Incline Why Doomstacks Control The World

[Beastro]

Non-confrontational combat in Paradox games needs to be looked into, like the long periods where siege and counter siege happened because battles could decide a war and cripple both due how expensive it was to equip an army. Skirmishing in battles is also lacking and similar things, like slowing down a unfought, withdrawing enemy to hammer it, can only be done by detaching fast units and essentially suiciding them ahead of your main army instead of getting them to advance ahead and harass without exposing themselves to open battle.

As always though, naval combat is the worst and the way it's handled in EU4 made me avoid it completely. One shot deceive battles that destroy the opposing enemies navy is bullshit in every era of naval warfare, because it's always been the exception, not the rule. Paradox tried to expand the role of navies to protect trade and shit without realizing the fundamentals of how navies are used and that is sea control. Because their games lack that, and a wise AI, the heavier ships and how navies are actually used are neglected.

In the end most of what Paradox games naval combat focused on is the old French way of thinking, that the sea is to move armies around and it doesn't matter if the navy is destroyed so long as they transports get the army to where it's meant to go, which isn't how things have turned out and ignore control and denial to the ocean with the chess game of squadrons acting and counter acting against one another while skirmishing trying to find the favourable ground for a decisive battle.

 

[kris]

That would certainly work in a turn based game, I'm not so sure about a real time one like Paradox does. I'll be implementing something similar.

paradox games are actually turn based, and include both those points by slowing armies the bigger they are and with attrition.

Monthly idiot who think a realtime game is turnbased.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

What?They are clearly TB.

 

[kris]

What?They are clearly TB.

dont know if serious or not.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

my ignore list grows.

 

[Ninjerk]

All games are turn-based. Each turn is a fraction of a second.

 

[Raghar]

What?They are clearly TB.

dont know if serious or not.

HOI2 is turn based. One hour is one turn. You can easily check that. Otherwise they would waste CPU time for no reason.

 

[kris]

What?They are clearly TB.

dont know if serious or not.

HOI2 is turn based. One hour is one turn. You can easily check that. Otherwise they would waste CPU time for no reason.

I am being trolled, right?

 

[Norfleet]

He is technically correct. The best kind of correct. It is certainly POSSIBLE to play a Pdx wargame by pausing every turn in this way. Unlike "real time" games with turns of fractions-of-a-second, a Pdx wargame actually has turns of comprehensible and playable length. If the action is sufficiently intense, you actually can go hour-by-hour. Unlike games where turns are of such small scale that it would be unplayable to do this, this is actually doable and actually happens if the action is sufficiently intense that a popup would occur and pause your game every hour.

 

[Raghar]

Actually I wanted to write technical reply but then I seen some posts and I become curious about arguments from peoples who are not game developers/didn't write simulations.

Things might be interesting...

 

[Norfleet]

Actually I wanted to write technical reply but then I seen some posts and I become curious about arguments from peoples who are not game developers/didn't write simulations.

Well, implementationally, most games are "turn-based" under the hood, but it sort of ceases to be a turn-based game when your turn-clock happens to be exactly the length of the turn. Artifacts of this turn-based behavior can be seen when the speed of actions, such as bullets, starts to exceed the granularity the simulation is prepared to handle elegantly, and you get bullets that fly through objects without hitting them because they cover so much ground in a turn that they phase right through the target object. This is prevented by moving towards a "RTWP" implementation under the hood, in which the simulation calculates when the next time something interesting will occur, pauses to update the state of the simulation accordingly, and then continues.

 

[almondblight]

But the more you simplify combat and make it more about simply numbers, the better the conditions for a doomstack. If force composition, tactics, and strategic positioning are minimized, then all that matters becomes who can throw the largest numbers at the other guy: The Doomstack.

But it doesn't have to. Doomstacks are often pretty risky in Neptune's Pride, for instance, because you're pulling ships off of other fronts (making it easier for an opponent to attack you) and focusing on a single point gives your opponent a lot more room to maneuver. And since it takes time to move your ships into position, you're making yourself vulnerable for quite some time just setting up the doomstack (and if your opponent sees what you're doing, they'll be able to move ships around in preparation before you even launch an attack). You're also not going to be able to just steamroll your way into the heart of the enemy because while both of you are losing ships each battle, they get a defensive bonus and their reinforcements are much closer to the front lines than yours are (so a lot of massive attacks end up like the Spring Offensive).

