|
jeffreysutro@jeffreysutro.com -> Commander Initiative in For Liberty (1/14/2007 1:21:01 AM)
|
quote:
In addition I have self-imposed a range of home-made rules upon myself which basically makes the game a lot harder for me while increasing the depth of the ‘people management’ aspects which I find personally very interesting. each commander must pass an ‘activation’ roll (similar to BoA) in order to move (they can always retreat) or take any offensive action. I roll a couple of dice and if the result is less than or equal to their Offensive + Defensive ratings combined then they are O.K.
This part of a post by Lancer on his excellent AAR got me to thinking. I really like the concept of commanders having "initiative" that influences how active they are. I would tend to tie it to readiness, making it a "special ability" that can be added to a commander, rather than being tied to the commanders attack and defense ratings. After all a commander can be a good battlefield soldier while still being slow about initiating campaigns or battles. George Thomas, the American Civil War general, and Bernard Montgomery the British World War II general are good examples of that.
I would propose that a commander with the "High Initiative" attribute would recover readiness more rapidly than a commander without the atribute, while a commander with "Low Initiative" would recover readiness more slowly. Presumably this feature would be fairly easy to add since it uses existing game mechanisms. I like this approach because it ties in with the type of decision making the player is already doing (eg. deciding whether a commander should be retained or replaced, deciding whether to attack immediately or wait for readiness to recover further, etc.), without adding "arbritary" restrictions on what a player can do. This avoids the frustration of having a unit refuse to move due to bad dice rolls, while still reflecting the fact that some commanders tend to be much more active than others.
That said, at this point For Liberty "feels' pretty much complete (at least to me) and I suspect that there will be few if any subsequent patches. In subsequent reaeases however I think that initiative is a feature that is well worth considering.
|
|
|
|
