Food supplies for armies?

[Radiotraining]

Hello!

 

I don't know if it's the right place to write, mine is just a shoutout to the developers and modders of 0ad Delenda Est, because I really loved their work!! I just recently downloaded and played 0ad which is an impressive game already, but is only after trying DE that I really found complete satisfaction from the game. Although more experimental, I found the gameplay of DE a more polished and definitive version, adding a new layer of depth and complexity to the vanilla core. 

I felt the need to write about it on reddit ahaha 

 

 

Since, as far as I understood, both 0ad and DE mod are mostly passion projects, I couldn't help but recognize the amazing effort of all developers and artists involved. 

 

Now, I wanted to write in the forum as well to propose a further idea for the gameplay, since is still a work in progress. I don't know if new ideas are welcomed or this is the right place, but here we are. Please don't kill me.  

I come from a long experience playing a Haemimont Game, Imperivm (this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperivm:_Great_Battles_of_Rome) and there's an interesting element in the gameplay, such as food supplies for the army. Basically, there's a decay on the HP of your units, the furthest they march away from your town and villages, so you have to plan to have enough food supplies before starting a long campaign of conquest. 

Now, I don't know exactly how this could be translated into 0ad world, but it could be something related to territory influence, with some attack/defense penalty or HP decay - similar to what already happens to outpost - when you stations your army for too long outside your borders. This could open new strategic possibilities, for example giving a new importance to territory expansion, and also -maybe- prevent from just spamming the enemy bases with armies, forcing for a more calculated approach to conserve the troops. The reverse could happen for the defense, meaning that in case of attack the units in your territory result to have some bonus for being inside your area. 

Of course, together with this there must be also a system to secure supplies to the army in enemy's territory. In the game I mentioned beforehand (Imperivm) this happened by assigning mules with food to the battalion. I don't know if the same could be implemented, or other solution would be better, for example some technologies to unlock that counter-balance the decay/penalty effect, or the already existing "upgrade" button of the units. The idea basically would be to make the conquest of other territories less obvious and more costly, requiring more planning effort than just flooding the gates with units. 

I don't know if this makes any sense ahaha I just thought about this because I appreciated the details such as the slave/citizen mechanics introduced in DE, because it gives a great element of historical accuracy, and at the same time it opens up an alternative way to play the game, bringing it to a slower pace before booming. So, similarly, I just wanted add my two cents with an element of realism and strategy. 

In any case just take my words of appreciation from a simple guy who really enjoyed the game and can't wait for the next Alpha release! 

 

Ad maiora semper! 

Edited October 28, 2020 by Radiotraining

[badosu]

cc @wowgetoffyourcellphone

[badosu]

Knights and Merchants had a food supply mechanic, unfortunately the game was not polished enough to see it in action in an interesting manner (*nostalgia intensifies*).

For 0ad it definitely would be a big challenge, I reckon it should be feasible though complex both for presentation and mechanics (and how they'd fit on 0ad). Hp decay certainly would be the easiest way to piggyback.

I'd love to see something like this.



 

[Nescio]

What I did in my 0abc mod is simply give units a negative food trickle rate.

[Radiotraining]

Yeah, I'm not a developer myself, so I don't really know the feasibility of implementing new features, and also, I imagine the devs of DE arleady busy dealing with enough stuff than thinking of another feature to add to their workload, so take this idea with a good grain of salt. 

Ideally, what I imagine the best implementation would be a slow HP decay over time, with a way to counter-balance this effect. The decay shouldn't be something that completely change the gameplay dynamics, but enough to weaken your units if you forget them somewhere random in the map, you have to move them far away or you have to sustain a prolonged siege, for example, so you have to take that into consideration. 

While I was writing my point before I thought about the "upgrade" button already existing, that could push back the decay effect for each unit, but would cost something in food, for example. This way the cost would be proportional to the units you have selected on the field, so a big army requires some "high" additional food cost and a good food production in your base to keep it sustained. 

