Healing by Combat Class

At this time I'm still working on developing out the Naval review. I've identified a number of dll programming tasks to support that effort so that we can introduce these naval units with some new dynamics and features to support them.

Some long time ago, Hydro and I agreed we'd like to make healing a combat class specific ability. This would mean that, rather than having one overall generic type of healing that affects all unit types, we could have many differing KINDS of healers that heal differing types of units. Therefore we could have Veterinary Healers, Medics, Motor Mechanics, Siege Engineers, Naval Engineers, Aviation Mechanics etc...

Of course, adapting this dynamic to the whole of the mod is not an overnight task. So I wanted to make sure that it could be implemented in steps and stages. Therefore, as I was working on reviewing these naval units, I realized this would be a good time to introduce the tag and some preliminary usage of it. By having our healing ships denote that they only heal other naval units, we can introduce the dynamic in a first stage that can also stand as an example for how to insert the dynamic into other unit interactions later.

Therefore, as a part of the naval review effort I've now added the HealUnitCombatTypes (for Units), HealUnitCombatChangeTypes (for Promotions), and HealUnitCombatTypes (for Buildings) tags.

To work with these tags:

• HealUnitCombatTypes (for Units):
  
  Code:

  <HealUnitCombatTypes>
  	<HealUnitCombatType>
  		<UnitCombatType>UNITCOMBAT_COMBATANT</UnitCombatTypes>
  		<iHeal>10</iHeal>
  		<iAdjacentHeal>10</iAdjacentHeal>
  	</HealUnitCombatTypes>
  </HealUnitCombatTypes>

  
  On the Unit Tag we can establish either a same tile healing bonus (the numbers on that work the same as the original healing tag but only apply towards the Unitcombat specified), an adjacent tile healing bonus (again, the value works the same as the HealAdjacent tag we have but only applies towards the specified Unitcombat) or both, as is shown here. If you want to only include one or the other value, it's not necessary to declare both iHeal and iAdjacentHeal, only the unitcombat and the tag you want to manipulate.
  
  As per normal, only the best healing unit will apply its healing to the tile.
  
  But be careful because this tag, when applicable to the unit evaluating its ability to heal, will be cumulative with any use of the normal healing tags on the same healing unit. Therefore the unitcombat healing and the normal healing will add together to the final healing amount if the unit healing is of that qualifying unitcombat. This is how I've managed to make it so we can modify these tags in somewhat gradually. More on that later.
  
  Of note, we never had a native healing ability tag for the base unit definition and have always had to previously use free promotions to rank them. This now allows for a LOT more granularity in our approach to improving healers so that should be very exciting. Therefore we can have the first healers perhaps adding +5% healing to the type of combat class they heal (for example: heals people, heals animals, heals mechanical...) And then the next level of healer can heal +7% instead. Still a step up, just more gradual rather than only having the stages of improvement we can offer from the normal healing promos we have now (very constricting when designing upgrade chains of healing units and very muting when it comes to enabling skill improvements through promotions thereafter!)
  
  
  
• HealUnitCombatChangeTypes (for Promotions):
  
  Code:

  <HealUnitCombatChangeTypes>
  	<HealUnitCombatChangeType>
  		<UnitCombatType>UNITCOMBAT_COMBATANT</UnitCombatTypes>
  		<iHeal>10</iHeal>
  		<iAdjacentHeal>10</iAdjacentHeal>
  	</HealUnitCombatChangeTypes>
  </HealUnitCombatChangeTypes>

  Works the same as the unit tags. And again, allows a lot more granularity here... Becoming a GREAT healing unit can now soak up a lot more promos if we design them to add a bit less benefit with each promotion upgrade. Perhaps these promos can even start to branch off into enabling more healing of other types etc... I'll be spending some time in the very near future working out some new healing promo structures around this tag and some of the new heal on victory, heal adjacent on victory etc... tags that we haven't seen much use from so far.
  
  
  
• HealUnitCombatTypes (for Buildings):
  
  Code:

  <HealUnitCombatTypes>
  	<HealUnitCombatType>
  		<UnitCombatType>UNITCOMBAT_COMBATANT</UnitCombatTypes>
  		<iHeal>10</iHeal>
  	</HealUnitCombatTypes>
  </HealUnitCombatTypes>

  We have many buildings that add healing values in the city that adds to the best healing unit to determine the overall healing bonus for units stationed in the city.
  