A the rules that people try to add on to prevent doomstacking seem like Soviet price controls. Lots of unnecessary layers piled on in order to avoid addressing the weak foundations that are the root of the problem.

 

[Mr. Pink]

In AOWSM you can have at most 8 troops in a stack. Saruman has a massive army of 6 full stacks on the screen and he has 2-3 more cities with even more troops, which is more than my army or my dumb retarded AI allies. If it were some shitty carebear game with afterthought combat slapped on it he'd just RAEP everyone with a doomstack. But here you can see my army standing next to a bridge that's blocking the only passage to the east where he would RAEP Theoden. NONE SHALL PASS! Because of the bridge he can only attack with 1 stack and if he does, he'd get RAEPD over and over again. In the open 6 stacks vs 1 translates to 48 troops vs 8. He doesn't have waterwalking or move across the mountain spells or air transports so he can only go north to attack Agent Smith in a castle where I have 3 stacks, take a long boring journey through Moria or go through the northern mountain pass. If he does that I will reinforce the army at that bridge and RAEP him in his tower. Because 2 of my armies are tied up in containing Saruman and Sauron in the west, Sauron's gonna RAEP the dwarves or Gondor because I'm fighting the Goblin King and can't be in 4 places at the same time.
I went too much offtopic... basically this is how you avoid doomstacks.

AI doomstack annihilated by decent positioning from player

 

[Lone Wolf]

I went too much offtopic... basically this is how you avoid doomstacks.

The same thing happens in Paradox games through frontage. Put simply, the game puts a limitation on just how many regiments can face each other, at any given time. Therefore, while you can stack 90 divisions in a particular province, only a fraction of those divisions will participate in the fighting.

Historically, this was also the case; there is only so much force that can reasonably be applied across a certain frontage. For example, the Soviets in WW2 achieved pretty insane concentrations of artillery: almost 650 artillery pieces per k/m during the Battle of Berlin. If they really needed to, they could concentrate a Rifle Division across 4-6 kilometres of frontage (and sometimes even more densely - in August Storm a certain rifle corps had a frontage of 4.55km).

 

[Norfleet]

The same thing happens in Paradox games through frontage. Put simply, the game puts a limitation on just how many regiments can face each other, at any given time. Therefore, while you can stack 90 divisions in a particular province, only a fraction of those divisions will participate in the fighting.

But here's the thing: A cap like this actually promotes doomstacking. If, say, only 8 units can face each other at once, then the largest force you can field is 8 units. You will stack the most powerful and hard hitting of those 8 units into one place. Either there is a defensive composition of 8 units that is capable of repelling this attack, which means that is itself a doomstack, or you will roll your opposition, because he cannot counter by throwing more at you. At this point even Tactical Combat cannot necessarily avert a doomstack scenario. Take a game like, say, Sword of the Stars: You've got a maximum number of points of ships you can field in your line of battle. Various techs can improve this, but ultimately, there's a maximum. What happens? You assemble your most powerful line of battle into the tip of the spear, backed by some support ships that are protected from any danger because they're excluded from the combat itself by the command point limit. At that point you roll unstoppably through any opposition the AI can field short of an even more powerful doomstack, which, being the AI, won't exist. It doesn't matter that you're outnumbered and outgunned 800 to 1. Every battle is a turkeyshoot where you crush the enemy's initial wave and then spawncamp him until the clock runs out or he runs out of meat for you to slaughter. It doesn't matter how many ships he has, all that matters is his initial wave: Everything beyond that is a spawncamp where enemies materialize from the reserve roster one at a time, struggle helplessly to get their guns on target while being focus-fired by 3 Dreadnoughts, and then explode without firing a shot. If there wasn't this arbitrary cap, I would probably have been swarmed under by the sheer numbers of the horde, but because of this cap, I have a doomstack that rolls unstoppably through everything the AI can muster. Even a human player is hard-pressed to respond with anything other than his own doomstack, although at least he has the option to immediately begin fighting evasively with his first wave.

In a game without Tactical Combat? This option won't even exist. The Doomstack cannot be stopped.

 

[Sranchammer]

Paradox could solve the doomstack by tying army limit size in a province to tech

 

[Lone Wolf]

Paradox could solve the doomstack by tying army limit size in a province to tech

To an extent they do; there's a supply limit in play. Stacking more than 12-14,000 men in almost any Russian province in 1444 will see your available manpower plummet within months. Wars can be lost because the player is careless with the supply limit/attrition.

