Hi! This time it will be short (or not). Check out my proposal on how to make ground battle both quick and cool!

A. Preparation phase.

Adversaries don't know about each other's choices during this phase - just like in the currently existing system.

1. During an invasion, each party - Attacker and Defender - controls 3 regiments. They can set them to be equal (M+M+M) or differently sized (S+M+L, or ).

2. Attacker and Defender see a schematic map of battleground consisting of 3 Zones:

	- this is military infrastructure
	- this is buildings
	- this is residential areas

3. Players can choose objectives (directions of advancement) to their regiments.

Defender allocates its regiments at Zones.

Attacker's	view		Defender's view

4. When the battle launches there are 3 separate Fronts. Number of Battle Turns may be different in the Fronts - that depends on Battle Modes chosen by Attacker and Defender.

Fights in  and  Zones cause Collateral Damage: either buildings or pops might be lost. This depend on Battle Modes of Attacker and Defender regiments and on total damage dealt by Attacker during Battle Turns.

Eliminating a defending regiment in  Zone has an effect during the rest of the battle and in further battles in this system until one of the parties loses/withdraws.

Eliminating a defending regiment in any Zone has consequences on macro scale:

Zone	Battle Turn effect or Collateral Damage	Macro effect
	Consequent Battle Turns and Battles: Defender regiments suffer from debuffs on the other 2 Fronts.	Manpower in the node replenishes slower; military buildings are disabled.
	Collateral Damage: buildings destroyed.	Non-military buildings are disabled; attacker can sell 1 of them after the battle.
	Collateral Damage: pops killed.	Production from population and Planets is heavily decreased; increases the opponent's war weariness.

5. Attacker and Defender can choose Battle Modes for each regiment separately. Examples:

Offensive: 

Blitz - quite the same as now.

Skirmish - like "Infiltrate"

Demolition - no modifiers from the battle mode, but more Collateral Damage

Reconnaissance - less damage, but a buff to the other your regiments in the next Battle Turn if the reconnaissance regiment survives the current battle turn.

<...>

6. Finish him!

If one of the parties have 4 times less battle strength than the other at the end of the battle, the battle continues till elimination of the weaker party with respective casualties on the winner's side - at this final turn all the regiments merge and do not have any Battle Mode modifier. Collateral Damage is not applied.

B. Battle Animation

It may be quite a similar to the current one, though a visualization of the 3 Zones is required and forces are split into 3 regiments. If a battle at one Front ends and at the other proceeds, a regiment is idle or occupying a Zone (or singing an intimidating battle march).

C. Reinforcements

A ground battle can only occur once per turn at a specific node.

If Attacker fails to occupy all the Zones, other invading fleets can send reinforcements.  I suppose maximum of invading troops shall be proportional to the current population of the system or a similar variable, thus representing a width of front and maintenance capacity. Reinforcements could be deployed if a battle in not ongoing. An invader can withdraw its troops which increases manpower on-board and cancels Zone occupation.

D. The Battle continues...

If both armies survive and the attacker does not withdraw, the battle automatically continues at the beginning of the next turn involving the Attacker's reinforcements - as well as restored manpower of Defender. But now some of Attacker regiments are trying to occupy Zones again while the others should hold the ones occupied in the previous Macro turns. That means that some of the Attacker regiments have Defensive Battle Modes and vice versa. During this new preparation phase both parties may alter switch locations of their regiments (if you occupied  with  last turn, now you can place  in that Zone to defend it). This is how a preparation window may look on the second/third/etc turn of invasion: 

	Attacker	view		Defender	view
Offensive Mode	>>					Defensive Mode
Defensive Mode					<<	Offensive Mode
Offensive Mode	>>					Defensive Mode

That's it for tonight. See you another time!

lo_fabre wrote:

Good ideas here.

My only concern is if this would be too difficult to implement for Amplitude with actual game issues and state.

Hi! I kept in mind that the system should not be overcomplicated for Devs and players. I presume that most changes this system requires could be done by copying features from other ES2 design areas and by linking variables that already exist in game. For example, 3 Fronts are rather +2 copies of the currently existing ground battle algorithm. As for visual part, it remains quite the same except for preparation screen that could be implemented by using the same battle animation screen and adding several icons for battle modes, placing regiments and showing Zones. 

If you have an insight in what's the most difficult to implement within the system, or a suggestion on how it make it easier, your suggestions are always welcome!

After all, I don't remember a space 4x where ground battles are more interesting than just a throw of dice. If ES2 changes this trend, it will be widely appreciated I presume.