would your unit of 10 Lizardmen Halberdiers from the Lizard King and your unit of 100 Skeleton Archers need to combine to a unit of 110 Skeleton Archers and Lizardmen Halberdiers. Why wouldn't it be easier to make those separate things standing in the same rough area.

If you have 10 Lizardmen Halberdiers and 100 Skeleton Archers because you're an 8th level Necromancer, you are on the border of what you'd need mass battle mechanics for. But now scale it up by seven levels and you're a 15th level Witch Queen. You've mustered 2-5 troop types 4 times a level (or more) for 7 levels straight. Now you have an army of thousands, but more importantly it is an army that has a hundred different things in it.

The problem with just making typed squads of various sizes count as individual units is that as RPG characters accumulate armies rather than simply fiat completed armies, they will inevitably get more types of squads than your system can handle. Even if your system can treat 10 Elvish Spearmen as a unit or a thousand Elvish Spearmen as a unit, the fact remains that in an RPG you are not just going to get additional Elvish Spearmen. You're gonna end up with Gargoyles and Kobold Markslizards and manticores and shit. Every village you conquer is likely to be a different racial mix and giving up different levies. You're gonna look a lot more like the Persians than the Greeks.



RPG mass combat is constrained by the inherently scaleable nature of everything and the accumulatory haphazard nature of everything. Simple X:1 unit conversions (like BATTLESYSTEM) don't work because armies can be dozens, hundreds, or thousands. Exponential squad multiples won't work because armies will inevitably become too heterogeneous.

You just have to bite the bullet and figure out a way to make a unit that has Crab Man Heavy Infantry and Dwarven Pikes in it.

-Username17

[maglag]

But then wouldn't you also need some super granular system to convert each kind of invididual monster's stats into mass combat stats? What's the difference between orc and dwarves with pikes? What if the orcs have leather armor and the dwarves have full plate? What if they're all wearing chainmail?

I would've imagined those kind of details youldn't matter and your blob of crabmen and lizardwomen all count as warriors. If you can afford to give them all heavy armor they count as heavy infantry. If you can afford to give all of them pikes they can count as pikeneers instead. If they're high level enough they count as elite infantry.

Otherwise seems like you'll spend more time calculating your army's stats than your own character's stats.

Not to mention casualities. If orcs and dwarves with swords contribute different stats to your army, it also means you need to care exactly how many of your dead dues were orcs and how many were dwarves.

[virgil]

Let's do a tiny fight with tiny men. No flanks, Core only, final destination.

Army A Roster: 1 Officer, 10 Light Infantry, 50 Ashigaru

• Bombard 5 - Flank 740
  Hold 650 - Shock 650
  Siege 650 - Patrol 720
  Morale 850 - Toughness 660

Army B Roster: 1 Officer, 50 Slingers, 15 Guards

• Bombard 105 - Flank 940
  Hold 425 - Shock 450
  Siege 775 - Patrol 920
  Morale 850 - Toughness 710

Round 1 of Mass Combat
Army A will attempt to prey to B's weakness, and choose the Raid tactic. Army B's officer will expect this and perform the defensive Feint tactic.

• A's Final Combat Value = 17 (A's Flank, converted) - 15 (B's Hold, converted) - 2 Tactical Disadvantage = 0
  B's Final Combat Value = 18 (B's Flank, converted) - 17 (A's Patrol, converted) + 2 Tactical Disadvantage = 3

B has the higher total CV, and so it gets to inflict attrition on Army A.
Attrition = (Bombard + Shock)/4 = 139
Attrition subtracts from the stat used in tactics, and the army breaks when the attrition penalty equals the army's morale. For example, round 2
Mass Combat, Round 2
Army A is stubborn, and mildly insane, so it will not change its tactic. Army B is going to be emboldened and expect this damage to make them more cautious, so it's going to switch to Adaptive Screen.

• A's Final Combat Value = 16 (A's Flank 740 - 139, converted) - 15 (B's Hold, converted) + 2 Tactical Advantage = 3
  B's Finals Combat Value = 18 (B's Flank, converted) - 16 (A's Flank, converted) - 2 Tactical Disadvantage = 0

In a sudden turnaround, Army A gets to inflict its attrition this time; (Bombard + Shock - Attrition)/4 = 129. Attrition is now nearly equal, and tactical choices are going to be the deciding factor for this fight over the next few rounds; which isn't terribly surprising with such a closely matched battle with two leaders of equivalent skill.

With the numbers and tactical choices involved, I'm not seeing an advantage to including dice rolling anywhere here. We are obviously not counting any terrain advantages. I am also assuming the two officers are of equal Command skill (making their bonuses cancel each other out). No special traits are given to the tactics beyond what stats are compared; as one could imagine Ambush giving an increase on attrition if successful, and a Shieldwall reduces received attrition, etc.