natev wrote:
I'm pretty sure it only costs extra movement points when the movement both begins and ends adjacent to an enemy unit.

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken, but I guess someone should actually check.



(Note that this penalty never stops you from reaching an enemy army in the first place, because an army with 1 move remaining can still enter a hex that normally costs 2 movement points; but if you care about how much movement you have leftover after reaching the enemy army, it makes quite a difference how this penalty works.)

natev wrote:
1) Units that begin their turn inside a besieged city may step onto the ramparts (the barricade marking the siege), but no further; friendly units starting outside the siege may step onto the ramparts, but no further; friendly units on the ramparts may go inside or outside

2) Cities with friendly units on their ramparts at the beginning of the turn don't take any siege damage

That sounds extremely exploitable:



1) If the attacker doesn't have enough movement points to reach all rampart hexes within a single turn, then the defender can break the siege without a fight by sallying a single unit to a hex the attacker can't reach. If the attacker approaches that single unit but doesn't reach it, then next turn, the defender can withdraw that unit back into the garrison and sally a different unit in a completely different direction, stalemating the attacker perpetually. This basically makes it impossible to siege a large city without multiple armies (and exactly how large it has to be depends heavily on the terrain and the shape of the city).



1.a) Which means the defender will almost always be able to break the siege on the turn you arrive, since you'll have spent your movement points just getting to the city. That effectively delays the start of most sieges by a turn.



2) Even if the attacker can reach any point on the city's perimeter in a single turn, once they've attacked and killed your one-unit sally army, they've used up their action point, and you can safely send a second unit out to break the siege. So even in a small city, you can stalemate the attacker by sacrificing 1 unit per turn per attacking army. It's pretty much the same 1-unit-armies exploit as before, you've just moved it to the defender's side.



3) If the defender can see the attacking army circling the city to attack the sally unit, what stops him from retreating the sally unit back into the city before the attacking army gets close enough to initiate combat? Then sally in a new direction and run the attacker in circles until he's out of movement points. (I guess this particular bit could be prevented if moving from the city to a rampart halts your movement for the turn.)



4) In a game with a turn timer, you can sally a unit 1 second before the turn ends and the besiegers can't possibly respond.

taltamir wrote:
Actually, no, you are wrong.

What is silly is that in a game without ranking, played for fun, you would engage in such obscura and then complain about it.

I'm all in favor of people playing the game in whatever way is most enjoyable, but design flaws are the designer's fault, never the players' fault, and it is totally legitimate to complain about design flaws even if there are ways you could potentially play around them.



I also frequently feel that the people saying "just don't do that" are ignoring legitimate difficulties with their proposal.



For one, the exploitive behavior is often on a continuum between "X was obviously intended" and "Y is obviously an unintended exploit", with a gray area in the middle, and whoever plays in the darkest gray gets an advantage over the others. With no bright-line rule between "good" and "bad" play, everyone is encouraged to play just a little bit looser with the rules, drifting ever closer to the exploit you originally complained about, and the most principled players are at the biggest disadvantage. That's hardly a good outcome.



For another, if you play with strangers online, are you seriously going to discuss your house rules with them and demand they agree to them before the game starts? The logistical burdens and social costs there aren't trivial. Even if you do, how are you going to enforce that? If you're 6 hours into a 12 hour game and suddenly discover that someone's been breaking your house rule for the past hour (possibly because they're a jerk, but more likely because they misunderstood or forgot), pretty much your only options are to scrap the game or give up your house rules.

ChongLI wrote:
Video games have rules enforced by the game engine for a reason. Telling players "just don't do that" is silly. We want to play the game by the rules that were designed by the developers and to feel like we're doing everything we possibly can in order to win.

Actually, no, you are wrong.

What is silly is that in a game without ranking, played for fun, you would engage in such obscura and then complain about it.

It reminds me of the joke "Doctor, it hurs when I do this" says the patient "then stop doing this" says the doctor.

Now, I am not saying that it shouldn't be fixed... but rather that it shouldn't be a high priority because people don't have to engage in such behavior

Antistone wrote:
I know that reinforcing on attack costs an action point, which prevents you from doing it more than once per round.



As previously discussed in this thread, reinforcing on defense does not cost an action point. Is there a separate mechanic saying that you can't reinforce on defense more than once per round? I don't think I've ever had that situation come up.

