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SGO: With so many sides, diplomacy will be critical and frankly it’s usually a weakness in 4X games. I’m extremely interested in how you’re going to model the give-and-take necessary for diplomatic negotiations. Probably the best model I’ve ever seen is in Europa Universalis II (nod to mutual buddies at Paradox), but that seems like it might be overkill for what you’re attempting here. How are you going to resolve this? One of the limits of computer game diplomacy is that it usually doesn’t address the “I’ll allow you to do that here, while I act there” situations, is that something that will be possible in Legion? (Most computer games simply can’t do it, and say ‘if you want that complicated diplomacy, play against another human…)
Slitherine: We agree, the EUII diplomatic model is very good and detailed but a bit too in depth for what we needed for Legion. We’re allowing the player to make alliances, declare wars, offer tributes, negotiate peace etc. As you mentioned, one of the biggest problems the AI has is diplomatic negotiations is working out how to trade off one thing against another. We’ve spent a lot of time designing the UI to avoid such problems, and it comes down to letting the AI structure the conditions of the deal itself. E.g. if you want to ally with an AI side and offer the alliance to them, they may accept it, or they may demand a tribute from you to get the alliance. The player only has to say whether they wish to accept the deal or not, they do not get the chance to offer structure the deal themselves, so the AI never has to evaluate what the player is trying to offer them. We think it simplifies the diplomatic negotiations down to its core and yet allows the AI to make complicated decisions taking into account many different factors. E.g. economic and military power, mobilisation, relationship, geography, allies, enemies, etc. Each AI side has a controlling “king” like the player and that king has characteristics that effect the decisions, such as aggression, predictability etc. We’ve found these factors allow the AI enough flexibility to do different things in different situations, and even vary what it does if nothing changes to avoid being predictable, making each game unique and interesting.
SGO: Strategically, a great deal of Rome’s success had to do with development of the transport net, communication, economics – how will Legion handle this sort of ‘meta’ improvement that isn’t tied to a single region?
Slitherine: As mentioned above we are focusing on the military side of the era. We’re also concentrating on Rome’s expansion rather than the retention of territory. Roads and other major works did not happen until after an area was conquered and pacified. Legion covers the conquering but not the Romanisation of these conquered lands.
SGO: Will there be for-of-war – i.e. the player has limited knowledge of an area until it’s explored?
Slitherine: The player has limited knowledge about their enemies but we did not like the shroud approach used by other games. The maps look really good and we didn’t like it when they were almost entirely obscured by large areas of black, or darkened. We also didn’t like the way you had to explore areas that in reality would have been pretty well known (e.g. I can’t imagine the Romans wandered out of Rome thinking “I heard a rumour there was coast line around here somewhere, but I’m not sure where exactly…..”). We have limited the players knowledge in other ways linked to how enemy armies are shown and how much information you get about them. You can always see the entire map, but you’re not always sure what it is that’s moving around on the map.
SGO: Will this fog extend to political issues (i.e. not just map objects)? Will you know who all your enemies are at the start (for example, exploring a province and finding out the Gauls there hate you)?
Slitherine: As mentioned above we felt this was not realistic so did not have the shroud work this way. There are starting relationships between each nation and every other nation at the start of the campaign and to pretend you knew them well enough to like or hate them without even knowing whether they were north or south of you made little sense to us. As the geography is based on a real world setting, it also means people know what shape the map would be anyway and where other nations should appear, so why hide it from them. Shrouds make much more sense in games that have randomly generated terrain – E.g. Civ.
SGO: With the troops already outlined on your site, such as Legionaries, Praetorians, Auxilia, Cavalry, and Velites you have basically all the land troop types covered. Will there be any consideration of naval warfare?
Slitherine: We made a design decision early on to focus Legion around the land battles. We did not want to split our time between models for naval, sieges and land battles, so have put all our efforts into making the land battles play really well, look great and different from anything else out there. Naval is another possible feature for a sequel.
SGO: A great deal of Roman tactical ability had to do with siege engines and especially field fortifications (Alesia springs to mind!) – how will these be addressed in the tactical engine?
