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Attrition, every army looses men ?

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2009 9:55 am
by Rowney
<All armies in history lose men through sickness, starvation and desertion, some have even lost more than in battle itself. the Crimea, Napolians retreat from Moscow to name a couple.like so with cc, wherein a single unit loss would occur on stacks of 6 or more men every 2nd or 3rd go and would cease to affect a group of 5 men. This would make for a much more attacking game, deterring players from sitting on big armies. The period between a loss of a man i think would be sufficient for strategic replacement or attacks, moreover it could be used more generally to stop players who delibrately miss goes to gain advantage. A player doing so would be more inclined to a re-ordering of his men before feingning departure. I also think it would make the reinforcment phase a much more flexible strategy, with men moving from stack to stack to avoid loss. Better to loose men in battle than attrition. Iam not a game programer and see the obvious difficulty in determining the time a army as been stationary in a moving game, so possibly a single random 'attrition' di could be thrown every 3rd go with loses ranging from no more than 1 to 3 on all your armies put together.
Thanks for your comments, including any that think its a dumb idea

Re: Attrition, every army looses men ?

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2009 10:29 am
by lancehoch
Rowney wrote:<All armies in history lose men through sickness, starvation and desertion, some have even lost more than in battle itself. the Crimea, Napolians retreat from Moscow to name a couple.like so with cc, wherein a single unit loss would occur on stacks of 6 or more men every 2nd or 3rd go and would cease to affect a group of 5 men. This would make for a much more attacking game, deterring players from sitting on big armies. The period between a loss of a man i think would be sufficient for strategic replacement or attacks, moreover it could be used more generally to stop players who delibrately miss goes to gain advantage. A player doing so would be more inclined to a re-ordering of his men before feingning departure. I also think it would make the reinforcment phase a much more flexible strategy, with men moving from stack to stack to avoid loss. Better to loose men in battle than attrition. Iam not a game programer and see the obvious difficulty in determining the time a army as been stationary in a moving game, so possibly a single random 'attrition' di could be thrown every 3rd go with loses ranging from no more than 1 to 3 on all your armies put together.
Thanks for your comments, including any that think its a dumb idea

Have you looked at the Age Of Realms 2 map yet? I believe that this map has at least part if not all of this idea coded into it. On that map, most of the territories have "frostbite" and lose one troop per turn. There are some other maps that incorporate similar ideas.

Re: Attrition, every army looses men ?

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2009 10:34 am
by sully800
It definitely incorporates the idea, as does Oasis and other maps. The aspect they do not capture is the randomness. In all current maps you know exactly what territories will face attrition and it happens every round.

It would be somewhat interesting to have random attrition - you don't know where it will happen (though maybe you know probabilities) and you don't know exactly when. You could make it so a pivotal territory has a high attrition chance and therefore it is risky to stockpile men there, but some leaders might be willing to take that chance. This would be similar to leaving troops in Siberia during the winter -- theres a good chance they will freeze but no guarantee.

This is not currently possible but not a bad suggestion. I personally prefer more strategy and less luck, but I can see why some random losses would make the game interesting.

Re: Attrition, every army looses men ?

PostPosted: Sun May 24, 2009 5:38 pm
by wolfpack0530
some video games (turn based strategy games) implement attrition, and it happens at the beginning of each round. In CC it could look something like this using a random generator to "choose" terts each round, or every 3rd round ect.

Lets use classic maps and 10% attrition rate. So if you have 20 armies on a tert, you lose two, if less than 20 armies, you lose 1.
Incrementing round 4
O1 -1 army
F2 -1 army
N2 -1 army


I think it would be great to have the option. You could choose the %, choose how often it happens. You could implement "conditions for attrition", or have less and more severe types that only affect certain parts of the maps.

Drought or Locust in Sahara -2 armies
Typhoon in Sri Lanka -4 armies
Plague in British Isles -3 armies

So if you wanna conquer Europe, you will have to deal with the plague,
the Antarctic, of course hypothermia
Flooding of Coastal Terts ect.

Also, it could affect neutral armies too. If the game wore on long enough, all the neutrals would eventually dwindle down to 1s. This would definatelu afffect strategy in 1v1 games on large maps.