Hi everybody,

Abstract (tl;dr):

The current capture the flag battle style in opendev makes, despite of sieges, no sense, as defending or conquering an arbitrary point on the battle map is historically not accurate and leads to an unnormal play style. A more elaborate system, where one tries to capture existing structures of the enemy is proposed and the outcome of a battle should have a stability impact on your and your opponent cities. Lastly, I introduce the Warscore mechanic, which gets calculated by won battles and Victory Points, which are generated by occupying important enemy structures.

Playing the battles presented in opendev, I found the design to make every battle a "capture the flag" skirmish not quite fitting. Firstly, I want to summarise what problems I see with the current system. Secondly, I introduce an alternative system, which dynamically changes the goals in a battle, depending if you fight on neutral ground or in your or your enemies teritories. Thirdly, I suggest a Warscore mechanic, which generates its score by won battles and occupied Victory Points. The latter will be defined as well.

The current battle system

Right now, you can win battles by completly destroying your opponent forces, by conquering the enemy flag (if you are the attacker) or holding your on flag (as defender). While I can see this system work in sieges quite well, when you have a conflict on open ground, I could not see the reason to focus everything in a fight on one random placed flag on a tile with no spezial meaning for either side. When two armies collide on a field (which happend historically very often, ranging from battles of the roman empire to the Napoleon battle of Waterloo as example), the main goal in this fight were to inflict more damage to the enemy than to receive. Especially in the last opendev battle (Japan vs Korea), where you play a completly outmatched Japanese on defensive position, you where able to hide your units from the enemy mortars and defend your flag for eternity, since the opponent never wanted to cross the river. So, although getting completly smashed by the opponent and loosing heavily, I was victorious, since I controlled the flag. This did not represent the outcome battle at all.

What to change? Alternative goals in battles

Static flags you must conquer make - in my opinion - only sense, when the place has some form of interessed to either sides. Let's say you put a flag on resources you or your enemy control and use, or on outpost, or on forts, and so on. Capturing these points is then your goal in the battle and the defender tries to hold them as they don't want to lose them. Of course on could just destroy the enemy forces, resulting in conquering all points dy default. This concept would give two things: First, you want to try to fight far away from your territory and close to the enemy position. Second, in later stages of the game you could create a front line by this, by peu à peu gaining more resources and outposts from your enemy and thus slowly winning the war.
But what happens, when you fight on neutral ground, when there are no own or enemy territories? Well, then the goal in the battle is to destroy the enemy army, or at least inflict more damage than receiving.
To motivate the player to fight as good as possible, I would suggest, that battles lead to a stability gain or loss, depending how devastating they concluded. Based on history, in the ancient times normally there was one (or a few) battles which decided whole wars. Only later, when it was more important to control or weaken the enemy war production, the actual value of single battles diminished rapitly.
So if you win a major victory you gain a boost in your cities (war propaganda), while the enemy losses morale. Sure there could be more battle outcomes like minor victory, draw, or

Pyrrhus victory (every side losses stability).

Warscore and Victory Points

Assume each city has an importance value based on different parameters like population, production, number of infrastructure building, number of extensions, if it's your capital city, and so on. Now, if your opponent conquers an outpost of your city, because it was not adjacent to your main city and thus not in city walls, you lose food, production, gold income and the importance value shrinks. The difference between old and new value are the Victory Points generated for the other side in the war.

The Warscore is a value ranging from -1 to 1 and shows how good (positive) or bad (negative) your side stands in a war. Winning battles increases the score, while losing lowers it. Also occupying Victory points increases the value. Depending on the casus belli these things could be weighted differently and one could also introduce ticking warscores.

I would be happy to start a discussion with you guys, since I think, when battles have a specific focus in this game and are very detailed and quite long, they should also have a major impact on the war and the stability in your cities.

I do quite like the idea of flags being decided by important points on the map. I'm not sure I would remove the flag on neutral ground though. Personally I don't like the idea of battles to the death so I would definitely like some sort of points system to resolve who won and who lost. Capturing the flag could still work for that, maybe to represent capturing the enemy's camp and baggage (with perhaps appropriate penalties on the strategic level?)

I don't like the idea of stability hits at all though. First of, players don't need to be motivated to fight well. If we're attacking that army, or they're attacking us, we already don't want them to succeed. Moreover I feel like it would just be an unnecessary layer of frustration. Losing a battle is already frustrating, the negative effects on your empire would just compound that. I imagine that'd be even more the case for new players who haven't figured out combat yet or those players who don't particularly like war (and are likely auto resolving, which would make the AI responsible for that penalty). Basically, losing units, the strategic drawback of your army being forced to retreat, the potential loss of outposts or cities and the inherent frustration of defeat are penalties enough for losing without additional empire-wide effects.

