Camping & Ambushes

I browsed through the forum and there has been a few suggestions about some kind of stealth skills, groups with mounted units being more visible than those only including infantry and even camping. Well, a few things came in to my mind:

1) I think the group should be required to camp either every night or risk getting troops fatigued or at least camp in order to heal the wounded. This would make things more interesting in longer chases or in escaping from the enemy - you can't just run around in circles until all your troops are healed. Being required to camp regulary, even without having wounded soldiers would make the time limits of quests make more sense, now they are all really broad with no sense of urgency at all. I'm not a big fan of tight time limits, but they would fit well in to some quests.

2) Sneaky enemies should be able to surprise a camping player group, resulting in some sort of desperate scramble defence. (Having player troops and characters wearing only partial equipment to combat, for example, being roused from sleep would be nice, but I believe it is too much to ask.)

3) Computer groups should have to follow the same rules about camping and sneaky player group should be able to ambush them in their sleep.

4) I think sneaky groups should be able to mount an ambush in forests or similar envinronments - this can mean bandits ambushing the player group in a forest, or the player ambushing an enemy prison transport in a similar place. Practically this would mean the ambushing group sitting tight until the victims run close enough to spring the ambush.

These aren't really big issues, just thought to notice.

this is somthing i posted before, but ill repost it because i think it has merit:

somthing i definetly wanna see in this game, if seiges and town battles are ever implemented, is more focus on the logistics of actual war. soldiers should require more food then one lousy bite of that dried meat everyday, horses should need grain, and they should need to rest after traveling long distances, soldiers should need to set up camp after travling a long distance/ finishing a battle, etc. i think it could be set up in the following manner:

1. add a fatigue meter to the game. as your armies travel and fight battles, this meter depletes. the lower it is, the worse your army fights.
food and resting "setting camp" will restore fatique. fatique would also affect hp healing of your troops.

2. armies should require far far more food. im talking wagons full here. (split up food into 2 different categorys, actual food, and water) make it so the more food you give to your armies, the faster their fatigue replenishes. also, the kind of food you give to your armies should have an effect too, say feeding them grain would restore less fatigue then feeding them meat. you should also have to feed horses, for your calvary, so calvary units actually cost more food.

3. moral should have more of an effect. i know it was suggested a lot before, but make morale in combat dynamic. to make it simple, instead of having morale seperate for each unit, make the entire army share the same morale. as your men kill the enemy and win battkes, morale goes up. as they get killed and lose/flee from battles, morale goes down. how much morale gets lost depends upon the leadership of your character and the type of unit lost, say the higher the tier of the unit, the more loss.

now, morale would have several effects in battle, if it gets too low, your men flee battle and desert you, and if its gets really high, your army gets combat bonuses, like increased movement speed, more damage, and the like.

outside of battle, morale could also be linked to fatigue. the higher your morale, the rate of fatigue loss would be slightly lessened. also, certain commody merchant items, such as wine/ale, will increase morale. it would have to be doled out like food, but gives morale instead of lessoned fattigue.

what you guys think?

Reply to corksacker69's post:

1. Good idea. Fatigue should also slow down the movement on the map making a fatigued group an easy target for bandits.

2. Realistic, yes. The best way to deal this would be to have them bought in the "party screen", where you could see how many units of food your group consumes and there could be "a cap" for food, which could be increased by bying horse wagons.

3. Yes and and player's units that flee the battle should form a group named "Deserters of [player name]'s party" and if player hunted them down his/her group could get a miraculous boost to their morale .

instead of being just some random generated party to fight, <faction> deserters could actually be ex-armymen turned theives and bandits that quit their faction because of extremely low morale as a result of many lost battles, bad leadership, or mass staravtion.

I'm brand new here, but I'm about to purchase the game, and my first opinion has to be on this very topic.

This is why: right now, it wouldn't be a bad idea to think of things which could be implemented to the game that are not just good ideas, but would also be intuitive and fairly simple to program. I think ambushes would be.

