Hi all, I''ve been thinking about this for a while, just thought i''d toss it out here for you all to pick apart... Let me begin by talking about my basis - One of the aspects I like most about crpgs is getting to control your party in battles. To me, the Baldurs Gate games have the most fun battle system of all time. You have your party of six people, you can pause and give them all orders and they move out and do what you want (most of the time!) So using this system, you can have you fighters in the front while while your ranger and magician and clerics rain death from protected positions. To me this is much better than the system used in console rpg''s like final fantasy. So this is where i''m starting from. I ask myself, "this is great, but wouldn''t it be even better if I could have a really big party and fight really big battles?" Of course this introduces a ton complexity into the game; and even borders on becoming a rpg/rts type game (like heroes of might and magic) But the type of game I am thinking of would start from a Baldurs gate type interface; isometric, create your character, find party members, go out and complete quest and gain exp and level up etc... But the difference would be you could also control a much larger force. How would this be accomplished? I was thinking of having one of your NPCs be like a sub commander and through dialogue boxes you could give him/her commands for your larger force to carry out. For example; you are given a quest to cleanse the northern mines by the local noble who gives you a temporary commission as an officer and assigns to you a detachment of spearmen and a couple of clerics. The sub commander NPC joins your party and you talk to him and tell him to "begin moving the unit north toward the mines" and you go outside the castle and the detachment is forming up and marching north (this is were it gets like a real time strategy, but not really) Then you can go about your business, meet up with them at the northern mines and lead them in and fight ala Warcraft without the resource gathering and a much smaller map, just fighting. There could also be story interludes here, for example you have sent your men north and the sub commander sends a runner back to your party saying, "the detachment is in trouble, we have been trapped by an unknown force just south of village noname! Come Quickly!" Then you would travel north and lead your wayward spearmen to victory using your party etc... Well, this is getting a bit wordy so i''ll stop here. What do you all think?

Three words: Final Fantasy Tactics.

Thanks for the responses everyone,

I wanted to talk a bit about how the player would actually control his/her forces during combat. Continuing the above example, the player and his party travel to the area where the detachment is trapped. Once the player and his party are on the same screen as his forces he can control them directly with the mouse by clicking on a unit and giving it directions. I won''t allow the player to click on individual units as you can in a typical rts; but rather when the player clicks on a unit (say a spearman) the spearmans entire squad is highlighted and recieves the orders. In this way you can organize your forces to fight in a line or other formation (ever heard of a pike-square?) and its also a more realistic medieval style combat (if you can turn your enemies flank then you are almost certain to win!) Inherent in this idea is that each individual unit (soldier/monster/whatever) has an area of occupation that blocks enemy units from passing in between your forces and penetrating your lines. Also manuevering entire formations at a time as opposed to individual units at time will make handling large forces much easier.

Once again I welcome any and all comments!

I have toyed with this myself a little bit. The biggest problem is deciding how to implement the soldiers-are they actual persistant NPCs or are they spawned for the mission?

As usual, the better option is the tougher one, but I think it would be cool to say go into the royal barracks and talk to these guys just in general, or promote within the ranks while out on campaign, and then when you start a new campaign, then you recruit the same guys or the ones you like.

I also think it might be neat if these guys had histories- say you go these mines. Maybe one of your soldiers used to be a mineworker, so you make him a scout, and one of these guys in accustomed to the Northern mountains-very cold and inhospitable, so you make him your commander. Or maybe there are orcs infesting the mines and you select a commander based on his previous battles against orcs.
You might also be able to contract some people. Say you get this campaign, and the country''s best tracker is a town over, you select a handful of these guys and go over and recruit him, with the noble picking up the tab.

Perhaps you can also get wagons and horses from the local stableman and carpenters.

Millions of possibilites,
its a great idea definitly. Might also be fun to go and conquor the neighboring kingdom...

Just a few cents.

Awesome! DrMol I can tell you like the same type of game as I do! I had tentively thought about makeing horses (griffon, pegasuses) available to enable the player to travel faster; and if you have horses (etc...) then that enables Cavalry (ie knights etc...) to be implemented as well. To me this (horses) are really ambitious. Not to mention your idea of having persistant soldiers. So what happens when you get your force and goto the mines and your a poor leader and your guys get wiped out? Do you just keep going back until you deplete the available soldiers? What happens then?

One detail I skipped entirely on purpose was, how do you supply all these people with food and supplies? Logistics are at least 50 percent of any military campaign (or more) in reality, But to me worrying about wagon trains of food is not "fun"!

I also toyes with the idea of cavalry, millions of oppertunities there:
slaves pulling rickshaws (my world has a concored race-gnolls- used as slaves, an intersting twist thrown into an otherwise lawful good society) but would be impractable outside a city

All those winged beasts-dragons, pegasus, griffons, etc, plus land based animals, such as wargs, horses, centaurs, elephants, etc

Cool stuff, but like you said really ambitious. Hmm, check out my post on the whole fantasy soldiers thing. Mix the two together, for calvary. Cool

Anyways, if you failed to clear out the mines, then, it is doubtful that you would be employed again, unless say, there was a noble who wanted it to look like he was trying to solve a problem, so he sets up an army, but doesnt really want to solve the problem, so he hired you as the commander..

This wholec cross breed is a lot better IMHO than these RPGAction games that are coming out and a hell of a lot better than Rap-Rock. I think they fit hand in hand. Biggest problem is that in itself an RPG is a huge project, and a wargame is a huge project. Huge+Huge=Really Huge.

AS for the food, I would think that the simplist solution is to chop it out, say that the noble worries about it, or perhaps set it up so that the better your campaign is (for example, how much of a path you have cleared behind you or maybe how many men you allocate for rear area patrols) might influence the quality and amount of your supplies.

However, I think the whole logistics stuff might actually be sorta cool if you set it up right. Maybe the enemy sets up an encampent in your rear, and you only realise because no supplies get through, so you lead a small band south to take em out, but while you are away, your main force gets counterattacked. Maybe in your wake, the local guild of theives funds an operation to waylay your caravans, which creates quite a problem, the only true way to eradicate it would be to go into the city and raid the house....OOO that would be awesome, urban medieval warfare. I dont know how realistic that is, but I can just see it, and small precision raids on houses, maybe you leave your main force and take in the band of assassins you recruited and slip into the city to a house and take out the commanders. That is sorta off the subject, though. Anyways, what do you think?