This doesn't address the retreat mechanic or even the unit swarm exploit directly, but what if the swarm of size 1 armies strategy could be penalized by drastically increasing the dust maintenance cost of additional armies, especially small armies? My goal is to make it so that eight single-unit armies performing this retreat-and-replace tactic would cost you dust compared to sieging with a "normal" configuration like two size-4 armies. Maybe your empire is rich and powerful enough to afford the dust for this expensive military tactic, in which case you deserve to crush your enemy, but in an even match you wouldn't be able to afford cheesing your opponent this way.



I don't know exactly how army maintenance is calculated now, but I think each army costs the same amount of maintenance, no matter how many you have. Instead, we could have the costs go up for each additional army, or for each additional 1-unit army. So the overall cost would be quadratic in the number of armies. Or the "too many armies" penalty could start kicking in after exceeding some "expected number of armies" that could depend on era or map size or number of units.



Say that right now each army costs 4 dust.



Option A: the 5th army costs 6 dust, the 6th army costs 8 dust, the 7th army costs 10 dust, etc.



Option B: each single-unit army costs 2 extra dust for every other single-unit army you have. So, for a brief period of time, you could afford to field two single-unit armies (extra 4 dust per turn) or three single-unit armies (extra 12 dust per turn). But eight single-unit armies would cost 8*7*2 = 112 extra dust per turn.

Perhaps retreat should always trigger the Manual battle option, and there be a couple of target points (so one point can't just be camped) that you have to move your unit to.

Some possible ideas for improvements:



Reinforcements should only lose their action point when actually called upon in battle, but not when enemy retreats.



Make retreat damage scale with relative strenght of attacker vs defender.

That would remove the need of splitting armies as the final effect would be the same.

Propbuddha wrote:
taltamir, there's nothing preventing another enemy stack from walking up and starting a separate siege.

I don't see a problem here. Its perfectly legitimate to have a new stack come in an siege. the issue is that is abusable with 1 unit armies. If the enemy took 50% HP damage by retreating to all 6+ sieging units, then it is a fair enough scenario.

Antistone wrote:
Multiple problems with this solution have already been pointed out in this thread, with the most serious (IMO) being that the defender can now wreck your 8-unit army by attacking your 1-unit army (the 8-unit army either takes 50% damage from retreating, or trickles in as reinforcements and gets picked off 2 units at a time).

That is a separate existing issue with reinforcement system in general that is not limited to sieges.



Also, this scenario cannot be forced on a player by another player. As you can choose to not place that 1 unit army on the siege line. (its still available for reinforcements if it is 1 hex behind it.

Unlike encircling a city with 1 unit armies which forces this issue on the other player.

Propbuddha wrote:
How did you do something that isn't in the rules yet?

"Sieging with a weak army and a strong army" is already in the rules. The part that isn't in the rules yet is the bit where this makes you horribly vulnerable to cheesy tactics in a way that sieging with just the strong army doesn't.

Sorry I reworded that, I meant protect a player from making a mistake.



How did you do something that isn't in the rules yet?

Antistone wrote:
That's why I suggested that defeating the largest sieging army (or forcing them to retreat) should break the siege for the rest of the current turn. If I've got two 8-unit armies and one 1-unit army sieging you, killing the 1-unit army shouldn't give you a free pass, but if you kill one of the 8-unit armies I'm willing to say that you've breached the siege perimeter and opened a supply route for a turn (my remaining armies can resume the siege next turn--or attack your city on the current turn, if I think I can take it).

Pardon me, I must have missed that part.



I think that'd solve these problems, and is a fine solution.

Or I suppose you could generalize my original idea and say "the attacker is refunded their action point if they win (whether the defender retreats or is wiped out)". At which point action points are barely limiting anything at all (they still matter if you draw), but I don't immediately see any disasters that would result.

The action point mechanic doesn't do a whole lot anyways-- it prevents reinforcing multiple times, but wrongly as often as rightly. I get the feeling it was intended to keep a check on high movement armies, but reasonable army quantities aren't so extreme that it matters, and movement is still a god-stat. Llike I said, I'm a fan of the attack-twice-to-break-retreat mechanic, I think it's an important check, so as long as you don't let one particular unit attack another particular unit twice in a single turn, I don't think the game would suffer noticeably from becoming a lot more forgiving about AP. (But I don't know, maybe there's some good reason for it that I haven't considered.)

You siege with a weak army and a strong army, you risk this. So what? Do the rules need to protect the player from making dumb moves?



I see this as interesting game play. Want to break the siege? Attack the weak point...

