Duels

[civilizationfanatic2000]

Let there be Important People. Generals of armies. Warrior Monks. The strongest warrior in the tribe. These are units that consist of one man, and can be attached to entire armies.

Let these Important People get into duels- a turn based minigame. The rules of these duels are highly configurable, focused on emergent rules rather than top-down forcing of realistic combat. This would allow a Fall From Heaven-esque mod to account for battles between a giant and a normal sized man, or two men jumping from building to building in a duel. The base game can have in turn highly realistic combat.

Duels are an option that can be toggled on or off.

Why duels? To simulate champion combat.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Not sure I like the idea of simulating duels between individuals considering the scale of the game

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

Not sure I like the idea of simulating duels between individuals considering the scale of the game

Champion warfare was used to avoid the bloodshed that would come from a full fledged war, iirc. So on the mechanical side, it could be a way for the player to avoid the destruction from war utterly ruining their plans. Instead of a luck based minigame, the minigame would be skill-based to encourage players picking that option.

There were also duels important to history. Using this Wikipedia article:

> Single combat was also a prelude to battles in pre-Islamic Arabia and early Islamic battles. For example, the Battle of Badr, one of the most important in the early history of Islam, was opened by three champions of the Islamic side (Ali, Ubaydah, and Hamzah) stepping forward, engaging and defeating three of the then-Pagan Meccans, although Ubaydah was mortally wounded.[1] This result of the three single combats was considered to have substantially contributed to the Muslim victory in the overall battle which followed. Duels were also part of other battles at the time of Muhammad, such as the battle of Uhud, battle of the Trench and the battle of Khaybar. In the early Muslim conquest the Muslim commander would often duel with the enemy commander, For example, Khalid ibn al-Walid and hormozd in the battle of the chains.

Besides duels, nothing else should be on the personal scale. Duels also provide support for fantastical game mods and DLC which place a focus on superhuman warriors.

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

How would one make a system that accounts for realistic combat and extremely unrealistic combat while not being overly simplistic or overly complex?
Maybe it's best to go cinematic from the start.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

So in a game designed for 500 turns you want to add more time-consuming individual combat to the turn. I can't think of any single thing more designed to make sure that a higher percentage of games are never finished.

On a practical level, how do you handle combats between Civs that actually believe in Champion Combat and those that don't? Your Medieval/Classical Hero rides out to challenge Wing Fat of the Tang Dynasty and he will be answered by 500 crossbows. Challenge the average Apache war chief to individual combat and he'll shoot you down with a stolen rifle from 200 meters away. Some folks see no sense in heroics when it isn't necessary, which means that every Civ in every Era would have to be 'graded' for its applicability to Challenge Combat to see whether the challenge was accepted or laughed off. And also for whether the army of any Civ would abide by any negative result from the individual combat, which is another extreme variable: in modern armies the loss of a general has little effect on the troops or officers, except to give a Promotion Opportunity to his Deputy Commander or Chief of Staff, after which the victorious Combat Challenger is blown to fragments by the nearest troops and the battle goes on as planned.

The motto of the Seal Teams is: "Never Fight Fair", which pretty accurately predicts their response to any Challenge.

 

[Patine]

Champion warfare was used to avoid the bloodshed that would come from a full fledged war, iirc. So on the mechanical side, it could be a way for the player to avoid the destruction from war utterly ruining their plans. Instead of a luck based minigame, the minigame would be skill-based to encourage players picking that option.

It was used by some civ's. It wasn't, by far, a universal practice, and even where used, had radically different - and incompatible - traditions and rituals from each other.

This would allow a Fall From Heaven-esque mod to account for battles between a giant and a normal sized man, or two men jumping from building to building in a duel.

Fall From Heaven? Is that a different game?

 

[pokiehl]

I do not like this idea at all. The concept seems rather forced and corny, and very out of place for a Civ game.

 

[Patine]

The motto of the Seal Teams is: "Never Fight Fair", which pretty accurately predicts their response to any Challenge.

Or some similar mottos by Che Gueverra, Võ Nguyên Giáp, Draža" Mihailović, and Yasser Arafat.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Or some similar mottos by Che Gueverra, Võ Nguyên Giáp, Draža" Mihailović, and Yasser Arafat.

Or, of course, the near-universal maxim of the great General P. T. Barnum:

"Never give a sucker an even break."

