If they add a lot of complex terrain features, even in the army spawn area, I can understand why it would be irreplaceable. They said they wanted those, I think, and if those make it into the game, placement should also be included. Otherwise, I don't see enough solid arguments as to why we would need one.

It makes no sense at all for two opposing armies to meet in a random formation outside of an ambush type scenario. Even then the attacker would still organize their formations before the assault. It either needs to automatically set it up intelligently or give the player the option to set up the formations for their side.

I hope they get companies and the like sorted in 3C. Kind of annoying to have spent a lot of res on a unit of ten guys only to have them go down all at the same time

NullAshton has presented a very eligant and intuitive system.  Players will quickly understand that Action Points=Tiles Moved and Combat Speed=Number of Attacks.  Partial moves allow an attack just not the full stationary amount.

Also, limiting retailation is a must day 1, version 1.0 otherwise there is an overwhelming flight to quality.  A large population should present a strategic advantage.

But say that the dragon has area affect counter attack? For normal counter cost. Those peasants would be fried right away. And how is this not a viable tactic? Mass assault might buy you enough time to do what you want.

And yes, Annatar I think you are right. Nothing enters unless the AI can use it, and if the AI can use it, the auto placement must work no problem.

Re: Unit Placement

I would definitely like to see some control over where my units are placed at the beginning of the battle. Ideally (but time intensive) would be to place each unit on the map - each time a tactical combat starts. This is quite unrealistic for this type of game however:

1. tactical combat could happen quite often (making repeated placement boring)
2. multiplayer games would be needlessly dragged out

Instead I would like to see an Army Setup screen for each of my armies (see this post: https://forums.elementalgame.com/388257 ), in which I can pre-configure Armies as to which units are part of it, and where they are placed by default.

This would be a compromise between random placement and lengthy manual placement.

Re: Retaliation

I personally don't see a problem with using a mass of weak units to swarm a strong one - that seems very realistic, and really one of the best and only ways to take down a great hero.

Imagine the big troll in the Lord of the Rings movie - down in the Mines of Moria ... would you really want to stand up and fight that thing man-to-man? I would try to swarm it from all sides, distract it, tire it out, then send in a stronger guy to finish it.

Swarming + tiring out would be simulated by attacking the guy and making him retaliate each attack, until he has no Action Points left to move/attack when his turn arrives.

Unless your army MASSIVELY outnumbers mine, you're not going to be able to lock down very many units with peasants (and not for very long since they'll be dying quickly against something powerful enough to use the tactic on). Also, the tactical map shouldn't be so big that you can converge and lock me down before I get a turn. If it's a problem, I can use other units to block my lead guy, only letting you attack him with one or two things at once (unless they die). Thus you won't be able to swarm effetively without getting through other stuff. You might get a couple of shots in, but then your army is weakened and mine is sitting right there for my turn...

This is basically the AoW counterattack system and it worked pretty well. The problem with not limiting counterattacks is that it becomes impossible to gang up on a big unit (as it will simply counterattack and smash everything). Big units are strong, but being able to tie them up provides a larger force of weaker units a method of attacking them.

Without something viable like that, you very quickly get to "stack your strongest units because nothing weaker can stop them" types of gameplay.

[Disclaimer: wall of text of doom! Had a busy weekend, going to reply to the entire thread at once ]

First, a note on counterattacks: free counterattacks are obviously a bad idea, if a knight is getting ganged up on by 8 peasants at once, he just doesn't have time to simultaneously hit all 8 back. Subtracting movement from your next turn per counterattack is also a bad idea; what if my dragon wants to just ignore all those stupid peasants poking his toes for minimal damage, charging past them to crush your sovereign? You shouldn't be able to deny the dragon movement by sending ineffectual attacks at it; this removes the other player's choices. There's an elegant solution: you can only counterattack if you have spare movement leftover from last turn, and counterattacks use up that movement. So if my swordsman holds his ground with 2 movement saved, preparing himself to be attacked, he gets a couple counterattacks if he gets hit during my opponent's turn; if he charges forward using all his movement and perhaps attacking someone, he's leaving himself open to being attacked himself without the ability to counterattack, which makes a lot of sense. Also if some system is used where different weapons have different movement costs, so you might not have enough moves left to use your weapon again if it's a slow one, this provides some usefulness to those 'leftover' moves (you get to counterattack at least, counterattacks would be cheaper than regular attacks, say half cost).

