Combat system - Ideas

[Avairian]

@Swift_Cube

Another idea of what we could do would be an Ancient Athens Style of citizen soldiers, where you’d have a small force of highly trained troops and the rest of your population could be unskilled banzai soldiers.

Tenno Heika Banzai!!!

Sounds like a good idea to me -watches the world burn;

[untrustedlife]

That may be true ,and i agree to go a more dwarf fortressy route.

However, quoting the main website:

We know that there are lots of different play-styles for this kind of game. Some players want to focus on building an incredibly awesome city with happy, well-fed citizens. Others focus on building a strong army and exploring/conquering the realm. Many just want to tinker with the simulations in the game world. We want you to play the game the way you want to, so as you play the world will respond to your choices.

Each initial game world is randomly generated, but an AI “dungeon master” observes your behavior and tweaks the content based on your actions. This is always done in a way that is natural and makes sense from a story perspective. For instance, a player who is more aggressive when dealing with local, small-time goblin raiders may find his actions have triggered a long-term war against the goblin nation. Violence begets violence.

So two players with different play-styles, beginning with the exact same starting world, will have very different experiences as the game progresses. We like this for a couple of reasons.

Actions have consequences! Are you sure you want to rob that friendly caravan that just visited your town? There may be repercussions down the road.
Play the game how you like! The game adapts to feed you the kind of content that you like. There are limits here, of course. Don’t expect to neglect basic defenses just because combat isn’t your favorite thing in the world, nor should blood-hungry players neglect a basic economy and shelter for their citizens.

http://stonehearth.net/stonehearth/

So players are free to play as they wish, and they will make it fun for players who want to play it hardcore RTS style.
As well as those who like simulation, and those who like building.

So if you want to be a conqueror, they allow it,. (But obviously the battles will not be at the same scale as total war battles)

[Dufremle]

Personally, I’d be kinda happy if they did it like WC 2/III, or even the Myth series.

Myth, especially Myth II, I think would be a good route to go in terms of how combat works because every unit has its sort of base line, general stats of some sort, which in Stonehearth could vary from soldier to soldier based on their own personal statistics. Units in Myth 2 also would move at different speeds, do varying amounts of damage based on class, and have different abilites/tools available to them. Myth was also relatively small-scale, and there were no unit production buildings - you had to use the warriors you had available. Some of these things already sound similar to how Stonehearth plays out already - there aren’t any unit production buildings (of course), and its not massive in scale.

Maybe it could work similarly in Stonehearth, where each warrior class gets a couple of abilities that suit their role, and they all use different weapons for the job. A footman could get a couple of abilities to bolster their defensive strengths in some manner, and maybe a damage buff of some kind. A marauder could have two damage or speed boosting abilities, let’s say. And if you wanted to cut down on some of the micromanagement aspect, you could set the ability timers to work in such a manner that the battle would probably be over by the time they fully recharge again.

Or if you really wanted to, you could take it a step further with the weapons and have each warrior class use certain types of weapons in a broader category, so you can switch their weapons up a bit. For example!

A Footman, being your standard man-at-arms, could wear most armor classes (cloth/padded, leather, plate), and use a variety of one-handed weapons. For the sake of this random example, we could say that the “sword” class one handed weapons have a faster attack speed, versus, say, “mace/hammer” class weapons which ignore a certain amount of armor or something. And this could apply in combat to where if you wanted to have your sword-armed men chop through a bunch of lightly armored enemies, they could do it in a timely manner, and your hammer wielding dudes could smash on some enemy heavy infantry.

Just some food for thought!

[Amlin]

Has anyone given much thought to the idea of turn based combat? Would allow for much greater control on the battlefield and make the battle much more tactical. I know some would find it less fun than a real time option.