Slitherine: We are allowing the player to build forts with garrisons. These contribute in the defense of the city, but all battles are fought outside the city. We didn’t want to compromise the battle system to try and fit in sieges, so for this version of the game garrisons contribute to the battle outside the city, but if the battle is lost the city is lost.
SGO: The FAQ suggests that control during a battle will be minimal (IMO a good thing) but does this mean that the tactical formations and changes of Roman troops (something for which they were famous) will be implemented by AI?
Slitherine: Before the battle starts you place each of your squads on the battlefield. You get to set their orders and choose their formations. Different types of units will be restricted to different formations, based on historical information. The AI will be doing the same thing for the troops it controls and both sides will be trying to gain an advantage by making best use of the terrain, orders and formations.
SGO: What I’m thinking of specifically is unit dispersal to avoid missile fire, re-forming for melee, etc. How do you plan to handle units and formations?
Slitherine: Yes you can choose to put your troops in different formations, some of which are less vulnerable to missile fire (these tend to be narrower formations) but they suffer when fighting hand to hand. Deeper formations have more pushing power and gain a momentum advantage, so you must weigh up the defense bonus against missile fire against the hand to hand bonus of a deep formation. Light troops can be put in a dispersed formation that reduces the casualties from shooting, but this formation is very poor at hand to hand fighting. Different formations suit different units and different jobs. Regarding the Roman flexibility, there are different ways to illustrate this. One is to offer more formations to the Roman units and let the player decide how best to fight the battle. There are alternatives though such as making the Romans suffer less when they are attacked in the flank and rear, which is one thing their flexibility allowed them to fare better in. We want to do more play testing to assess the best way to achieve it.
SGO: Can you pause and give orders?
Slitherine: No, the idea of Legion is that you must plan everything before the battle starts. You cannot control the troops once it has started. From this point on their own AI kicks and makes decisions based on the orders you have given them. When we have more feedback from play testing we’ll know what level of control if any is required in the battles. We’ve got the World Wargames Champion designing the battle engine, so you can be sure the battles will feel real and look authentic.
SGO: Will combat troops have a morale value, and not ‘fight to the last man’ – will this vary due to circumstances, training, support, location, experience, etc?
Slitherine: Yes, this is a very important part of the battles. Units have a cohesion level that starts at ordered, then drops through disordered, shaken and finally routed. As the units morale drops the cohesion drops down through the different stages. Recruits have low morale and are fall through the steps faster. Morale is reduced when when casualties are received, and increased if casualties are inflicted. If other units on your side are routed, then all your units take a morale hit. The size of the hit depends on who routed. E.g. if some skirmishers were routed, nobody really cares (to be honest, in a real battle nobody would have noticed as they tended to run backwards and forwards a lot anyway, so you couldn’t tell when they routed!). However, if you lose the Praetorian guard, you can be sure the whole of your army is going to be very nervous and it could be the turning point that’s makes the entire armies morale just crack and run (much like Napoleons army broke at Waterloo when the Old Guard were repulsed – “la Garde recule”).
Cohesion can also be lost by flank attacks. If your squads is attacked from different directions at the same time, there is a chance the squad becomes disordered. Disordered and shaken units are less effective in combat and routed units just scatter from the enemy. Experience is a major factor in morale. Raw troops are much more likely to panic than hardened veterans.
SGO: The FAQ states “hundreds of units” on screen. I just reviewed Takeda (which also looks to have a similar 2d sprite-based battle screen) and I was struck how clearly this bar has been raised by games like Shogun which implemented a fully rotatable 3d environment with up to 5000 units per side on screen. Obviously the 2d/3d thing is a matter of taste (the FAQ says “3d rendered” but it looks like it’s a 3d background only, correct?), but the unit count has a great deal to do with how ‘realistic’ the whole thing feels. Comments?
Slitherine: Our maps are pre-rendered in 3D, but this is done before the battle starts, allowing us to render them to a more detailed level than other games that render them on the fly. The terrain that appears on the battlefield depends upon the location of the battle and the area around it. Each battlefield is unique, yet if you fight in the same place twice you will get the same battlefield. We are currently working with Paradox to covert the units to 3D rendered sprites. In Legion the battles can have up to 20 squads with up to 80 men per squad. We could have made the battles larger but we found that making the battles too large made it hard to track what was going on. We think the battles in Legion are big enough to look really interesting, yet not so big that you cannot keep track of how your troops are doing. Bigger is not always better! E.g. In Cossacks, its impossible to tell what’s going on or control the troops once you have anything approaching their unit limit.