But here's the thing: A cap like this actually promotes doomstacking.

Your point has merit, but this also happened in history more often than not. Breakthrough troops were usually the best available. The first echelon was almost universally the echelon expected to carry the day. Only in rare circumstances (the Romans with their Triarii and Napoleon with his Old Guard) did elite forces get husbanded at the point of decision. So, I don't see a problem with lining up your best forces along the available frontage.

You say this encourages doomstacking. I have no problem with doomstacking. It's a sound military principle that can be executed well (Paradox games) or poorly (SotS, from the sound of it). The example you use from SotS does not in any way reflect what happens in the Paradox games, because their frontage system doesn't work that way.

 

[kris]

What?They are clearly TB.

after all the old topics, mostly about RPGs, on this subject I really thought this was some elaborate trolling/sarcasm. Usually came up with someone claiming Baldurs gate was turnbased, because under the hood character actions there is within cycles long as PnP turns (systemically).

By definition the Paradox games are real-time games.

To be a turn based game the game need to have players play in actual turns, normally one after the other, but for multiplayer games turns can be simultaneous. a game like Europa universalis don't have turns, it have processing cycles set to happen every day and another one set to happen every year. That is not turns, even with Norfleets cheeky remark that you could simulate having it as a turnbased game by having the game paused every single day. A processing turn like this exist in every single game ever made, so unless you want to claim every game is turn-based you are off. It still would not be by normal deifnition. So no, EU/HOI are real-time games, not turnbased.

 

[Galdred]

But the more you simplify combat and make it more about simply numbers, the better the conditions for a doomstack. If force composition, tactics, and strategic positioning are minimized, then all that matters becomes who can throw the largest numbers at the other guy: The Doomstack.

But it doesn't have to. Doomstacks are often pretty risky in Neptune's Pride, for instance, because you're pulling ships off of other fronts (making it easier for an opponent to attack you) and focusing on a single point gives your opponent a lot more room to maneuver. And since it takes time to move your ships into position, you're making yourself vulnerable for quite some time just setting up the doomstack (and if your opponent sees what you're doing, they'll be able to move ships around in preparation before you even launch an attack). You're also not going to be able to just steamroll your way into the heart of the enemy because while both of you are losing ships each battle, they get a defensive bonus and their reinforcements are much closer to the front lines than yours are (so a lot of massive attacks end up like the Spring Offensive).

A the rules that people try to add on to prevent doomstacking seem like Soviet price controls. Lots of unnecessary layers piled on in order to avoid addressing the weak foundations that are the root of the problem.

Actually, in Neptune's Pride, doomstacks offer very little benefits, because the point of a doomstack is to maximize firepower at a given location.
Given that the combat model is more or less trading 1 ship for 1 ship in Neptune's Pride (or rather tech level*ships for tech level*ships), doomstacking offers very little benefit (actually, launching lots of carriers on as many targets as you can is stronger, as it results in a larger production swing), but that is not a very interesting combat model (at least, it cannot be used in anything that aims a little to be a simulation).

 

[BlackAdderBG]

What?They are clearly TB.

after all the old topics, mostly about RPGs, on this subject I really thought this was some elaborate trolling/sarcasm. Usually came up with someone claiming Baldurs gate was turnbased, because under the hood character actions there is within cycles long as PnP turns (systemically).

By definition the Paradox games are real-time games.

To be a turn based game the game need to have players play in actual turns, normally one after the other, but for multiplayer games turns can be simultaneous. a game like Europa universalis don't have turns, it have processing cycles set to happen every day and another one set to happen every year. That is not turns, even with Norfleets cheeky remark that you could simulate having it as a turnbased game by having the game paused every single day. A processing turn like this exist in every single game ever made, so unless you want to claim every game is turn-based you are off. It still would not be by normal deifnition. So no, EU/HOI are real-time games, not turnbased.

The difference with BG is that you could issue move commands then unpause and game responds immediately hence the real time.That is not the case in eu/ck/vic/hoi.The game waits for the "turn"(been day,hour or whatever)to tick for the AI to resolve all commands.This is clearly evident when you attack AI armies in neighboring province when AI is weaker,but it doesn't starts it's move immediately after you unpause,it waits for it's turn.There is ofc some commands that are resolved immediately like disbanding/buying units,DoW and such ,but they are player driven and again the AI will respond to them after the end of the turn.

