Just a thought:

Why don't we have tank rushes all the time in modern day warfare? Why isn't the free world's military fighting doctrine based on massed rushing? Why is it that only poor, desperate nations like Iran and Iraq resort to human wave attacks?


Damage Model

Playing a completely unrelated game, Counterstrike, really informs me of this one. Taken as a strategic contest, Unreal and Quake are nonsense (fun, yes, but strategic, no). But when one shot kills, suddenly all the "units" start behaving differently.

The linear hitpoint model then has to go in favor of either fewer hitpoints for everything, or a more varied range of damage possibilities. You will never rush a machine gun nest armed with machetes because a single bullet can maime or kill you.

The inclusion of facing (finally) opens up more rich tactical possibilities, as well. Tanks with weaker armor in the rear will be disinclined to retreat, and possibly vulnerable to pincer movements or ambushes.


Support

It sucks that no RTS I know of has gotten supply lines right. When units can just plop down a new base right in the middle of your territory, without any realistic limits other than defense, you get viral warfare, not military warfare.

I can't cut off and starve the enemy; cause him to become suppressed; nor interdict his forward operations because the main axis of his military power comes out of friggin' thin air!!!! How many entrenched bases would you have if they couldn't be supplied? And how many tank rushes would you have if you could mount rearguard operations forcing them to put more into defending their advance?

I like the idea I saw some time ago about tying unit health into supply wagons for a medieval wargame. Units couldn't heal after battle unless the supply wagons got through. The wagons would feed enough to be important, but not be so numerous as to be a micromanagement hazard. (Plus, resupply now would become a special, dramatic event) Oh, and for the love of the cosmos, make the actual resupply automatic .


Morale

I like the recruitment concept, but I'd like to also see the notion of morale extended to the actual fights themselves for the sake of strategic movements. Units that are isolated and cut off should have a lower morale (esp. if they've been without resupply). Units that have suffered heavy losses should have a chance to break and run. This could diminish with veteran status, giving yet another reason to preserve troops.


Well, that's all the brainstorm I have for now. Great suggestions, btw, Sandman!


--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Edited by - Wavinator on April 30, 2001 11:16:13 PM

I like your ideas. 1 suggestion I would add would be about the air units.

The only game I have ever seen to get air units right is Total Annihilation where the air units had to land, only certain air units could just hover and blow the crap out of stuff, the rest had to fly-by and then turn around for another pass.

However, in a futuristic game, what is to stop an enemy from air-lifting a nuke right into the middle of your base, blowing you to kingdom-come? Air obviously needs a lot of work, as the previous strategy was often used to destroy someone in Total Annihilation.

Another thing about air. Air units in real life cost a LOT of resources and specially trained troops to fly them. That makes them VERY valuable compared to infantry and other ground units.

Also, air units can only land on runways/carriers/special fields, etc. However, in a futuristic game, it''s not difficult to imagine that most air units are like the current Osprey, able to fly like a plane and land/take off like a helicopter.

Hope this helps you out.

-Hyren


"Back to the code mines... ka-chink... ka-chink..."

I would have to say that Total Annihilation has did just about everything right. The level of control is high while also having enough automation to keep from being boged down by too much managment. A new updated verison of Total Annihilation using the lastest technology and building on the great features from 1 would be a real winner!!!

Afastrunner
AKA Camelboy

Wav:

quote:
The linear hitpoint model then has to go in favor of either fewer hitpoints for everything, or a more varied range of damage possibilities. You will never rush a machine gun nest armed with machetes because a single bullet can maime or kill you.

I completely agree... I was thinking about the damage model this morning. I was thinking that instead of hit points, you have a sort of critical damage system. Any hit will either do nothing at all, minor damage, or critical damage, according to some function of range, accuracy, weapon strength and unit resilience. Minor damage does not kill the unit, but may effect its performance in some way, but any critical damage will kill it instantly. So an infantry unit will be very vulnerable to single hits (most infantry will pretty much always be killed in a single hit) whereas a tank with multiple redundant systems might be quite hard to kill... but if you have a decent weapon, and are a good enough shot, you can still take it out in one. Snipers could be very effective...

quote:
It sucks that no RTS I know of has gotten supply lines right. When units can just plop down a new base right in the middle of your territory, without any realistic limits other than defense, you get viral warfare, not military warfare.

