In reality the bigger the army (i.e. stack) the longer it should take to mobilize it. That would have a good balancing effect by giving some appeal to smaller stacks for their "maneuverability".

TR

What would the movement penalty be for a larger stack?
And how many troops in a stack before it is considered large, or big?

what about -0,025 per troop? so per 40 troops one movement point less
or is -0,05 better that means per 20 troops 1 movement point less

i go for the first option and i think it's a good idea of Taurus

I like the .025 better.

Well I don't have all the answers
but a good "rule of thumb" might be something like a 5% penalty for every 50 units or every 100 units might be more acceptable so that a 500 unit stack might get a 20% mobility penalty.
Again this is not a movement restriction but rather a time restriction (i.e. it would take longer for the bigger stacks to come to full movement capability).

TR

but TR the movement must regenerate with in the set time limit of the game, hence a 12hr game your movement would have to be at full in 12hrs. However a lost of movement over terrain would be better, smae movment points, just wont go as far.

People would still use large stacks. Such a small penalty wouldn't discourage that. So this wouldn't add anything to the game besides making it harder to learn.

"save"
I'm sure you have on occassion had units that were not at full strength on the turn increment;
and of course the movement increment would have to be in proportion to the speed of the game.

"sage"
I think some players are very precise and would learn to take advantage of a "fine tuned advantage".
Don't forget 299 scouts would have a slight edge over 300 scouts and to be perfectly honest, although I admit I am still learning the fine details of the game;
I didn't have any difficulty at all learning the basics of it.

PS:
Some of the other ideas for adjusting sound good but I don't know if adjusting for each unit would put a strain on the server or our processors or whatever would be effected.

TR

It wouldn't be a fine tuned advantage. It'd be an unneeded complication that would slow the game down.

Nobody would opt to make two stacks of 150 scouts rather than 1 stack of 300 scouts just because of this change. Heaven knows nobody will choose 10 stacks of 30 scouts. Big stacks are just better, and the benefits would outweigh the annoyance of moving slower.

It would be one more thing for noobs to learn. And they're already confused enough.

"Sage"
patience is a virtue

TR

....

um....yeah...

Anyways, keeping the game simple enough for new players is more important.

Just to chime in, what ticks people off now as it is, is slow pace games the time it takes to actually reach your opponent and engage in a battle, to slow itd own further would cost us players.

Dont slow troops down it will make it longer and more time between the game (ITS WARONLINE< NOT ECONOMYONLINE)

"Sage"
I don't think this suggestion would strain anyone's brain to be honest (i.e. if the suggestion is decided to have merit and if it can be incorporated into the programming without too much difficulty).
There would be nothing to learn except possibly advanced strategy. This is not something that would have to be added to
"how to get started playing";

and to be perfectly honest I think the vast majority of us
"strategy game buffs"
enjoy a game that is as mentally challeging as possible;

So I think
"as simple as possible"
just doesn't float.

PS:
Of course the idea will probably be rejected but I hope not for the wrong reasons.

TR

I'm not advocating keeping the game as simple as possible, I'm just advocating that, if we should introduce something new and (somewhat) complicated, that it should add something to the game. This doesn't.

If any change were made along these lines I would advocate rather than giving a penalty to large pops, give a bonus to small pops. e.g. +2 MP for 5 pops, +1 MP for 10 (or 15) pops. Anything at 16 or more gets normal movement. The concept being that those 5 man scouting units are really out there to be scouting - travelling light, etc.

"ITS WARONLINE< NOT ECONOMYONLINE" - DoRW

I don't agree . The sooner the player base in general understands this the sooner the level of competitive play will increase. As I've stated before, Waronline is not a wargame, it is an economic game. Or in other words, I am of the opinion that one of the primary factors that the average player is average is because they pay to little attention to their economics and fail to understand the significant impact it has on gameplay.

"(ITS WARONLINE< NOT ECONOMYONLINE)"-"DoRW"

Yes I don't even know how this comment above applies to this thread;
but I think someone may be in for quite a surprise when we get the new version.

TR

ok, here's my reasoning(s) as to why in our current game system, this would *NOT* work:

1.In the current game system, castles are close together... close enough that you can get from one to the other with even the slowest units in 4 turns if you pick a good rout. Longer distances don't make sense because it just wouldn't be fun if you had to spend all that time moving... plus games have more than 2 players; planning attacks would take more politics than even now if distance were increased.

2. The scale. because the castles are close, and smallish, the scale is wrong for a thing like this to work correctly. (I'll tell you a way I think it could work in a bit) If you think of these castles as multiple tens of miles apart, which would be realistic, then the time involved in getting from one castle to the next would be days, not a day... so resting and such would have to be incorperated into each movement... however, fighting can last 10 turns or more... does this mean that they sleep and then attack right next to eachother?