Another way would be simply some upgrades in the barracks that slow down the rate of decay, but you have to unlock it in different city phases, so you can get rid of this effect only in the last stages of the game, and kinda prevent random fast rushes in the beginning .. idk

If we want to follow the "Imperivm" model, then that could be this mule/donkey units (or whatever) that follow the army with maybe some "area of influence" around that should cover the troops? In this case, it could be also an element that you can kill or conquer as well, I guess. Just throwing ideas there at this point ahahaha 

The "bonus" for the defending army would be obviously to not have any kind of HP decay for being already in the base territory, thus making it a little bit stronger 

 

In general I don't know.. I think it could possibly add an interesting dynamic in the gameplay, but can also risk to make it unnecessarily clunky. I guess it should be experimented and tweaked a little, but if it's also too complicated to implement from a dev standpoint, just forget about everything  

edit: just read the last comment.. gotta try your mod man!

[Radiotraining]

29 minutes ago, Nescio said:

What I did in my 0abc mod is simply give units a negative food trickle rate.

Thanks for the reply, I had the opportunity to know your mod!

and hey! this is actually a smart trick! it would make even more sense if is affected by the territory, so it really emphasise on the cost of conquest 

Anyway I downloaded and now I'm gonna try it out!

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Thank you for the kind words. For the past couple of months, work on the mod has stalled due to work commitments and other "hobbies". Specifically, I want to complete work on the new hero mechanics before I add anything else new. Though, I do like the idea of "freeing" slaves and could be a nice way to save your skin if too many of your Citizens get murdered. I will probably add that feature.

 

About negative food trickle and things like that, I once implemented it but took it out because I felt it was confusing without corresponding relevant UI changes and improvements to properly support it.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Thank you for the kind words. For the past couple of months, work on the mod has stalled due to work commitments and other "hobbies". Specifically, I want to complete work on the new hero mechanics before I add anything else new. Though, I do like the idea of "freeing" slaves and could be a nice way to save your skin if too many of your Citizens get murdered. I will probably add that feature.

 

About negative food trickle and things like that, I once implemented it but took it out because I felt it was confusing without corresponding relevant UI changes and improvements to properly support it.

[badosu]

6 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

slaves and could be a nice way to save your skin if too many of your Citizens get murdered

Or to have a servile revolt

[Radiotraining]

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Thank you for the kind words. For the past couple of months, work on the mod has stalled due to work commitments and other "hobbies".

Hey! You're very welcome! Considering the effort you guys put into it, being a side-project along other things, makes the game  and your work even more amazing and the minimum is to give proper recognition to that! 

 

For the slave/citizen thing : exactly!! That's the purpose I had in mind when I wrote that. Like, some sort of extrema ratio when you lose everyone else and you need someone to build something, for example

 

About your feedback : I must agree with you, a food trickle alone without any other visual clue doesn't "fit" well with the gameplay. A quick solution to the problem could be a minus (-) value that appears together with the food resource counter when your troops start moving, to give a sense of the expenses. But at this point, I find that the effect on units HP more appealing, as it provides a sense of vulnerability to the units you send to the frontier. The problem is to find one easy way to make this effect reversible, so it doesn't affect the gameplay entirely, but just provide a small inconvenience to overcome in battle.   

For the sake of brainstorming, maybe a visual clue could be a small "starving" symbol that appears with the unit thumbnail to show that they lost their "autonomy" and just need to come back to their territory to refreshen this countdown and avoid HP loss? It could be some "extrema ratio" that only appears after a very prolonged time "abroad," so affecting units HP during long sieges, stationary people outside the territory, or whatever action that takes longer that a definite time threshold so to not affect otherwise general movement of people?

 

Really, is definitely not an essential feature, tho. So I was just toying with the idea as long as it fits consistently with the overall game and makes sense to add. If it's too much of a burden, also coding-wise then nevermind

 

Slightly off-topic : since I discovered this forum and some amazing behind-the-scenes of the game, I stumbled across a concept idea that you proposed somewhere, about "settlements" that you can build elsewhere and develop independently as towns and cities alongside your capital and I just wanted to say that is a really great concept and intuition!!  It would bring more focus on map features and strategic expansion and add another interesting flavor to the game. 