Also, on a semi-related note, attack speed and movement speed really do need to be separated, as many have already said. How does a dagger make you move faster than a guy with no weapon? Knights with lances shouldn't get to attack quickly, but they need to move quickly; the guy in plate with the greatsword needs to move very slowly, but he should be able to attack fairly quickly (faster than a knight with a lance, at any rate).

Easiest way to implement this, I think, is the suggestion someone made to give all weapons (and spells too, why not) a combat speed stat that represents attacks per turn, such that movement/combat speed = cost to attack - but that's overcomplicating things. Instead of displaying the "combat speed" on the item, show players the end result - the "cost to attack" - because that's the number players actually need to know anyway, and skipping to that part saves them an unnecessary calculation (this has some other unintended effects, which the math-inclined may notice, more on that later*). Say you have 3 movement, and your greatsword has a delay ("cost to attack") of 2. This just means it costs 2 movement each time you swing it; one swing leaves you with 1/3 movement. This leads to an odd situation where you don't have enough movement leftover to swing again, however, which is a problem - less of a problem if that movement can be used to counterattack, but still. It'd be nice if you can swing again at half damage, perhaps; like sweeping a greatsword right-to-left, and following it up with a weaker left-to-right backswing (there's a reason they sharpened both sides of the blade).

*This also lets you create weapons that require a high movement unit to use at all; you could have a lance that costs 4 movement to use, so that even a cavalry can only use it once per turn, and an infantry couldn't swing it at all.. this makes a lot of sense, weapons like that need high movement to build up the momentum to use them.

Was going to say this myself, but TCores beat me to it. Sauron does not attack quickly, and neither does a dragon breathing fire at a group of soldiers, or any other megaunit that can sweep through dozens of peasants at a time. These are slow moving, slow attacking units, the key is they can hit multiple enemies at once. Giving them them 5 or 10 attacks a turn so they can knock out 5 or 10 peasants a turn is absurd, because then they can use all those attacks on a single target as well - can you imagine Sauron walking up to a single enemy and whacking it 5x a turn with his huge mace, getting in more attacks than a dagger wielder? They need to do aoe damage, not fast attack speed, and this can be represented by special abilities as above.

Incidentally this makes countering such units much more interesting, merely giving them high combat speed lets them be equally effective against anything, while aoe makes them particularly effective against clusters of weak units - but gives you the possibility of countering them with a single strong unit and/or spread out ranged units (it even makes sense, you don't slay the dragon with a cluster of peasant spearmen it can flatten all at once, you rain arrows on it from afar or send a knight out to melee it).

By the way, abilities need to be linkable to items, so that equipping your sovereign with a claymore lets him cleave/sweep through two or three enemies at once - there needs to be a distinction between light weapons that can attack quickly and huge weapons that attack slowly but hit multiple enemies. Critters that don't need weapons (i.e. dragons) could still have cleave as an innate ability, but no Sauron-type humanoid should have it by default regardless of weapon (can you imagine Sauron sweeping through 5 guys with his bare fists? He needs that huge mace to do it). If you do include some massive Sauron's-mace-like weapon that can cleave through many many units at once, you could add a strength requirement to use it, so that no ordinary peasant can pick it up and start sweeping through armies; it'd be reserved for the powerful, high level units that should have that kind of army-slaying potential, like a properly upgraded sovereign.

you are right

i dont like too much the ap draining just cause of some strange mechanics

the best idea imo is still a DR

every counterattack deals 10% less dmg

or you can even inglobate attack speed into that

every counterattack deals 60/speed% less dmg

so a strong  monster with high speed can counterattack many times, while a normal unit only a few

You're encouraged not to use all your units movement or attacks in order to leave room for counterattacks. If you're actually moving and doing things, counterattacks are a total non-factor. Your opponent meanwhile is encouraged primarily to attack things that don't have counterattacks left.

The only units that will be counterattacking under this kind of system are meat shields brought to get in between the incoming baddies and the important units. The important units will be attacking and then running for cover because they can't defend themselves after doing something.