I have come across it on occasion, note that this is DIFFERENT for a human player and an AI player. An AI player can reinforce however many times it pleases.

But a human player's unit can only reinforce once per round.

Yes. Perhaps an updated UI would make more sense. Instead of the reinforcement checkbox there could be a retreat button next to each unit. When you click the retreat button that army would disappear from the list and the next one would promote up.

ChongLI wrote:
Basically, if you retreat an army from a battle the reinforcements still have the option to fight. The first reinforcement in the list (which you can already rearrange) would then become the main army of the battle.

Interesting. That would certainly make protecting settlers much more feasible.

Antistone wrote:
That might be interesting, but it's incompatible with the basic system assumptions of Endless Legend. Even if you tried to apply a speed penalty to large armies, the armies would just split up, travel next to each other, and merge at their destination.

I don't mean speed in the sense of movement points here but in the sense of action points. Smaller armies have more action points per unit. This enables 2 small armies to harass a big army and slow it down dramatically. The solution for the big army player is to protect it. Think of a battleship or aircraft carrier being protected by a bunch of smaller ships.

Antistone wrote:


I can't tell what you're trying to say here.

Basically, if you retreat an army from a battle the reinforcements still have the option to fight. The first reinforcement in the list (which you can already rearrange) would then become the main army of the battle.

ChongLI wrote:
In general, I think a smaller army should be more mobile and able to react more readily than a large one.

That might be interesting, but it's incompatible with the basic system assumptions of Endless Legend. Even if you tried to apply a speed penalty to large armies, the armies would just split up, travel next to each other, and merge at their destination.

ChongLI wrote:
The big army would only pay the reinforcement penalty if it is not adjacent to your army. If it is adjacent to your army then it ought to be able to attack your army directly while the 1-unit scout army retreats.

I can't tell what you're trying to say here.

Antistone wrote:
Some observations about ChongLI's suggestions:



1. The general idea seems to be: you can always spend your movement points to move away from the attacker instead of fighting. That's an interesting idea for its potential to address the "race issue", where your pursuing army's ability to force a combat with my running army comes down to which one of us issues an order faster at the start of the next turn, but it's not really analogous to the existing retreat option; this isn't so much a fix for retreat as the elimination of the retreat mechanic plus an unrelated change addressing a different problem. (In particular, if you didn't anticipate getting attacked before issuing your move order for the turn, then retreating is probably not a viable option for you that turn under this proposal, no matter what else is going on.)

The anticipation issue is a matter of vision. Perhaps some of the movement and vision bonus items need to be revised, perhaps based on army size? In general, I think a smaller army should be more mobile and able to react more readily than a large one. This consistent with historical warfare and the idea of screening large armies with skirmishers and using scouts to try to slip past the skirmishers.

Antistone wrote:


1. (a) Also, this still doesn't completely fix the race issue, because by reacting faster than me, you can control the direction I retreat, which you couldn't have done if I reacted first. Also, I might not be able to retreat at all if you can slip a second army in behind me before attacking with your main army (the second army doesn't need to be strong enough to fight me), though that maneuver is probably too complicated to complete before I can get an order off if I anticipated it in the previous turn.



NOTE: I made an unrelated suggestion for addressing the race issue in this thread more than a month ago.

That is true, though I think my suggestion would make it much less of a problem than we have now. Ultimately, it'll be very hard to get rid of all the race issues. Another major one is the race to buy valuable resources/units/heroes from the market in multiplayer games.

Antistone wrote:


2. At first it looks like you can force a combat with me as long as you have more movement points remaining; however, moving next to an enemy army costs extra movement points! If you attack me in open terrain, I can spend 1 movement point to fall back a space, but you have to spend two movement points to follow me and attack again, and then I can repeat the process. This means my one-unit army standing in front of your 8-unit army can reduce your movement by half (more or less, depending on terrain) with exactly zero risk of taking damage unless you have at least double my movement speed. I'm guessing that wasn't your intent.

Oh yes, I wasn't aware of the 2MP cost for moving next to an enemy army. I don't see this as a problem, however. Using skirmishers to delay an army is an old and legitimate tactic. The counter to it is to field skirmishers of your own.

Antistone wrote:


3. I dislike the entire idea of penalizing armies for choosing not to reinforce; that implies that your nearby 1-unit scout army is a liability to your 8-unit main army, because if anyone attacks the scout, you either have to let your big army trickle in slowly as reinforcements (and get picked off 2-at-a-time) or they suffer the penalty for not reinforcing, both of which strike me as unfair. My main army shouldn't be forced to protect a nearby weaker army under any circumstances; if you want to kill my main army, you should be forced to attack it directly.

