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ericbabe -> RE: Guess where the French went? (11/4/2005 5:01:37 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Uncle_Joe
The things that occur in the game allow for hundreds of thousands of troops to base far from home. That is where it start to really strain believability. Part of the problem is that Depots are just a channel for your entire econ. If you have the money/food in
Frankly the mechanism I originally had to prevent this was supply costs. There is a penalty for large stacks and there is a large cost for every depot in the chain. There is also extra supply cost for operating in enemy territory and for operating in bad weather. There are also surrender-during-retreat penalties for units that are out of supply. Economies were limited by the very large waste rules we had. In early versions of the game players couldn't field enormous armies because the waste rules prevented their economies from being able to afford them. At the start of the 1805 scenario France immediately had to go into debt in order to continue to prosecute the war.
I found it to be a fairly elegant way of handling the problem -- you can field a big army far from home if you can keep the depot chain open and can afford to pay the huge costs. I reckoned it integrated the economy into military maneuvers and into politics very thoroughly. It encouraged players to save up resources when they anticipated war, to make their campaigns brief and decisive, and allowed the underdog the strategy of fighting a delaying campaign.
Secondly, the AI's advantage at harder levels is an economic advantage. This allows the AI to field larger armies than the player and to concentrate them farther from home than the player. It's AI handicapping, and it's a common computer game mechanism. Admittedly it does allow the AI to field larger than historical forces, even with the old waste rules, but it makes for a more challenging game and a more enjoyable game, in my opinion. I could have handicapped the AI by giving it large combat bonuses, but then you'd have the situation at harder levels where Turkish militia were better fighters than the French Old Guard, and then you'all would be (rightfully) complaining about that. I prefer the former situation. Any AI handicapping is going to make the game a-historical in some way, and no AI handicapping is going to make the game less challenging and thus less enjoyable. Faced with this situation we choose to err on the side of challenging/enjoyable.
Players didn't like the limited economy and the large waste rules, though. There were many irate posts to the effect "I've built a 2,000,000 man army, but why can't I afford it! This ruins the game for me." And the waste rules... we probably received more complaints about the large level of waste than we did about all other aspects of the game combined.
Consider France in the 1805 scenario: there are new players trying to figure out combat and movement rules, but we've thrust them into a situation where they're burdened with an army that they can't afford -- a perfectly historical situation for France at that time, but it's not perhaps the best way for new players to learn the game. Players want to move and fight, yet their most pressing concern is really the economics of supply, and they probably don't even realize it!
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