 

[Patine]

Or, of course, the near-universal maxim of the great General P. T. Barnum:

"Never give a sucker an even break."

It's too bad no authentic or verified such quotes survive from actual Hashashim or Ninja/Shinobi.

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

So in a game designed for 500 turns you want to add more time-consuming individual combat to the turn. I can't think of any single thing more designed to make sure that a higher percentage of games are never finished.

On a practical level, how do you handle combats between Civs that actually believe in Champion Combat and those that don't? Your Medieval/Classical Hero rides out to challenge Wing Fat of the Tang Dynasty and he will be answered by 500 crossbows. Challenge the average Apache war chief to individual combat and he'll shoot you down with a stolen rifle from 200 meters away. Some folks see no sense in heroics when it isn't necessary, which means that every Civ in every Era would have to be 'graded' for its applicability to Challenge Combat to see whether the challenge was accepted or laughed off. And also for whether the army of any Civ would abide by any negative result from the individual combat, which is another extreme variable: in modern armies the loss of a general has little effect on the troops or officers, except to give a Promotion Opportunity to his Deputy Commander or Chief of Staff, after which the victorious Combat Challenger is blown to fragments by the nearest troops and the battle goes on as planned.

The motto of the Seal Teams is: "Never Fight Fair", which pretty accurately predicts their response to any Challenge.

Hmm, this idea is not as well thought out as I thought. Thank you for correcting me.

Fall From Heaven? Is that a different game?

A fantasy game mod for Civ. Specifically, fantasy that draws from DND (and DND draws from arthurian legend, which is big on duels). I'm a big fan of the idea that the base game should include principles (rather than specific cases) that can be altered to make a good variety of mods. That was the ratioale behind this.

 

[Patine]

Hmm, this idea is not as well thought out as I thought. Thank you for correcting me.

A fantasy game mod for Civ. Specifically, fantasy that draws from DND (and DND draws from arthurian legend, which is big on duels). I'm a big fan of the idea that the base game should include principles (rather than specific cases) that can be altered to make a good variety of mods. That was the ratioale behind this.

Which iteration of Civ? I'v never heard of it.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

It's too bad no authentic or verified such quotes survive from actual Hashashim or Ninja/Shinobi.

There should be a collection of sayings of Hassan-i-Sabah. And John Man's Ninja mentions a ninja manual. Though if I recall correctly most of the excerpts from the manual are about the importance of secrecy and intelligence-gathering.

 

[civilizationfanatic2000]

Which iteration of Civ? I'v never heard of it.

It's a mod for CIV IV.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

It's too bad no authentic or verified such quotes survive from actual Hashashim or Ninja/Shinobi.

The saddest lack in quotations is that, even in Russian, there has never been a complete collection of the sayings of Aleksandr Vasilyevich Suvorov, one of the most quotable of all military leaders:

"Train hard, fight easy"

"Fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks"

"Achieve victory not by numbers, but by knowledge"

"One minute can decide the outcome of a battle,
one hour - the outcome of a campaign,
and one day - the fate of a country."

"Perish yourself but save your comrade"

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

So in a game designed for 500 turns you want to add more time-consuming individual combat to the turn. I can't think of any single thing more designed to make sure that a higher percentage of games are never finished.

On a practical level, how do you handle combats between Civs that actually believe in Champion Combat and those that don't? Your Medieval/Classical Hero rides out to challenge Wing Fat of the Tang Dynasty and he will be answered by 500 crossbows. Challenge the average Apache war chief to individual combat and he'll shoot you down with a stolen rifle from 200 meters away. Some folks see no sense in heroics when it isn't necessary, which means that every Civ in every Era would have to be 'graded' for its applicability to Challenge Combat to see whether the challenge was accepted or laughed off. And also for whether the army of any Civ would abide by any negative result from the individual combat, which is another extreme variable: in modern armies the loss of a general has little effect on the troops or officers, except to give a Promotion Opportunity to his Deputy Commander or Chief of Staff, after which the victorious Combat Challenger is blown to fragments by the nearest troops and the battle goes on as planned.

The motto of the Seal Teams is: "Never Fight Fair", which pretty accurately predicts their response to any Challenge.

so no to any heroic duels between the two leaders as portrayed in Romance of the Three Kingdoms? things like Guan Yu VS some big Wei General ?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Hmm, this idea is not as well thought out as I thought. Thank you for correcting me.