The big army would only pay the reinforcement penalty if it is not adjacent to your army. If it is adjacent to your army then it ought to be able to attack your army directly while the 1-unit scout army retreats.

ChongLI wrote:
After having read through all of the suggestions I have a proposal of my own (4 parts):



[LIST=1]

Armies that choose to retreat automatically move one hex in the opposite direction of their attacker if possible, taking no damage while doing so. Otherwise they move to another hex which is not adjacent to an enemy army. If either of these moves is impossible, the retreat fails and the army is destroyed. If the army is not adjacent to any enemy armies (because it is reinforcing another army), it need not move at all in order to successfully retreat.

Armies on the retreat are allowed to go to -1MP. This emergency movement point costs all of the units in the army half their HP, making it an option of last resort.

Armies which choose not to reinforce a battle automatically retreat instead, using the same mechanics as the above rules with the exception that they take no damage and are not destroyed if retreat is impossible. Instead, they are forced to reinforce if they are unable to retreat.

When an army attacks and its opponent retreats it gets its action point back. This allows a single army to pursue a fleeing settler and force it to retreat multiple times. Whether it successfully destroys the settler or not depends on the relative move speeds of the 2 sides and how far apart they were at the beginning of the sequence.

[/LIST]



What does everyone think? From what I can tell, it solves most of the problems of fast-clicking and scouting. Surrounding an army (or city) with weak units is only temporary because all of the units are forced to retreat and move away (breaking the siege). On the other hand, legitimately wanting to retreat from a siege where the enemy mustered up a superior defending force is still possible. Scouting and sending out lone settlers is also possible as long as they are careful about where they move and plan their retreat path ahead of time. This makes the game more strategic by making vision, move speed and terrain features more important.

I like it.

Antistone wrote:
I'm all in favor of people playing the game in whatever way is most enjoyable, but design flaws are the designer's fault, never the players' fault, and it is totally legitimate to complain about design flaws even if there are ways you could potentially play around them.



I also frequently feel that the people saying "just don't do that" are ignoring legitimate difficulties with their proposal.



For one, the exploitive behavior is often on a continuum between "X was obviously intended" and "Y is obviously an unintended exploit", with a gray area in the middle, and whoever plays in the darkest gray gets an advantage over the others. With no bright-line rule between "good" and "bad" play, everyone is encouraged to play just a little bit looser with the rules, drifting ever closer to the exploit you originally complained about, and the most principled players are at the biggest disadvantage. That's hardly a good outcome.



For another, if you play with strangers online, are you seriously going to discuss your house rules with them and demand they agree to them before the game starts? The logistical burdens and social costs there aren't trivial. Even if you do, how are you going to enforce that? If you're 6 hours into a 12 hour game and suddenly discover that someone's been breaking your house rule for the past hour (possibly because they're a jerk, but more likely because they misunderstood or forgot), pretty much your only options are to scrap the game or give up your house rules.

I agree with this. Exploits are natural for the player to use, and therefore important for the designer to fix. Rank has nothing to do with it. No one plays a game to lose.

Antistone wrote:
1.this isn't so much a fix for retreat as the elimination of the retreat mechanic plus an unrelated change addressing a different problem.

I don't know about that. It is certainly a significant change to the way retreating works, but it fills the same roles as the existing mechanic.

however, moving next to an enemy army costs extra movement points!

I'm pretty sure it only costs extra movement points when the movement both begins and ends adjacent to an enemy unit. Pursuit of a retreating unit wouldn't begin next to an enemy unit (well, unless there were other units around). And if attacking doesn't cost AP until there's a resolution, the besieged army in the opening post can afford to clear the area of adjacent units.

3. I dislike the entire idea of penalizing armies for choosing not to reinforce; that implies that your nearby 1-unit scout army is a liability to your 8-unit main army, because if anyone attacks the scout, you either have to let your big army trickle in slowly as reinforcements (and get picked off 2-at-a-time) or they suffer the penalty for not reinforcing, both of which strike me as unfair. My main army shouldn't be forced to protect a nearby weaker army under any circumstances; if you want to kill my main army, you should be forced to attack it directly.