All you have to do is this: when enemy armies are wandering the world map, they already have modes, right? Like chasing, running, etc. One mode should be "camping". When a band is camping, the player can decide to attack them (as usual) and, depending on the "Tactics" skill, the player has the advantage of choosing where to attack the enemy from, and the enemy is unaware of you until you come within a certain distance, or you attack them.

The two things this would require would be, 1) the ability to choose where to start before battle. You could maybe accomplish this with a "free cam" mode or something. 2) It would help if there was a system of "awareness" in the game where NPCs can actually be "unaware" of their opponents. Spotting would happen when they come within a certain distance or, every time they are hit with a ranged attack they get a 25% chance to spot the attacker. I think someone somewhere else was wondering if nighttime had any effects. This could be two effects right here #1 a modifier to a successful ambush in the first place and #2 the distance at which unaware NPCs spot each other (and you) on the battlefield.

MAJORLY addictive game, by the way. You guys really nailed the perfect Medieval combat system.

=$= Big J Money =$=

Welcome to the forums, and good to see you dug up an old thread instead of completely making a new one with the same idea.

Camping and abushing would be fantastic additions to the game.

I can see both as really interesting minigames that would add a lot of interest to the game.

***repost warning***

This is one way that camping could be implemented - from a previous post. It's mainly about camping but the way that troops are deployed could also work for setting ambushes.

Still think that campsites would be a great addition. Especially if our own campsites could be raided and we could raid the camps of our enemies.

It could become a really cool little minigame. You and you band of adventurers are caught way out in the wilds.

Select the camp option from the menu at the bottom of the campaign map.

Camp or autocamp? This would be an a or b choice.

A. Select camp if you want to deploy your own camp setup.
B. Select autocamp if you want to save time and have the computer deploy for you

If for instance you knew that there was a whole bunch of dark riders on your tail the you would select "Camp". You would deploy your resources defensively. If when you camped there was nothing near (that you could see) you would just auto camp and take the risk.

Select campsite:

A random battle map appears on the screen, you look at the site for defensive potential. If it looks good you accept that map and move to camp deployment phase.

If you don't like that particular map you can select another or one more. Three choices. If you get to the third map - that's the one you get.

Camp deployment Phase:

You have various camp resources depending on the size and equipment of your party.

You have an interface that lets you drop your resources on the map. Tents, camp fires, baggage caravan, horses, torches & guard posts.

You then allocate guards at various points

OK all that and then see what the night brings.

Encounter phase:

Most times I guess that nothing would happen. Other times you will get attacked. Sometimes there might be false alarms. Sometimes it could be a bear or a pack of hungry wolves)

Battle phase:


If your camp was attacked then depending on the perception skills of your designated guards and the stealth skills (and tactics) of your enemy you would get varying degrees of warning. For instance you have Borcha and Marnid on guard duty you've trained them up so they're good. You get plenty of warning to rouse your troops and get some armour on.

If you put a bunch of peasants on watch. The first alarm you'd get was the scream of dying guards and the pounding of hooves. i.e. no time to prepare.

Of course you'd be able to sneak up and raid enemy camps and catch them unprepared too.

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I think a minigame like that would add a whole new dimension to the game.

A bigger world map and a stat for endurance would probably be necessary to make the whole thing worth doing. For instance you and your party and horses could possibly go for three days without rest but the you need to camp to recover if there were no nearby settlements.

The longer you travelled without rest the slower your party would move and the weaker your troops would get. It would become something to think about, a strategy, use of resources and risk in its own right.

That's how I'd like to see camping implemented - or something like that.