SGO: I very much the screenshots of the various troop types (esp the tribal javelineers). Will there be a variety of values ‘underneath’ the graphics?
Slitherine: Yes, one of the things we are keen to do is maintain the currency of units throughout the game. By this I mean that the squads you buy at the start of the game are still useful even in the final stages. This was one thing we learned from Westwood when we worked with them to create Dune 2000 & Dune Emperor, before forming Slitherine. The aim is that new squads you can build are not just upgraded versions of the ones you already have, but perform a different task. E.g. The Auxilia are cheaper than Legionaries and will lose to them in a fight on open ground. If you put the Legionaries through a forest though, the Auxilia now have the advantage. The idea is that the more types of units you have, the more options you have. The best armies will not be those with the most expensive troop types, but will be the ones with the most balanced composition.
SGO: Will one tribal warband have the same stats (morale, etc) as every other tribal warband or only different sizes? (For example, would Parthian archers be more dangerous than Gallic ones?)
Slitherine: Every unit that looks the same will have the same starting stats. E.g. if you have 2 squads of gallic warband, this could give you 2 squads of 80 men in a battle. Everyone of these men has the same basic stats at the start of the game. Later on, as units gain experience though, this is not necessarily true. Also, the Gallic warband look different and have different stats to the German warband.
SGO: Another critical aspect of military actions in the ancient world is the limited nature of intelligence. Will tactical battles have a fog-of-war?
Slitherine: We are experimenting with ways to achieve this and will need more play testing to know what works best for Legion. Our initial plan is to limit how much of the enemy you can see when choosing to deploy your troops, based on an intelligence level linked to how many scouts etc you have available.
SGO: If so will it be “once this part of the screen has been seen, it’s always available” or will it be more like Close Combat “this part’s been seen, but if nobody’s looking at it now it’s not updated”?
Slitherine: We’re doing something a little different to both of these. We’re not having a shroud at the campaign level. Personally I don’t like the way that in Close Combat you can’t tell if you have checked a piece of ground. E.g. If there is nobody in a bunker it means you can’t tell if you haven’t seen that bunker yet and there could be people in it, or if you have checked it out and made sure there is no one there. We show the positions of all armies on the campaign map, but no information on these armies. It could be anything from a small scouting force to a large army. Its not until you get closer to them that you find out more details about them, but even then the info is still only rough. The only real way to find out the details of an enemy force is to engage it in battle.
SGO: Will regiments have any regional loyalties (i.e. a Gallic Regment either fight better in Gaul, or have a greater chance to revolt in favor of a Gallic General)?
Slitherine: Its not something we’d thought of, so will not be in this version. It’s an interesting idea though and something we’ll bear in mind for the future.
SGO: I see that you are concentrating on single player. I’ll admit up front that I have the same experience with any online strategic game (Warlords, Civ, etc.) in finding it mighty hard to drum up opponents with both the time & devotion to commit to a long term strategic game. There is, however, a great ‘market’ emphasis on expandability and replayability, as well as mod-ability (whether people actually have the time to use them is a whole different question). To lack internet play AND lack any sort of editor seems, well, old-fashioned. Aren’t you afraid that this is going to hurt you (by at least SEEMING to limit the replayability)?
Slitherine: We don’t think so. One of the things we are allowing the player to do is adjust the starting conditions of the scenarios, so although there is no editor they can play the scenarios in numerous ways. Apart from being able to play as any side in any scenario, the player can also choose from any of 4 alternative histories for each scenario, or a completely random set-up. All in all, this means there are lots of things to try in Legion and the feedback we’ve had seems to support this.
SGO: What is the possibility that later scenarios created by Slitherine would be downloadable off the web?
Slitherine: It’s not something we’re ruling out and we are trying to make sure that its technically possible, but we don’t have any firm plans on this yet.
