Obviously we need combat to fit into the game smoothly, but that’s not even what I was talking about. When I say we don’t need to have a feel defined for the game in terms of combat I’m talking about WE people who backed and plan to play the game don’t need to have a feel defined RIGHT NOW. We don’t need to have a presupposition about what “feel” will work for combat because we don’t even have anything resembling a combat system.
Approaching it in a hand wavy “it just won’t work” like so many people do on the subject is uncreative.
Whole dimensions of this game are going to be compartmentalised. With resource management, and limited populations there is going to be a focus on particular aspects of development at a time, combat inclusive. Mining is going to play differently than farming, hunting is going to play differently from building. Combat is going to feel different from others.
Everyone remembers a sloppy implementation of unit control during an early alpha build, huh, I guess unit control doesn’t work at all and there’s no way to work that in. The new trapper is great because they thought of strong mechanics that fit the character: waiting. Zones are great for waiting, if it were a hunter class you might need to chase and kill animals, but it’s not, it’s a trapper, it sets traps, and waits. Combat units aren’t going to be waiting around all the time. Zones aren’t dynamic enough to manage combat offensively, and the AI won’t be smart enough to ever self manage something like a siege.
The age rating for stonehearth? They aren’t just building this game for children, the majority of the people backing it in the early stages are presumably old enough to work a credit card.
Whether or not “min/max players” feel pressured to do something is a thing they should work out on their own. Besides, having that complaint that the game gives you more ability to control and optimise doesn’t seem likely for those sorts of players.
If/when they make starvation a bigger threat, messing up farming and food gathering will mean death, intelligent strategic management of agricultural growth and production as your population grows will mean the difference between a lost game, a one where you thrive or one where you barely scrape by. There will be other ways to lose other than getting killed.
You seem to be stuck on this Starcraft 2 thing. You can pick the most generic control scheme in RTS games and assume the developers here are too uncreative to work anything in if you want, but it’s not a real argument and it doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it well.
My point about total war’s mechanics stand, whatever projection he chooses to make about them not scaling is his business. But having control at the multiple unit level and issuing commands to those groups would satisfy the need for control because of incompetent AI, and the Orchestrate and observe goal of the developers.
And yes, I am being offensive to babbies several times, but I’m going to be honest about the no-micro peasant’s age. I’m not going to pretend like I’m a super nice guy while being condescending, I’m going to be condescending and then explain openly that I’m being condescending.
—END OF OLD DISCUSSION THOUGHTS ON MECHANICS START HERE—
The way I picture the squad implementation is that in order to raise a force that can “attack” and hence be given direct orders, you need to have enough people in a squad that can justify the attack. This gets around the issue of one or 2 man squads because realistically who is going to be attacking with two guys?
Alternatively, tying into the optional route, you could have officers who are the rallying point for squads and squad formation, these guys could even be expensive to produce so it would be costly to over make them (maybe they need gold for officer badges or fine material for officer caps or some such). They can lead squads of any number of units, but as a gameplay mechanic these people are going to be super valuable, so rather than an artificial limiter of squad size we have a practical game-play based one.
The scales you give for a size of a squad seem reasonable.
I assume that defence can be handled alright on its own with zoning mechanics.
There can be units who do scouting as individuals explorers, journeymen, scouts, etc, but that can be implemented easily through zoning, (Set zone to “explore”, any scouts you own will automatically make their way cautiously, maybe even let them have a stealth option).
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. But when it comes out on Steam or appears on the shelves in TESCO / Wal-Mart / whatever? Ah.
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