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Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:
... While we see the whole combat played out in detail in dom to me what is key is that the unit vs unit balence is good.
... The details are cute but I would not change one to be more "realistic" unless it improved general balence so I think thats the sort of question we need to ask. ...
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Keeping in mind my Version of the suggestion (i.e. as below, giving full-damage in repel attacks, but never more than one attack per turn, and no repel for units which had just attacked)... I would expect that the balance implications would be:
* Weapon length would be slightly more important.
* High-morale units would be more affected by enemy weapon length.
* High-damage-capacity units would be more affected by enemy weapon length.
I don't expect it would be unbalancing. I think it would just make the length factor a little more important, and a little more important in situations where it currently isn't important (especially, high-morale units who aren't about to die froma 1-point hit). I would expect balance to be improved.
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Part of what I'm trying to say is that ancients combat is not something you reason out using commen sense. You need to read as many primary and secondary sourcs as possible and focus on what the ancients consider the salient features of combat.
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I agree with that point, particularly for a game trying to be historically accurate. While Dominions has some nice elements of historical accuracy, however, it's about pseudo-historical units, often a-historical matchups, and also lots of fantastic and magical elements. There is a really enormous number of possible match-ups, most with no historical precedent, so I would contend that the main effort should be to have mechanics that make some sense, so that as many matchups will play out in reasonable, intuitive, and understandable ways.
Moreover, for the question at hand, for the point you made to be relevant, one would have to assume or imply that the existing mechanic is the result of careful historical research, and that it offers superior results to a more common-sense mechanic. I don't know the devs' reasoning for the 1-point max damage on repel, but my expectation is that it's not because of scientific/historical group-combat results analysis.
I assume the reason IW has repel do max one damage is a design decision to only apply so much complexity to the problem. It might be a bit of a chore to implement something more like I suggest, and the current mechanic at least gives some fairly-reasonable effect of weapon length, without the over-simplification leading to unbalanced results. That is, if you allow a full-strength attack, you need to keep track of who has attacked and when they can next attack, in order to avoid someone getting too many attacks per turn. That would be more complicated to implement and more complicated to explain to players, so I expect they decided it wasn't worth the effort and the current solution was good enough.
To stay on track, what I've been saying all along is that ideally, if IW agrees it'd be worth their time, I'd like to see it work this other way. Overall, the existing mechanic is ok, just a little bit silly and insignificant in some cases that don't seem to make sense, because of the 1-hit damage part.
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So how should a Giant hitting a body of spearmen be represented? I think if the Giant manages to close then there is no problem in it getting the first real strike. It has brushed aside the opposing spears as the holders trembled in fear and burst into their ranks.
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How a giant plays out versus a bunch of spearmen is relevant, but is only one combination of a nearly-infinite number. However, it's as good example as many of how the current situation is somewhat unfair and inappropriate. Why would you say there is no problem and assume it has brushed aside spears? Why would anything do that without a specific ability to do so? I'd say it should only be able to do that if it in fact does manage to avoid, brush, or shrug off the attacks, and that ideally there would be appropriate mechanics for this. Mechanics that make sense are the best way to get results that make sense, when an infinite number of detailed combinations are possible.
PvK