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Original post by Edward Ropple
Realism is necessary in a historical RTS, and none of them are even that realistic. I've yet to see one that is negatively impacted by its adherency to historical fact.
Of course realism is relevant in any historical game, but to what degree? No one wants to play through the Hundred Years' War if it takes a whole century. You're always going to need a lot of abstractions for gameplay purposes.
However, if you want to improve realism, starting with a game like AoE, there is a lot of ground to cover before you should start considering modeling the agility, strength, and intelligence of the right feet of the soldiers. There are some "fundamental flaws" (flaws in the sense of realism, not necessarily gameplay) in the whole genre to work with. Now, your priorities will probably vary, but here's a few thoughts:
The control system should be as automated as possible, but all the automation should be optional. Most importantly, it should focus on giving jobs to be done, not orders for single soldiers. Let the computer worry which workers to assing a certain job.
All infantry should be able to walk through forests. It would allow a lot of strategies, especially if the visibility is asymmetric (i.e. you can see easily out of a forest, but not in, so making ambushes will be easier). Also, infantry should be able to swim across narrow rivers, and scaling mountains wouldn't be too bad either.
How about property? There are a lot of comments on not allowing archers to destroy buildings, which I agree with, but you shouldn't need to destroy all enemy buildings, but rather be able to conquer them. Converting them with a priest (or what have you) is lame and most definitely not realistic. Peasants (or villagers or what have you) could also be considered property; within a feudal system the vassals have really no choice but to comply, and even if they were freemen they probably wouldn't worry about who was in control as long as they could go on living their lives. The game Cossacks did a great job at this. Vehicles (including catapults etc.) and deployable weapons (e.g. grenade launchers) should be manned and if you killed the troops manning the vehicle/weapon, you could man it yourself.
As for actual battling, it would seem that currently in most games the defender will need more units than the attacker, which is ridiculous. Allow the soldiers to dig trenches, guard routes (with a group of soldiers that are
automatically send to defend the walls/whatever if a guard notices the enemy) etc. and really build a defence line, not just some arbitrary unguarded walls. Soldiers in trenches/whatever endure much more punishment.
There should be a reason for expansion. Having extremely limited resources (AoE) with resource locations is one solution, but limits the span of the game and forces an aggressive expansion (so that you won't run out of resources). However, after the resources have been collected, there is little point in conquering that land area. Having non-exhaustible resource locations with limited gathering speed (Empire Earth) will force you to expand (so that you get resources at least at the same pace than the enemy) and allows for longer game sessions, but because the maximum number of units is (relatively) low, you won't have the resource locations fully manned anyway. The moral is, killing just for the sake of killing is not all that motivating (if you want a coherent game world).
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Original post by nuvem
Note the lack of numbers. Note that even when you do know the numbers, it doesn't really tell you what it really does. 100% sounds great, but 100% of what? Will that let me defend an Ogre's attack? With consistant text only descriptions, you can actually get a lot more across to the player, without losing any of the internal simulation's complexity.
Personally I am a mathematically oriented person and I like seeing numbers. If you have attribute levels of 1, 2, 3, and 4, changing them into "awful", "bad", "great", and "phenomenal" would only confuse me while not providing any fuzzier output. Also, just grouping the values into good (3 and 4) and bad (1 and 2) won't make the actual information any fuzzier per se, you just lose some information. It takes considerably less time to compare two numbers and two words. After all, which one would you choose: "phenomenal" or "mind-staggering"? Whatever the semantics the original designer has imposed on those words, it is not necessarily the same the player would think. Just changing numbers to words is not all that helpful, and most certainly it gets a lot
less across to me, as the player, yet this is a question of
opinion. At least have the option to display numerical values instead of words, if you personally hate seeing numbers.
Your point conserning the frame of reference, however, is completely valid. 100% doesn't mean anything by itself, and neither does 27894. This should be defined in game terms. However, just arbitrary words like "moderate" or "great" don't mean anything either, if you don't define them. Moreover, such words are
relative (one year is next to eternity for a microprocessor, but a mere instant on an geological scale, so saying that something takes a moderate amount of time requires a frame of reference).
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Original post by Pxtl
A simpler, mathematical solution is having an "armour value" that is taken off of all attacks.
You could have different types of armor and different types of damage. However, just balancing it like paper-rock-scissors-style is lame. Empire Earth does this to a ridiculous degree, where the invisible sniper unit can practically kill any infantry unit with one shot, but several heavy machine guns take a whole lot of ammo to kill the sniper.
Quote:
costasgr43
- health, that will be in form of energy, meaning healable. It will be decrease if dodged, hit by a hammer that will not kill him, a bow that hit him at the shoulder etc.
- hit points(why? why? why?), that will not be healable and will specify the "power" needed by someone to kill him. So, if a hit (swords, lances etc will have infitive HPs attack that will kill a unit no matter how many HPs it has, or something like that (very great creatures ,ie dragons, may need several "killing" hits)) wont kill him it will reduce his health.
As Madster said, this is confusing. I'd rename the hit point concept (as in the quote) as something like constitution and (if I understood correctly) the health would be closer to the fatigue attribute in some sense (or indeed the original hit point concept). I like the idea, but the terminology could need some work.