Lockdown isn't really a problem. Sure, a swarm of peasants can lock down a dragon for one turn. The dragon killed a bunch of them, and on your turn what's the rest of your army doing? Going and fighting other units, which ties them up from locking the dragon down again. The system has worked quite well in practice, giving a means of keeping really big units somewhat in check without encouraging the player to do silly not-fun things (like having a bunch of guys just stand still so they can act as a counterattack-capable wall).

This just makes me think that everyone assumes counter-attacking will work differently. This looks at a unit's left-over action points from the previous turn to decide how many counter-attacks it can do. I don't mind this system because it leaves the choice to you.

The other talk about swarming is to "lock down" a unit and deplete its next turn's action points and make them unable to move/attack. I don't like this system at all because it leaves you choiceless.

So, before we continue discussing limits on counter-attacks and reasons behind it, we should probably agree on which system for it we're talking about, because these two are quite different.

we are not talking about a footman

we are talking about dragons, wyrm, powerful champions

ofc you can nuke a critter, but you cant with a dragons

so locking a dragons making him waste AP against summoned creatures or shit is a cheating mechanics

just a plain sucking of AP cant work, there is a non opinable flaw in this system

so rather propose something more evoluted than just draining AP

You're right, although I think those are good things - matter of opinion, I guess. I'd like to give the player a choice between "move and attack" or "stay still and save movement for counterattacks, potentially doing more damage if attacked (but discouraging enemy from attacking this unit, for that very reason)." Yes, that probably will lead to specialized offensive units that will attack and run away, trying to avoid being in a situation where they would counterattack at all, and specialized defensive 'meat shields' designed to get in the way, save their movement for counterattacks, and be very costly to attack. That specialization (if it occurs) is an unintended side effect but not a bad one I think; the key is that my idea a.) limits counterattacks while b.) leaving the choice up to the player whether they want to counterattack or use movement for something else; whether they want to attack a unit capable of counterattacking, or go out of their way for a defenseless unit; the choices are the important part to me. Granted those choices may need some balancing to work to make all of them viable; maybe no one will ever save movement for counterattacks, but this could be fixed by lowering the cost of counterattacks (i.e. 3 or 4 counterattacks in place of one regular attack, perhaps).

As a side note, I really don't think it's silly and not-fun to have a line of melees stand still as a counter-attack capable wall, I think that's an interesting tactical alternative to attacking - again matter of opinion, I guess. Such things were in fact done often in real battles, charging forward to attack shouldn't be the only viable option.

But anyway, here I'm afraid I have to disagree; you make it sound like lockdown is a problem, you just don't expect it to be a big problem. And it probably won't be, in most situations - but there will be extreme examples where it can be exploited (by exploit I mean a legal but unintended use of the game mechanics). Let's assume the "counterattacks subtract from next turn's movement" suggestion where counterattacks take half a normal attack's movement. What if you have some amazing megaunit, a dragon or whatever, with .. say 5 attacks per turn, or 10 counterattacks. What I'll do is this: get a spellcaster or squad of archers, a vulnerable unit that can do some decent damage to your dragon and eventually wear it down, but would be instantly killed by the dragon if it got hit back. Let's just say that my ranged units can wear your dragon down in 5 turns, while the dragon could kill them in one turn if it had the chance. Then I'll accompany them with 50 expendable peasants, cheap guys with one damage weapons who can't hope to scratch your dragon - logically, they shouldn't have any impact on the battle. But I'll send in 10 peasants per turn, just enough to lock down your dragon, while my archers/spellcasters pelt down 20% of the dragon's hp per turn, killing it while you don't have a chance to do anything the entire battle.

Now there are obvious counters to this - don't let the dragon travel alone, for example - but that's beside the point. You shouldn't have to take special precautions to avoid a potential exploit, the exploit should not exist at all; the dragon should be able to kill a fragile spellcaster and his 50 harmless peasant friends by targetting the spellcaster first, this is what a player would expect and no illogical game mechanic should get in the way of it. The fact that this situation may not come up often and can be avoided is irrelevant, the point is you shouldn't have to be aware of this exploit and go out of your way to avoid it.