Military | Battles | Major Spells

Using 100 Metal to equip a single Swordsman is a bit ridiculous, don't you think? Unless I'm misunderstanding something here...

We can always lower the collection cap and/or recruitment cap. In fact, 1,000 soldiers per turn would make high RM cities more valuable.

What's wrong with the current system?

Hmm... You're right. Instead, the number-of-the-day is 5.

The scale, Lime. I want losing 100 soldiers feel like something. I also want to make raids something you don't send five thousand troops to do, and still avoid things like "Boo hoo, he only sent 100 soldiers! That's so little it means nothing!"

2 is a better number, but I still don't think this is the best way to limit army size. 10x upkeep plus 1k troops per turn?

I still don't think this is necessary.

The scale can and should start out small, like everything else. However, by mid- and late-game, I don't mind 5k+ armies. In fact, they should be that size.

2 is too little.

Alright Lime, here's my justification on making the game have fewer troops overall. They're mainly tied to the raiding system that allows one to go and mug someone else's caravan when they're not on your territory. Raiding is something that's meant to be really impactful for the game, after all, you're performing a sabotage mission on enemy supplies, and has the possibility of rewarding you with a huge resource advantage. Alright, so will you send three thousand troops to infiltrate enemy territory unseen to rob a single caravan? Of course you don't. You send 100 at most. Now, let's compare that to the number of troops you have at your disposal and your enemy has guarding the territory you need to go through.

You've got 25,000 troops. 100 troops is an insignificant number compared to that. Totally miniscule. The enemy has 2,000 military units patrolling the region you need to move through. Compared to that, 100 is also very little. What do these numbers mean? It means we have a system that makes it look like you can accomplish something, when in reality the attempt is doomed to fail, but even the loss is completely insignificant. Basically it's a system that just frustrates both parties. The raider for accomplishing nothing, and the target for getting irritated by succesfully defending his caravan and lands not accomplishing anything. That's why the numbers need to change. Both participants need to feel like something impactful just happened, whether or not it was a success or not.

My co-worker once talked about this thing in a conquest game he played that might solve our problems.

In the game he was playing, essentially there was an "implied cap" of troops that any nation could have. Why was it implied? Well, because you could totally have more troops then the cap, but there were consequences if you did.

The consequence? Civil war.

In this game, any nation, should they surpass the "cap" (Don't ask me what the number was, btw) there was a chance that the nation could erupt into a military-civil war. The troops of the nation would be divided during this time, and stopped when there was a victor - By that time, troop count had diminished because WAR KILLS.

If we set the implied cap low enough, we could then have it be more of a strategy game instead of a numbers - Platoons of 100 instead of 10,000 or whatever.

Thoughts?

I don't really want to impose any caps like that for anything. If a player has done their job well and all that, limiting the size of their armies in that manner is just saying "Good job! You've become the best player in the entire game and have a whole bunch of resources! Too bad you can't use them to do anything really, but at least you have them!"

Limiting a player on what they can or can't do is not something I want to be doing as a gamemaster. While that's an approach that might've worked elsewhere, it's not something I want to try out. Game balancing has to come from the numbers, not from outside influence.

4 is my last offer. It's not quite as harsh as I'd wanted, but it'll have to do. I guess losing 400 troops in the current game counts as something of an impact, considering people tend to move around assault forces that are in the few thousands.

I still don't see the need for a system change in general. While making Troops more powerful certainly means that losing 100 troops is felt more deeply, it also is felt more deeply if you lose 1,000 troops. And, it has the added bonus of making you feel like you have power (especially when you have 1,000 troops instead of 100. It makes you feel more like a proper Nation than just a band of idealistic mercs and rogues.) Also, and this is the most important part, it won't make everyone go "Guh? What?" just like we did for the past few posts.

Yet 1,000 troops aren't suited for an infiltration mission into the enemy territory, Lime. The whole point was that no matter how strong a single troop is, you won't send more than 100 of them to enemy territory on a raid.

Lord William wrote:

Yet 1,000 troops aren't suited for an infiltration mission into the enemy territory, Lime. The whole point was that no matter how strong a single troop is, you won't send more than 100 of them to enemy territory on a raid.

Well, if you're planning a raid, you may try to create troops suited to raiding.

And why would anyone waste time and resources to that when normal troops can function just fine? We can't expect the players to just magically solve all the problems themselves, and if we do, we're in deep shit.

Honestly Lime, I really don't see most of your motives behind half the times you argue against me. This is just a numbers balancing issue. There's a gameplay aspect that brings nothing but frustration unless the numbers are changed, and the change has no impact on anything else in the game. Why're you fighting so hard against me when all I'm trying to do is make the game more enjoyable?

With the official creation of Special Forces, I get what William is saying. I just think 10x upkeep and a cap of 1k recruits per turn will work. I'll reduce garrison sizes a bit, probably cut em down by half. Expensive armies will sting when you lose em. There can also be a strategic cost to losing troops, mainly that you'll have to move new troops into position. The cap for MTLs can be cut down to 500 to accommodate this.

