Let's go quick here.

Normally, armies are either fodder for expansion or slaves to their masters! There is no difference between any 2 armies. You don't feel sentiment to your comrades.

But, what if an army naturally got better by fighting?

Say, every time an army was used in a battle and it survived, it got 1xp. It would get a bonus to attack and defense percentages.

Essentially, you can attack some neutrals to have a better army, or you build up momentum as your army attacks your enemy. If you value your troops, you'll use them wisely! New recruits are fodder, veterans are your valued war machines.

Everything would remainthe same. You would have a separate option between including veterans and or recruits to move order. You would see the experience of enemy armies as part of normal Intel.

That sounds awesome and add your idea for units the Cavalry Infantry and the anti-something would be glorious.

Implementing this, even as an optional feature, would require what essentially amounts to a reworking of game mechanics. Right now, I'm going to presume that Fizzer doesn't have a class specific to armies and doesn't store armies as anything more complicated than integers. To implement this, he would have to store armies in their own class and then totally change the way combat works.

Unless the combat mechanics are the same as Risk the board game, I think the calculations for an attack aren't done army-by-army- think of how long that would make 1000-army attacks take against substantial defences.

Beyond that... it's just a bad idea. I don't see why you're interested in making Warlight much more complicated and much less predictable and strategy-based. It's a game about calculated risk and making good decisions with limited information, and that sort of setup only works when the information is simple enough to be understood and quickly analyzed, not when something wacky like this is going on in the game.

If you want a shitty game like that, then go play AtWar or something. Let Warlight be the basic, sane strategic game.

Edited 6/26/2015 10:11:43

I am afraid that knyte is perfectly right

I like this idea.

"If there's a will, there's a way."

As Knyte said, terrible idea. Far too complex and complicated. Not only would it require a whole lot of new code to handle the armies discretely but it would also require a whole new user interface/graphical representation. How are you going to display a stack with ten different army types in it? And how is the user supposed to be able to accurately assess kill/defense rates if each unit has a different value? You'd have to rely solely on the analyze tool and would not be able to do the calculations in your head as you can do now.

Also, how is it determined which armies die in an attack when using a mixed stack? Do the veterans die first or do the raw recruits?

And how is veteran status earned? If it is simply through surviving an attack, why not have a teammate (or a friend/ally in FFAs) throw 1 army at your stack of 50... get 49 veterans for the cost of 1 army?

The idea would allow striking momentum to gather force very rapidly. It would encourage you to try and use veterans for important battles, or at least use them intelligently.

It wouldn't be hard to calculate approximate offensive defensive ratios.

It could be a set rate of +1% offensive/defensive for every 1xp. You would be able to tell apart veterans and their separate xp amounts as you would normally look at an army, through the left side of the screen.

I understand it would require a lot of coding, but what doesn't?

@Richard that kind of works perfectly into the idea. You're"training" them. But a veteran army is a useless army if it's not on the front lines.

There could be 3 different kill order options : veterans first, starting from best to worst. Recruits first, worst to best, or random (which would play into the idea of calculated risk).

Have you ever played risk? It honestly sucks. Too many kingmakers, and once you have a lot of armies, you are still restricted to 3v2 painfully.

Edit :

@knyte
You say risk is some basic game, but it is quite the opposite. My ideas only address the fact that this game is complicated.

Edited 6/26/2015 19:25:44

I agree with knyte and Richard Sharpe.

While the idea of having "veteran" armies is interesting, it would have to work alongside with some kind of weird no-split mode which also doesn't allow you to *combine* armies. I don't think that would work in Warlight.

It could also really unbalance the game in the direction of the winner, which is generally not good game design.