That's a good point. Of course, it's only necessary because of the siege aspect of the encirclement. Let me toss out an alternative way of dealing with the siege portion, in conjunction with ChongLI's other suggestions:



1) Units that begin their turn inside a besieged city may step onto the ramparts (the barricade marking the siege), but no further; friendly units starting outside the siege may step onto the ramparts, but no further; friendly units on the ramparts may go inside or outside

2) Cities with friendly units on their ramparts at the beginning of the turn don't take any siege damage

3) Only units on besieged hexes-- not outside reinforcements, not units on the ramparts-- receive fortification bonus



That allows abstractions of sallies and of smuggling in goods at great risk. It means the attacker has to really maintain a presence to deal siege damage, they can't just camp an eyeless one and say, "Quarantined! Our job is done." And it favors tall, borough-heavy play, which needs a bit of a boost anyways, as well as favoring cities located on chokepoints that need to be approached from both directions to effectively siege-- an important consideration to placement, at least in George RR Martin novels

taltamir wrote:
1. Don't do that. Don't play with people who do that.

Video games have rules enforced by the game engine for a reason. Telling players "just don't do that" is silly. We want to play the game by the rules that were designed by the developers and to feel like we're doing everything we possibly can in order to win.

taltamir wrote:
2. Superior army? You outnumbered him 2:1

Numbers aren't everything. My "army" was composed of free throw-away units the cultists get from their converted minor faction villages. His army was a highly-upgraded elite force commanded by a high level general.

taltamir wrote:


had he split his army and attacked with 1 unit at a time

>First attack with 1 unit

>You do not retreat, gang up on it and kill it

>Second attack through 5th attack

>Cannot bring in reinforcements since units can only reinforce once per round

>Retreat or fight

and two retreats = death

so, at the end of the first round doing that you would go from outnumbering him 10 to 5, to it being 8 to 4. Had you both had 10 units, the actual result would have been much harsher on you.

Splitting his army was impossible; there was simply no room to do so.

taltamir wrote:
3. That being said, this should be fixed.

I agree! Check out my suggestion a little ways up.

taltamir(emphasisadded) wrote:
>Second attack through 5th attack

>Cannot bring in reinforcements since units can only reinforce once per round

>Retreat or fight

I know that reinforcing on attack costs an action point, which prevents you from doing it more than once per round.



As previously discussed in this thread, reinforcing on defense does not cost an action point. Is there a separate mechanic saying that you can't reinforce on defense more than once per round? I don't think I've ever had that situation come up.

taltamir wrote:
Superior army? You outnumbered him 2:1

He implied that his units were no match for the enemy units in a 1-to-1 fight (or at least, that was my reading).

Some observations about ChongLI's suggestions:



1. The general idea seems to be: you can always spend your movement points to move away from the attacker instead of fighting. That's an interesting idea for its potential to address the "race issue", where your pursuing army's ability to force a combat with my running army comes down to which one of us issues an order faster at the start of the next turn, but it's not really analogous to the existing retreat option; this isn't so much a fix for retreat as the elimination of the retreat mechanic plus an unrelated change addressing a different problem. (In particular, if you didn't anticipate getting attacked before issuing your move order for the turn, then retreating is probably not a viable option for you that turn under this proposal, no matter what else is going on.)



1. (a) Also, this still doesn't completely fix the race issue, because by reacting faster than me, you can control the direction I retreat, which you couldn't have done if I reacted first. Also, I might not be able to retreat at all if you can slip a second army in behind me before attacking with your main army (the second army doesn't need to be strong enough to fight me), though that maneuver is probably too complicated to complete before I can get an order off if I anticipated it in the previous turn.



NOTE: I made an unrelated suggestion for addressing the race issue in this thread more than a month ago.



2. At first it looks like you can force a combat with me as long as you have more movement points remaining; however, moving next to an enemy army costs extra movement points! If you attack me in open terrain, I can spend 1 movement point to fall back a space, but you have to spend two movement points to follow me and attack again, and then I can repeat the process. This means my one-unit army standing in front of your 8-unit army can reduce your movement by half (more or less, depending on terrain) with exactly zero risk of taking damage unless you have at least double my movement speed. I'm guessing that wasn't your intent.