I like the idea, but I don't think you need the deployment phase. It could work like cork's but with a diffrent set of maps

Sounds awesome, but do you think something that drastic would get implemented? Even my ideas were a bit much at the time. How about this, if all that can't happen:

How about when you camp (with a hotkey or button on world map), you just stop right where you are and regain health much quicker. In fact, camping should really be the only time you regain health: the same should go for NPC warbands. You can camp whenever you want, I guess, but maybe movement should be at half-speed at nighttime to encourage night camping (or day movement can just be 2x, I don't care). The other reason to camp at night is because that's when most hostile bands (notice I said most...) will be camping too, so you are a little safer.

When camping, your view distance is halved, and any enemies that have a tactics skill higher than your spot skill will be completely invisible to you. Suggested enemies to give high tactics skills (4) to would be: Forest bandits, and scouts. Moderate tactics skills (2) should go to the legitimate armies. Obviously, this works for you too. You can ambush others without them even getting the chance to run away if your tactics skill is high enough.

Hey, another reason to camp would be troop morale! There isn't much being done with this right now, but not camping for too many nights should seriously lower their morale.

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Big J Money said:

When camping, your view distance is halved, and any enemies that have a tactics skill higher than your spot skill will be completely invisible to you. Suggested enemies to give high tactics skills (4) to would be: Forest bandits, and scouts. Moderate tactics skills (2) should go to the legitimate armies. Obviously, this works for you too. You can ambush others without them even getting the chance to run away if your tactics skill is high enough.
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I think ability to ambush camping enemies should depend on the party size as well. After all, it is harder for 100 guys to sneak on sleeping foes undetected than to do the same with 10 guys. Perhaps cavalary should get a penalty too, being more visible and louder?

I was thinking for some sort of on the move ambushes as well - you know, caravans travelling through a forest being jumped on by forest bandits hiding there. However, I don't know if this is possible to implement in the game. For one, it would require roads, which most parties would follow, creating potential ambush zones.

I fully agree with healing being possible only by camping - some sort of fatigue factor would be nice too. I think it would nice implement in combat as well.

Not to get off topic...But plz try to keep your posts simple and small as possible, no way am I reading that 10 pg essay up there.

chuckle

Which 10 page essay is that?

My post would appear to be the longest so I suppose you mean that. I did try to keep it simple... obviously not simple enough. Ah well.

i'm not sure about the food wagons and stuff, but i have to totally agree it's a bit unrealistic my army travels 4 days in a raw without resting :X

forget about fatigue for a moment, in reality people -need- sleep (last i checked) and in military terms it's a 6 hour minimum for sleep or troops start a accomolating fatigue and start fighting like a drunk hag.

i also currently find it hard to combat at night (let alone other disadvantages, like reduced sight, etc), and instead of finding an inn or -waiting- until morning - it would be nice to setup camp until morning like you suggested instead.
back to fatigue, your army can skip sleeps, but they will get lower morale and lower fatigue will should add disadvantages in combat like you mentioned.

also, the fatigue bar is a good idea, since it's something you should see -all the time- (instead of opening party screen every 3 minutes)

if i may add, i think 80% of the armies should make camps at night, and if you add the fact everyone get reduced sight (already implemented i believe) the chances of ambush are slim (unless the other 20% are looking to party )
so taverns are always safer, but in reality an army rarely saw a good bed rest.

also i think an attack should lower the battle balance (tactics), since you still have guard shifts on camps. (and you may say a good tactician plan them better).
if the tactic difference is great an ambush may occour, but i have no idea how it should be implemented, but it's a good direction.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with what you said. In case armagan doesn't want to mess with a "fatigue bar" for every unit, he could simply have a fatigue counter for every army. All it does is keep track of how many hours your army has gone without sleep. At some point, you will be forced to rest immediately. You're right, it would be nice to see it on the screen instead of having to investigate your army all the time. One way to do that though, is just have little messages that pop up, similar to the "your army is starving!" message. The reduced morale for not camping often enough is also a great idea. I thought I had mentioned it, but I probably just assumed I did. This whole theme could easily be summed up by the term, "Forced March".

