Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => The Theory of Everything => Topic started by: Sardaukar on February 23, 2023, 09:16:39 PM

Title: 4X - A new model for warfare?
Post by: Sardaukar on February 23, 2023, 09:16:39 PM

The GLSMAC project is becoming very exciting. The author intends to first replicate the original design of the game and then open GLSMAC up to modding. Am not yet sure how powerful the modding tools will be but he's mentioned that it will be possible to create a 3D globe world map rather than the traditional 2D cylinder.

It's got me thinking about the way 4X genre simulates the activity of civilizations.

Unit movement is particular is weirdly abstracted. It would not take a recon rover twenty years to cross a continent. This then translates into a very odd simulation of warfare; wherein conflicts last for a good fifty years. CivII highlighted this discrepancy with the obvious contrast between ordinary late game warfare and the WWII scenario, where each turn was equivalent to a couple months.

I'm considering a new way of simulating warfare; a radical reinterpretation of 4X:

When vendetta begins, each one year turn is divided into 10 Chiron-months. (This could be some other number.) Production still only happens at the end of each year/each 10 chiron-month-sub-turns. There would need to be a mechanism to keep players from exploiting vendetta for purposes of exploration. Perhaps if you move a unit into unexplored territory, it exhausts its remaining movement for the rest of the year.

With the sub-turns for vendetta mechanism, you'll have wars that take a few years to resolve, with troop movements and tactical maneuvers taking place over a matter of months. The risk of such an approach is long term vendetta that bogs down gameplay by forcing you to move your units 10 times every turn/year as Yang declares war on you and just sits on another continent without attacking. This solution to this problem could be a mechanic for economic war weariness, which forces truce after a while, depending on the factors involved.

Something along these lines would make gameplay not only more realistic but also more tactically interesting.

Title: Re: 4X - A new model for warfare?
Post by: DrazharLn on February 24, 2023, 01:58:03 AM

There's a similar idea in other 4Xs. Endless Legend and Humankind (and Age of Wonders Planetfall, Sword of the Stars, and of course the Total War series) handle the incongruently long wars in Civ by moving to a tactical map when battles are fought, which means that each battle is fought within a single strategic turn, and if the outcome of the battle was not decisive then you fight another battle on another turn, which makes sense to me.

I like Humankind and Endless Legend's gimmick for this, which is that the tactical battles are fought on the strategic map. Here's a clip where you can see an army engaging another on the strategic map and how that turns into a tactical battle fought on a subsection of that same map:

(starts at 3m 10s)

It does mean that you're nesting one game within another and a problem with many of these games is that either the strategic or tactical level isn't very good and you end up just wanting to skip easier battles to play the strategy game or just play the tactical battle game.

Title: Re: 4X - A new model for warfare?
Post by: Sardaukar on February 24, 2023, 06:07:48 PM

Haven't played these other games so can't compare. Humankind sounds good. SMAC combat already can be pretty good. It's just that the timespan and movement distances are incongruous. Hence the idea for strategic sub-turns.

I mostly play multiplayer PBEM. You get 5-7 players, turns can take a while. If vendetta were a limited type of special turn with a mechanic that forced truce after a couple years, it would be possible, theoretically, to rig up the main game so you could play each non-vendetta year/turn independently and upload them individually to the main savegame file. Something like this:

(a) Everyone downloads main game file.
(b) Everyone plays independently.
(c) All players upload their independent turns to the main file.
(d) Repeat.

You'd perhaps need some kind of traffic control to keep units from running into each other but I think it would be easier to dictate that you cannot enter non-allied territory outside of vendetta (or without right-of-passage agreement) but units from different factions can stack in the same tile in neutral terrain. Would need a button to manually declare vendetta at end of turn which would initiate the sub-turn strategic movement phases in the following year.

This is all pretty far out and different from the original SMAC but am just considering how to make a more realistic simulation and whether that would make better gameplay. If it doesn't prove to be an overall improvement, what's the point?

On the same lines, I've experimented with radically increased core movement values, with the logic that technological mobility should allow more fluid maneuvers. Infantry have 4 movement, rovers have 6, etc. Infantry better at attacking fortified positions. Rovers get big bonus in the open. This synced very well with the Will to Power (mod) setting to forbid use of roads in hostile territory. The invader lacks the logistical infrastructure which the defender can use to move equipment around. While promising, a number of problems did crop up.

(a) Artillery need farther range.
(b) Aircraft with vastly increased (i.e. realistic) ranges become unbeatable recon forces. Good luck trying to sneak up any troops. The solution here could be to reinvent airpower along the lines of CivIII. You don't move air units around. Activating one instead opens a vast grid, with options for assault or recon. All this is especially true for missiles.
(c) Would want to mod the movement penalty for fungus. Sea fungus in particular becomes much less significant.

Anyway, just thoughts on SMAC II, 4X in general.