I had almost forgotten about supply lines... thanks for reminding me... If units have limited ammo then you have to be very careful about how far you reach - it is all very well if you manage to capture that enemy bridge, but if your troops run out of ammo then the enemy can just take it back again. You could have fairly tense battles, a few units desperately defending an important feature, gradually running out of ammo as time goes by, waiting for supplies to get through. Exactly how the supply lines will work I am not too sure - I agree they need to be fairly automatic.

quote:
I like the recruitment concept, but I''d like to also see the notion of morale extended to the actual fights themselves for the sake of strategic movements

I am in two minds about morale... on the one hand I think it should be included, but on the other it is *SO* irritating when your units wander off and do their own thing, particularly since they are normally doomed anyway.
One thing I was thinking about was giving the player the ability to set the aggression of the unit. If the unit is set to maximum aggression, it will *never* retreat - this is the equivalent of telling your men that failure is not an option - the success of their mission is more important than their lives. On the other end of the scale, you set them to a very low aggression, something like telling them that they should, under no circumstances, risk their lives. In this mode, your men will fall back very readily, on encountering any remotely significant resistance. You also have various levels in between. Also note that I said that they ''fall back''. Not ''run away like a bunch of cowards and let themselves get shot in the back''. Some players might think "uh, sod this, i''ll just whap the aggression up to high for all my units, there''s no downside" There is a downside... your units will happily sacrifice themselves, and you will have to replace them. And I intend to make sure that every casualty counts. Running away when you are outclassed is often quite a good idea... plus a clever enemy could use it to lure a foolish opponent into a trap....
The biggest problem with this is the interface, but that is something to think about much later....

Hyren:

quote:
However, in a futuristic game, what is to stop an enemy from air-lifting a nuke right into the middle of your base, blowing you to kingdom-come?

Several things.... Interceptors, anti missile defenses, and the big one.... the fact that your enemy doesnt necessarily want to...
If you nuke an enemy outpost, then it is completely destroyed. You have to build a new one, which takes time and resources. Instead, you have another option... capture it! A base, once built, can just as easily be a base for your enemy, it just depends whose troops are sitting in it. In a game where supply lines are important, an enemy base full of weapons, armour and food is a much more desirable prize than a radioactive crater.

quote:
Another thing about air. Air units in real life cost a LOT of resources and specially trained troops to fly them. That makes them VERY valuable compared to infantry and other ground units.

Definitely. I want the player to value all of his units... real life nations spend fortunes on training their armies and building state of the art weaponry, they arent going to want to waste it. Air units are particularly expensive - a single missile can cost several million dollars, let alone a whole plane + pilot.

quote:
Also, air units can only land on runways/carriers/special fields, etc. However, in a futuristic game, it''s not difficult to imagine that most air units are like the current Osprey, able to fly like a plane and land/take off like a helicopter.

Hmmm. Futuristic planes may be able to land anywhere, but they can still only refuel/re-arm at a suitable base .... As for hovering, again, a futuristic aircraft may well be able to hover, but does it really want to? It just becomes a sitting duck...

supply lines? Strifeshadow has them. Instead of pumping peons to pull in money you build a network of towers. Towers pull money from aether pools which are scattered over the map. They aren''t concentrated in expansions so you have to expand incrementally instead of big chunks. You rarely build a new town hall, instead you just keep making the lines bigger. However if a tower is damaged it will leak, and so any aether passing through it on its way home will not be transmitted completely, some gets wasted. If you actually take out the tower they stop getting money. Snipping can be pretty important. One of the nice things about this system (aside from the obvious: no peon pumping!) is that players are forced to defend more area, yet they also have to keep their townhall safe in case someone tries to snip their lines.