So, it seems Forced Marching kind of goes hand in hand with camping.

80% seems about right to me, as well. I'd think only about 20% of bandits would be willing to keep their men awake at night to go hunting for ambushes. You woulnd't want it any higher than that or else you'd get ambushed too often, and it would get hella annoying. Maybe some types of stacks would be more likely to ambush than others? I can see forest bandits and dark hunters doing it a lot. I guess you agree with me that a difference in tactics skills makes sense as to whether an ambush is successful or not.

Good stuff; I hope we see it. Seems like armagan expressed some interest in the idea of ambushes in general.

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holybandit said:

Not to get off topic...But plz try to keep your posts simple and small as possible, no way am I reading that 10 pg essay up there.

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Not to flame, but this is the suggestion forum. Here, people suggest ideas they think would improve the game. Some ideas take alot of explaining and discussion to communicate properly. If you aren't up to the task of reading the whole thing to help work out the idea, at least don't tell them to abbreviate their idea, that will simply add miscommunication and limit what comes of the idea.

On the consumables idea: Different foods should have different advantages. Feeding your troops well on meat and such will increase their morale. However, there's a reason most armies didn't supply this stuff often, make meat not only expensive, but liable to spoil if carried too long. Conversely, hard-tack style rations just help stave off fatigue, but don't raise morale. Ale and Mead will spike morale, but won't help (infact may slightly hinder) fatigue.

Related to consumables: What if heroes could have unique feats? Cook: Morale increases from food are doubled. Logistics expert: Food spoils at 50% of normal speed, and troops consume 10% less food. I have other ideas for these, but I think I'll make a new thread for that, those are the only ones that apply to this thread.

On the camping/ambush idea: What if camp sites could be seen from further away at night than you can normally see a unit during the day? This would reflect that a lighted match can be seen for over a mile on a dark night, and an army of campfires. . .?

I like the sneaking units idea. What about "marching orders" You could have standard march, where you move at the average speed of your army (or speed of your slowest unit, if you want to be more realistic), forced march, which would be roughly 150% move, but drains fatigue and morale, so best for outdistancing an oncoming superior force, or hurrying to reinforce a losing battle, and stealth movement. For this, even an army composed exclusively of cavalry would move at roughly 75% of infantry walking speed. This would reflect that they were dismounted and leading their horses to keep quieter and less visable. Cavalry would still be louder and easier to spot than infantry, and a small unit harder to see than a large one, so that should definitely modify your stealth (basing it off of the player's tactics skill sounds like a good idea).

Unique feats? Sounds cool to me, and would be a fairly simple thing to implement. Feats were one of the most ingenious things Wizards of the Coast added to D&D when they created the 3rd edition. Simply put: modifiers to already existing rules that all have cool sounding names. Feats were great in Fallout as well, but they weren't called feats.

Yeah, camp sites should be seen farther away.

Lethandis said:

What about "marching orders" You could have standard march, where you move at the average speed of your army (or speed of your slowest unit, if you want to be more realistic), forced march, which would be roughly 150% move, but drains fatigue and morale, so best for outdistancing an oncoming superior force, or hurrying to reinforce a losing battle...

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"Forced Marching" has nothing to do with the speed of the march. A forced march simply means marching for longer periods of time and stopping to take fewer breaks (aka camping). Now, I will admit there is a disconnect in this game in terms of how far cities are from each other; they are too close. You can travel to multiple cities in only 1 day! So if the goal of a forced march is to play catch up, your idea for faster marching would work better than my idea of simply not camping. To be honest though, I don't want to have to micromanage my army's speed while on the map. I think it sounds tedious, and as I said there is no realism to it. Also, wouldn't the AI also be able march faster? It becomes moot on implementation in that case. In my mind, when an enemy is nearby, my troops are moving as fast as they can anyway.