Because to me, this change doesn't make sense. If you're going to do a raid, and you want to do it quietly, then you do not send soldiers, you send spies. If this entire change is just for one aspect of the game, then there is clearly a better way to go about doing this.

It's not only about raiding, it's about Special Forces and the overall scale. I'll crunch some numbers before we playtest to figure out the best solution.

I get what you're saying Ascertes, and it'll limit armies to the level where troops are as big a tactical asset as we want, BUT, it's not a real loss when you lose them. Send 100 warriors, lose them, and you've effectively only lost 1,000 metal. It's not a big enough investment. Sending a poorly planned raid and failing it as a consequence is supposed to sting. When your opponent can lose 20,000 resource, and you can only lose 1,000 at most, can you really call it fair?

It's got a very high reward, incredible material advantages. It must also have a high risk.

As for Lime, spies don't do raids. A spymaster may be able to take on even paragons one-on-one, and peel away layers of enemy guards when given enough time, but they're not fighters, and certainly not some who just haul tons of resources from the middle of the enemy territory just like that.

When the change has no impact on anything but this one mechanic, I don't really see the point in not making it just for this reason. The only reason this change couldn't be made was if it A. impacted something else negatively (I'm seeing to stuff like paragons and such being in balance already) or B. If it didn't achieve what it's supposed to. I don't see either of those conditions being met, so I don't see any reason not to do it.

The problem I see with this is that it's changing all of the numbers drastically. Everybody's first thought was "Wait. 100 metal for 1 Soldier? How much metal could one soldier need?!"

Lime is right. Want to just lower the collection cap? Because yeah, if we madly multiply unit cost, we'll need to adjust, for instance, building costs as well. I got those in a good place at the moment... I think. Would be a shame to go through and change all of them.

I don't know, honestly. Rome II is handling this by requiring every army to have a general, where in past games an unlimited number of captains could lead armies of any size. Requiring a general severely limits the number of armies at any one time, but it means the loss of an army really hurts because you need to spend time training and moving replacements into position. That won't really work in GW5 because we're making Commanders optional Agents. I think if we lower the recruitment cap and MTL capacity, while increasing upkeep 10x and maybe even lowering the collection cap, we'll have much smaller armies.

Ok, even a quick calculation reveals one starting settlement - 20k Gold/turn - allows for 200 troops with 10x upkeep. That leaves no room for construction or other Gold costs. If you want small armies, that'll do it!

Hmm... Actually, let's go the other way. Instead of multiplying only upkeep, increase the material cost of recruiting the troops, but leave upkeep as it is in GW4. It won't impose ridiculous limits on how many troops you have (thus creating a frustrating setup where you will hit the max cap of soldiers your gold income allows you to have like instantly due to the low resource costs, You could recruit the max army you could have in a single turn if it wasn't for recruitment limit, Ascertes).

By only having the recruitment resource cost increased, we achieve a lot of things: First of all, troops are a lot more valuable, and a careful investment. Losing a hundred troops really feels like something, no matter how many troops you have in total. Secondly, armies will scale very nicely into the lategame. Basically your armies will only be limited by your resource pool, since you won't be hitting the max cap anytime soon due to your resource limits. And third of all, raids will become even more enticing, because a material advantage of, say, 20,000 resources is a lot.

Hence, quintuple resource cost for troops and other military stuff, but leave the rest as it is in GW4. You really don't need to change the other stuff, like buildings. Military is separate and changing that won't affect buildings and such.

If we quintuple:

The initial costs were based on simple division: 2,000 recruitment cap meant that for the most expensive soldier, one that cost 10 resources each, you could recruit up to the cap if you collected 20,000 of that resource. Multiplying that by 5 means, by that system, the cap should be 400. I don't know if I want it quite that low, but there's no point having a cap of, say, 1,000 when the average player won't be able to recruit even half that in an average turn, unless he has large modifiers (which won't be the case for a while) or trades for resources (which aren't guaranteed to be delivered safely).

What I meant by rebalancing building costs is the same idea as the above; it's based on how many troops players could recruit from the resources they gather in a single turn, because the focus was on the military in GW4. I know buildings were too expensive in GW4, but my aim for most of the costs was to cut resources used for troop production by half, making it so that players could still recruit about half the cap, but they'd have to choose when to start building carefully because they couldn't recruit as many troops when they started construction projects. With building costs as they are now, players can barely recruit 1/5 of the cap (at 1,000) if they choose to build something, and with more construction choices available, they should be building something almost every turn.

Wait, are ships still going to be made 5x? That'd be awfully pricey...

Hmm... No, ship costs won't get multiplied. And I think quadrupling will be actually be enough. 500 troops for your full resource load on the first turn. Recruitment cap can sit at 1,500 troops. Never actually liked the thing anyway.

4x the resource cost for standard troops (I think siege engines and ships are good) and a reduced recruitment cap (1k). Garrison sizes cut by half, MTL capacity cut by half. Building costs stay the same. Anything else?