FreeOrion

I know we should still be focusing our creative energies on Ship Combat, but I couldn't help it.

Personally, I kind of liked the combat in MoO3 (mostly because of the noises and the lists of strategies, everything else was very poor) And I came up with an improved version of it for FO.

Here is my proposal for ground combat in FO:

This idea assumes that ground combat takes place at the same time as ship combat, although the principles could easily be applied otherwise if this is not the case. Also, apologies its a bit long, and still just a rough outline.

Units

Ground forces are made up of a number of units, abstracted to Regiments (The guys who do the fighting) Support Assets (Artillery and any support provided by orbitting starships) and Special Forces (Small units of commandos). Each unit uses up one space in a transport pod, and each transport pod contains four or five spaces.

Regiments

Regiments are the basic troops that make up your armies. They are the primary units taken into consideration in the battle calculations. You can build such units as Infantry, Heavy Infantry (Marines), Armor (Tanks) and so on.

Support Assets

Support units on their own are very weak. Their purpose is to enhance the capabilities of your own regiments, and to limit the effectiveness of your enemies' regiments. You can also gain a number of Support Assets from any ships within firing range of the planet. Support Units include Artillery, APCs, Fighters, Bombers on the ground, as well as Orbital Bombardments and such from your ships and orbital defenses.

Special Forces

The purpose of Special Forces (or Commandos) is to destroy enemy Support Assets and to cause havoc for Regiments behind enemy lines. Obviously these guys won't have an effect on orbital assets, although they can be equipped to attack Fighters and Bombers. Commando Teams are always equipped with specific roles in mind, this equipment cannot be changed during combat but is modifyable outside of it.

Battles

Actual combat is resolved using objectives, targets and tactics. The battlefield, and the composition of ground forces plays just as big a part in combat, but superior numbers and technology doesn't exactly ensure victory. Objectives, Targets and Tactics are defined during deployment (Space Combat) but can be changed at the start of each combat turn

The Battlefield

Progress is tracked using the number of regions held by each side. Planets have 3-10 physical regions based on the planet's size, plus two more for Planetary Shields and Orbital Defenses if the meters are above 20, and an additional region for each building on the planet. The Regions themselves have little impact except concerning tactics.

Objectives

These are your basic goals for your forces on the planet. There are three broad objectives only:
* All-out Attack - Your troops simply charge at the enemy, capturing any regions they overrun
* Capture Ground - You pick a few regions you want to control and the Regiments fight normally.
* Hold Position - Select which of your controlled regions are most important to you and your forces defend them. Useful for choking a planet's Orbital Defenses.
* General Retreat - Only available if you have transports in orbit, your forces pack up and move offworld.

Targets

Targets are obvioulsy the focus of your objective. They're presented as a list of checkboxes, with a different list for each objective. The more targets specified, the harder it will be for your forces to accomplish their objective.
* All-out Attack - You specify which enemy Regiments you want your troops to destroy first.
* Capture Ground - You specify which enemy controlled regions you want your forces to capture.
* Hold Position - As stated above, you specify which of your controlled regions you want your troops to actively protect.
* General Retreat - There needn't be a list of targets for this objective, unless you want your forces to fill certain transports first.

Tactics

This explains the details of how you want your forces to go about accomplishing their objective. And it is possibly the most important decision you have to make. To keep it simple, you needn't have an in-depth knowledge of warfare tactics to understand this part as its a bit abstracted.

Basically Tactics are presented as various Configurations, that is a list of conditions for your forces' compostion, your enemies' and the world EP/ Region type you're fighting on. You only pick one to use for the turn. Whichever side picks a tactic that better suits their situation gets a significant bonus for their forces.

At the start of the game you only have a limited number of tactics to choose from, with more being researchable. Most of the tactics you start with have very broad configurations. To prevent abuse, the stricter the tactic's requirements are, the harder it is to use, although its bonuses increase proportionately.

For an example, using a general "Massed Assault" tactic requires a force containing just about any units in massive numbers, whereas "Blitzkrieg" Requires lots of Armor, Mechanized Infantry, Artillery and Orbital Support and relies on fighting on open ground, making it useless when capturing a structure, but devastating on a terran world with low population.


That's my two cents. Any thoughts?

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

My present conception is to have ground combat be a rather hands-off affair. Anything involving tactics for ground troops is probably too detailed. Think of them, when on ships, as another weapon a ship can carry. A ship or fleet could be ordered to drop ground troops during a battle or during a turn, and would do so, and the results would be calculated based on whatever factors are relevant, but there probably won't be any more control than that. The "results" would either be success (capture planet) or failure (ground troops are destroyed). Things like sabotaging a particular building or killing population would be among the acts that spies would be employed to perform.