Mines don''t work the same either. Once you have a mine built on a spot it constantly produces money and stores it in the mine. Since the income rate isn''t based on how many workers are mining you only need one worker per mine. It is is completely across the map you might need two, but basically one per mine. Since your workers are travelling long distances your opponent can kill your worker and grab his bag of money and run home with it. If they kill the mine and build a new mine on the same spot they get all the money that has built up. So you get into a lot more conflict over resources without all the peon work. They don''t have time for that, they''re off making or disarming traps.

I just can''t get over how good this game is, you can read battlereports here, the one by YRM is really good. The other highly rated one isn''t that good, the rating is mainly from all the pretty pictures

http://www.battlereports.com/viewreports.php?gametype=ss

hm... it''s great to have so much ideas floating around!


Damage Model:
Doesn''t the Command&Conquer series have this? e.g. Artilary could kill groups of infantry but not even have significant damage to amoured tanks.

But there''s something unrealistic here in C&C: a tank shot cannot kill an infantry? That is rediculous. Please take heed on this if u really need to have some good damage model.

Supply line:
Anyone play Fate of The Dragon? They have this similar feature. When your men are out in the field, they will get weaker and hungrier... unless u have some food for them. So u need to bring along some food supply and then build up some tents/bunkers for your army to rest and get healed. Try to play''em, I can''t tell much.

BTW, Earth2150 need u to reload ammo during a fight.

Morale:
I don''t see any games that have good implementation on this yet. But Warlords: BattleCry is not bad. Or Seven Kingdom 2 also will do.


My 2% worth.

quote: DerekSaw
Damage Model

Dark Reign did really well at that.



ANDREW RUSSELL STUDIOS

I like you''re style of thinking, Sandman. A couple things that have been bugging me about RTS games- more specifically, Westwood games.

1) Bases- for a multi-million dollar company, Westwood sure doesn''t do much research. You''d think they might turn on the tube and put on CNN when there''s a war on (there''s always a war going on on CNN) so they can figure out what it''s like. Sometimes, after weeks of fighting, some units will be able to commence an assault on a military base. They are not built by magical factories 30 feet away from the front, and then appear out of the ground after construction. Why? Well, that leads me to my next point.

2) Damage- when a jeep is hit by an 8-inch high explosive shell, does it:
a) drive away
b) lose some hit points
c) become small chunks of unrecognizable steel

Wooden buildings have retained some magical abilities from fantasy games- they can withstand tank shells that would, in real life, destroy heavily armored steel and concrete bunkers, and yet being hit by small arms fire causes them to explode, and then completely caese to exist.

3) Nukes- I could go on for hours with all of the little things, so I''ve decided to finish with possibly the most unrealistic part of Westwood''s games. Ever see pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki post-circa 1945? Buildings 3 miles away were eradicated. Up to 6 miles away from ground zero, wooden buildings were burned to the ground.

What happens in Westwood games when a nuke lands 4 feet away from a tent? A jeep blows up, 5 infantry die, and the tent catches fire.

Maybe that should change this in their next game- oh wait, they DON''T change their games. Tiberian Sun was the only game in the series with a major difference from its predecessor, although they do have to... *gasp* film an hour and a half of cutscenes. Maybe they should get into the movie-making business.

quote: Original post by Wavinator

Just a thought:

Why don''t we have tank rushes all the time in modern day warfare? Why isn''t the free world''s military fighting doctrine based on massed rushing? Why is it that only poor, desperate nations like Iran and Iraq resort to human wave attacks?

