Resources to maintain armies

[Peter]

I would want too see more kind of resources armies use up when on they are on the field, for example:

1. Money ( obviously )
2. Food ( when not present the morale/fighting abilities will lower and possible more and more people will desert your cause )
3. water ( when not present it functions much like the food template but it has an more dramatic effect, people will die and desert and even switch side, just utter exhaustion will emerge.


I dont mean Sims bars that emptyes in 4 seconds but more like 3-4 turns or even more. This will bring more depth into the strategic map. :hmmm:

i dont think this will require any long term coding so i think it could be done before release. Atleast i hope they got something similar in development.

[Khelben]

Questions: do you think the logistics of getting supplies and other neccesities to your troops would be a fun gameplay feature? Something like that could certainly be implemented into the game but considering the length of and the number of provinces in the campaign mode don't you think such a system would just be annoying and a hassle for the player in the end?

If introduced to the game it would have to be made in some very clever and innovative way so that it remained a fun and interesting part of the gameplay all thru the campaign. Such things often just tend to be repetitive chores rather than an exciting challenge for the player. And it might make the game less enjoyable for those that only like the tactical battles and don't care for the overall strategy ie persons that just want to get into battle fast and skip most of the fuss in the turn based mode.

In the later stages of the game such a system might mean that you'd have to manage hundreds of supply lines each turn just to keep your armies from dissolving.

[Lee1026]

Also, in the real world, generals had very large staffs to keep track of all of this. We don't.

[Cyrus the Virus]

I've seen in edu.txt something about food in Rome, heard that they planned to include such thing, but disabled it.

Think it become to much things to take into consideration.

[Space Voyager]

I think both food and water supply can be reduced/recalculated to the cost of it. So it's all about money. IMO it would be more than enough to include the supply cost for the armies, preferably depending on the distance of the army from the nearest faction's (or allied) city.

[Khozemnian]

I would want too see more kind of resources armies use up when on they are on the field, for example:

1. Money ( obviously )
2. Food ( when not present the morale/fighting abilities will lower and possible more and more people will desert your cause )
3. water ( when not present it functions much like the food template but it has an more dramatic effect, people will die and desert and even switch side, just utter exhaustion will emerge.


I dont mean Sims bars that emptyes in 4 seconds but more like 3-4 turns or even more. This will bring more depth into the strategic map. :hmmm:

i dont think this will require any long term coding so i think it could be done before release. Atleast i hope they got something similar in development.

Thats a really great idea. I've been thinking about this for while now and wondering how it could be implemented. MY thoughts are this:

You have an army. When you click on that army, just like every other living object in the game, a green circle lights up at its feet right. Okay, well, if this was implemented, a line, perhaps similar to the trade caravans you can see on the roads in RTW would appear between the closest city and lead to the army. If the line reached the army, it was supplied, if it didnt, they slowly starved, no inbetweens. Obviously, due to micromanaging, it would be a pretty simple feature, but would add things like being able to cut your enemies supply route off and slowly starve them to death.

I think it would be a really great feature to include.

[Ragss]

Ew. It'll never happen. Way too much micromanagement for mainstream consumers.

[Kanfoosh]

Way too much micro management for anyone hell i even lose track of my cities in mid-campaign on both RTW and MTW

[PatWest]

It really wouldn't have to be more complex than the siege effect. The longer your army stays in the no supply zone the more it dies off. You could have the same little popup screen that told you how many turns you had untill total annihalation.

[Khozemnian]

It really wouldn't have to be more complex than the siege effect. The longer your army stays in the no supply zone the more it dies off. You could have the same little popup screen that told you how many turns you had untill total annihalation.

Exactly. There is no micromanagement involved whatsoever. It simply depends on where your army is in relation to enemy armies and friendly cities. My idea behind this was that the player would not have to do anything, but the supply line would simply show whether or not the army was being supplied. Small enemy units could block some of the supplies but not all of it whereas a major enemy army may be able to completely shut you off from supplies. This could work for when your army is overseas as well by showing a line of trade which is highlighted to denote that that particular trade route is being used to supply your troops. The line would then continue overland and reach your army. The effect this would have on the game would be pretty cool, as logistics is ancient warfare were the primary concern of commanders and monarchs alike. However I realise that it would be asking to much to make this a major factor in the game, but it would certainly add a coolness factor to it. Imagine blocking your enemies supply route and starving them...sounds like fun to me.

[DougyM]

Not a fun feature nor a realistic one (technicaly) .

lords would supply the money to keep their armies, that money pays for everything from maintaining armour and weapons to food and bedding.

It was the staff of the lords etc... that worried about how to spend said money.

I dont see how adding a feature that steadily ruins your armies just becuase a green line doesnt go to them can be considered a good thing.

[Khozemnian]

Not a fun feature nor a realistic one (technicaly) .

lords would supply the money to keep their armies, that money pays for everything from maintaining armour and weapons to food and bedding.

It was the staff of the lords etc... that worried about how to spend said money.

I dont see how adding a feature that steadily ruins your armies just becuase a green line doesnt go to them can be considered a good thing.

