Buladelu said:
Right. Pure strategy game would propably look like interactive fiction. You read a lot, compare some data and then say "Well, I think we should get ourselves some heavy industry and attack Poland, and also give some social care to medicine and schools". Or Majesty, if you think about it (although you still cast spells and place buildings).
Indeed. I was actually thinking that a 'pure strategy' game like would probably be best done in realtime than as a turn-based. The point of turns is to give you the opportunity to go and deal with the fine structure of building construction and the rest yourself even in a large empire - if you're not dealing with that, it becomes much more feasible to do it all in real time.
Buladelu said:
Also problem of every strategy game is that you're allpowerful dictator and your people are calm and obidient slaves even in EU (although in games like Civ it's not so obvious because of high level of abstraction).
Actually, I've seen a few where it's important (or at least significant) to keep your people happy. In many cases (the 'Master of' series) this just applies to cities, and military forces will still follow your directions regardless, but the Age of Wonders series has morale for troops that can result in diminished combat performance or even desertion if you can't keep them happy.
When it comes to 'being forced to fight with small armies' - it can keep the disparity between a small garrison force and a killer offensive army smaller, but as long as there's a significant power distinction between weaker and stronger units you're still going to have the concept of the killer army versus the speedbump. And with only small groups being able to engage at once, that reduces the possibility for multiple weaker units to be able to bring down the stronger unit by ganging up.
Still, I think the biggest problem I'm having with what looks to be the current system is that with what appears to be 1UPT and each tile appearing to represent a fairly large area on the map (I think I have seen chokepoints just one hex wide), it really does seem to cut down the ability to build diversity in armies. Given the size that hexes appear to be, it doesn't seem realistic that archery and similar attacks would cross more than a single hex, so in the example of the 1-hex-wide chokepoint, if you want to push up that chokepoint you don't really have much in the way of options apart from sending up the best melee unit you can followed by a ranged unit, possibly backed with artillery that can reach three hexes or support spellcasters like clerics that can buff allies two hexes away behind.
The simplest solution in my mind might be to allow heterogenous forces in tiles. Instead of being limited to just eight warriors in a tile for a melee unit, for instance, make it possible to mix in a paladin or two (for buffs and undead destroying) and a couple of dwarves or rogues (to apply stuns and other debuffs) with the remaining warriors. Such a solution would allow combat to continue being fought on the strategic map (as it appears to from what we've seen) and keeping the current tile size without building a varied force becoming an endeavour that means your army is going to need to occupy half a dozen tiles, even if strictly speaking it's no bigger (and may even be smaller) in the number of troops it contains than the army of the guy who just decided to make a full tile each of Warriors and Clerics.
