Multistaged Damage and Multi-Unit Enemies Thread - Vector Thrust

The title's a little misleading, since this actually has fairly little to do with units with sub-objects, though it does touch on them somewhat tangentially. What I want to discuss are enemies with different damage behaviors than the norm of: hit + hit = they die.

First: Multistage Damage

What I mean by multistage damage at this point is a unit that has different properties at different health values. Some variables that might change would be defense (damage multiplier), AOE size/strength, time between firing, detection distances, maneuver performance, etc.

What illustrates what I'm talking about best would be probably be infantry. Since infantry units would probably be too small to treat individually, I am going to assume they are treated en bloc as squads or platoons. How does one do damage to this collective? The simplest answer seems to be to shoot it until it's dead, chipping off an increment of unit health with each hit. However, since it's a pseudo-formation of infantry, what would make more sense would be a logarithmic drop off. The first hits do the majority of the damage, with the next few doing less and less. To compensate, the unit will become less effective with each successive hit. This makes infantry easy to degrade, but tough to neutralize and even tougher to eradicate.

This could also work well for other area targets, like cities, industrial districts, and drone swarms.

Conversely, for harder targets like bunkers, the inverse could be applied. The first few hits do very little damage, but as more damage is done, each successive hit deals more, sorta like "cracking" the complex's armor.

Second: Multi-Unit Enemies

Basically IADS, datalink buses and any other unit that is supposed to act in tandem with another specific unit or set of units. For example, an IADS usually has at the very least a search radar, an engagement radar, and the SAMs themselves. How does one build a functional integrated air defense in VT out of these disparate units and mostly using pre-existing mechanics?

The search radar is the first component. It has very long detection ranges and a wide datalink AoA effect. The engagement radars then have very long detection ranges and very long lock ranges but in a fairly narrow cone. Without the search radar, the engagement radars scan the horizon aimlessly, hoping to find something, while with the search radar, they have little trouble locating targets. The last link in the chain are the SAMs. They can only fire on whatever the engagement radar has a lock on and are within launch range of. Of course, most mobile AA has its own radars, so the chain of interaction will mostly be only two units deep, but squadrons with multiple aircraft types could function in a fairly similar way, with certain aircraft prioritized for destruction before others.

What illustrates what I'm talking about best would be probably be infantry. Since infantry units would probably be too small to treat individually, I am going to assume they are treated en bloc as squads or platoons. How does one do damage to this collective? The simplest answer seems to be to shoot it until it's dead, chipping off an increment of unit health with each hit. However, since it's a pseudo-formation of infantry, what would make more sense would be a logarithmic drop off. The first hits do the majority of the damage, with the next few doing less and less. To compensate, the unit will become less effective with each successive hit. This makes infantry easy to degrade, but tough to neutralize and even tougher to eradicate.

So, Wargame/CoH modern RTS/RTT style infantry then?

Edited by: Nergal01

I would guess? Unfortunately, RTS is an area of gaming that I haven't really delved into... at all. I'm probably saying a lot of stuff that's really quite old news conceptually.

I had an idea for handling infantry, but I'm pretty up in the air: given the way the helicopter missions were handled in Assault Horizon, I think some detail is necessitated for handling them if/when we ever get close to the ground if we ever wanted them to look good. From up in the air as we usually see things, I think a complete abstraction of the infantry might be a good thing.

Boogie_Van wrote: I think some detail is necessitated for handling them if/when we ever get close to the ground if we ever wanted them to look good. From up in the air as we usually see things, I think a complete abstraction of the infantry might be a good thing.

Various LOD may help to prevent resource hogging, i.e it looks detailed from close and it looks like a bunch of cardboard box from afar.

If we're trying to follow RTS/RTT example (i.e World in Conflict, Wargame series) here, infantry squad is actually treated like a "fake" vehicle.

Edited by: Nergal01

May as well handle them that way.

I can't help but think helicopter/ground combat will be a little Toy Soldiers-esque if we can kill infantry directly. I think that takes away from the seriousness a bit, though.

I think I read your comment as having infantry rendered with models and having them visible would reduce the seriousness of the game, initially, but I'm pretty sure now that you meant something along the lines of having the destruction of infantry at all as being a sorta odd conceit, due to how remote the player is from the ground fighting, and honestly, I'm inclined to agree if we're talking about something like battalion levels of infantry on the battlefield. It's pointless to have infantry as a targetable unit outside of specific mission update style sub-missions for time sensitive close air support, since there'd probably be way too many on most battlefields otherwise.

I guess infantry should probably be treated something like the Falken hangars in Ace Combat, where they're generally unnecessary for the completion of the core mission and are more optional content for the player to engage in.