  Buildings are no less specific though. Hospitals aren't a great place to repair your jeep, for example. So this tag was designed to work this system from the building side and it does not enable adjacent healing as you can get on units.

After some deep thought on the matter, this means I need a new combat class category for units that helps to shape the application of these tags. I'm thinking that the new combat classes that would determine the healing category for units will be designed to represent hybrid types as well.

So you'd have Healing classes like:
Heals as a Person (like an Axeman - the unit is entirely made up of people)
Heals as an Animal (like a Trained Dog or a Pigeon- the unit (or at least the fighting part of it) is entirely made up of animals.)
Heals as Person with Animal (like a Camel Rider - the unit is made up of roughly half animals and half people.)

So then the healing UNITS themselves would be like:
Healer - Heals +6% for Heals as a Person type units. Heals +5% for Heals as Person with Animal type units.

Vet - Heals +6% for Heals as an Animal Type units. Heals +5% for Heals as Person with Animal type units.

Keep in mind only the BEST healer is going to be selected which is why +5% is necessary rather than +3%... the two healer types can't work together sadly. But both can cover, to a little lesser ability, common grounds.

You'd also have:
Heals as a Siege Weapon (like an Unmanned Machine Gun)
Heals as a Mechanical Vehicle (such as a Walker Droid or something to that extent.)
Heals as a Person with Siege Weapon (A catapult, with crew)
Heals as a Person with Vehicle (A Motorcycle for example)

etc...

So I'll be going through the Combat Classes and determining what Healing CC categories to utilize here as my next step.


All apologies to those who feel there are many problems that still need to be addressed before we develop any new dynamics. I do plan to attack them all here very soon... I just want to at least complete the planning and preparing phase of this naval project before moving to debugging mode for wrapping up the release. This was one of the more miscellaneous (but very cool) projects on that list.

Also... I'm very open to any offers of assistance in evaluating and adapting our buildings and units to this system. Obviously, it's got to be well planned before being fully implemented as we have a number of new unit types that we'll need to flesh this out properly.

Most of those shouldn't be too challenging as we should just pretty much first re-design the healing capabilities of the core healing units we have now (which are primarily People healers) and then we generate parallel healing unit types for the other primary healing categories like mechanical, siege, animal etc... that have stats very similar to the core healing units but with the main difference that they heal different types. I'm sure art on such units can't be too difficult to find on the site here given there are so many types of unit arts that have been submitted on the forum over the years (just will take a lot of looking for them is the main thing so help there I'm sure is appreciated as well!)

I'll probably need new Healing combat classes and probably some new healing AI settings so that the AI realizes the need to cover all its bases - though Alberts or Koshling - if you have ideas as to how to best work this from the AI side I'm listening. I adapted the AI to currently see the use of this tag as similar or half as valuable to the normal healing tags so at the moment the AI won't see the full value of getting all the types represented in major stacks and such. Since we're only applying to the Navies at the moment, we've got some development time to consider how to work out a more advanced AI structure for this - I know... yet another AI consideration of so many to develop. Again, hoping to commit to primarily AI improvements next cycle.


Anyhow, anyone have any questions, comments, concerns, ideas etc?



EDIT: Oh, one more thought that has occurred to me during the design of this tag... perhaps we could have some units that won't heal at all unless they get some healing assistance. Or just some unitcombats that have some real negative healing factors, like Siege for example - would heal much slower as the crew itself is only so capable of repairing it and would take much longer to do so without the assistance of a master siege engineer. Some robots may not heal at all unless they have mechanics on hand... etc... This could be an interesting angle to consider as well. We already have the UnitCombat tags to work with for this too which is cool. And they could be applied directly to the Heal As UnitCombat categories so could be a very convenient way to implement them.

Thunderbrd said:

..., like Siege for example - would heal much slower as the crew itself is only so capable of repairing it and would take much longer to do so without the assistance of a master siege engineer....

Click to expand...

Except historically the siege engines like catapults were built at the site of the siege not built in a city and transported to the place they were to be used. Even the multi story Roman ones were built on site. The crew were trained in building and firing them. It is only when you get to cannons do you have siege weapons that need to be made and transported to site.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

Except historically the siege engines like catapults were built at the site of the siege not built in a city and transported to the place they were to be used. Even the multi story Roman ones were built on site. The crew were trained in building and firing them. It is only when you get to cannons do you have siege weapons that need to be made and transported to site.

