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:

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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:

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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:

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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? 

[ShadowOfHassen]

i'm just trying to think how it would complicate battles, you couldn't really retreat then without sacrificing units to cover the retreat (which is realistic). It would also make healers way more important (and maybe require people to maybe obtain them sooner.

[Dakara]

low speed= easy death 

[Grautvornix]

@Dakara Right, possibly there needs to be a distinction between attack speed reduction and movement speed reduction - and for both suitable values need to be evaluated hence sugested to implement as a mod for testing.  

[guerringuerrin]

IMHO, I think applying it to all units would encourage snowballing. I understand it creates an incentive to use healers, but perhaps they could be improved to create the same incentive.
I like it for hunting, and it could be fun with certain special units like heroes or mercenaries.

[Perzival12]

I’m seeing this in a few ways. For the sake of linguistics, I’m just going to presume that this is going implemented.

Adding this will make retreating much more costly, meaning that faster units will become even more valuable (because they can retreat faster).

Healers will be much more useful, rather than a side unit thats only useful in massive numbers.

If this is applied to hunting, it will kind of make hunting overly easy (I have problems with the hunting system in general, but thats another topic)

Some units should be immune, such as heroes, siege machines, some champions (Naked Fanatics would make sense lol)

This will 100% increase snowballing further, since the more injured an army becomes, the less effective they are at combat, which makes them get injured faster, etc.

I don’t think this should effect attack speed; if the idea is to show that wounded units can’t walk as fast because of they’re injuries, then how can they swing a sword at all; also, on the balance side, this just further increases snowballing, which is a major problem.

Finally, just a simple request if this is actually implemented: PLEASE make this an optional component rather than a required one, modding is hard enough without going through hundreds of template files to add this to them.

[ffm2]

In general, I have a bad feeling about this feature if applied globally.

This depreciates formations even more (not that I'm a fan of it) as all will be as slow as the slowest unit.

At first thought I could see this for fanatics or camp cav. Or with a general speed floor of the speed of infantry. So infantry won't be affected at all.

But on second thought, if you think about the micro battle with a few cavalry at the start, this depreciates retreating. Since when you retreat, you know the few wounded will fall behind and fall prey of the remaining army. I think this will be the biggest effect. That on all spots loose single soldiers can get taken out easy.

I also don't think more incentives for healers should be implemented. The ranking and cost saving is already incentive enough. They are a complementary unit for when the game play allows it. But not a necessity.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

I really do not suggest applying this idea. Modifying unit speed according to their health just implements a huge amount of gameplay inconsistency. It is important that units respond to commands and behave as expected.

I suppose there could be niche scenarios in mods where the ability to do this could be useful, or possibly for new unique units, but you have to ask yourself what benefit to gameplay this will realistically bring.

To me, the idea is just not well motivated, it seems like throwing in some inconsistency for no reason at all. On the realism argument, I have said this before, but making specific aspects so realistic while leaving other aspects of the game very unrealistic sends mixed signals about what kind of game this is.

3 hours ago, ffm2 said:

At first thought I could see this for fanatics or camp cav. Or with a general speed floor of the speed of infantry. So infantry won't be affected at all.

I think we would be better off just changing those units' base stats to begin with.

[Gurken Khan]

My first thought was "No.", and the discussion didn't convince me otherwise.

 

On 03/08/2026 at 8:11 PM, Grautvornix said:

more realistic

You know what else would be more realistic? Latrines, STDs, sore feet (inf) & sore butts (cav).

[wraitii]

I think lowering the attack of damaged units is possibly more worthwhile. Still allows retreating, but might smooth the snowbally Lanchester effect. Needs thorough testing, and possibly comparisons with other existing games.

[Thalatta]

On 05/08/2026 at 10:35 AM, wraitii said:

I think lowering the attack of damaged units is possibly more worthwhile. Still allows retreating, but might smooth the snowbally Lanchester effect.

Yes, I also was thinking this, considering that the snowballing increase and formation depreciation are good arguments against the whole idea. Still, I'm somewhat in favour of it, more as to set in place the mechanism (for mods to tinker with), and because it's good that new players realise there are things going on besides what's obvious in most RTS. I was thinking then that:

-All penalties should be minor, and apply only for very low HP (thus present gameplay is not that drastically changed).

-Lowering attack speed (or/and damage) first, and later movement speed (something like at 30% and 15% of HP, or whatever makes sense).

-That wouldn't "make hunting overly easy", but it has also been proposed to make animals faster (and weaker), which would work hand in hand.

-It would indeed work hand in hand with my proposal of "use an area as target", which was intended to be applied also to many other things.

-Would make healers more useful and retreats possible (except for those who are too wounded... understandably).

-Penalised units should be sent to the back of formations, whose speed should not be affected by them (they should struggle to keep up instead).

-In conclusion, things would mostly "behave as expected", except on extreme circumstances, which is useful for some variation in tactics.

 

On 04/08/2026 at 11:16 PM, real_tabasco_sauce said:

making specific aspects so realistic while leaving other aspects of the game very unrealistic sends mixed signals about what kind of game this is.

That issue has the worse consequence of making some things really funky, but I don't think penalising a bit very hurt units is such an over-realistic game-averse concept as many other concept would be.