3. I have just shown that the time and scale are not consistant enough with reality to fairly deal with mobility: a fight realisticly is only going to take part of a day or a whole day if its really big; unless its a siege. Mobility should NOT effect such conflicts, however, going back to scale, we would HAVE to have mobility be universal based on the scale idea; each turn would have to represent about a day.
And if we throw reality out the window, which is ok, since we do that all the time... we can consider mobility a complication we don't need and simply won't fit into our current system without causing more problems than strategic possibilities. either way, in our current system, mobility = bad.


Now I'll tell you what could be changed to make this idea of Mobility work, and I believe its more complicated than we need, but for the sake of trying to perfect an idea, here I go:

We'd need to work only with the new 1vs.1 games that are going to come out in the next version. why? because this idea won't work without increasing the distance between castles drasticly, and as I mentioned before, that would cause issues with politics etc. in our ffa campains, hampering any conflict. but in a 1vs1, you'd only have one way to go anyway... so a little extra distance won't matter too much. Here is why the distance increase is important: we'd need the scale to be larger for this to work... so that movement to the enemy castle would take more turns. if it took 10 turns to get there (with our current movement system, not this new one) then we could say the castles were a day apart, that COULD be realistic, although if we were going strict reality (which by luck we never do) they would probably be 2-4 times farther away at the least. and the castles would need to be bigger too.... sieges would be fun if castles were ten times there current size

OK, so you ask, why do we need to change scale for mobility to ever come into play? here is why: if we make it so that 10 turns = 1 day, we can then do this, which is the only way I see mobility ever working.

4 turns of daylight
1 turn twilight
4 turns night
1 turn dawn

see? now, mobility vs. army size can be expressed. if you have a 1 pop scout, you can ride all day and all night... if you have 500 scouts, twilight and dawn, you will spend getting to a place of security, because at night, you can't move at all for some of the time, based on size.

Now, to increase the idea of a need for preparation, at night, all ZoC should be ignored, sight should be reduced by HALF (maybe reduce range too), and movement for large troops should be reduced/gotten rid of in some cases.
They can retal of course, if some lone scout tries to attack... but they can't move much.

continued...

If they are in a fight, they are gonna be able to still attack in the night anything close by of similar size, even with these new restrictions, since neither would be able to move very far. however, a smaller army could escape into the night if it were late enough, which is realistic.

oh, and btw, twilight and dawn wouldn't really act different than day or night except to warn of the comming change... I think that 6 turns of regular lighting to 4 changed would be good, maybe even 7 to 3, since people would get tired of waiting for dawn and the ability to fight again if they were in a intense battle.

All that is "fine n'dandy" but how about the effect on combat?
I suggested this because I have recently tried the "large stack attack". It's not going so well for other reasons like it really isn't suitable for the maze map if for some reason you have to adjust your point of attack.

Anyway my struggles led me to think of this idea because if for example a large army of scouts can deal such a devastating attack, shouldn't the defender at least have the benefit of the fact that a large army of scouts would tend to react slowly to regrouping for another attack or to retreating? Wouldn't a defender possibly be able to muster a counter-attack if the attacker is still present?
Also I would prefer something like this instead of a "retreat penalty" is another reason I thought of this.

"Fan"
I understand your idea and I like it but I am trying to slow the big army down from being able to escape or too quickly make a second attack.
However I also don't want to slow down the game so your idea plus possibly two delayed moves for large armies might be the right combination (i.e. increase the moves of small armies like "Fanatic" says;
but also without decreasing the moves of the large army, cause the first two increments of the movement of a large army from zero movement to be imobile).

In other words a large army would still be able to move the same distance/turn but would not be able to start moving until it has 3 MP's of movement. It would be allowed to move the full distance until there are zero MP's as long as movement starts with at least 3 MP's.

TR

well, as many know, the new version will not have unlimited army sizes. infact, we were looking at 1-pop armies.

however, i think it will end up as 10-pop armies for standard sized human troops. the max-pop will depend soley on the size of each unit.


for this version, i always wanted some sort of penalty for larger armies. at the moment, there is no real advantage to using smaller armies, but advantages to having fewer large armies.

the idea was to have to make a strategic choice between a larger army, or several smaller ones. and even then, 1000 pop is a bit too big.

i guess the question now is, does anyone favor smaller armies? or do the majority always use fewer large armies instead? if so, i think that would indicate a problem.

basically, when there are choices in a strategy game, and everyone always chooses one over the other, then it is not balanced.