Well being from iran i could comment on a few things first off we are not a poor desperate nation. But i do admit that my country did use a human wave attack on iraq but the only reason for that is because we just went through a revelution and had lost most of our military through it. The only reason for that was because defense was important when a country gets attacked it must defend like in any rts game you''ll even send in your settlers if you have to just to defend the country. Now a day''s my country is equipped to fight and i dont think we will be using that tactic anymore.
This is an example of what happens in rts games. For instance you were just attacked by ur friend and u defended ur base but had a ton of military die and then a minute later u get rushed from another player ur only hope is to send in whatever you have hoping that u will win the battle. But what is the point of this unity? Is it there just to destroy the opponents or for something else?
I think that for an rts game to have any strategy actually involved you actually have to change everything around. Having two people attack one of the enemy is not a bad strategy but at the same time nothing new either. We need something that will introduce new strategies something a person can use to give them more choices and mroe reasons to do something.
Maybe a small defense force in the begging of the game will help early rushers but what about later? Maybe if there was a better diplomatic role in rts games then it would be more interesting. For example what if one team had a ton of nukes while the other had a ton of gold. They need to trade and because of that they can''t attack each other. They have to play together to get rid of the competiton. Or maybe the person with the nukes just bombs them and takes their gold, but they have to get the gold or else they cant have enough money to build anything anymore. What i am really trying to say is there are a ton of things that can be done to an rts to change the way people play but very few people are willing to do that and until something happens we are stuck with same tank rush.

- Goblineye Entertainment

All very good and valid points. Let me throw in a few of my own, some of which mirror yours very closely, but in a more specifically focused genre...military strategy.

Let me begin however by first of defining what to me encompasses the term strategy. Most games out there today see strategy games as sort of a different version of chess. Each side has it's own pieces, and you formulate some kind of plan of attack to exploit his weaknesses. What differentiates this style of gaming from say a tactical first person type game is that it stresses the usage of various types of units and the management of resources to build such units to defeat your opponent.

But in very few games is there any long term or "big picture" mode. As I have said in other forums, just because you can win the battle doesn't mean you can win the war....or vice versa. Look at the Confederates during the American Civil War, which won the majority of battles, but lost the war, or conversely, the Americans during the American Revolution in which they nearly lost every battle, but still won the war. Very little thought in most RTS's is thought of any sort of campaign mode in which the logistics and resources of your faction is taken into consideration.

Now, let's also look at the paradigm of RTS's today. Basically, you micro-manage your side's economic resources, while simultaneously fighting battles. Frankly, this is ludicrous. That's not to say that resources are not a very important part of strategical thinking (it's what made both Germany and Japan lose WWII....not thinking about their army's endurance), but to manage both at the same time? Are we playing a war game or a civilization game? Then again, some games forget resourcing totally, and just focus on building units. This too does not reflect a good model of actual warfare, as one of the key components of any general's thinking is how to maximize his own resources while minimizing his enemy's. In the Filipino martial art of Kali, they say" if you defang the viper, he can't bite". That's why industrial centers are prime targets. So to simply ignore resourcing is also a bad model.

So what do you do? Well, I think a hybrid RTS/Turn based style game is the only way to go. In essence, here is my idea. You chose your faction's characteristics much like you would a character in a RPG. For example, a faction's characteristics might include not just material resources such as Metal factories, Oil plants, or plastics refining, but it can also be defined by things like high technology or even the psychological makeup of it's citizenry. Perhaps the best way I can explain this is a realistic comparison.

Let's say you want to model Japan. It would have poor material resources, but it would have a high technology base, middle population, and a fanatical morale. If you wanted to model Russia, you might give it middle resources, low morale (except when defending, then fanatical) and middle technology base. Hopefully you can see where I'm leading here. By defining a faction's characteristics, it shows what KIND of units he can make, how QUICKLY he can make them,the QUALITY of the units produced, and perhaps most importantly, how MOTIVATED/DISCIPLINED those units can be.

Let's look at that last point a little more. In the 80's, Warsaw Pact forces seemed like a juggernaut on paper. Other than the NATO forces naval power, far and away, the Warsaw Pact vastly outnumbered NATO forces. And some of the equipment...again on paper...was as good as or equivalent to NATO equipment. However, Warsaw Pact forces had a much MUCH lower motivation and discipline level (on average) compared to NATO forces. And not just the quality of the actual troop units themselves. As the Russians learned the hard way in Afghanistan, the Soviet command structure was simply way too ineffective to deal with guerrila type warfare, worse so than US military command structure in Vietnam.

