I played recently Master of Magic in easy mode and I realised something that is present in many games where conquest is present. The problem is simple.
If my opponent has 3 units to defend him self, how could I make sure that my chances to succeed an attack are relatively high:
- Send stronger units than my opponent.
- or attack with more than 3 units of similar strength.
Most of the time, stronger units is not necessarily available. Which creates an inflation where to increase your chances to win, you attack with more units. And the defender accumulate more units, forcing you to send even more units.
Some games put a cap on the amount of units. For example: Master of magic is limited of 9 units. But if your defender has 9 units, you cannot send 11. So you need multiple groups of 9 units and hope that 2 successive attack with each group will work.
Another problem is the invincible defender. Let say each territory can hold a max of 2 units. If my oponent has 2 units to defend his territory, I cannot send 3 or more, because the max is 2. But if I attack with all my 2 units, I leave my territory empty which in certain games can be very bad. Else, I can only attack with 1 unit, which definately puts me at disadvantage.
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So how can this be solved?
In many situation throught history, smaller armies managed to get a victory over larger armies, so size should not be the only factor.
In romance of the 3 kingdoms II, they added additional factors that influence combat resolution. Troops can have training and equipement rating. Officers have different "war" rating. There is some limited subterfuge like switch side an officer or create fire. There is a tactical battle resolution where the player could expect performing better than the AI.
Which means that 2 armies of 5 units (which is the max you can bring without allies), will never be exactly equally the same. Best case scenario. Both sides are prepared, and have officers with strong "war" value. So only the tactical battle remain. Most of the time in that situation, the battle could not reach a conclusion and multiple successive attacks were required.
So what is the real solution to this, offer more variables, ambush and other possible subterfuge that the player can take advantage of. Have some random situations that prevent the predetermined outcome.
How can a smaller army wins against a larger one?
Great replies from everybody
I played AOW2, but prefer MOM.
I like the heroquest suggestion. Moving 3 units per turn could be a similar solution (like "conflict" NES game), where the larger army is not more advantaged, but can cover more ground. That could be the easiest solution to implement. Not sure about the same unit moving multiple times like in heroquest.
On BGG somebody said that the smaller army have more opportunity for improvisation, or micro management than the larger army which has more logistic to do. One way to compensate this could be to give smaller units some special preparative actions like ambush, special weapons, etc.
Both questions are somewhat related. The reason why I interest myself in smaller armies defeating larger one is for the evaluation of the player on the battle outcome. If the player's evaluation on his chances of success is very low, his solution would be to inflate his army. If the attacker must inflate his army and he already reached the maximum, then the defender becomes undefeatable.
On the other hand, if smaller armies have some chance to win, players will be less inclined to inflate their army and will engage battle on equal strength without any doubt. Else same strenght is too risky and they inflate to gain the advantage.