SGO: I applaud your effort at aiming for a low machine requirement, but sometimes this can be hobbling for the overall game quality. The average computer out there is still a Pentium 1, but the average GAMER’s computer is somewhat higher – maybe a P300. 32 megs of RAM might be altogether too ambitious – Win 9X would barely clunk along in real mode w/32 megs, do you realistically plan to make a game that will run in such a spec’d machine and yet still be fun for someone with a decent machine? (Not to put too fine a point on it, but most people CAN play a game programmed for a Gameboy on their systems – does that mean they’d want to?)
Slitherine: It has been a challenge to design a game that works on a low end Pentium but that still competes with other games coming out, but we’re extremely happy with the results. We’re still aiming for a low spec, but we need to test the final version to be sure it runs at an acceptable speed. We’re not saying it was easy (it wasn’t!), but we think it’s been worth it. You only have to look at the screenshots to see if you think we’re competitive or not, and the feedback we’ve had so far has been great and suggests we are. We’re not compromising the game to make it run on low spec machines, but we are being very careful about how we use memory and structure the code to be as fast as possible. We also have the added advantage that strategy games are not as processor intensive as most other genres out there. When C&C came out it was initially slated for running in VGA and having a low minimum spec, but people saw past this and the game was a great success. We’re not happy with the way minimum specs are being forced up all the time. Some games rely entirely on their looks and getting good screenshots for the mags. For these games any prolonged period of play soon shows up the flaws in the game design that were hidden by the gloss. With Legion we’re not hiding behind the gloss, but focusing on making a really good game and part of that job is making it look good, but it’s by no means the only thing!
End of Interview
Thank you Iain for the screenshots and all the time you took answering our questions!
When I first asked about Legion, I really wasn’t sure what it was about. Was it going to be The Settlers (ala Rome)? Or was it going to be something more along the lines of Roma Universalis? Paradox told me that they wanted people to realize that they had more to offer than ‘variations on an EU theme’ and with Legion I think they have found a compelling vehicle.
Slitherine has made some very interesting decisions (and I’m not using that as a euphemism for bad, I really mean interesting) about gameplay, such as the management-lite tactical combat. This system seems to resemble a number of miniatures rules for ancient battles (DBM or Tactica spring immediately to mind) all of which are radical departures from the command-intensive style found so commonly in tactical computer wargames. These systems rationalize a lot of the lower-level activity on the battlefield so they don’t at first glance seem to be comprehensive, but nonetheless offer an extraordinarily authentic ‘feeling’ to the battles and their outcomes. I found myself particularly sympathetic to Iain’s comments about strategic fog-of-war and I like the idea of tactical setup flexibility proportional to scouting assets.
For any developer, there will always be tradeoffs in the design of a game, and for small developers the razor cuts that much closer. Omitting multiplayer (practically a requirement in today’s market) is a ballsy move; rightly they recognize that a mediocre single-player game can’t be saved by ‘playing online instead’ – not even a titan like id Software could survive such a thing unscathed (cough, cough, Quake3, cough). Logically, the resources that one would otherwise throw into solving the thorny issues of multiplay may be more efficiently spent crafting an AI that makes online play – if not extraneous – redundant. The lack of an editor seems more dubious (I’ll admit I’m frankly hoping that the fans will quickly crack the secrets of editing for Legion and release the floodgates of fan-base creativity). Ultimately, the proof of their decisions will be in what we get when we see the game loaded.
In any case, my brief experience with Legion thus far is similar to that I had with EU1 so many months ago. Check out
www.slitherine.co.uk, follow the news, read the notes for the (now four) scenarios posted and see the depth of historical knowledge that is going into every stage of the game’s development. Again, as in EU, the forums are filled with a stunningly well-informed group of people who can apparently answer everything from details about tribes in western Gaul to the minutae of Roman unit battle awards. Laudably, there is also the relatively frequent appearance of Slitherine; not just dispensing pearls of wisdom about Legion, but taking input from the proto-fans and really absorbing it (which is cool).
As a result, Legion looks like it’s going to be deeply educational despite Iain’s protestations above. It also looks like it might be one heck of a fun game!