I've previously posted complicated ground combat proposals but that, or your suggestions, are probably not practical. Having a few different types of troops sounds interesting, but it's a lot to manage for players and hard to control while a whole system-spanning space battle is happening. From a realism standpoint, we can just assume that all planetary troops are suitably combined arms with appropriate equipment, and not bother tracking generic troops, marines, infantry fighting vehicles, tanks, atmospheric craft, artillery, naval vessels, etc.

Ground battles might or might not take several turns to complete. A ground battle might be resolved in accelerated real-time during a space battle, or we could have ground troops exist on a planet for several turns while combat is resolved slowly, with the option to drop more troops to reinforce. The latter might be more interesting given the intended strength of planetary shields; dropping troops (or employing a spy or social manipulation) could allow a player to capture a planet that would be otherwise impervious to direct attack due to its strong planetary shield.

I personally think all "Ground units" should be a simple measure of strength.. all identical except for race/empire.

On a Planet, or in a ship, you would have
10 Ground units Race X
5 Ground units Race Y
etc.

Higher Tech = more ground units you can produce per Production point [also the more you can 'ship']
The Strength of an 'army' is
# of Ground units
Adjust for Race EP match
Adjust for Racial Ground combat bonuses
Adjust for other 'situation' bonuses.. ie one side has ships in orbit the other doesn't, etc.

so 10 Ground units race X on Planet X=10 * 1 =10 strength
5 Ground units Race Y on Planet X=5*0.2=1 strength

total Empire A army strength on Planet X =11 strength

Then you just compare strengths of the two armies

Empire A base strength=11
Empire B base strength=9

give one side a random bonus.... random number gives a 50% bonus to Empire B

Empire A current strength =11
Empire B current strength = 9 +50%= 13.5

If single turn resolution is to be used

Empire B wins with (13.5-11)/13.5 of its units surviving

Otherwise, eliminate the same amount from each side each turn

The intensity of the battle is where tactics would come in [those might also affet who gets the random bonus, and the amount of it]... you would determine how intense you wanted the battle. (actual battle intensity would be determine by what each side chose, your relative strengths, the balance of power, etc.)

ie intense attrition battle 6 points lost each side
5/11 empire A unit's survive
7.5/13.5 empire B unit's survive

guerilla warfare 2 points lost to each side
9/11 empire A unit's survive
11.5/13.5 empire B unit's survive

This would continue until one side is eliminated or until peace agreement expel them from your planets

Do you have a vendetta against me Geoff? Or do you just hate all of my ideas? It would help if there was a little more "constructive" in your constructive criticism.

Seriously though,I think oversimplifying ground combat should be a definate no-no. I don't mind dropping what I've called "Support Assets" and "Special Forces" and ditching "Objectives" and "Targets," and such. And I know there are a lot of design decisions to be made before v0.6 but just like space combat, having a larger stack of units shouldn't guarantee victory.

I think just adding Tactics is simple enough to track on each planet (There are only ten! And I doubt you'll be fighting for all of them at the same time). Abstracting everything to just your force composition and a few modifiers for race picks and environment is a serious let-down to what I consider a very important part of the game (important enough to have a whole v0.# dedicated to it)

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Captain? What does the big shiny red button do?

Thinking about visually presenting a complex ground combat always gave me the creeps. I just wouldn't know how to do it well. I appreciate everything that's simple and like merging it with space combat.

Additional detail would be good if it serves some other purpose- like capturing missile bases on a planet (during space combat) and using them against the enemy. If it's all down to "what side wins and takes over the planet" I don't see much room for such elements. (Naturally, ground troops as a separate force are a must have...).
But what about a distinction between space marines (for boarding ships) and ground troops (attacking planets)? I'd say those are completely different units.

THAT I'd agree with.

A few points, there are no 'missile bases' on a planet.
Everything that 'does space combat' is something in space, either a ship or an 'orbital'... so 'boarding actions' would/could/should be entirely separate from ground combat.
so there is no reason for ground combat to affect space combat... unless it takes control of the planet


I think you Should have settings for ground combat
Goal=get political control of a planet by destroying enemies
[player chooses strategy of higher or lower intensity combat: ie full out assault ... long term guerilla warfare]
[player chooses level of collateral damage: scorched earth ie shoot civilians if you see them/nuke any cities that happen to exist ... minimize ie only shoot clearly known combatants when you can't immobilize them in any other way]

One possible alternative Mission:
Raids would be aimed at 'Cover' for some espionage mission [essentially temprarily/permanently boosting your Spy meter on a planet to allow you use it.]... this would allow you to 'steal' things.