Click to expand...

We very well could try to represent this through siege engineer units that take some time at the site to build the siege weapon, which perhaps can only attack to move.

So this could be a step in that direction, where we create the siege engineer units that heal siege units - then later we can further mod them to represent things more historically as you explain.

Thunderbrd said:

We very well could try to represent this through siege engineer units that take some time at the site to build the siege weapon, which perhaps can only attack to move.

So this could be a step in that direction, where we create the siege engineer units that heal siege units - then later we can further mod them to represent things more historically as you explain.

Click to expand...

How do you represent an hour or two needed to build the siege engines when turns are days or decades? On the move the pre gunpowder siege units are the people and tools, in battle they are the people, tools the weapons. I have always considered the unit to be humans, with the health representing the health of the crew. The graphical representation of the catapult etc, is just so you can see what they can do.

I think that the pre gunpowder siege units should be treated as human. This should also true of the early ships.

@TB

So now for example Repair dock building will only heal water units?

Nimek said:

@TB

So now for example Repair dock building will only heal water units?

Click to expand...

That one one of my requests to TB actually.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

How do you represent an hour or two needed to build the siege engines when turns are days or decades? On the move the pre gunpowder siege units are the people and tools, in battle they are the people, tools the weapons. I have always considered the unit to be humans, with the health representing the health of the crew. The graphical representation of the catapult etc, is just so you can see what they can do.

I think that the pre gunpowder siege units should be treated as human. This should also true of the early ships.

Click to expand...

I'll be working on a morphing ability here soon... Perhaps we need Siege Crew units that can shift between the siege unit and the crew itself (but take a round to do so.) I think that we should represent that hour or two (which is probably more like 10-12 hrs in the case of catapults and more highly mechanical types) by the round to convert - this is so that on the defense, they're either prepared - or not. Much like it takes days to decades to fully fortify a unit. Map movements are always going to be grossly inaccurate in the amount of time it takes units to do things but if we represent the time and the vulnerability that can introduce it can still work.

So... would Siege crews only be able to convert to siege weapons when in particular terrains or features then? Sounds like it'd be tough to build a catapult in the desert.

Nimek said:

@TB

So now for example Repair dock building will only heal water units?

Click to expand...

Exactly... that's what we can do with this system.

Hydromancerx said:

That one one of my requests to TB actually.

Click to expand...

I do hope you've fully read this thread then because you're now enabled to do just that and this thread explains exactly how it works from a modder's perspective.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

How do you represent an hour or two needed to build the siege engines when turns are days or decades? On the move the pre gunpowder siege units are the people and tools, in battle they are the people, tools the weapons. I have always considered the unit to be humans, with the health representing the health of the crew. The graphical representation of the catapult etc, is just so you can see what they can do.

I think that the pre gunpowder siege units should be treated as human. This should also true of the early ships.

Click to expand...

Further thinking on this...

Repairing these things is not all about repairing the people. Even if you are imagining that the siege weapons are assembled at the site, if the equipment has physically been damaged, which it would be likely that it has suffered significantly in a direct conflict, then either the parts need to be replaced or repaired to functional status. The effectiveness of doing this is not going to be the strength a normal medic type would possess. This is why there's going to be Heals As (Unmanned Siege) and Heals As (Manned Siege) so that the standard medic WILL have some ability to heal Siege, just not as strong as a normal People unit. We can then presume that the Operators of the Siege weapon piece together the rest. But if the crew is left to heal or be replaced by new recruits from other nearby units and a Siege Engineer is onsite, his ability to heal a Manned Siege will be good too... better if it's an UNmanned siege - of which there wouldn't be too many in the early eras.

A medic unit could be promoted, then, to specialize in helping Siege weapons by getting some enhancements to being able to help on both sides of the unit - enhancing his Unmanned and Manned Siege healing, or a Siege Engineer could be promoted to help more with actual field medicine as well so would enhance his People and Manned Siege skills. Probably in this case, the Siege Engineer would be best represented as a very cheap healer unit that doesn't take as much upkeep so would be well suited for inclusion in a stack over just having multiple healers with differing specialties.