Whatever the case, is really amazing all the improvements so far, so thank you and all the people involved for creating such a fun experience for everyone! 

Edited October 29, 2020 by Radiotraining

[badosu]

Well, a simple way to do it perhaps would be to have ox wagons that act similar to traders, they must reach a farmstead to replenish food (perhaps take food from the player), with a large hp buff aura of 5-10%. As soon as the wagon leaves the farmstead it begins to lose food storage, when the food storage is empty the aura is nullified and it gets back to get more.

These wagons should be fragile and be able to make from the cc/farmstead without any cost, but only 1 can be done.

Mechanics: obviously it would help defensive positions considerable and this makes sense since you are close to the supply lines, also introduces an incentive for players to flank/cut supply lines, would also help aggressive stances but not as much.

This makes a lot of sense both historic and gameplay-wise. I don't think it would be too hard to do except for the food countdown presentation (could reuse the capture points/trader loot UI). Talking about capture, would be super cool to be able to capture the wagon but would be difficult with the 1 only limitation.

Edited October 29, 2020 by badosu

[Nescio]

Rise of Nations had units suffer from attrition damage when in enemy territory (like 1 health per second), unless within range of a friendly supply wagon. It would be nice to have that mechanic in 0 A.D. too. @Freagarach?

Actually 0 A.D. used to have health decay (rP10034), but this was replaced with the current capture points territory decay when structure capturing was introduced (rP16550).

8 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

About negative food trickle and things like that, I once implemented it but took it out because I felt it was confusing without corresponding relevant UI changes and improvements to properly support it.

Resource trickle is displayed in tooltips:

Spoiler

But yeah, the top panel could use a redesign, displaying not only the amount of resources you have, but also the trickle total.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 hour ago, Nescio said:

But yeah, the top panel could use a redesign, displaying not only the amount of resources you have, but also the trickle total.

Indeed. I was thinking of some kind of income rate versus/minus expenses display. Similar to Rise of Nations. 

[Freagarach]

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Indeed. I was thinking of some kind of income rate versus/minus expenses display. Similar to Rise of Nations. 

Interesting idea, but I think that would work best if the resource gathering would go from event-based to continuous production (e.g. lumber camps being semi-large structures being built next to some trees giving a(n) (unlimited) trickle of wood, which is increased with number of assigned slaves and/or amount of wood nearby).

6 hours ago, Nescio said:

Rise of Nations had units suffer from attrition damage when in enemy territory (like 1 health per second), unless within range of a friendly supply wagon. It would be nice to have that mechanic in 0 A.D. too. @Freagarach?

Actually 0 A.D. used to have health decay (rP10034), but this was replaced with the current capture points territory decay when structure capturing was introduced (rP16550).

TerritoryDecay.js just sends a message (MT_TerritoryDecayChanged) whenever an entity gets out of allied territorium, so you could listen to that in cmpHealth and respond accordingly. That would be fairly slow I guess though.

[Radiotraining]

Hey! Thanks everyone for taking in consideration my suggestion and all the feedbacks!

Even if not eventually implemented, is pretty interesting to jot down ideas and share different solutions! 

 

In general, I would say that the best solution must be easy to implement and develop into the game. It should work as an added nice detail, but not overhaul the established gameplay dynamic. Or, at least, that's not what I intended by proposing the concept. 

So, for example, I feel like changing the whole resource-gathering dynamic by making it unlimited kinda push everything a bit too far from the purpose at hand. 

To avoid too much confusion I think also that if we want to simulate a food supply system, is better to choose from one of the shared solutions, being either some effects on the food resource counter, or with some effect to singular unit's HP, but not a mix of both. 

 

On one hand, I like the food trickle idea for being quite straightforward, with a clear cause-effect between unit movement and food consumption. Especially if this is supported by introducing the expenses in the GUI 

On the other hand, I like also the vision proposed by Badosu!  I haven't thought about RoN supply wagons, but sounds like the right model to follow for this game-mechanic. In this case, in my mind I was thinking about some standard "autonomy time" for the units when they leave your safe territory, and when this initial time finishes you start to have some slow effects on their HP (or maybe just the already mentioned "attrition damage", but at a very slow rate). No particular need to represent this visually, other than the hp line at some point slowly depleting. This should allow you to move your people freely anyway, and maybe do some very quick skirmishes and raid with the cavalry, but if you plan to start a proper campaign or sending your villagers far away to gather resources, you better claim some portion of territory or make sure your troops are supplied with either a wagon thing or some technologies to unlock. 