It's hard to give feedback on your idea of warscore or victory points because, while you explained how the system might work, it's not clear what you want them to do? Do they help determine the stability hit? Are they for determining what you ask in peace deals? Are they there to force someone into peace?

Battles without a flag would only result in a battle to the death if you (or the enemy) are unable to retreat. If one side is definitive losing, then the player or AI should get out of the fight to avoid complete annihilation. Then the comparison between the starting army strength and the resulting strength can be used to evaluate the winning side. So it might be possible to inflict hugh damage to the enemy but still retreat, as you perhaps need your troops anywhere else on the map more importantly.

The idea of stability hits was motivated mainly by the historical influence of major battle to whole wars, especially in early eras. Since the battle system in Humankind is a unique characteristic, I feel that when you invest half an hour in combat and only one turn passes in the "real" world, the effects on the battles should be higher. But I understand your argumentation and see the problem in finding a balance between making the battle system new player friendly and challenging complex.

For Victory Points and Warscore: Victory Points should mainly indicate the player how important different objectives are in a war. Is it better to conquer this outpost or that one? How important is it to focus my troops on this city of the enemy, so if i capture it, what swing is it in the war?
With Warscore you can see how good or bad the war is going for you and ultimatly can get more or less claims for your side in a peace deal. Also it can be used during a war as a tool to analyse where to focus on. I keep this pretty vague, as there are several possible ways to implement such a system. But personally I like it, when the UI shows the player how the war is going and what objectives or battles were the reason why the Warscore shows the given value.

Narcisse wrote:

The purpose of the "capture the flag" thing is not to be historically accurate, but to have an anti-kiting / anti-camping mechanic (problem of endless legend)

All the fighting system of HK have abstractions, it's a non-sense to search an absolute historical accuracy on the fighting system, it's like chess or another tabletop ruleset, and most of the videogames obv. Maybe just the name or the lack of informations/tuto about this mechanic are confusing (some feedbacks about that)

Actually in siege battle, you can take the most important enemy structure : the city center.

And we don't know a lot of the mechanics which will be present in the released game, moral for exemple, retreating, etc ...

There is apparently some Militarist mission which give you Fame for your victory score, etc...

Looks really too soon to suggest more complexity, subsystems, alternative modes or stats.

I very much agree with you Narcisse. +1

I think that the goals in battle are fine as is right now. As stated by others, its fine to have just one flag to prevent kiting. However, I would say that capturing the flag is historically accurate. The flag represents the rear of the army, including headquarters, supply trains, and lines of communication back to friendly territory. The only in-battle effect I would change is penalties for not holding your flag, such as a combat strength decrease, or immediate retreat.

Stability and "warscore" are very hard to give feedback on, since we haven't seen any diplomacy during OpenDev. It sounds like you are going for systems that encourage loosing players to make peace early, but there would also need to be similar encouragement for the winning player to make peace as well.

We know than Hittites legacy trait is about "+20 moral when going to war". So I want to say ,wait and see, to know more about the game for the present.

Thanks everybody for the wonderful feedback and discussion.

You are right saying, that one has to wait and see what the game and the battle mechanics are going to be. Nevertheless, I think it's better to share such ideas as early as possible, as the develpers can potentially use some ideas and then have more time to implement them, if they find the feedback interessting. If they already planned to implement similar mechanics to the game then it's completly fine with me.

As I can see in the discussion the flag in every fight is seen mostly possitive by you guys. Personally I think that it enhances the camping attribute of battles, especially as a defender, as you can focus all your troops on one site. Furthermore, I can see scenarios where you, as an attacker, don't want to push forward, but soley weaken the opponent forces in their current position. To get back to the Korea vs Japan battle, it was clear, that the strength of Korea were their mortars, as the Japanese had no answer to them. On the other side, crossing the river with the inferior units would have been a loss of several units, as the Japanese had superior strength against that.
But for me it was absolutly strange, that after the battle, the strength comparission between the forces remained similar to before the fight, which generally favours the side with more manpower (Koreans), but only because the flag was protected, the Koreans had to retreat their superior position and the Japanese could push forwards.

werewolflord wrote:

In korea scenario, you are defending an outpost, so staying on your ground and not allowing the ennemy to take it should count as a win.

Then winning just make the loser retreat, which globally makes sense.

I agree with that and as I wrote before, I would like seeing these flags on outposts and other strategic sites but not randomly placed.

I like the warscore aspect... so long as it is tied into whatever diplomacy system the game has.  A high warscore and you get more in the peace negotiations.  A low warscore... and not so much.  Low enough, and you should be "forced" to take a "bad" deal for peace.

