INTRODUCTION When I was a child I lived for a few years a quarter mile from the Appian Way, the archetype of Roman military roads. I used to walk and bicycle to school over it every day. At that time, in the late 1960s, much of the original Roman paving was still exposed; it probably still is.
The modern perspective on ancient military roads is distorted by the fact that most of us evaluate them from the point of view of driving an automobile over one. It's a jarring experience, not what they were designed for, and leads us to underestimate their utility. Walking or route-marching over something like the Appian Way gives one a quite different perspective, one which goes far to explain why kingdoms and empires built these extremely expensive constructions. Because I've actually had that experience, the way roads work in Wesnoth has bothered me ever since I began playing the game. It is also relevant that I have fought with SCA heavy weapons, wearing close to 40 pounds of armor. I have intimate firsthand knowledge of how terrain affects fighting and movement when you're wearing such gear. A major difference is that on a road you can afford to be much less careful about where you put your feet. Unless the grassland is someone's trimmed and leveled lawn or cropland, it's going to have stones, chuckholes, and other nasty little irregularities on it. If you try marching unheedingly through these the way you might down a paved or cobblestoned road, you're going to hurt yourself sooner or later. Running or charging is likely to make it sooner. Armor magnifies this. The extra compression load makes ankle and knee injuries more common even on the most benign "grassland" terrain. This phenomenon is quite well known to anyone (else) who has fought at the Pennsic War <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsic_War>... Ancient empires built military roads so they could move troops faster and still get them to battle with legs that weren't already beaten up and injured before contact with the enemy. You can walk on grassland, but you basically cannot route-march on it. The speed difference is significant. THE PROBLEMS Here are thwo problems I see with roads up to 1.4: 1. The "Road (Grassland)" display glitch A superficial, UI problem with roads up to 1.4 is that they displayed in the status bar as "Road (Grassland)". I know that WINR, but that representation is so false to my experience of the Appian Way and fighting at Pennsic that it jumps off the screen and messes with my play experience I fixed this in trunk by breaking the alias link between Road and Grassland, then adding a 'road' attribute to every [movement_coast] and [defense] declaration containing 'grassland' that simply copies the grassland number. This change means "Road" has its own movement class now, simply displaying as "Road". It makes no gameplay changes. It breaks savefile compatibility, however. 2. Roads make no tactical difference Since the road numbers are still identical to grassland, there is still zero tactical difference between being on grassland and being on a road. This actually bothers me more than the UI glitch, but how to fix it is less clear. I think gameplay would be more tactically interesting -- without being less intuitive -- if roads made a difference. Right now there is no reason to take or defend roads on grassland. If there were, you'd see things like infantry being posted to stop cavalry probes up a road. With road as truly separate terrain type, at least we could turn this knob fairly easily. But those worried about proliferating complexity need not worry that it opens the door to lots of other types. I actually spent quite a bit of time trying to invent a maximal set of terrain archetypes when I was making the road change, figuring that if I was going to incur the incompatibility cost to add one new one I might as well put in all the others at the same time. The only other one I came up with was "floor" for indoor settings, and I couldn't justify that because there isn't enough tactical difference from Road. QUALITATIVE CHANGES In principle, some units ought to have better movement capability on road than in grassland. I am very sure, from personal experience, that this should include Heavy Infantry (and other units of class 'armoredfoot': Warrior King, Infantry Commander, Assault Commander). I am also pretty sure it should include units of movement class 'mounted'. I am less sure on how roads should have defense effects. This depends on how much of a unit's defense we think comes from use of cover and how much comes from its agility on the terrain. Where agility is a large component of a unit's defensive ability, there's a case for giving it a defense bonus on roads. But this effect is weak enough that I think playing with it can wait until we've worked out the implications for movement. RUNNING THE NUMBERS I'm going to make this concrete by proposing that 'armoredfoot', 'dwarvenfoot' and 'mounted' units should have 125% movement on roads. There are three ways we could implement this: 1. Fractional MPs Under this scheme, for example, an HI's coast for moving on a road hex would be 0.8MP. This would preserve the assumption that grassland hexes always cost 1MP. 2. MP scaling Under this scheme, we quadruple the HI's base MPs but also quadruple all costs in the armoredfoot movement class, except that the road cost becomes 3 rather than 4. Preserves integral MPs but breaks the assumption that grassland always costs 1. MP BALANCE Obviously, HI and cavalry become more mobile on roads. I'm not worried about the HI mobility change much. 4 to 5 is not a large change, and they'll still lag Spearmen moving on adjacent grasslands. The main effect will be to make them better at what they already do, which is area defense. Cavalry going from 8 or 9 to 10 or 11 is more an issue. In general I think this will be a good change, as increasing the mobility difference from infantry will make things like true cavalry flanking maneuvers easier to pull off (as, I think, they should be). The problem that would goes with that, though, is a slight disadvantage to factions which have neither dwarves nor cavalry. (I gave the road bonus to 'dwarvenfoot' to avoid penalizing the Knalgans.) I think this effect is weak enough to not be a problem, but some MP testing will be in order. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion -- George Washington & John Adams, in a diplomatic message to Malta. _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