As for Naval... I'm again simplifying this to Manned and Unmanned - the tech level of the ship being irrelevant as we'll assume that the technological capabilities of the healer are in tune with the era he's in. The crew is really only one part of the equation to consider and the ship can't float or function very well if it isn't fully intact - which is largely mechanical and a specialized trade to make and fix ships.

Since we don't have specific healing ships in the early eras, we should probably have promotions be available to more general types of ships so that nearly any type can be envisioned to carry a crew that can provide this sort of healing - though obviously the buildings would make port the best alternative for recovery.

Later, when healing ships are introduced from the Steam era on, the normally weak field healing of ships can be improved greatly by these boats that have a base unit capability to heal - as well as opening up further tech unlocked healing promos at this time. The difference between some ships having more or less focus on healing manned vs unmanned naval can become very significant in the naval review proposal that's coming together...


The one contradiction I've determined to this usual arrangement would be Aircraft... I don't think we should worry too much about the pilots and crew here and just go ahead and assume one combat class for both manned and unmanned - the crew can be replaced far more easily than the hardware in this case.

EDIT:

So that we can mull this over together for a bit before I commit to assigning all these, these are the combat classes proposed to handle healing. The first section is how the unit heals. The second is for healing units themselves so we can craft promotion access.


Additionally, I've noticed that units and combat classes don't have a native base healing modifier. Combat Classes and Promotions have modifiers to enemy, neutral and friendly territory healing modifiers but no overall modifier. Furthermore, normally there's a minimum of healing. I propose we make a Unit and Combat Class (and perhaps should apply to promos too) overall healing modifier tag for the unit to manipulate its own healing capabilities and a boolean for units to assign some units to be potentially incapable of healing at all (min of 0 is made possible) - for example an unmanned robotic unit without the aid of any healing units should probably not be able to heal on its own in the slightest. Furthermore, late game Nanomorphic units are supposed to be able to heal themselves quite rapidly - to the point of really not even needing healing assistance (I may even introduce an ability to regenerate DURING combat round by round at some point - the main problem would be odds manipulation on this.)

So... more thoughts to ponder.

Couldn't manned units have HealsAs(People) as well as their other HealsAs class? There would be a lot fewer classes that way...(by which I mean it does away with the need for 'combos')

Yudishtira said:

Couldn't manned units have HealsAs(People) as well as their other HealsAs class? There would be a lot fewer classes that way...(by which I mean it does away with the need for 'combos')

Click to expand...

And would also thus do away with any need for specialized healer types. Should a Heals (People) healer be as effective at recovering a Mounted unit when we can assume half the injuries sustained are to the mounts?

How is the healer ship supposed to do his work? I always assumed a hospital-like ship that can heal wounded troups. But repeairing a heavily damaged ship in the middle of the oceans sounds weird to me - especially in the industrial age. I think having only later ships beeing able to heal on the way and having to get ships back to a friendly coastal town to heal makes a cool strategic feature.
And as you mentioned damaged ships are less maneuvable. Is it possible to add a penalty on movement on damaged ships (and maybe jeeps etc) in some way?

I don't think that having siege units morph between units is a good idea.

The delay between arriving in place to siege and then siege is already there for old style siege units as part of their movement. Usually they can't move in next t the city and fire in the same turn. At least mine never have.

As to building siege units in a desert, that is one case where the required stuff would have been transported to the place. However since we assume baggage trains at the moment I suggest we assume that the equipment is part of the unit also. It would explain why they move so slowly.

Faustmouse said:

How is the healer ship supposed to do his work? I always assumed a hospital-like ship that can heal wounded troups.

Click to expand...

Indeed the current ones are mostly hospital ships and about troops with some workshops for damage control on both ships and non-human units.

However we are talking about extending the healing mechanic. I feel the current healing ships be renamed to hospital ships that heal units (troops mostly) in the plot and adjacent plots. It would be nice if this could be expanded to include plots further away as well.