I can't think of anything else that ground combat is designed to do.... both conventional/guerilla war/'burn it to the ground' are encompased in the settings for a standard 'mission'

Aw man, no planetary missile bases? I need to be directed to the discussion behind this decision

It has to do with the abstraction of planetary management aiming to avoid having the player rebuild the same buildings(including defensive facilities) again and again on every planet. That's not something that is under discussion anymore.

Planetary defensive is implemented using the defense and shield meter. Defense can be thought of as a net of satellites in orbit and will probably be represented as such in combat.

That does not mean that there won't be any buildings that have some kind of (major?) effect in space combat, though. For example, there could be a building that boosts the stealth of all your ships in the system, or a building that lowers all shields of enemy ships and so on. Any meter of any object(ships, planets) can be effected in some way.

Another major idea was the concept of Very strong planetary shields... so that simply bombing and moving on wasn't an option.

This means that If you have a powerful fleet, you still don't automatically get the planet (you need to either invade or spend a few turns bombarding down the planetary shields to slaughter the population or blockade them until they starve/surrender)
But that means the planet can't have missile bases firing at you from behind this very powerful shield.

Think of it like the Missile bases are now in orbit... they are still there, but you attack them like immobile ships

And what about a simple solution in which a player simply decides what percentage of the planet's usable surface is supposed to be devoted to housing/farming/factories/laboratories/military bases? It wouldn't require any repeated effort, just a single setting, which would then be carried out by the population (and buildings would be rebuilt if destroyed).

Something very similar has been done with the focus selections - military excluded. Those are all past design decision which are highly unlikely to be changed.

You've done nothing objectionable that I've noticed or recall.


Whether I like them or not isn't really the issue... I've proposed some similar ideas myself, but now that I'm sort of deciding which ones to use, I have to be critical.


I didn't really read the details of your proposal in this case, because after skimming it, it was obviously much more complicated than what I think is appropriate. I've tried to explain why ground combat needs to be relatively simplified, especially if it ends up being resolved during a battle. Beyond that sort of explanation, I can't really give "constructive" criticism of your suggestions because they're just not applicable... It doesn't matter what subdivisions of units / regiments you proposed, different types of units, details of "regions", or objectives and targets if the whole thing is too complicated.

In particular, for a galaxy-spanning TBS with solar system-spanning phased time combat, dealing with different troop types is impractical. Consider the annoyance of having more than one type of missile to keep track of in a fleet, and imaging having to load up different types of ground troops and deal with all the related issues. Rather than doing all that, we can simplify to what's important and appropriate at the scale of the game, and just have armies that are fully self-contained and functional. If this was a ground combat simulation game, then having lots of detail of units and tactics would be fine, but it's just one part of a much larger game, and can't be made any more complicated than it needs to be.


There can be various statistics about an empire's ground troops beyond their number. Even MOO 1 had various techs that improved ground troops. The point is that the actual process of making and using them has to be kept quite simple.


There's also a whole system's fleet battle going on at the same time. And ten separate combat simulations with different planets spread around a system, with its own complicated UI that'd have to be popped up to check the details is quite a lot to keep track of.


Having a v0.# in a roadmap written five years ago doesn't mean a subsystem has to be particularly complicated.

However as above, tech and other factors can influence combat; it's not just race and environment.

Argh, so much I want to say.

Regardless of the state of development, I think it merits debate right now: Are there any notable reasons to treat ground combat and space combat separately like many 4X games have done in the past? If so, what are they?

If not, is it better that they happen at the same time? Rather how RTS's often have naval and ground forces simultaneously occupy the same gaming space.

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Photo-dump.

Musings

One thing I've been thinking about ground combat is that it should feel big, like really really big. Months of combat involving millions of troops* on each side big. A ship is expensive, troops are cheep and plentiful and even if they weren't the sheer size of a planet means that to have any sort of administrative control you'd need lots and lots of soldiers. I have two separate ideas that could add to the illusion:

Firstly in battle when your ships drop ground troops have lots and lots of transports moving troops from the ship to the surface, I hesitate to recommend a verity of different kinds of transports because that requires more work from the artists.

Secondly, if its feasible for ground combat to last more than one turn create a random battle report generator that provides fluff to the turn beginning summery, a planet is divided up into named combat zones; a combat zone could be a geographical area, a city, a key strategic location such as a government building, etc. Then randomly assign how much combat took place in each region and create a fluffy report.

* Measured useing humans, convert to alien troop numbers as appropriate.