These are just the tiny little things that game designers simply don't think about to make games more real, and therefore more immersive and intellectually challenging. So, here's my following list of things that Game Designers should be aware of:

1) Command and Control: Units aren't simply units without a chain of command or unit integrity. The amount of freedom of control to field officers can greatly enhance a fighting forces effectiveness (as an example, German forces in WWII had a very strict chain of command, when the 101st got scattered all over Normandy, many German Forces stood around and did nothing, because they could not take the initiative without orders from higher ups)

2) Morale: Just because you order a unit to do something doesn't mean he's going to do it. I can't stand how almost every game out there will let you treat all units like mindless fanatics obeying their "god". Morale however is more than just keeping cool under fire. Morale is also motivation to fight. If you are on a recon search and destroy mission, your units probably aren't going to as motivated as a unit making a last ditch stand trying to delay enemy forces from hitting fleeing civillians.

3) Issuing Orders: Speaking of "God", how come every game has the interface as some sort of omniscient God who can control units as if he had a magic radio to order his every command. The fog of war does not just apply to not knowing where your enemy forces are, but what your OWN units are doing. Patton once remarked, "don't give great orders, give orders that can be understood". It would be VERY original if you commanded units as a real commander would given the capabilities of the technology of the time. If you think this will give a lack of control, think about it hard enough, and you'll see the extra challenges it will present

4) Campaigning: Just because you won the battle today doesn't mean you can win it tomorrow. One thing I liked about Homeworld was that you carried over your forces from mission to mission. A real commander must take this into consideration. He has to think about when and if reinforcements will arrive. Another great game was the Close Combat series which modeled campaigning very well. Think about it. What game have you ever played that rewards you for retreating from a battle...and made true the old dictum "discretion is the better part of valor"? Sometimes, the best thing to do is to make a strategic retreat to consolidate your forces or hook up with reinforcements while your enemy stretches himself thin or puts himself in a disadvantageous terrain(Robert E. Lee was a master at this).

5) Logistics: Related to campaigning is the management of logistics. One thing that RTS's totally lack is any sort of TO&E (tables of Organization and Equipment). Properly equipping your units on a strategic scale shouldn't be any different than chosing your weapon load-out for Rainbow Six.

6) Balancing (aka "points armies"): While this isn't normally a problem for computer games, this problem is RAMPANT with miniatures. The entire concept of having a "balanced" game by comparing one army's point totals to another's is like saying since I paid 40grand on a Toyta Land Cruiser, I have a better vehicle than a Toyota MR2. Comparing army's by point totals is the exact same thing. Units are not additively summed up, they are GREATER than the sum of it's parts. Units are meant to compliment and or supplement each other. For example, Aircraft Carriers don't operate alone, they operate in Carrier Fleet Groups that are also composed of other ships, most namely escorts. Escorts are meant to provide a barrier defense (particularly against other aircraft). An Aircraft carrier by itself is a powerful unit, but unsupported, it has serious weaknesses. Ditto with Tanks. I'll face any gamer with unsupported Tanks in a city against Infantry....I'll eat you alive. So just summing up a army by some arbitray total is ludicrous.

7) Missions: This goes hand in hand with campaigning and balancing. In the real world, you assign missions because of several factors. Usually you have a specific target in mind or you have no choice in the matter. The whole point of a fight is because there is some sort of objective that you need to take ahold of. This is far more interesting than "I'll take my 1000pt army against your 1000pt army, and last man standing wins". BORING. The most amazing battles in history have been the lopsided ones, or ones with clearly misguided objectives (for example the Battle for Arnhem bridge, or Gallipoli)

Well, I've probably bored everyone to tears, but I just needed to get this off my chest. I think if Computer gamers would take a step back and look at some miniatures games, they would find some VERY interesting ideas to break from the stale convention that RTS's are today. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Jon Tuffley's DirtSideII and StarGruntII miniatures games, as he has some very good ideas on strategy gaming in a military environment, or any number of classical turn based games such as Johnny Reb, Fire and Steel, or Command Decision to name just a few handful.

Edited by - Dauntless on May 9, 2001 2:41:02 PM