3. I dislike the entire idea of penalizing armies for choosing not to reinforce; that implies that your nearby 1-unit scout army is a liability to your 8-unit main army, because if anyone attacks the scout, you either have to let your big army trickle in slowly as reinforcements (and get picked off 2-at-a-time) or they suffer the penalty for not reinforcing, both of which strike me as unfair. My main army shouldn't be forced to protect a nearby weaker army under any circumstances; if you want to kill my main army, you should be forced to attack it directly.

ChongLI wrote:
TLDR; I was able to overcome a superior army with weak units by exploiting the retreat and siege mechanics.

1. Don't do that. Don't play with people who do that.



2. Superior army? You outnumbered him 2:1

had he split his army and attacked with 1 unit at a time

>First attack with 1 unit

>You do not retreat, gang up on it and kill it

>Second attack through 5th attack

>Cannot bring in reinforcements since units can only reinforce once per round

>Retreat or fight

and two retreats = death

so, at the end of the first round doing that you would go from outnumbering him 10 to 5, to it being 8 to 4. Had you both had 10 units, the actual result would have been much harsher on you.



3. That being said, this should be fixed.

Propbuddha wrote:
And if the Settler is just as cheap as a throw away scout (a whole other discussion)

Tigregalis wrote:
He said a scout is just as expensive as a Settler.

What I actually said was that the scout was

natev wrote:
only marginally less expensive than the settler

How wide is that margin? With Broken Lords, the cost can be collapsed onto a single axis. A starting stalwart (naked) costs 78 industry. A starting settler costs 160 industry (134 + 1 pop (= 52 dust, ~ 26 industry)). So a scout costs about half as much as a settler. I'll grant that my original wording minimizes the difference, but we're not comparing dirt to diamonds, we're comparing 2% milk to half-and-half (I'm having my morning coffee ). Losing two naked scouts is a cost equivalent to losing one naked settler. Losing a scout is better than losing a settler, but if you're feeling the cost of one, you're going to feel the cost of the other.

ChongLI wrote:
After having read through all of the suggestions I have a proposal of my own (4 parts):

At first glance, that seems like it would solve the problem (and some others as well), and is pretty intuitive. You've got my support!

After having read through all of the suggestions I have a proposal of my own (4 parts):



[LIST=1]

Armies that choose to retreat automatically move one hex in the opposite direction of their attacker if possible, taking no damage while doing so. Otherwise they move to another hex which is not adjacent to an enemy army. If either of these moves is impossible, the retreat fails and the army is destroyed. If the army is not adjacent to any enemy armies (because it is reinforcing another army), it need not move at all in order to successfully retreat.

Armies on the retreat are allowed to go to -1MP. This emergency movement point costs all of the units in the army half their HP, making it an option of last resort.

Armies which choose not to reinforce a battle automatically retreat instead, using the same mechanics as the above rules with the exception that they take no damage and are not destroyed if retreat is impossible. Instead, they are forced to reinforce if they are unable to retreat.

When an army attacks and its opponent retreats it gets its action point back. This allows a single army to pursue a fleeing settler and force it to retreat multiple times. Whether it successfully destroys the settler or not depends on the relative move speeds of the 2 sides and how far apart they were at the beginning of the sequence.

[/LIST]



What does everyone think? From what I can tell, it solves most of the problems of fast-clicking and scouting. Surrounding an army (or city) with weak units is only temporary because all of the units are forced to retreat and move away (breaking the siege). On the other hand, legitimately wanting to retreat from a siege where the enemy mustered up a superior defending force is still possible. Scouting and sending out lone settlers is also possible as long as they are careful about where they move and plan their retreat path ahead of time. This makes the game more strategic by making vision, move speed and terrain features more important.

It's not a contrived scenario, it's something I did repeatedly in my last game.



But yes, it would be preferable if the rules protected you from every contrived scenario. I don't see how this plan is so much better than alternative proposals that don't have this problem that it should be able to ignore it.

Check out the dates, penguin There have been two patches since this. The biggest change is that armies laying siege can no longer retreat. While it's probably still possible to abuse the mechanics, in my experience, it's not worth the upkeep, hassle, and attrition.

You could simply:

1. Make seiging use an action point, so you cannot seige after participating in a battle, and;

2. Make it so that all armies directly adjacent to the two fighting forces are automatically drawn into battle as reinforcements.



this way, close formation army swarms are all drawn into the fight anyway. They wont be drawn in if there are tile gaps between them, but this nullifies most of the army swarm tricks. e.g. In the original seige example, when the seiged army attacks, all surrounding units are drawn in and cannot seige till the next turn.