We all need feedback to stay on track.

In truth, I am generally in favor of anything that adds more personalization and 'people' to the game, but we also have to keep in mind the scale of the game in time and space. Any game with turns that represent 1 to 40 years minimum time and tries to cover 6000 years of human history just has to leave out a lot of individual events that only took hours or minutes In Real Time but could take up a large chunk of playing time for a single turn. It's a fine balance sometimes.

so no to any heroic duels between the two leaders as portrayed in Romance of the Three Kingdoms? things like Guan Yu VS some big Wei General ?

Read any of the '7 Classics' of Chinese military theory, including Sun Tsu, to see how realistic the idea of any personal challenge combat would be between Chinese army leaders. The key word in Romance of the Three Kingdoms is 'romance', which originally meant 'fiction'.

Now, one possibility to get something like this in a Civ-scale game might be to Require a General or Great General to stack units into an army. Place a limit on the number of Generals you can support, and this would automatically limit the Unit/Army Spam.
Then, having a named General with each army, when that army goes into battle there would always be a chance that the General becomes a casualty, and one possible method would be that he accepts or extends a Challenge to individual combat with the enemy General. This would not be some Sub-Battle between two individual figures, though, in order to keep the game moving along. Instead, the game presents the results to you: something like "General Jubilation T. Cornpone killed in single combat with the enemy general Nefarius Purpus the Roman, treacherously stabbed in the front when he looked down to make sure his sandals were tied. Army ran away."

- And, of course, that also opens the possibility that Accepting a Challenge would be one Social Policy/Cultural attribute of your Civ and one attribute of a General or Great General could be his/her capability in Personal Combat: don't let your Roman general Maximus Gluteus go up against El Cid or Robert the Bruce if you expect him back in one piece!

 

[BuchiTaton]

We all need feedback to stay on track.

In truth, I am generally in favor of anything that adds more personalization and 'people' to the game, but we also have to keep in mind the scale of the game in time and space. Any game with turns that represent 1 to 40 years minimum time and tries to cover 6000 years of human history just has to leave out a lot of individual events that only took hours or minutes In Real Time but could take up a large chunk of playing time for a single turn. It's a fine balance sometimes.


Read any of the '7 Classics' of Chinese military theory, including Sun Tsu, to see how realistic the idea of any personal challenge combat would be between Chinese army leaders. The key word in Romance of the Three Kingdoms is 'romance', which originally meant 'fiction'.

Now, one possibility to get something like this in a Civ-scale game might be to Require a General or Great General to stack units into an army. Place a limit on the number of Generals you can support, and this would automatically limit the Unit/Army Spam.
Then, having a named General with each army, when that army goes into battle there would always be a chance that the General becomes a casualty, and one possible method would be that he accepts or extends a Challenge to individual combat with the enemy General. This would not be some Sub-Battle between two individual figures, though, in order to keep the game moving along. Instead, the game presents the results to you: something like "General Jubilation T. Cornpone killed in single combat with the enemy general Nefarius Purpus the Roman, treacherously stabbed in the front when he looked down to make sure his sandals were tied. Army ran away."

- And, of course, that also opens the possibility that Accepting a Challenge would be one Social Policy/Cultural attribute of your Civ and one attribute of a General or Great General could be his/her capability in Personal Combat: don't let your Roman general Maximus Gluteus go up against El Cid or Robert the Bruce if you expect him back in one piece!

Talking about have "alternative" eras like the ones of Millennia. That game is going to have an "Heroic Age" as an alternative form of the Classical Era, thinking about the culture and goverment mechanics for CIV7 I was on the concept of gain "national values" from your cultural products, these mean to represent the more relevant values for your culture that are exalted in their myths, festivities, traditions, customs and all kind of arts, for example for military bonus we have values like Discipline, Bravery, Loyalty and Honor this last one make me think about something.

What if as the main power of your era you achieve to build a society centered around the idea of heroic leaders where champions duels become a significative way to resolve militar conflicts?
Maybe you can reach Contemporary Era and get "Mecha Duels"

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I remember in some of the Total War games (I only played TW:Empire) you could duel with non-combat characters, but it was just a percentage chance of victory, not an actual battle.
Maybe this could be tied to great people somehow, like if one meets another from an unfriendly civilization you have a chance of "disabling" the other without going to war.