I see no need for siege units being a specialized thing. Before gunpowder the same mechanical guy would fix the horsedrawn wagons as would fix the catapults or pretty much any mechanical device of the time. After gunpowder it's again the same engineers of cannons that apply the exact same principles for fixing smaller firearms or even fireworks. Then we have the incorporation of electricity and microchips in modern artillery. Here again, the same electrical engineer is capable to repair any electrical stuff in the army, because electricity is applied according to the same principles wether it's on a mortar or in a tank or on a boat. "Siege units" is a false category when it comes to what skills you need to repair it throughout the ages.

It's the same deal elsewhere. Any modern vet will be trained to care for both dogs and horses. In fact all mammals, humans included, have the same basic anatomy. The heart and vital organs are roughly in the same place with roughly the same shape and function and roughly the same biochemistry e.t.c. (which is why lab rats continue to be used in medical experiments). A vet will actually be fully capable to heal a human should circumstances call for it. And then we have the ship relying on sails for locomotion and later ships relying on steam power or combustion, here we have very different skillsets needed.

Ships are actually very good examples of what I'm trying to get at. Sailing is different from propulsion by some kind of internal engine. You might also say that the engine of a nuclear submarine is totally different from the engine of a steamer. It's kinda true but also not since most nuclear power (and most kind of fuel based power in general actually) are essentially steam engines with another source for heat than that coal you picture in your mind. Even most ideas about how to utilize fusion power in the future revolve largely around using it to heat up water into steam that is then led through some pipes where it's made to force a thing to spin. In short, the same thing we've used for centuries.

The point here being that the qualifications in skill and knowledge required for repairing various things do not strictly follow the usual categorisation of military units. Especially not over long stretches of time. The nuclear submarine is very likely to be powered roughly the same way as your kitchen. If the malfunction of the thing is located in the steam power end of the equation then Newton can fix that for you. If it's the electrical engine side causing trouble in the submarine then an electrician is what you need. And if something goes wrong with the nuclear reactor then it's probably best to abandon ship. That we have special engineers and mechanics e.t.c. in the navy vs the airforce vs the landforce is much more a matter of army organisation than it is about these various people actually possesing different skills and education.

Faustmouse said:

How is the healer ship supposed to do his work? I always assumed a hospital-like ship that can heal wounded troups. But repeairing a heavily damaged ship in the middle of the oceans sounds weird to me - especially in the industrial age. I think having only later ships beeing able to heal on the way and having to get ships back to a friendly coastal town to heal makes a cool strategic feature.
And as you mentioned damaged ships are less maneuvable. Is it possible to add a penalty on movement on damaged ships (and maybe jeeps etc) in some way?

Click to expand...

+1

There is only a limited amount of repair that can be done at sea. The ship needs to get back to a port with a repair dockyard to become fully functional again.

Thunderbrd said:

And would also thus do away with any need for specialized healer types. Should a Heals (People) healer be as effective at recovering a Mounted unit when we can assume half the injuries sustained are to the mounts?

Click to expand...

Actually I think much of the 'healing' for both men, animals and equipment is resupply. That isn't really taken into consideration much in civ. When it comes to horses/elephants/whatever I think the distance to closest horse/riding animal resource you control should play a part in how fast it recovers aswell. Maybe having more of certain resources could be worked into the equation here. Are there plans for some modding in this regard? At the very least damaged units should cost extra maintaince. And with size matters the option to reduce the size of a unit when it's badly damaged in exchange for some extra healing, if not complete healing, would be nice.

Converting to a quantity basis for goods will be time consuming. The main difficulty is the AI needs to change as will trade. Playtping has a system but it assumes that the goods are held in a central store, your capital, and are instantly available throughout your nation. Converting this to local stores for vicinity goods is not to hard but what do you do about those goods currently provided by forts or improvements outside the work area of cities.

Faustmouse said:

How is the healer ship supposed to do his work? I always assumed a hospital-like ship that can heal wounded troups. But repeairing a heavily damaged ship in the middle of the oceans sounds weird to me - especially in the industrial age. I think having only later ships beeing able to heal on the way and having to get ships back to a friendly coastal town to heal makes a cool strategic feature.
And as you mentioned damaged ships are less maneuvable. Is it possible to add a penalty on movement on damaged ships (and maybe jeeps etc) in some way?

Click to expand...

1) I envision (most of) the healing ships as being fully capable of making major repairs on site - equipped to handle both the injured people and the ships themselves - through divers, welding crews and specialized mechanics and so on.

2) I do agree that ships should be very very slow to heal at sea, even if you do have a healing ship on site. That can be accomplished.

