Battle of posts VS War of annihilation

[klunny10]

As always let me preface the following by saying great work and please keep it up. It seems you are on course for making the game I have always wanted here!!


Back in the American Civil war general Lee feared a battle of posts leading to the seige of Richmond against George McClellan. That is taking positions covered by artillery, then re deploying and taking the next and so on.

Total war games were always a battle of posts. Sometimes the AI might ruin a few buildings if you left it in possession, but essentialy bar the core areas there was no serious damage.

The razing mechanic however introduced in Attila makes for a war of annihilation. With AE's population mechanic (which I love) this would seem to me to be far more serious with your local population put to the sword.

Will we be able to re-distribute populations in AE? By this I mean in a similar fashion to Rome 1 where you could use peasants/plebs to increase a province population by disbanding within its borders.

Or perhaps via building chains you can promote immigration? (shivers).

Perhaps this has been answered elsewhere but I cant find it.

Best regards and hugs.

[Petellius]

Probably not on release, it's a damn good idea though. I'll pass it on to our scripter and see what he says.

[Causeless]

As always let me preface the following by saying great work and please keep it up. It seems you are on course for making the game I have always wanted here!!


Back in the American Civil war general Lee feared a battle of posts leading to the seige of Richmond against George McClellan. That is taking positions covered by artillery, then re deploying and taking the next and so on.

Total war games were always a battle of posts. Sometimes the AI might ruin a few buildings if you left it in possession, but essentialy bar the core areas there was no serious damage.

The razing mechanic however introduced in Attila makes for a war of annihilation. With AE's population mechanic (which I love) this would seem to me to be far more serious with your local population put to the sword.

Will we be able to re-distribute populations in AE? By this I mean in a similar fashion to Rome 1 where you could use peasants/plebs to increase a province population by disbanding within its borders.

Or perhaps via building chains you can promote immigration? (shivers).

Perhaps this has been answered elsewhere but I cant find it.

Best regards and hugs.

The most obvious immediate solution would be to utilize buildings as a method of affecting manpower (building barracks etc could primarily increase manpower growth instead of allowing more recruitment options as in vanilla), as well as edicts.

It is possible to recruit units and disband them in another region to increase population, but this isn't ideal. Using a peasant unit might work but then it's still imperfect, because these would both take up army slots as well as only representing one class (when the population system has multiple cultures and classes). In the future it may be possible to use some UI magic and have a custom button which changes the recruitment interface to show a citizen unit for each culture/class that you can recruit to move around, without cluttering up the normal recruitment interface. However, that'd take quite some work and wouldn't add a huge amount; as well as requiring micro-managing from the user to handle.

I'm not entirely sure of what we'll end up with in terms of scripting for the first release, but a lot of these ideas are very good and I'd like to see some simulation of them eventually.

I'd like to be entirely clear these are just ideas at this stage.

As far as scripting goes I can promise nothing. The previous pictures/videos showing a population system after I left the team exaggerated the progress of what were really just non-functional proof-of-concepts and as a result none of that code can be actually be used. As such, it really comes down to time: if anybody has any lua scripting experience and would like to help, and especially if you are comfortable with Git, it would be greatly appreciated! Send me a message.

Frankly - at this stage I cannot guarantee or promise that a manpower system will even be included in the first campaign release.

[klunny10]

The most obvious immediate solution would be to utilize buildings as a method of affecting manpower (building barracks etc could primarily increase manpower growth instead of allowing more recruitment options as in vanilla), as well as edicts.

It is possible to recruit units and disband them in another region to increase population, but this isn't ideal. Using a peasant unit might work but then it's still imperfect, because these would both take up army slots as well as only representing one class (when the population system has multiple cultures and classes). In the future it may be possible to use some UI magic and have a custom button which changes the recruitment interface to show a citizen unit for each culture/class that you can recruit to move around, without cluttering up the normal recruitment interface. However, that'd take quite some work and wouldn't add a huge amount; as well as requiring micro-managing from the user to handle.

