Blitz more like amphibious attacks?

Hepps

@liberty_lion As I said... it's an interesting concept. See if more people chime in with idea's.

wirkey

@liberty_lion In one of the board games, might have been revised, there was an optional rule. If all defending units are destroyed in the first round of combat, tanks may move one more space to an empty hostile territory.

Cernel

@wirkey You might be thinking about the "Panzerblitz" National Advantage for Germany in Axis&Allies Revised, but I just checked that one allows only to Non Combat Move further 1 if you win in 1 combat round (potentially making your Armours move 3 spaces total).
That is still a cool concept, as it allows fast unit to work akin to air units (kill the enemies, then move out of counterattack), and it would be particularly cool if applied to cavalry units, also before WW2.
But, yah, that's more of another way to have the special ability of air unit, than a blitz thing, tho taking a hostile undefended then going in a friendly is blitzing too, technically (still, you cannot wait NCM to do it; so, not strictly).
I always wanted a way to retreat with land units after killing all enemies, and maybe I will make a feature request about it (I talked about it in the old developer forum, a while ago).

wirkey

@cernel yeah, that's what i was talking about

prastle

@wirkey it also occurred in Xeno's version but they had double combat move round 1 only

wirkey

@prastle yeah, I loved that game, although it had a lot of flaws. A friend of mine has that board game but we haven't had time to play it in ages.

zlefin

A long time ago I was considering some sort of deep penetration mechanic;
the one I was considering would be that blitz (or super-blitz or whatever y awanna call it, since it'd be a different mechanic than the standard blitz rules) units could go past enemy defenders, but only if there's at least 1 other attacker for each defender.
so for instance, if you have 1 infantry and 2 tanks to attack with; and the defenders are 2 infantry; then one of the attacking tanks could go deeper, but the other tank would have to stay there
whereas if there was only one defending infantry, then both tanks could go past.

Hepps

@zlefin So if there was as in your second example.... would this then leave 1 Infantry to attack 1 defending Infantry?

So then in this type of scenario.... I am assuming the results of the first battle do not impact the "Super Blitz".

I like the concept.

prastle

@hepps no leaving 1 infantry and 1 tank to attack the 2 inf. while the other tank goes deeper I believe. Neat idea @zlefin

Hepps

@zlefin This type of system could also be used to deal with the blocker flotilla's in naval and add a very interesting dynamic that could potentially back fire on the attacker.

No idea how this would be coded.... But I like the concept.

zlefin

@hepps
correct, in the second example it would leave 1 infantry attacking 1 defending infantry and the results of the first battle don't impact whether the second is allowed. so it'd be more of a sacrifice play to serve as a distraction while the blitzers go deep in that case.
code-wise, all the validation/control has to happen in the combat move phase, for combat itself units simply attack the province they're in.

in other circumstances it simply functions as a way to let massive stacks go past small blocker forces.

I don't remember how hard/feasible it is to implement; as it was long ago that I looked. you definitely have to make sure it has some validation locks in place to prevent people from undo-ing actions that were necessary to have enough units in the territory to let other units go past.

as I think about how it'd all work; I wonder if air units should be able to provide the "pin"; or if only units of the same domain (air/sea/land) should be able to provide the distraction that enables other forces to go past.
if an air unit was part of providing the pin, then you'd need to make sure it couldn't move again; code-wise it's probably a bunch easier to do if air units can't provide a pin.

aye, it would also help deal with the one blockin gship issue.
I think I was playing a lot of nwo when I was looking at the idea; as nwo has a lot of huge stacks blocked by one small thing. ofc changing that would massively change the balance on nwo.

prastle

@zlefin and why can't we make you a mod/dev again?

Hepps

@zlefin whether you included the feature in NWO is a matter of deciding whether to include it or not.

In all reality... this feature would likely be independent of the current mechanics.... so you would likely end up making a stand alone version and then re-balance the game to suit.

General_Zod

@zlefin

It seems that the only way to implement this via xml would be to count units. That's a big xml hurdle, imo. Other components appear reasonably doable.

The idea as a whole is cool, maybe place a feature request once you confirm what is truely missing to make it happen.

Although I should add counting units is also doable just extremely unpractical to code in existing xml.

