V2 Development Chat

I think it was somewhere in here, and I think it was deadskinmask who said it, but I had a thought...

The discussion was on aggression/dedication to a war. And the suggestion seemed to be adding in a dynamic nation-wide (or at least location-wide) attribute that went up as you won battles, went down as you lost battles, and also went down the longer a battle went on.

Well I just reading a bit about the Lu Meng vs. Guan Yu affair during the three kingdoms and, though the story I was into was fiction itself, one of the things they posited for Lu Meng's success was that Guan Yu trained his soldiers constantly. It gave him well-drilled elite soldiers, but as soon as Lu Meng came in and promised them furloughs if they surrendered - well they defected or went AWOL.

I know we had, at least opaquely, talked about adding a training/drill attribute to soldiers. So why not add a drill level that affects damage and damage resistance alongside morale - and make morale a variable attribute. So instead of troops always starting with 50 morale at the start of battle and going down from there - they start with 25 when they're first conscripted, and they rise by a certain mount each turn that they aren't used in battle. We can make the governor's stats affect it if we like: Like troops gain Charisma/10 Morale per turn. So someone with 60 Charm gets +6 Morale each turn.
Tangent: Likewise we can have troops steadily gain drill each turn based on the local governor's attributes: Lead/20 gives drill up (so 60 Lead would equal +3 Drill each turn, just by performing their standard duties).

Then we add in a Train Troops ability that works as such:
(Lead/10) = Drill Rise per action
[(Charisma/20) -10] = Morale loss per action

So if you have 60 Lead and 40 Charisma and you Train the troops, you'll get:
+6 Drill and -8 Morale.
Flip those numbers for 40 Lead and 60 Charisma and you get:
+4 Drill and -7 morale

So if you constantly drill your soldiers to exhaustion, then you'll wind up with elite demoralized soldiers who will start battle with very low HP.
Since troops will start with say...25/100 Drill and 25/50 Morale upon conscription, as well, it means that just suddenly drafting a thousand soldiers to invade your neighbor by surprise will be more of a gamble.

Just a late-night thought.

Neat idea. I think NB was planning on adding either ships or marine-type units in the next version. That could be the benefit to that. Maybe a marine unit or a unit equipped with ships could traverse any water tile, but all other units can only ford at actual fording points?

Or perhaps have marine units or units with boats be able to cross non-fordable points as if they were regular tiles; but units without boats would move across water like they currently do - they can only cross one tile per round?