Mitigate "attacker's advantage" by moving a few units at a time

A good idea but a lot of details to work out. There is certainly something to be said about Endless Legend's iniative system (although I appreciate that's not exactly what you proposed; but maybe making it more explicit makes the system clearer and more accessible). In theory, that could still be implemented. For instance, cavalry gets higher iniative, archers and other long-distance units lower, all unit classes increase initiative through their upgrades over the eras. Maybe veterancy or tile attributes could influence initiative too.

In practice, I'm not sure it's going to happen at this point. Seems like a fairly deep revamp of how the combat engine works. But hey, if the engine is based off EL's, the functionality may still be there somewhere and it's not impossible.

In my separate idea on first-mover advantage I proposed enlarging deployment zones. I took a cue from e.g. the Age of Wonders series where I feel like it matters less who moves first. And that's because battle maps are much bigger and the attacker cannot typically cross distance to the enemy on round one. (And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to attack with full capacity). So, maybe giving an option to space the two sides farther apart at the start of combat could be an indirect way of migitating the advantage of going first. At least it seems like a less drastic change and so stands a bigger chance of implementation.

I agree with you that making the deployment zones be far apart instead of adjacent could help, but this breaks down when there's many units involved and the deployment zone becomes too big 

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docktorkain wrote:

I agree with you that making the deployment zones be far apart instead of adjacent could help, but this breaks down when there's many units involved and the deployment zone becomes too big 

Good point. Larger deployment zones will work less well in later eras with larger unit counts. Which is arguably where the first-mover advantage would be most impactful.

Maybe one other idea: in the first round, make reinforcements move after the "main battle's" units. Any units moved in the battle area after the battle was iniated would not be part of the initial "salvo". A bit more like the Endless Legend model how reinforcements joined the battle gradually. In practical terms, it would look something like this:

Round 1:

All the attacker's units initially caught in the battle zone act.

All the defender's units initially caught in the battle zone act.

All the attacker's reinforcements take actions

All the defender's reinforcements take actions

Round 2 and 3: as currently.

The order of movement could also be broken up a bit, such that defender's reinforcements act before attacker's reinforcements. Or more broadly that first-mover advantage changes over the battle, i.e. Round 2: defender moves first, and thus twice in a row, and in round 3 attacker moves first in a row.

Probably none of these really get at the heart of the problem. I'm just throwing around some smaller, narrower ideas, in case full-on initiative implemention would be too big a change for the devs to implement.