2 Things this game desperately needs

[B0rsuk]

Archonsod said:

To look at it another way, if you tell soldiers who've been on campaign for several months, saw many friends killed, spent the time they haven't been fighting scrounging around simply for food and spent their nights attempting to sleep in a damp, windy tent to go home, I reckon they'd be gone before you finished the word home.

Going home, robbing some shops and raping several women on the way isn't mutually exclusive.

About unintended consequences of disbanding:
only if you use stupid function. Chaff is pretty weak and unrest-disband function should count it as such. There could be other factors, too, like hostile dominion decreasing unrest from disbanding (on the grounds that hostile population is able to deal with marauders by themselves... to a degree). And so forth.
There could be other, annoying effects of disbanding, too. Soldiers disbanded in a province adjacent to enemy province... could join the opposing side in quest for money ! This would fix chaff convoys for good.

[Taqwus]

Sandman said:
Would you have to take the soldiers back to their home province to avoid the disband penalty? Why can't we just assume that they make their own way home, like mercenaries?

They quite possibly spent months getting there and might take months back -- if there even is a path that doesn't involve the use of magic they don't have. Given the era, they also probably don't have much savings other than what they're carrying. They certainly don't have months of dried rations for the way home. The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too. A local lord is also going to be concerned about the ex-troops overstaying their welcome and taking excessive liberties for a variety of reasons, and is not going to be happy with getting stuck with the bill, either.

Mercenaries are an interesting idea, but the teleportation issue should probably be dealt with at some point -- mercenaries wandering from province to province looking for employment, say, rather than manifesting somewhere at a player's whim. A group that organized itself as a mercenary company, however, should have a greater chance of remaining as a cohesive unit -- either looking for employment together, or doing the whole 'slaughtering the locals and setting themselves up in charge' thing that occasionally happened.

[Taqwus]

Vectoring... yes, would be nice. Thought it'd be easy at first, but then realized I was ignoring supply and similar issues.

Hm. It's theoretically easy in the basic case, but if we start throwing in constraints like "don't choose routes that cause starvation because multiple groups chose the same intervening province", it gets harder to optimize. Not only do different groups of commanders and their troops move at different speeds in different areas of the map, and they only impact supply when they're actually in a specific node.

Relax that constraint, work more on a capable UI for it than multiple-simultaneous-pathing (so that it shows the routes that the armies would take and when they'll arrive, and lets the user adjust the waypoints if the thinks that there'll be supply problems, an excessively tasty target for an army-blasting spell, or a move through a province that seems to have a hidden unit-hurting site) and maybe it's doable).

[Sandman]

They quite possibly spent months getting there and might take months back -- if there even is a path that doesn't involve the use of magic they don't have. Given the era, they also probably don't have much savings other than what they're carrying. They certainly don't have months of dried rations for the way home. The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too. A local lord is also going to be concerned about the ex-troops overstaying their welcome and taking excessive liberties for a variety of reasons, and is not going to be happy with getting stuck with the bill, either.

What does this have to do with making the game more fun?

[Taqwus]

Some of us actually enjoy realism. Would you prefer a game which ignored morale, fatigue, maintenance, inaccuracy, friendly fire, the ability to do pre-battle order assignments... like nearly every cookie-cutter RTS out there?

[MaxWilson]

Taqwus said:
The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too.

If you're talking about realism, you've also got the same problem with unrest being generated by the simple presence of your armies in a province, regardless of whether they've been disbanded. Dom3 is actually pretty minimal on the province-management thing, being more of a wargame than a Civilization game, and you could easily take this idea about soldiers and unrest far enough for it to be a tedious micromanagement detail. Morale and inaccurate fire add a lot of fun to the game because they add new tactical dimensions that you can exploit, but I'm cautious about adding a new detail to the world model purely for realism's sake. In the real world, your population should be fluctuating slightly even without a Growth/Death dominion or huge drought/blizzards/immigration, but it's nice to have that detail abstracted away because otherwise I'd feel compelled to pay attention to it, even though it hardly matters. If the unrest from disbanding were small I'd probably feel that it was a needless hassle.

-Max

[Nick_K]

Weren't employed soldiers quite keen on rapine and pillage in mediaeval times too? I don't think making them unemployed would necessarily dramatically increase this.

[Sombre]

If you make disbanding cause unrest all that will happen is people will either not use it or feel forced to move all their guys to one sink province in order to disband them. Is that realistic? Is that fun? Does it satisfy the people who are asking for the disband command in the first place? No on all counts.

Dom3 isn't even a realistic game. It's far more arcadey that a lot of 'risk' inspired strategy games. I mean this is a game with simple recruitment, economic, political, religious, diplomatic etc systems. If you want extra annoyances based on 'realism' then feel free to roleplay that your commander got drunk that day and failed to lead his army to attack or that your troops are unable to march during winter due to a lack of adequate blankets, or that they'll all go back to tending the crops during the summer. Why should everyone else be forced to deal with extra pointless micromanagement?

[MaxWilson]

Taqwus said:
Hm. It's theoretically easy in the basic case, but if we start throwing in constraints like "don't choose routes that cause starvation because multiple groups chose the same intervening province", it gets harder to optimize. Not only do different groups of commanders and their troops move at different speeds in different areas of the map, and they only impact supply when they're actually in a specific node.

Just wanted to point out that if we had an API for .trn and .h files we could do this ourselves by pre-generating a .h file that continues "scheduled" movement and then just doing a "Continue where I left" on that.

There are a lot of nice things you could do if you could write .h files from a standalone app. External AIs for one, which would also let you set a player to AI temporarily and then come back as a human. Imagine a scenario where the AI fights until your dormant pretender awakens, and then you have to clean up the mess...

-Max

[Sandman]

Taqwus said:
Some of us actually enjoy realism. Would you prefer a game which ignored morale, fatigue, maintenance, inaccuracy, friendly fire, the ability to do pre-battle order assignments... like nearly every cookie-cutter RTS out there?

This has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with imagination. I could just as easily write a ton of paragraphs 'justifying' why disbanding shouldn't cause unrest. The decision is arbitary, and should err on not punishing the player for doing something entirely normal.