CrazyG

There is a map called roll through the reich which had something like this. There was a second combat move phase that only allowed tanks and other mechanized units to move

zlefin

I looked a bit at the code to see how hard it would be to implement one of these; it looks like it would require a moderate amount of work, but not huge. definitely not trivial though.
If I had to guess, i'd say 6-10 hours of work (factoring in the thoughtful coding, some ui decisions, debugging, and discussion), but it's notoriously hard to estimate work times on things like this.

most of the work would be changes in movevalidator as far as I can tell, with maybe a few ancillary changes elsewhere. there's several different sections of code in there that would need to be modified to allow for some form of deeper blitz, and it's not quite as simple as just adding a check.

you'd need to decide which implementation(s) to use if you were gonna do something; my proposal, liberty's, or some other one. Doing multiple proposals at once is definitely more work than just oding one, but there's a lot of overlap, so if in the future you'd want want more than one of the implementations, it could be worthwhile to do all at once.

if one were to go for a proposal, there's a number of particular details to work out in relation to the ui about what makes for the best/easiest interface for it. like will it autoform a blitz path if you click deeper into enemy territory; how to decide which units are getting left behind for the pin force (under my proposal).

so i'd say the main question/process from her eis:

is there a mapmaker going to make a map, that will see sufficient use, to justify the work of implementation.? if not, wait until there is.
if so, then start ironing out the details of the behavior and how it will present through the interface.

redrum

@zlefin Really depends which of the several different proposals you went with as some would be much easier to implement than others. I would say probably all of them would take more than 6 hours of development especially when you consider unit tests and manual testing. Probably more like 10-15 hours for the ones that aren't too complex would be more realistic.

Hepps

@zlefin I would implement this idea into my next map 100% for sure. Just saying.

zlefin

ok, so gonna start ironing out some details on proposals/possibilities to use then, as well as just clarifying things and brainstorming scenarios/problems that may occur.
not sure what we'd end up calling this mechanic; for now I'm gonna use Superblitz as a name.

predicate battles, by which I mean the battle you're going into that some of your units then Superblitz past.
how does the predicate battle affect the superblitz battle.

basic options are:
contingent: like a transport battle; the predicate battle must be won to do the superblitz battle. if it's not won, then the superblitz battle does not occur. battle order must be enforced by engine.
If the predicate battle is not won, what should the behavior of the superblitzing units be? if there's a retreat then superblitzing units could retreat along with them, but what if there's no retreat ordered? what if all attacking units simply die, then what happens to the superblitzing units?
what about the cases where the battle is neither won nor lost due to a turn limit timer on combat?
what if the battle results in mutual annihilation?

what if all attacking land/sea units die, but there are remaining air units? should the province then be captured by the superblitzing units before they get to go onto their battle,or does it not count as a win at all? the answer here will also apply to the mutual annihilation scenario.

if the predicate battle is lost (not retreat, but actual death of the attackers) should excess casualties be applied to the superblitzing units?

independent: like my proposal; the outcome of the predicate battle has no effect on whether the superblitz battle occurs, and should not have any effects on the predicate battle at all.

semi-independent: a hybrid, the predicate battle does not affect whether the superblitz battle occurs, but may have other effects on the battle (like validity of retreat routes, only previously won battles superblitz'd past may be retreated to)

Scenario: provinces A, B, C, D are in order (i.e. A next to B, B next to C; but A is not next to C.
provinces A & D are owned by the attacking player. B & C are owned by the defender.
the attackers wants to send some units from A into B, and superblitz some into C. they also want to send some units from D into C, and superblitz some of those into B.
how to handle situation? which battle to resolve first? in this case you have to resolve a battle without the predicate battle being resolved, OR you have to prevent such scenarios from occurring at all.

handling retreats:
touched on by some prior points above, one of the basic questions for superblitz is how to handle retreating from a superblitz.
in my original proposal, it'd be impossible to retreat to a province you superblitz'd through, in order to maintain it's independence. some users would of course wonder why you couldn't retreat to the province you blitzed through if you won that battle already; a question of what's feasible/easier to code/design around, and what players expect the behavior to be.

you could setup a semi-independent hybrid option as described prior.

depth of penetration:
how many layers deep should superblitz'ing be possible? only one extra province deep, or as many as you meet the conditions for (i.e. have enough movement for and can meet whatever extra conditions are required by the model used)? should that answer by simply definite one way or the other, or an engine-settable variable?

redrum

@zlefin Just a few thoughts to help make this somewhat reasonable to implement:

If you go contingent, you may want to initially not support using this feature with limited battle rounds or just consider an unresolved battle (both sides still have units) as a loss to keep it simple. Otherwise I think things get weird in the opposite direction of what you are trying to address which is the attacker uses just a few troops where at least 1 survives the limited battle rounds in order to superblitz past.
To keep things simple, I'd say no matter which option you go with if the superblitz battle occurs then there is no retreat options.
Unless you put some kind of strong rules around how many units the attacker must use on the predicate battle then I don't really see how independent or semi-independent make much sense. You want to avoid allowing the attacker to use one infantry on the predicate battle to blitz past and crush a bunch of air units behind them. Also not sure that having 10 infantry attack 10 tanks so that my other 10 tanks can superblitz past would be a good mechanic as I could just retreat my 10 infantry after the first round.
If you go contingent, then you probably want to resolve all predicate battles first to avoid the scenario you outline. Or prevent units from superblitzing to a territory that is already a predicate battle of another superblitz.
Depth of penetration, I'd focus on just 1 extra province to start otherwise its probably going to get very complex and not sure more than that would really even be usable by an actual map.