User:Danaris/Proposals/No More Big Blobs
The dominant military strategy in BattleMaster involves getting the entire realm together in one place and dropping it on the enemy, rather like a sackful of bricks. This lacks finesse, precision, and, well, much strategy (or tactics). It would be far preferable if the majority of the time, nobles were broken up into smaller armies which each had different objectives, only coming together for things like major TOs and city/stronghold sieges.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to ensure that a huge army will not always win while simultaneously ensuring that a larger army generally has a better chance against a smaller one. Thus, we need to be creative in coming up with realistic ways to make it more difficult for large, monolithic armies to win over smaller, more agile ones. These can be categorized generally as discouraging travelling and sitting around in very large groups, facilitating chaos in combat, and giving more options to militaries that are interested in fighting more strategic and tactical campaigns. (There may, of course, be some categories I missed; feel free to add them here.)
At present, all of these need further elaboration; I'll try to start fleshing some of them out a little later...
Travel
- Allied Acrimony And Distrust - Make large groups of allies in one place start to squabble if they sit there for long
Combat Chaos
- Friendly Fire - Archers can fire into melee, but have a chance of hitting their own or their allies' men
Non-Big Blob Options
- Block Route Between - Allow battles between regions, and prevent travelling units from passing through unless they win the battle there
- Choke Points - Allow chokepoints on the battlefield, so that only a certain number of troops can pass through a given point at once
- Mountain Passes - Add explicit passes to mountains, which can host ambushes at chokepoints
- Ambush Attack - Actually implement the ambush feature, taking the other options listed in this section into account