You misunderstand; I never meant to imply that your opponent only needed a single unit to do this.



I meant that (for example) your opponent's 6-unit army can wreck your 8-unit army by attacking your nearby 1-unit army. Normally, your 8-unit army would presumably be at an advantage against their 6-unit army. But if they are only acting as reinforcements to your 1-unit army, the enemy will probably have significantly more units on the field at all points during the battle, so you'll probably lose; alternately, if you retreat, all 9 of your units are damaged 50%, and their army is still inside their fortifications.



Now, yes, you could choose not to bring the 1-unit army and siege with only the 8-unit army. But that means your 1-unit army might have to go out of its way to avoid the siege (you can't siege a city with only some of your adjacent armies, at least under the current UI), and there's no particular reason that you shouldn't be able to bring the 1-unit army along except that taltamir has invented a magical mechanic that arbitrarily punishes you for it (under the current rules, it would be vulnerable, but it wouldn't inherently make your main army vulnerable, and it could help by speeding up the siege and/or acting as a reinforcement when you eventually attack).

Antistone wrote:
Multiple problems with this solution have already been pointed out in this thread, with the most serious (IMO) being that the defender can now wreck your 8-unit army by attacking your 1-unit army (the 8-unit army either takes 50% damage from retreating, or trickles in as reinforcements and gets picked off 2 units at a time).

Do you really think that's an issue?



If a one unit army can "wreak" a 9-unit force, even if they reinforce 2 units a round, either the player skill gap is huge or the unit power gap is huge. Since this can happen anywhere on the map. it has nothing to do with siege.



taltamir, there's nothing preventing another enemy stack from walking up and starting a separate siege.

taltamir wrote:
game theory and the priority of fixing this aside, the solution is actually super simple:

- if an army that is besieging a city is attacked, all other armies that are also besieging that very same city cannot be unchecked as reinforcements. they must all participate in the battle or they must all retreat (thus all of them taking the 50% HP Damage)

ancillary armies that are in the reinforcement zone but are not besieging can be unchecked normally.

Multiple problems with this solution have already been pointed out in this thread, with the most serious (IMO) being that the defender can now wreck your 8-unit army by attacking your 1-unit army (the 8-unit army either takes 50% damage from retreating, or trickles in as reinforcements and gets picked off 2 units at a time).

game theory and the priority of fixing this aside, the solution is actually super simple:

- if an army that is besieging a city is attacked, all other armies that are also besieging that very same city cannot be unchecked as reinforcements. they must all participate in the battle or they must all retreat (thus all of them taking the 50% HP Damage)

ancillary armies that are in the reinforcement zone but are not besieging can be unchecked normally.

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

Platitudes. And I didn't say that the design flaw is the players fault, I said that WALLOWING in the design flaw instead of working around it is something you shouldn't do. Further, that this PARTICULAR design flaw doesn't even need to be worked around because it is NOT something you can do accidentally. This requires a deliberate attempt to break the game by creating an edge case.

Antistone wrote:
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?

Don't need to, this is a very unusual edge case and pretty much everyone can agree that you should not do it.

Also, if you have ever played games online before, you would know that people refuse to play with people who play in ways they disapprove of all the time, and that isn't for stuff that is universally derided as bad. People have no problem at all "coordinating" (or more often, not coordinating and just not playing with people who offend them)

Antistone wrote:
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.

THIS. "House rules" are annoying enough even in single player games. They take away from the pleasant focus of trying to beat the game and keep you constantly asking yourself "am I being successful because I'm smart or am I just exploiting?"



House rules are even more jarring when playing multiplayer with friends, and they're completely unfeasable when playing with strangers. To get around a game balance problem with a house rule is a mitigation of the problem, NOT a solution.

Antistone wrote:
Any proposals for how you would "fix" the retreating issue?

It actually is a tough situation, and the top post is a great example of the worst case scenario.



It wouldn't even help to permit multiple attacks on one turn unless you implement some kind of non-block for retreaters and lift siege once all sieging units are defeated-- otherwise, the army in the picture is still just stuck in the city.



Requiring an action point to siege doesn't much matter-- that siege is just the cherry on top of surrounding a large army with worthless armies. You don't even need to be close to a city to nullify a large army in this manner. Especially since 8-unit armies eventually become the norm, this is a strong strategy (when you have enough movement to do so).



Forcing reinforcements introduces new problems-- for instance, it becomes impossible to kill settlers by "surrounding" them (basically, just dividing your army in order to strike twice in one turn).



Removing all MP from a retreating unit turns retreat into a pretty useless mechanic. There'd be no escape.



