Should the Health of Units influence their Speed?

[Obelix]

  Copied from 'Closing Old Issues' thread in the 'Game Development & Technical Discussion' forum:

On 24/12/2025 at 2:50 PM, ShadowOfHassen said:

For example, here's one that suggests that lower health units could move slower. It's an interesting idea, but one I'm not exactly sure is one that 0 A.D. is ever going to have.

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/2091

As above-mentioned Issue was closed by @ShadowOfHassen and reopened by @Itms with a 'Needs Design input' label attached to it, I think I like to hear - from all of you - your thoughts.

Copy of the Comments from the Issue tracker

@sanderd17 commented 13 years ago:

Quote

If health would influence speed, it could have several advantages.

• Hunting could become easier, as animals start to flee (note that flee distance could also be tied to hp for an improved effect)
• Speed differences would impact the economy of the player, so it would (finally) be worth to have healers around
• It won't affect the actual battle too much

@wraitii commented 13 years ago:

Quote

I think it'd be an interesting mechanic to have because it would make units less efficient once they lose HP. An annoyance of mine is that units that have only 1% health left are as efficient as those that have 100%. This is not realistic, but beyond that it means that it's more efficient to just focus all your units on one enemy to kill it and then move to the other ones.

I think health should also be linked with either attack rate or damage. With both those things, focusing on one enemy unit would be much less interesting, thus making combat more realistic and less gamey, and having priests would be more interesting. Imo a win-win.

 @Palaxin commented 11 years ago:

Quote

Yes I also think an attack speed/damage debuff could be applied, but only down to about 1/3 of the full value. Otherwise at 1% hp you would have less than one attack per minute which looks weird. [...]

Personal opinion

I like the idea of Speed connected to Health, maybe by 25% steps of Units Health.

[Grautvornix]

Good points! Sound more realistic. From my perspective, a minimum attack speed needs to be available though (until exitus). Would that also affect movement speed? (for hunted animals as well as for advancing/feeling troops)

Indeed this feature would remove the need to micromanage (focus your "fire" on reducing enemy forces by quantity i.e. kill them individually one-by-one) but rather damage them across the board. This could however affect gameplay to quite some extent. Should that be tested with a separate mode first?

[wraitii]

The general idea would be to work around Lanchester's square law. Because several units can attack one unit, it's better overall to focus fire on one unit until it's killed (without overkill however), and then move on to the next, rather than distribute damage to the group as a whole.

I'm not 100% sure how to fix this elegantly - perhaps to an extent it's not really possible or desired - but in principle it should make the game fight less snowballs, which I think is generally a pretty good thing for an RTS.

[Grautvornix]

There was a recent proposal to use an area as target instead of focussing on one  target (the closest one) only which may lead to an overkill. Possibly the two changes could work hand in hand?