I'm not entirely sure of what we'll end up with in terms of scripting for the first release, but a lot of these ideas are very good and I'd like to see some simulation of them eventually.

I'd like to be entirely clear these are just ideas at this stage.

As far as scripting goes I can promise nothing. The previous pictures/videos showing a population system after I left the team exaggerated the progress of what were really just non-functional proof-of-concepts and as a result none of that code can be actually be used. As such, it really comes down to time: if anybody has any lua scripting experience and would like to help, and especially if you are comfortable with Git, it would be greatly appreciated! Send me a message.

Frankly - at this stage I cannot guarantee or promise that a manpower system will even be included in the first campaign release.

Thank you both for your prompt replies.

Buildings would presumably be adding a % of the existing population, which may be realistic but if a given pop is say '128' I would take a long time indeed to reach a use able amount for stable recruitment.

I can understand there are many limitations present in Attila which frustrate developments like these. I appreciate your efforts in any case.

Regarding the peasant unit though, what if dispanding it gave a fixed amount to each class (should class be present) much like a pyramid, I.E 30 elites 60 Middle class remainder Lower class etc. For simplicity this could be fixed regardless of the unit size setting (I'm thinking of your programming hours here) and still be functional.

Sadly I only ever got as far as "Hello world" in programming otherwise I would be glad to help.

[Causeless]

Thank you both for your prompt replies.

Buildings would presumably be adding a % of the existing population, which may be realistic but if a given pop is say '128' I would take a long time indeed to reach a use able amount for stable recruitment.

I can understand there are many limitations present in Attila which frustrate developments like these. I appreciate your efforts in any case.

Regarding the peasant unit though, what if dispanding it gave a fixed amount to each class (should class be present) much like a pyramid, I.E 30 elites 60 Middle class remainder Lower class etc. For simplicity this could be fixed regardless of the unit size setting (I'm thinking of your programming hours here) and still be functional.

Sadly I only ever got as far as "Hello world" in programming otherwise I would be glad to help.

Buildings could also encourage immigration from neighboring regions. Also, there's no reason that growth needs to be linear like that - it's possible, for example, to always add a static growth (of say 50 population) to a class on top of a normal % growth, which would stop the immensely slow growth rates at low populations while having little effect at high populations.

The multi-class peasant unit idea is a good one, but not suitable. The issue with the peasant unit working like that is three-fold:

Firstly, it'd require special-case code that the other units don't use, which isn't desirable as it's extra development work (and extra development work for a stop-gap solution is sorta against the point).

Secondly, how do you recruit the unit, if, say, you have 6000 low class, 4000 mid class and 0 high class? Even though you have plenty of population from the other classes you want to move, you cannot, because you don't have the high class necessary to recruit the unit. Sadly it's not technically really possible to dynamically track unit costs like that if they change due to in-game circumstances, so recruiting and disbanding only from the fuller population classes isn't really feasible.

Thirdly, AEs manpower will not just have classes like PoR2. It'll have separate cultures too, each of which contains it's own classes. So, even if a peasant unit recruited from multiple classes, there's still many different cultures, each of which includes their own classes. As said above, dynamically changing population cost for individual units like that isn't really feasible, and the chance that a region won't have any population in a certain culture is very, very likely, as it's nearly impossible that a region has every in-game culture in it. The obvious solution would be to have a separate peasant unit for each culture but that clutters up the recruitment interface, something obviously undesirable.

It may be possible to simulate these mechanics to a greater degree in the future, but in terms of quick-and-easy solutions these ideas take too much development time to be considered at a stop-gap solution. In the future, which greater development time, it may be possible to have a toggle button to change the recruitment panel to show a peasant unit for each culture/class in the region, but that takes time away from higher-priority development (and not just my time, but time for non-scripters to create the unit db definitions etc) and requires experimentation.

If temporary solutions require any reasonable amount of development time it's just not worth it when we'd throw it out for a different solution in the future anyways.

About unit size, right now the script assumes the largest unit size. It might be possible to add a setting to scale the unit size but AE is balanced for that unit size, especially when it comes to missiles, so you probably shouldn't really change it anyways.