3) I really like the idea of having naval movement reduced with damage! I've added that as a modding task for the naval review so it'll be getting covered here very soon then.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

I don't think that having siege units morph between units is a good idea.

The delay between arriving in place to siege and then siege is already there for old style siege units as part of their movement. Usually they can't move in next t the city and fire in the same turn. At least mine never have.

As to building siege units in a desert, that is one case where the required stuff would have been transported to the place. However since we assume baggage trains at the moment I suggest we assume that the equipment is part of the unit also. It would explain why they move so slowly.

Click to expand...

After further pondering I agree... which means that they WOULD be a hybrid of the equipment and the people. However, I like a point made here below which I'll use to tweak my approach to healing siege.

Indeed the current ones are mostly hospital ships and about troops with some workshops for damage control on both ships and non-human units.

Click to expand...

Specialists in healing manned ships is what we have here (and thus perhaps they would also have some healing for people in general.)

However we are talking about extending the healing mechanic. I feel the current healing ships be renamed to hospital ships that heal units (troops mostly) in the plot and adjacent plots. It would be nice if this could be expanded to include plots further away as well.

Click to expand...

It can be but it's hard for me to even understand how we justify adjacent plot healing, let alone anything further. Furthermore, processing on that would begin to become taxing... each further space out would be exponentially more processing than the last and I would fear there would be a noticeable turn time slowdown, given how often healing sources are checked and the added processing this 'by unitcombat' system is already going to add.

I'm adding Troopships too in this wave of new units. Troopships being large cruise ships utilized during war to transport larger volumes of units. I'm thinking those would also have some healing ability for people.

stoferb said:

I see no need for siege units being a specialized thing. Before gunpowder the same mechanical guy would fix the horsedrawn wagons as would fix the catapults or pretty much any mechanical device of the time. After gunpowder it's again the same engineers of cannons that apply the exact same principles for fixing smaller firearms or even fireworks. Then we have the incorporation of electricity and microchips in modern artillery. Here again, the same electrical engineer is capable to repair any electrical stuff in the army, because electricity is applied according to the same principles wether it's on a mortar or in a tank or on a boat. "Siege units" is a false category when it comes to what skills you need to repair it throughout the ages.

Click to expand...

This makes sense to me. So we should merge Siege and Motor Mechanic, and perhaps some of the other mechanicals like Mech and Robot into one - Mechanic. That could certainly help.

But...

stoferb said:

It's the same deal elsewhere. Any modern vet will be trained to care for both dogs and horses. In fact all mammals, humans included, have the same basic anatomy. The heart and vital organs are roughly in the same place with roughly the same shape and function and roughly the same biochemistry e.t.c. (which is why lab rats continue to be used in medical experiments). A vet will actually be fully capable to heal a human should circumstances call for it. And then we have the ship relying on sails for locomotion and later ships relying on steam power or combustion, here we have very different skillsets needed.

Click to expand...

I agree they are similar but I disagree about being fully equally capable skillsets. There are numerous considerations one profession needs to keep in mind that the other does not - and vets should be cheaper as they are simpler.

This can be represented by both having the 'abilities' of the other but not as strong in focus. Thus, if you wanted to travel light with healers you could have a medic for people handle your animals... they just won't do it quite as well. Keep in mind that the game mechanic picks the best healer unit for the job among those available, so having both would have an impact on the stack healing speed.

Ships are actually very good examples of what I'm trying to get at. Sailing is different from propulsion by some kind of internal engine. You might also say that the engine of a nuclear submarine is totally different from the engine of a steamer. It's kinda true but also not since most nuclear power (and most kind of fuel based power in general actually) are essentially steam engines with another source for heat than that coal you picture in your mind. Even most ideas about how to utilize fusion power in the future revolve largely around using it to heat up water into steam that is then led through some pipes where it's made to force a thing to spin. In short, the same thing we've used for centuries.

The point here being that the qualifications in skill and knowledge required for repairing various things do not strictly follow the usual categorisation of military units. Especially not over long stretches of time. The nuclear submarine is very likely to be powered roughly the same way as your kitchen. If the malfunction of the thing is located in the steam power end of the equation then Newton can fix that for you. If it's the electrical engine side causing trouble in the submarine then an electrician is what you need. And if something goes wrong with the nuclear reactor then it's probably best to abandon ship. That we have special engineers and mechanics e.t.c. in the navy vs the airforce vs the landforce is much more a matter of army organisation than it is about these various people actually possesing different skills and education.