Think about priests. You can be totally fine without, but is just nice to have a couple or more with your army to cover your back. Similar way, it shouldn't be a feature that cripple movements and gameplay, but you wanna take care of this if you deploy some big strategy.  

 

In both cases, the goal should be to add a little realistic "nuance" to the battlefield, a small layer of complexity to consider strategically, and a deterrent for spawning massive armies and just flood the enemy without thinking. With this feature you should have some proportional food cost counter-balance to prevent that from happening too often. 

If it goes too far beyond that, and if requires too much micromanaging then maybe is not a feature worth pursuing in my opinion, as the game is already rich and this should be only a "plus" on top of what's already there and works well  Just my humble opinions as a random player just happened to pass by this forum!  Obviously the last word then is to the devs or whomever wants to experiment with the concept, but again, is very cool to have the chance to share at least some ideas 

 

Have a good day everyone! 

Edited October 29, 2020 by Radiotraining

[badosu]

I don't like the attrition model much, mainly due to 2 reasons:

1. Armies were able to station at enemy territory by foraging/plundering the countryside (e.g. Hannibal in Italy), having a static debuff regardless of players actions does not seem sensible to me.
2. Gameplay wise, it's already impossible to win a game at early game, realistically setting the minimum gameplay time to 12 minutes if the opponent does not resign. 0ad is also very turtle-prone and we are already adding another layer of defense buff. Let's not punish raids/aggressive players more than needed

With a buff instead of debuff we are also able to introduce this mechanic at an opportune time, like for example a tech or enabling it in later phases, not interfering with the early game. I agree with @Radiotraining that it should be a rewarding strategical nuance although we know how food supply was critical in historical times.

Edited October 29, 2020 by badosu

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I think with Delenda Est's new hero dynamics plus all the other mod specific features, I think adding attrition is a step too far. Though, it would make a great nuanced change or addition to "no rush" match setup options. A mid ground between pure ceasefire and no ceasefire. So, a timed thing, like ceasefire, that would discouraged rushing for a limited time for players who would want that.

[Radiotraining]

Thank you for your comments! Yeah, I was still tweaking the idea but both your points seem fair enough.

Pretty dope to know that there are already enough features in development, that makes me excited! Ahahaha I understand that another feature might be redundant at this point and maybe is just not the right time to talk about it

And thanks to Badosu points regarding gameplay that I haven't considered deep enough. The idea to reverse the feature and make a bonus of it, instead of a penalty is an interesting workaround and maybe would fit better with the existing dynamic. Maybe in this case is more a matter of balance with the other bonuses in the game idk ..

Think there are many good ideas in this topic if anyone would like to pick one and experiment a little .. but otherwise quite excited to see where the game is already going!

thanks everyone! 

Edited October 30, 2020 by Radiotraining

[Radiotraining]

9 hours ago, badosu said:

2. Gameplay wise, it's already impossible to win a game at early game, realistically setting the minimum gameplay time to 12 minutes if the opponent does not resign. 0ad is also very turtle-prone and we are already adding another layer of defense buff. Let's not punish raids/aggressive players more than needed

@Radiotraining

Just a quick overthought : Ideally, to answer the problem, the attrition thing shouldn't be so strong and should be easy to counter-effect, but maybe just at some "x" expenses of food. This way, is not totally punitive, but only pushes you to consider this aspect (and build a solid economy lol) 

But yeah, can still maybe alter the gameplay tho, and in that case I agree with all your observations

Edited October 30, 2020 by Radiotraining

[Freagarach]

By the way, losing HP in enemy territory (albeit only during ceasefire) was proposed before: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Background%3A_Territories#BENEFITSOFCONTROLLINGAPROVINCE.