Fall Update: Empire and Revolution

Still working… not much broad features to expand on. Lots of small features to work on. There’s always the danger of scope creep but I think its good to try to work-in features and unit behaviors early-on so that foundational issues are quickly caught. Luckily so far haven’t encountered any major refactors. Probably biggest refactor / re-work is the thinking on how maps will be generated. At first I was using procedural generation direct to map generation… but now I realize I should allow for maps to be imported from photoshop layers as well. So now there will be the option for player custom maps to be easily drawn in a Photoshop-tool. This should a) allow for historical battles to be manually designed and b) allow for quicker prototyping of map features via Photoshop. Procedurally generating everything was tedious because it was difficult to get maps that looked good quickly. It may make more sense to make photoshop abstract drawings and then procedurally expand on the drawing.

Anyways here’s a bunch of screenshots and gifs:

Simple Photoshop drawing can automatically produce a map to test on. I haven’t yet decided if it’s worth for hills to still have the current contour shading or to smooth it more so that it looks like more a smooth hill. The dark contours do more accurately represent the grid heights and also do a nice job of actually quickly distinguishing the ground heights. This will be important to the player for artillery sighting and line of sight prediction.

Unit behaviors

Infantry can fire multiple ways now to handle the ways in which musket firing in groups evolved over time. A good blog post can be found here which matches similarly to what i’m using as reference. http://forum.milua.org/archive/TactiqueUk.htm

Other work is simply polishing reload behavior, polishing how formations are changed. Ultimately its important to make sure agent behaviors are solid-tight before expanding on AI, since unit behaviors obviously have ramifications for AI planning.

A company of 4 infantry units (120) can shift from 3-rank deep to 4-rank deep. By doing so the company will occupy 3 grids instead of 4 grids. Deeper ranks can allow for greater concentration of strength and stronger morale, especially at regimental strength

One of the earliest fire drills. After firing the musketeer will move to the back of the formation while everyone else will move forward. Attributed to spanish arquebusier and musketeer tercio formations.

Fire By Rank: An evolution of Fire By File, can be attributed to Dutch musketeers. The front row will fire and then move back together at a platoon level

Volley Fire: All 2–3 rows of infantry will fire at once. Can be attributed to Swedish mass volley fire.

Infantry Fire At Will: As company organization falls apart or after volley fire, infantry units can fire at will.

An advantage with volley fire is that after firing, a unit is able to immediately follow-up with melee charge instead of reloading. Units that are idle will automatically attempt to reload to be ready for the next volley.

Engineer units will be able to construct pontoon bridges that will cross otherwise impassable rivers.

New artillery shots

Howitzers will have higher arc and limited range but higher explosive damage. Solid shots on the other hand will have high range and will eventually have possibility for bouncing allowing for multiple enemy hits if the enemy is in deep column formations

You can kinda see the grapeshot with low gif resolution.

I also plan on adding in spherical case shot, which will involve the shell exploding in mid-air spraying fragmentation against the infantry below. This will be a late tech introduced by the British.

Also name test: Empire and Revolution? Empires and Nations? I like Empire and Revolution since it encompasses the history of the periods being covered… but its a bit wordy. That’s it for now. As always gifs take up an inordinate amount of time to make leaving not much time for writing.