I am a huge Total war fan, and because of this. The RPG based combat system that has been displayed in development videos, seems anticlimactic and dull. I am aware the the developers have implemented this in order to make it easy to survey the battlefield and make better strategic decisions, but this system limits strategy in my opinion. In Total war, there is nothing more satisfying to have a massive cavalry force rush into a ongoing battle, and watch your enemies units go flying. With this system, that probably wonāt happen. Now, I am not saying that there will be 0 strategy with this system. I am saying there will be limited strategy. By this I mean, you wonāt be able to have a group of soldiers rush down a hill and get a temporary attack bonus from their oncoming speed, or you wonāt get a defense bonus because your defenders have spears. The type of strategy that you will see will be more like making sure your melee units engage before your ranged ones do. I do like the system that is similar to games like Runescape, but I think it would be a lot more fun if more options were made available.
I might do an edit to this post in a bit, I am not too crazy about how I presented that.
Yes i would like that. Where you could have more of a battle plan. Also it would be great if you could create regiments, so you can more easily control a big army, and change tactics according to how the battle is going. Otherwise it would just be a jumbled mess, and the person with the larger army would always win.
Having said that i would understand if this canāt be implemented as they are covering so many areas of game play. So they canāt make every part of the game as good as a specialized game, like Total War.
I agree with you. Also if they did make the combat system like Total war, it is likely that many people would get overly confused. However, your mention of regiments popped another idea into my head. As you said, without some way of organizing troops. You will end up with a jumbled mess of warriors everywhere, and it would be a hassle to group everyone together to combat incoming raids, or ongoing raids. A solution to this would be a garrison tab. Something like this was introduced in StarCraft II Wings of Liberty. This tab allows players to highlight a group of units and right click on the tab. What this does is saves that group of units into the tab you clicked on, and creates a new blank tab so that you can create more garrisons of units. When you click on a tab that has units tied to it, it automatically selects every unit in that group, allowing you to quickly send a force to an area. Also, another nice thing that SC2 has is a great hot key system. I am not sure if Radiant is planning on using hot keys a lot. But they are nice to have and can be very helpful, especially in RTS games.
I donāt want them to go and copy other games feature by feature, but these little things are quite nice; and last I checked, nobody was putting patents on them.
If they donāt have a decent way of controlling troops etc. then combat will just be frustrating. Iād be very surprised if they didnāt implement a way to organise and manage troops in battle, it is an RTS after all and people want control over their men. I doubt itād be anything like Total War or even SC2 but as long as you can gather troops in an organised way and have them ordered for an attack or defence then it should be fine. Besides Iām sure modders would love to create more ways of manipulating your men, that being said, having something in the vanilla game would be best.
Iād think adding a minigame into the combat system would be great for people who love fighting games as wellā¦
Actually, itād be awesome if theyād make this game into a massive mini-game game with the actual main game.
But thatād be hard to do since itād take so much time and workā¦
Just a thought tho XD
Just keep in mind that they said a larger population would be 80 to 100 citizens, so really, your military probably isnāt going to be large enough to warrant this.
If we had ANY moderators on this forum Iād suggest to merge the topic with that one. (and to finally fix itās gruesomely butchered title)
Oh wellā¦
You leave that misspelling alone @Gazz! The threads seem alright to be split at the moment though as the other thread seems primarily weapon focused (and itās died down), whereas this one is a bit more concentrating on military organization.
An issue I think with a Total War style @LordNevs is that, with what we are assuming will be a population cap of 100, it might just not really work - the beauty of Total War is that satisfaction of having your 500 strong cavalry smash into the side of the enemy. Obviously this isnāt gonna feel quite right in SH when your 4 cavalry units plow into another small group of units.
Although I am sure somebody will get right to work at making a Total War military style mod - I seriously have to stop using that as a fallback.
Ah, I was unaware of the unit cap. That seems a little small though, for someone who would want to build a large bustling city. Perhaps they will increase it in the future.
I donāt think they actually mentioned a cap per se so much as that would be the population of a larger end game town. Iām sure f you wanted to go buck wild you could have more than that. Whether it is manageable or the game can even handle it, that is to be determined.
Yer just to say thereās no confirmation of a population cap, itās just speculation! Iām sure it wouldnāt be too difficult to raise a population cap, god knows how many units you could have before it just got too out of hand.
Even without a population cap though we can clearly see that the game is geared towards having hundreds of citizens, of which only part can be in the military; rather than thousands of citizens and military forces in the hundreds.
But as for having bonuses for charging down hills, flanking your enemies, having spears to counter charging enemies and the likeā¦ uh why not? Plenty of tabletop RPGās (and wargames), which are a big inspiration for Stonehearth have rules for exactly this sort of thing. So itās entirely possible that even with battles involving only a few dozen units a side that there could be plenty of nuances in the combat system to encourage holding the high ground, using spears to receive a charge and so forth. After all, Total War replicates all of these things as even Total War battles tend to be much smaller than battles in real life.
I do think a combat system like Total War would completely depersonalise combat, I mean I donāt care if 90% of my troops are killed in TW if I can win the battle - granted itād be a bad battle.
Whereas in SH I wanna feel a certain level of attachment to my units, I wanna be able to scout the field and say ah thereās Cid Stormbeard my favourite guy with an axe, and if he dies I want to feel like I have lost something.
I thought a bit about the combat system and I just think, something like Rome is not the right idea or model for this instance. It is just a different kind of combat.
My suggestion is to have a close look on tabletop skirmish games. Especially Mordheim (Mortheim if you are from Germany ^^). They do everything you need for a tactical combat in an very easy and satisfying way. From different weapon types to gaining experience, equipment, moral and so on.
The only thing is, it is turn based. So there has to be some transformation work, but the basic principles are all there waiting for an adaptation.
Fun Fact: Total War combat is also based on tabletop games, if you know Warhammer or something similar you know what IĀ“m taking about.
I think you are missing one point @LordNevs. The core of this game is ācity buildingā with RPG and RTS elements. Elements being the key. Total war is a RTS with minimal (very minimal) city building elements. The army sizes as mentioned above will be very limited compared to Total War, but the main reason for the slow pace of the combat is so that you have the ability to manage your settlement and combat at the same time. Remember, combat is going to take place on the same map as your settlement. The purpose of military units in this game are to protect your settlement from damage, the settlement being the star. In Total war your cities are merely a means to get better military units to fight with as they are the star.
Some times it is dangerous to compare game titles. It would be a huge mistake to make the combat in Stonehearth more like Total War, but Iām very sure the team knows this and there is no risk of it happening.
I think the devs are right about approaching military with RPG aspects in mind. The developers are looking for a closer relationship between the player and the individuals in the game. Also, mind you, that the population is limited and cities wonāt actually resemble a real city on the same scale.
And since Stonehearth is a simulation, Iād prefer if combat wasnāt completely controlled by the player. The most control Iād want over my military is 1)when to train 2)equipment 3)waypoints/patrol 4)storge/barracks/etc.
In other words, I wish Stonehearthās combat would be a little āDwarf Fortress-yā. Besides, SH isnāt a competitive RTS (it certainly is not an RTS) like SC. I honestly donāt think a complete control over the movement of villagers/soldiers would be very good.
@2_Zons
I completely agree with all your points here. The Total War series is of a separate scale compared to Stonehearth. Stonehearth is simply a different game and yes, itād be a terrible mistake to try and implement similar mechanics from TW to SH.
Another idea of what we could do would be an Ancient Athens Style of citizen soldiers, where youād have a small force of highly trained troops and the rest of your population could be unskilled banzai soldiers.
- I seriously have to stop using that as a fallback.