Click to expand...

I realize there's a lot of skillset bleedover between mechanic and naval and aviation repair but I do think it justified to have differing focuses - we can give this rationale some service by similar treatment of things as done with people and animals (though this makes me realize that carriers will need to be able to have and develop healing for aviation units.)

Ships cannot be so easily repaired by someone who works with jeeps and tanks - it takes specialized diving and welding skills as well as mechanical skills.

Aircraft have very unique and highly specialized engines and from what I've seen of the guys that work on this stuff in the Air Force here, it appears they pretty much learn very procedurally how to address issues on those aircraft and the skills are only minimally transferable. Additionally, those aircraft take quite a study to learn how to work on properly - and there's unique processes in parts tracking so as to make accidents highly traceable back to the source of dysfunctional parts... this you don't have to be concerned with as an otherwise normal gearhead.

stoferb said:

Actually I think much of the 'healing' for both men, animals and equipment is resupply. That isn't really taken into consideration much in civ. When it comes to horses/elephants/whatever I think the distance to closest horse/riding animal resource you control should play a part in how fast it recovers aswell. Maybe having more of certain resources could be worked into the equation here. Are there plans for some modding in this regard? At the very least damaged units should cost extra maintaince. And with size matters the option to reduce the size of a unit when it's badly damaged in exchange for some extra healing, if not complete healing, would be nice.

Click to expand...

1) Don't agree on seeing healing as mostly resupply. Sure it has something to do with it, jury rigging solutions to damaged parts and having replacement parts on hand. Having more arrows brought to the front, etc... but I definitely see it as getting injured men back up and running (or replaced with suitable refreshments - though usually I see it more as almost the whole unit wasn't killed just injured to varying degrees) more than anything. It would be nice to have some way to reflect some modification to healing from equipment and manpower resourcing but mathematically I think we'd be going too deep there - it's already looking a little problematic just to consider the hybridization of horses and humans in units, let alone replacement parts and so on.

2) Extra Maintenance when damaged? Hmm... does anyone else agree with this? I'm actually not against this at all - though I've often considered the higher resource costs of healing units to somewhat reflect this same source of extra expense. Could be an interesting modification though - and if gold is ever challenging in the mod it could also be an interesting strategy to wound as much of the enemy without killing them as possible so as to drain their coffers.

3) No on the last point... if I make it possible to split an injured unit then I'm not only opening up a lot of necessary splitting and merging (which is a problem at the moment as each split and merge adds to the unit count by recreating units from the previous and that goes against what are apparently limits in the code which may already be an issue - something Alberts and I have been looking at off and on as to how to resolve), and also adding a huge amount of needed micromanagement, but it also takes away the 'penalty' of having your units merged into super-forces, which is how long it takes such a super-force to heal.

Thunderbrd said:

It can be but it's hard for me to even understand how we justify adjacent plot healing, let alone anything further.

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That is the closest thing we have to what really happens. A unit is a group of people some of those people get wounded and are evacuated to the hospital while reinforcements are sent to make up the numbers in the unit. This sort of thing starts in the West about the Crimea War and the distance between the front lines and the hospital only increases as transport and organization improve. Think of the US MASH units.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

That is the closest thing we have to what really happens. A unit is a group of people some of those people get wounded and are evacuated to the hospital while reinforcements are sent to make up the numbers in the unit. This sort of thing starts in the West about the Crimea War and the distance between the front lines and the hospital only increases as transport and organization improve. Think of the US MASH units.

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Ok, I can buy it for adjacent effects - for anything more distant, don't we have medivac helicopters? Once the Naval review is complete, we'll have ships intended for carrying helicopters as well.

(Note to self: must allow transps to transport transports that have cargo)

Also... envisioning MASH units gives me an idea - would be interesting if healers could 'fortify' to increase healing ability rather than combat %.

Thunderbrd said:

Also... envisioning MASH units gives me an idea - would be interesting if healers could 'fortify' to increase healing ability rather than combat %.

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I have already said this. Same goes for anti crime units and crime and so on.