Another way to look at it is this: forced marching auto-implements itself. Think about it for a second. What if an enemy is chasing you, and it becomes night time. Normally, you would set camp at this time. Now, since an enemy is chasing you, you are going to continue marching instead. Because you have gone so long without sleep (refer to my earlier post) your army will begin to lose morale and gain fatigue. You could now say that you are "Forced Marching". No micro-management. No balance issues. It happens as a naturally occuring result of camping implmentation.

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feats are nice, but overall i think they are easily exploited (shall i take the dual berserker axe feat, or the cook feat, geeeee lemmi think) - and also i think it's a bit realistic to assume the warlord can affect the quality of the food (unless he cooks the food, and i think he'll be too busy with tactics or planning the travelling path)

well i wouldn't trouble myself thinking about unlaid eggs ("ungelegte eier" , thinking too much to the future ), it would just be nice to see the original food idea, as imo it's one of the main 4 solid ideas on this board.

Big J Money said:

"Forced Marching" has nothing to do with the speed of the march. A forced march simply means marching for longer periods of time and stopping to take fewer breaks (aka camping). Now, I will admit there is a disconnect in this game in terms of how far cities are from each other; they are too close. You can travel to multiple cities in only 1 day! So if the goal of a forced march is to play catch up, your idea for faster marching would work better than my idea of simply not camping. To be honest though, I don't want to have to micromanage my army's speed while on the map. I think it sounds tedious, and as I said there is no realism to it. Also, wouldn't the AI also be able march faster? It becomes moot on implementation in that case. In my mind, when an enemy is nearby, my troops are moving as fast as they can anyway.

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Hmm, I agree with what you say about forced march and its definition. However, I do see uses for two different movement methods from the basic movement, pretty much on the same lines as Lethandis.

First would be "sneaking", which you would use both when trying to remain less visible to passing enemy patrol and laying ambush on your foes (and/or surprising them while they are camping). Sneaking should be much, much slower than regular movement, to discourage players from using it as a default movement.

Second could be running/flanking/routing speed - the point is to ride as fast as the horses can endure or the footmen jog as long as you can. It would increase fatigue dramatically, but make the troops advance faster as well. When to use it? When running away from that bunch of Dark Hunters on your heels to the safety of a town, or making the final charge on the enemy group. The bad side - if your men have fight after first being forced to run several kilometers, they'll fight much worse and the horses are tired too. However, I think the increase in speed shouldn't be very dramatic - at least in the case of infantry. You shouldn't be able to continue using this method very long either, at some point men would be just too tired to carry on.

Movement types could be changed easily on the world map by clicking one of the three boxes at the bottom of the screen for example, or pushing hotkey.

What comes to the fatigue gauge, it is a great idea - especially if it would be impelemented on the battlefield as well. That way a group caught in combat in middle of a forced march or after moving at maximum speed could start the battle with high fatigue, being much less effective in combat. It doesn't really help to be the greatest warrior Zendar has to offer if you can barely move your legs from exhaustion.

I'd like to see fighting cause fatigue as well, dependant on the armor character wears and so on. Bouncing around like a bunny in a plate mail is bound to make you rather tired... As a bonus, it would put a natural limit on stupid tactics, such as jumping and shooting enemies in the head in close combat - yes, you could still do it, but not many times in a row.

Edit- Perhaps you could add fatigue points in addition to hit points and some skill in the spirit of Ironflesh, that allows you to increase them.

You can have traits like RTW traits, similar to your "feats".

Fatigue would make the game too hard. A lot of it right now is your idiots getitng killed and being reduced to you fighting an entire army solo. With fatigue, you will get destroyed by the endless waves.

As for the traits or feats, they shouldn't be gained by a character point system where you assign them but be given them when your action cause a trigger.

A person who frequently varies their soldier's diet and gives proper nutritional balance might get the cook virtue for example.

A person who makes their army march on stealth all the time might be termed sneaky and given some bonus to traveling in stealth etc.