Wish List: Routing

[Gandalf Parker]

I agree. It seems easily possible within the frame that the game already does.

[kasnavada]

I thought about this idea when I though of playing on a 400 / 2000 map... and thought about "real life" supply lanes, something completely missing from dominions, which I've found myself reproducing with commanders moving back and forth to reinforce my main(s) armies and commanders with a bag of vine just to bring supplies.

What I would like to see, to reduce micromanagement is another set of new instructions for commanders, based on real life supply lanes.

Gather army : order a commander to gather friendly troops from neighbouring lands.

Transfer army : order a commander to move a number of units from where he is to a point B.

Transfer supplies : same as above, but transfers supplies to an army, so they won't starve.

Transfer item : same as above.

What I can see with this idea, is your capitol-only unit and other units moving automatically, turn after turn, toward your frontiers, to join armies. I see failed assaults, armies routing and regrouping. I see real supply lanes from places to place that could be raided with scouts, stealthy of flying troops. And much less micromanagement.

What I think would be best is that you could choose what units to move (cavalry, infantry, archers). The best way I found to do that would be to implement a "transferable" category in the army screen (that would work just like the garnisonned category does now), and making a little change to the army creation screens that let you create units in the "transferable" or the "garnison" category.

The maximum number of units transfered would be dependant on 3 main factors : movement point of the commander, movement of troops, terrain, leadership... I've no idea what would make it balanced, my guess would be :
Units moved = (leadership / 4) * (movement / (distance of transfer)* terrain cost)

I feel that the maximum range for this action should be 3 or 4.

I would add a special case for astral magic, they should be allowed to transfer 1 man size unit / astral level to wherever they like (since teleportation is an astral spell, it would be logical on a RP sense), but maybe that feature should require research to be effective, for balance reasons.

Finally, scouts should, to balance that idea, have a small chance to find supply lanes, and some units should have the opportunity to raid them, in order to make the game more strategic.

I think this idea solves the problem of pathfinding for players, while offering another dimension to army-management in the game. I'm waiting for your replies should anything be explained or if you find a better way to use this idea, or even if you find it's a bad one.

[merlinme]

As examples of how not to do it, though, both Rome: Total War and Heroes of Might and Magic used to drive me slightly nuts the way they would recalculate the route without telling you, if they bumped into an enemy unit. Sometimes you want them to do something else; sometimes you want them to attack. What you almost never want to happen is for them to spend five turns moving on difficult terrain around the blocking army. Yes you can stop them if you realise, but I've quite often got them to continue movement without thinking about it, and wasted a turn or two. Or, to take another example, in Hearts of Iron 2, if a province changes hands, you'll actually end up attacking unexpectedly, and that's almost never what you want.

There is an equivalent problem in Dominions 3 when a province changes hands, which is why I raised it.

[Psientist]

All good points! I'm glad it sounds feasible, at least for the future.

I suppose this might be related because of the "stored future commands" thread that Gandalf brought up; but it would also be nice to buffer commander recruitment (more than one), and assign the "target province" in the buffer. It's probably too much to ask for to buffer commander AND unit recruitment, auto-assign units to commanders, and then set target provinces... it certainly would be nice though, as on a large map one could set up relatively remote fortresses to be "army factories" that send units to a nexus fortress in your domain that's near the battlefronts, that require little attention except to resources and funds. One can't escape micromanagement entirely, but every little bit helps.


For what it's worth, Civ: Call To Power *was* PBEM, because that's why I bought it. The relevance, I guess, is that to the devs it shows that various problems under discussion have been conquered before in analagous games.

[Gandalf Parker]

At this point in the games development (and I dont foresee a change) anything requiring a buffer could be a problem. The "buffer" would have to be written out to your file and then read back in each time the game processed a turn. People have wanted buffers for multiple turn planning on evreything from commander actions, to province actions, to research, to well.. just about everything in the game. We could end up with each turn maintaining an entire games actions in multiple snapshots running over 10 turns. And thats not even taking into the account the people who have requested history info such as previous moves, previous messages, etc. So it could be an entire games snapshop 10 prior and 10 ahead.

I think that was requested here has been worked out so that it could work with the games present way of tracking things. At least as far as we can understand the code of it. But that method doesnt quite stretch to real multi-turn tracking.