 

[kris]

The difference with BG is that you could issue move commands then unpause and game responds immediately hence the real time.That is not the case in eu/ck/vic/hoi.The game waits for the "turn"(been day,hour or whatever)to tick for the AI to resolve all commands.This is clearly evident when you attack AI armies in neighboring province when AI is weaker,but it doesn't starts it's move immediately after you unpause,it waits for it's turn.There is ofc some commands that are resolved immediately like disbanding/buying units,DoW and such ,but they are player driven and again the AI will respond to them after the end of the turn.

but that is merely there for processing speed. hence why hoi is hourly due to shorter time period. It is not turns, it go against the definition of "turn"

 

[BlackAdderBG]

It's turn based because technology is not advanced enough.Good luck if you can't see that the mechanics of the paradox games are turn based ,not real time.

 

[Norfleet]

Actually, in Neptune's Pride, doomstacks offer very little benefits, because the point of a doomstack is to maximize firepower at a given location.
Given that the combat model is more or less trading 1 ship for 1 ship in Neptune's Pride (or rather tech level*ships for tech level*ships), doomstacking offers very little benefit (actually, launching lots of carriers on as many targets as you can is stronger, as it results in a larger production swing), but that is not a very interesting combat model (at least, it cannot be used in anything that aims a little to be a simulation).

That sounds like an absolutely terrible "combat" model, a practically idealized Lanchester-Linear model that has existed...nowhere...ever, where every opponent squares off against another and fights until one is dead, and anyone who isn't able to pair off against an opponent stands around cheering for his side. This is not combat!

The difference with BG is that you could issue move commands then unpause and game responds immediately hence the real time.That is not the case in eu/ck/vic/hoi.The game waits for the "turn"(been day,hour or whatever)to tick for the AI to resolve all commands.This is clearly evident when you attack AI armies in neighboring province when AI is weaker,but it doesn't starts it's move immediately after you unpause,it waits for it's turn.There is ofc some commands that are resolved immediately like disbanding/buying units,DoW and such ,but they are player driven and again the AI will respond to them after the end of the turn.

That's not quite true, though. In BG, the game does NOT immediately obey your commands, it will drag its feet until the "turn". This is most evident if you try to launch a spell: Your guy just stands around looking like a doofus until the next "turn".

 

[Galdred]

Actually, in Neptune's Pride, doomstacks offer very little benefits, because the point of a doomstack is to maximize firepower at a given location.
Given that the combat model is more or less trading 1 ship for 1 ship in Neptune's Pride (or rather tech level*ships for tech level*ships), doomstacking offers very little benefit (actually, launching lots of carriers on as many targets as you can is stronger, as it results in a larger production swing), but that is not a very interesting combat model (at least, it cannot be used in anything that aims a little to be a simulation).

That sounds like an absolutely terrible "combat" model, a practically idealized Lanchester-Linear model that has existed...nowhere...ever, where every opponent squares off against another and fights until one is dead, and anyone who isn't able to pair off against an opponent stands around cheering for his side. This is not combat!

Indeed, the combat model is uninteresting (but failing to predict where the enemy fleet will hit may cost key planets, so there is that.
I suspect the main reason for that is that the game is meant to be played in real life time (fleets move every RT hour, with games lasting several weeks). Going for a system favoring concentration would have given a huge advantage to the more available player (as it was the case in other similar games, like Hyperiums or Dark Galaxy).
Neptune Pride is mostly about diplomacy, so I can live with them going for this compromise.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

The difference with BG is that you could issue move commands then unpause and game responds immediately hence the real time.That is not the case in eu/ck/vic/hoi.The game waits for the "turn"(been day,hour or whatever)to tick for the AI to resolve all commands.This is clearly evident when you attack AI armies in neighboring province when AI is weaker,but it doesn't starts it's move immediately after you unpause,it waits for it's turn.There is ofc some commands that are resolved immediately like disbanding/buying units,DoW and such ,but they are player driven and again the AI will respond to them after the end of the turn.

That's not quite true, though. In BG, the game does NOT immediately obey your commands, it will drag its feet until the "turn". This is most evident if you try to launch a spell: Your guy just stands around looking like a doofus until the next "turn".