Hey guys,
I wanted to go a bit more in depth of the combat system. Nobody has ever done a tactical rts game like this with up to 500.000 soldiers on screen so I had to pioneer many things. It turns out that this poses unique challenges.
First of all it is necessary to limit the amount of units. To have a fun gaming experience in a real-time game like this I consider the absolute maximum to be 60 units for each player. Another thing is that you have to limit how broad these formations of up to 5000 men get. Otherwise a single unit would stretch across the whole map and be completely impractical to move around. So I basically put all units into a column formation. Now every unit represents what was historically a division. Also concerning bridges - because funneling a 50000 men army across a bridge took hours or days historically and this is not very fun to do in a game I removed them. I find this a bit unimmersive too but please understand that you always have to strike a balance between game mechanics and realism.
I have laid great importance on realism whereever else i could. Morale is the most important factor in battles and it includes chain routs. That means a routing unit affects the morale of nearby friendly units. That way you don't have individual units routing and coming back repeatedly but at some point a breaking point is reached and an entire Corps routs. The whole AI army can retreat too if it thinks it has no chance anymore and it would be better to preserve its forces. Another thing is that I modeled the musket and cannon damage in accordance with historic accuracy curves.
Cover is another very important aspect in the battles. You get a great advantage if your unit is standing in a town or a forest (this is reduced in winter due to the lower amount of leaves). The downside is that your troops move more slowly. A special cover is earthworks. They are special because they can be destroyed by artillery fire over time. This way you can wear the enemy’s defences down before attacking as long as you have enough gun ammo.
Another thing is unit abilities. I think that implementing unit abilities that give magical bonuses like +10% charge bonus or something similar isn’t a good design decision. But what I implemented was to play marching music. It makes sense to me that soldiers would be invigorated by marching music so they get a morale bonus when it is played. You can in the campaign menu attach marching bands to your units which gives them this ability. The music played is based on historical music like La Victoire est a nous. Every major nation has a unique song to play. These are the other songs you will be able to hear that will make the battles much more epic:
Austria: Yorkscher Marsch by Beethoven
Prussia: Dessauer Marsch
Russia: Preobrazhensky March
United Kingdom: The British Grenadiers
On top of that there are eagles. Historically the French army had these as an imitation of the Roman eagle. A unit that bears an eagle gives a morale bonus to nearby units because they get inspired by its presence. The cool thing is the eagle can be stolen in battle by the enemy. If you can’t take it back in the same battle it is lost for the rest of the campaign. Only France has eagles.
Finally for immersion it was important to me to have speeches before the battles. Note that because of the army sizes in reality Napoleon didn’t hold speeches. He rather gave out notes for his officers to read. These are the sources I based the speeches on. For the sake of cinematics I made Napoleon hold these speeches himself.
In the following posts I will talk more about the campaign and AI. Also you might be wondering when the game will be released and I am happy to say that having started the development in February I am almost finished. You can expect a release quite soon!
This is all for now. Thank you!