I don't have any solutions myself, just interested in what a difficult problem it is to solve.

natev wrote:
Oh? I don't think of it as a meta-trick-- it's just encirclement, which usually carries a risk in splitting your forces. I think that's what Amplitude were getting at with making retreat work in the way it does. If you outnumber an enemy 2:1, you can deal with the risks associated with trying to wipe them out. I don't think it's so inobvious either, but a pretty basic trick players realize quickly.

Have you ever seen the AI use this trick? If not, I'm inclined to say it's an unintended exploit. If this were an intentional feature of the design, I think they would have programmed the AI to take advantage of it.



I managed to get through several games without thinking of this trick, and only discovered it when I saw it discussed on the forums. (Admittedly, I rarely focus on the military aspects of the game.)



And I'm not convinced it's much of a maneuvering risk when your armies can reinforce each other at the rate of 2 units per combat round. At the start of the game, armies are only 4 units max; split that in half, and even if you get attacked by surprise, you'll still have all 4 units on the field in the first round.

Propbuddha wrote:
Good points. Maybe instead of starting a siege, should be "starting a siege or starting your turn in siege".

At that point, you're pretty much saying that you can never retreat while participating in a siege.



One not-insignificant problem with that is that you currently aren't allowed to siege a city with some of the armies surrounding it unless you siege with all those armies. That could be changed, but would complicate the user interface and risks confusing the defender as to which armies are participating and which aren't. Even if this change would make the game better, considering that this still doesn't really solve the key problems, I think it's highly questionable whether it's worth the trouble (dev time, learning curve, additional time spent fiddling with sieges due to the increased complexity).



But setting that aside, do you really feel that you should never be able to retreat from a siege? That seems a bit arbitrary to me.







I notice that no one seems to have commented on any of the ideas I brought up in my first post.

I think there are reasons for retreat to exist, and I don't think the mechanic is so broken as to require scrapping it completely!



Here's the first thing I can think of. I think it's pretty simple:



Keep track of action points on a per-unit basis rather than a per-army basis and allow individual units to launch attacks.



The game changes almost imperceptibly with this change in any non-exploitative situations, but in the situation described in the top post, all the attacker has to do is select a few units, attack, select the other units, attack again. (They retain the potential risk involved in splitting their force.)



If you want to go one step further:



Apply reinforcement decisions to all same-turn battles involving a particular unit. So then the defender would have to choose to reinforce or not against ALL attacks, and couldn't choose to reinforce the second battle but not the first battle. (At that point, you'd want to allow the attacker to be able to include his entire army as reinforcement as well, and you'd have a bit of a guessing game going on between attacker and defender.)

Antistone wrote:
I think that current trick is an awful way to kill settlers and scouts.

Oh? I don't think of it as a meta-trick-- it's just encirclement, which usually carries a risk in splitting your forces. I think that's what Amplitude were getting at with making retreat work in the way it does. If you outnumber an enemy 2:1, you can deal with the risks associated with trying to wipe them out. I don't think it's so inobvious either, but a pretty basic trick players realize quickly.

natev wrote:
Forcing reinforcements introduces new problems-- for instance, it becomes impossible to kill settlers by "surrounding" them (basically, just dividing your army in order to strike twice in one turn).

I think that current trick is an awful way to kill settlers and scouts. It's counter-intuitive (new players aren't likely to consider it), it's based on a fluid variable ("number of armies" you have on scene can change wildly in a single turn for almost no cost), and it exacerbates timing issues (if they can order their settler to move away before you can order the second attack, they can escape, so the outcome depends heavily on who's quicker on the draw)



If you must have a way to block retreats, it should be tied to an actual combat variable, not a meta-game trick. Maybe you can't retreat if you're outnumbered at least 3-to-1, or if the attacker has at least 1.5x your speed; or maybe you take a variable amount of damage depending on the situation, like how the attacker can take a free volley at a retreating fleet in Endless Space, and with an extreme advantage the penalty gradually scales up to 100%; or maybe when you retreat, you get some sort of movement penalty, or the attacker can partially control your movement or something.



But saying you can sometimes retreat and sometimes can't, based on the number of armies there, is dumb.

Good points. Maybe instead of starting a siege, should be "starting a siege or starting your turn in siege". But you are right that another unit could come in and replace the destroyed one. However, the attacker should be able to move into the destroyed army's space if they have MP left (unless the other player fast clicks into the spot).



Unfortunately, there's no solution to the problem above with the game mechanics as is. A player with endless armies and enough to upkeep them can swarm whatever they want.