The rest of your idea supports this too as warscore can be awarded based on military losses and losing control of "important" tiles.  

I'm not a fan of the current capture the flag mechanic, but it doesn’t really conflict with the warscore concept.

tomatopp1 wrote:
In fact, i wonder if attacker shouldn't have a flag as well?

There is also one thing that disturb me, and do affect the objectives in battles I believe

And that is the fact that you don't have a way out of battle you can't win

Yes okay, in fact you can retreat on the prep phase, but I meant retreating during the actual battle

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, Amplitude needs to do more with the flag mechanic. One thing they should do is allow players to "retreat" units that start their turn on the flag tile.

Aye_Avast wrote:

tomatopp1 wrote:
In fact, i wonder if attacker shouldn't have a flag as well?

There is also one thing that disturb me, and do affect the objectives in battles I believe

And that is the fact that you don't have a way out of battle you can't win

Yes okay, in fact you can retreat on the prep phase, but I meant retreating during the actual battle

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, Amplitude needs to do more with the flag mechanic. One thing they should do is allow players to "retreat" units that start their turn on the flag tile.

yeah we should be able to reatreat during the battle, maybe activating a Retreat button would make our units able to retreat but unable to fight/have a Fleing -1 penalty and leave battle once near the flag. (if you don't have this kind of button then you can just remove damaged units from battle to easily and still win instead of keeping them in the rear, not sure its a good idea to allow this)

"Too easy" isn't a problem. Given the long range of units in the game currently, damaged units aren't safe anywhere on the tactical battle map. If a player is going to win anyways after removing units from battle, then the retreat option doesn't really impact their side of the battle. The loser would want some option to save a portion of their force.

tomatopp1 wrote:
Just imagine RTS like CoH if there was one single flag and each games were exactly 20min long and you only have to control the flag on the last second to win... terrible right?

Not if that RTS has you play across whole front with managing economy back home on top of that. There needs to be a balance in everything, battles are part of Humankind, not its main focus. You can't really have an intricate system that will force people to spend hours in one skirmish if there's empire waiting to be built, sitting around the corner. Good portion of playerbase won't even be that interested in waging wars, so system in place has to be possibly non-intrusive for them, preferably with autoresolve option that won't put them in too big disadvantage.

tomatopp1 wrote:

I get that HK main focus isn't necessarily the battle, unlike Total war or CoH

but even then, it can still improve its own features by looking at mechanics that did work (or not) in other games

To stay on the flag mechanic, the fact that they did added one was certainly a mean to either strategize more or avoid camping, maybe even to add objectives to the fight

The fact is... that it don't works

because you can just stand on your flag, and you will win anyway because the attacker will have a very hard time to either kill you or take the flag

Currently this mechanic is not working, and that is my problem with it

you misunderstood the "camping" thing. It's normal than the defender could camp his flag, ... it's the defender. In a real game, if you are the attacker, it's because you initiate the fight VOLUNTARILY. What the point of defenders if they can't defend their flag ?

The problem in endless legends was than a fast unit can run and kite all around the arena. In HK imagine a fast unit hiding and camping in fog of war, run away everywhere all around the arena to gain time... If all turns passed, it's a lose for the attackers.

The flag system work : the defenders are forced to confront the attackers OR to concede victory (retreating)

DNLH wrote:

tomatopp1 wrote:
Just imagine RTS like CoH if there was one single flag and each games were exactly 20min long and you only have to control the flag on the last second to win... terrible right?

Not if that RTS has you play across whole front with managing economy back home on top of that. There needs to be a balance in everything, battles are part of Humankind, not its main focus. You can't really have an intricate system that will force people to spend hours in one skirmish if there's empire waiting to be built, sitting around the corner. Good portion of playerbase won't even be that interested in waging wars, so system in place has to be possibly non-intrusive for them, preferably with autoresolve option that won't put them in too big disadvantage.

In my opinion the battle system is the main difference to the main competitor Civilization and thus there need to be a lot of focus on the system to please critics as well as the playerbase. And what I saw in OpenDev emphasised my assumtion, as there were two out of three scenarios, which focused on the battle and siege mechanics.
And if you're not interessted in fighting at all and just want to build up your empire and win by other conditions, then we have to wait how this is getting developed and how balanced this is going to be. But nevertheless, there must not be the argument, that "battles are not the main focus", as this is one of the flagships of the game and you don't want to make it too boring or too difficult or too [insert negative adjective here].
Ultimatly, it's a developer decission how important and time consuming each battle is in Humankind. Personally I like a more complex system, as this challanges the player more.

it would be good te be able to retreat while in a battle

also yeah can be annoying when battle is just shoot at that one elephant for 5 rounds and wait