Point taken. I can definately see it being frustrating that your army is being slowly starved just becasue of a "green line". However, I must argue the point of realism. Often, Kings who were leading crusades would pre-arrange for supplies to meet them at a cetain destiantion. And often this help would be outsourced to the Medieval maritime powers e.g. Venice & Genoa. It is wholly realistic for an army to run low or even run out of supplies and require more. Look at the example of Louis IX leading the last crusade. Through careful planning and organisation with other nations with a strong navies, he was able to organise food and fodder to meet him on Cyprus. From this base, he was continually resupplied until the army was destroyed. So is it realistic? Completely.

[Meldon]

Not a fun feature nor a realistic one (technicaly) .

lords would supply the money to keep their armies, that money pays for everything from maintaining armour and weapons to food and bedding.

It was the staff of the lords etc... that worried about how to spend said money.

I dont see how adding a feature that steadily ruins your armies just becuase a green line doesnt go to them can be considered a good thing.

But you could hardly get food and clean water out of thin air when marching through enemy territory in a desert or a similarly arid region, or even when the enemy simply refuged his populace and all their food and belongings in nearby cities in order to force the invader to attack a city in order not to starve to death in the empty fields. IIRC Vercingetorix did just that during the war against Caesar when Caesar started getting logistical problems.
Imho it would be a good thing to implement something like this, considering what an important role logistics played in ancient warfare and how often armies failed or at least got into serious troubles while campaigning simply because of the lack of food or water.
Maybe you could include the option to turn it off with the "Arcade Battles" box before the beginning of a campaign, though, so people who don´t like spending too much time in the strategic map can come to the battles faster.

[alanschu]

Imagine blocking your enemies supply route and starving them...sounds like fun to me.

Isn't this essentially what sieging does?

[Khozemnian]

Isn't this essentially what sieging does?

Precisely, but it would be on the campaign map and would not inhibit the movement of the enemies army.

Something else I have thought about: Many times armies would be able to forage and take food from the surrounding area, but not for extended periods. To reflect this, losses to an army with their supplies cut off would suffer very light if any casualties in the first 2-3 turns they didnt have supplies. However, after this things would start getting bad. To counter this, Generals could be able to have a new trait: "Forager" which would allow for the losses inflicted to be lighter.

I know any of this is unlikely to be included in the first version of the game but I'll suggest this to some modders and see what they think.

[Lord Janos]

I don't think that this would be very fun from a gameplay perspective. I agree that attrition should be a part of the game, and that it ought to have a more dramatic effect. For example, in wintry weather, perhaps certain passes through mountains and the like could become impassable for that turn until the winter ends. This would be realistic in that you would have to plan your offenses based on the time of year, and weather would have an effect on your armies. I think that troops get tired quicker on the battle map in snowy/blizzard weather already, but it would be good to see the effect on the campaign map too. You don't need to see people dying or anything - just a couple of minor annoyances like terrain sometimes becoming impassable in particularly bad weather, and having an effect on morale.

[King Henry V]

I suggested a similar thing a while (already more than a year!) back on the .Org for attrition in RTW.
http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=46723

In a game called Legion they had an interesting idea where if an army was spending a large amount of time in enemy territory, they begin to suffer (minimal) losses. This makes sense since because every army has men who are sick or injured or killed by locals when looking for food. The deeper you go into enemy land, the more casualties you have. The rate of Death is accelerated in winter, when food is scarce. This might be an interesting twist in RTW. Say you're playing Carthage and you want to recreate Hannibal's feat of crossing the Alps and attacking Rome. In the present version, going through the pass that leads to Mediolanum does not have you suffer any losses, even in winter, as does crossing the dessert in the height of Summer.

What you could bring in connection with supply lines, is the Zone of Control. Each army would have an area that it controlled. If an enemy army moved it's ZOC onto your supply lines, unless you had your own army to keep the lines open, the supplies would be cut and attrition would rise, morale would lower and so on. There would be factors which influence ZOC such as if your army has subtantial amount of cavalry, the area under your control would increase, and if the province you're invading has a low loyalty to its ruler, there wouldn't be so many people who resit the army so that attrition would be a lot lower. Of course, these options could be turned off, but it would add more realism to the game.

Of course, since this is the Middle Ages, in order to offset attrition you could turn on the Chevauchée mode on the campaign map, which would cause much devastation on the map as well as giving you food and booty.

[mark0701]

Where do you draw the line? Should my unit of armoured swordmen have a lower defence rating if they are forced to fight two battles in a row to account for them running out of shields?

Should my archers start with only half their number of arrows because they are far from home?

Maybe we should have troops disbanding of their own accord if they are left in one place too long.

I do believe that all supply routes into a city should need to be cut off before the defenders start to starve, but i wouldn't want to see it apply to field armies as well as it wouldn't add to my enjoyment of the game.

[The Mongol]

Yeah... I'd rather keep it the way it is. Thats overcomplicated imo.

[Space Voyager]

But it could be simplyfied into simple cost. Something would be better than nothing. I don't even think it will be implemented (the game is feature complete for a long time), but it would be nice to make the cost of upkeep for distant armies higher. Actually both food and water supply can be directly transformed into their cost in money. You need to pay for any supply anyway...

So the example I wrote about the shortest road being blocked is ok if it would simply mean higher cost. Shortes rout = lowest cost. Even when the army strays off the road it would be quite realistic to expect the cost of supply to be higher. Although the roads in the game are far from being the only roads that actually existed.

Whatever, if it's not not in the game already, it sure won't be added now.