Directional Damage/Armour

Retreat is hard enough now, this will make it impossible.

Good point - most implementations of this that I've seen have been accompanied by a 'move in reverse' button/hotkey, i.e. right-clicking while holding a button will make the group reverse to the clicked pointed instead of trying to rotate around. Would be a perfect fit, I think, and make life easier even without the directional damage stuff.

Yes, this worked very well in Wargame and CoH because of the small scale and tactical focus of the gameplay.  Ashes is much larger in scale and seems to be more focused on strategic gameplay.

I do think this would be a nice mechanic, but I'll copy and paste a paragraph from that massive reply I made to the August FAQ topic lol

"

You have to keep in mind, that if 500 brutes attack 500 brutes, it's not a 500 v 500 battle.  It's only the front lines units firing while the rest mill around doing nothing.  This is only changed by "running through", to forcibly engage more units at the same time.  In which case, the leading units would slowly get chewed up, and the result would be more or less be an equal exchange by both sides.  The only way to change this outcome with homogeneous units is positioning.  One side would have to outmaneuver the other so that it somehow attacks with a greater concentration of fire power in a certain area (imagine a line of 20 brutes wide attack a column of brutes 10 wide.  The 20 unit wide would win since they could bring more damage to bear quicker).

This is the reason why "pro" players in FAF always tech relatively early.  Because a t2 unit has more health, more range, and does more damage.  Essentially it is more "condensed" firepower, allowing you to bring more damage to bear at once (since you could only get so many t1 tanks shooting at once). "

So... The point here is that even with different armor facing types, run bys (which is till a problem my opinion as they are very easy to do) will still more or less result in an equal exchange by homogeneous units.  Obviously when you start considering a mixed meta unit, this starts to change, but the result would be the same with mixed metas of the same composition.  Directional armor would not change this because, well, both armies would get roughly equal number of flank and rear shots at each other.

Also, the way meta units create formations rather limits the idea of tactical flanking.  What I mean is that units are not fast enough to warrant any fancy tactics such as splitting off some of your meta unit to skirt around the enemy meta unit you are engaging.  The only kind of flanking that works is more of a "strategic flanking", where you entirely cut off an area, and then end up attacking an enemy army with 2 separate armies of your own.  However, I find many of the maps in Ashes are very "corridor like", and so this type of flanking is quite uncommon.

So this just leaves us with what we have - meta units blasting away at each other from the front, and most of the time i'm just running through the enemy meta units to save time (since I know my meta unit wins regardless, I might as well capture the power node while fighting and then move on, as opposed to killing the enemy, then capturing, then moving on).

These issues above rather limit how unique directional armor would be.

I think that in order for directional armor to have an a serious interesting affect on the game the above will need to be changed somehow.. be it either with having some faster units, have units behave differently in formation/out of formation, unit speed, better map design with less corridors etc.

But as I have been saying, I'll need to see more of the game before I could write anything about how actually fix this in game.  

I hope this makes sense, and doesn't sound like some crazy rant haha.  Let me know!

Also true.  This could be made interesting if units always move faster in their forward direction.  So if you retreat going backwards, then you will retreat slower.  You'll take less damage, but it will be harder to shake the enemy..

But as I type this, this wouldn't work lol.. because the enemy army is moving forward to attack you.. if you turn around you will be going to same speed as them so you can never shake them, but you'll also be taking rear shots..

I would also suggest a way to move a meta unit, but lock which direction they are facing when they move.. so you could move a meta unit sideways to allow you to skirt an enemy.  But then I think that units always turn to face who they are shooting at when given a move order (so they drift while shooting), so this would also be rendered moot..

Just thinking out loud as I type don't mind me..

Great points, shurtugalll, and I'm actually inclined to agree with you - I've been preferring smaller and smaller metaunits due to their pathfinding problems and the tight corridors in a lot of the maps. When you've got smaller groups, what I was saying makes more sense - I know it was a hypothetical, but would you ever expect to have two metaunits with 500 units each facing off?

I can absolutely see that!  Currently I just slug my way through the AI.  While I certainly have yet to see meta units that large fight each other, I have formed 250 ish meta units (ok I don't know the actual unit count, but the meta unit spanned several inches from max zoom out) before.  Unfortunately I've never seen even the AI create anything near that large.  I have seen the AI essentially make a huge number of units, and use all these units as one army, but this army is not one meta unit, it is several meta units moving together.  I know this because the army doesn't move in formation, lots of mini formations clipping into one another.

I actually don't much break up meta units into smaller ones like you describe.  I mean, with the corridor type maps I just make the biggest meta unit and chug on through, path finding be damned.  I just place a move order and forget.  The only reason I might break up meta units is because I have a meta unit so far up the front line that I can't really reinforce it anymore.  So I make the up coming stream of units into another meta unit so they arrive at the front line with some form of cohesion.  Then I'll merge (assuming that 1st meta unit is still alive at that point lol).

I don't see why - the metaunit and the way it behaves is what matters when combined with this. You don't have individual units that you micro to make sure they're all in range, right? Same with individual directions - it's just another layer of how combat works out when one metaunit attacks another, or multiple metaunits against one, etc. Nothing micro-heavy about it!

EDIT: On the other hand, I could totally see how it wouldn't work. Just spit-ballin  

Ahh, you're worried that some players will micro to that level because they're super 'competitive'? Yeah I can see that. But do players already do that in order to get different units that would otherwise be in a single metaunit into their ranges? The way to avoid that, I imagine, is to have the metaunit be smarter about positioning, i.e. making sure brutes move into range while Artemises stay back. Unit facing could be easily handled in the same way (and therefore making micro not that useful) - by having units always face the enemy or something similar. I'm pretty sure they already do face the enemy, anyway? Probably enough to make microing that not worth it.

I'm basically saying that there are always going to be parts to unit control that people will want to 'micro', but will not get many benefits from - i.e. moving individual units to get them into range, trying to manually make units face a preferred way, etc. That's not a reason to give every unit the same range, or make every unit in a metaunit be able to hit the same target, and I feel like worrying about someone uselessly microing isn't itself a reason to not vary how damage works in this (directional) way.

Couple it with a 'retreat' button similar to 'attack move', where the metaunit tries to back-up instead of turning away (even without directional damage, this keeps more guns firing to cover the retreat compared to the current behaviour), and you've got an easy to use, non-micro facet to metaunit combat.

Individual units don't get any of the bonuses granted to units in a metaunit.  Some of these are quite strong.

Bah Retreating is for the weak!

Commit and Forget