Motivation to attack.

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way2co0l
Brigadier Gen.
Posts: 687
Joined: Nov 29 2010
Human: Yes

Motivation to attack.

Post by way2co0l »

One thing I've been thinking about for awhile is that considering the value of historical hindsight involving this war, there seems to be very little motivation to go on the offensive early in the war. We all know how dreadful those offensives turned out to be, the the horrendous casualties they suffered. Hindsight tells us how prudent it would be to just man the front and respond to the enemies attacks, bleeding them more than they bleed you, and then striking once they've sufficiently weakened themselves. That's a big problem for this game right now. We all know better, so there's very little incentive to deviate from that course.

Obviously, the solution is to try to create an incentive, but the question is how to do that.

I think the most straightforward option is to enforce a penalty on the player (Not the AI, the AI should already be programmed to launch futile offensives) for every week that the player doesn't launch a sufficiently large offensive. I feel this is realistic of the period as every nation was looking for the knock out punch and there was tremendous political pressure on everyone involved to find it. The loss of prestige and morale for not actively seeking victory, especially early in the war, would greatly diminish public and military support for your leadership in the war. Obviously, this can be reduced after some period of time or after certain techs have been researched, but I think it's a necessary motivator. Especially if you combine it with what I was talking about in the Russian civil war thread where low DAR and/or MAR could result in internal issues to your leadership. It would force the player to take action in an effort to try to avoid that issue, and suffer higher casualties in the process.

The question then becomes a matter of how does the game determine what a sufficiently large offensive is in regards to this issue, and that's a much more difficult question to answer. The best option I can put forward is a percentage of manpower losses, which sounds counter-intuitive but I can't currently think of a better way. Any offensive that is launched against the front lines that I have described in other threads would result in major losses, and you'd have to suffer those losses in order to make any kinds of gains. The player would know they need to make gains in order to keep their civil and military approval ratings up so would have to pick and choose what gains are worth those losses, trading lives for gains. I understand it sounds harsh, but that was very much the reality of this war, especially early on, and I think this might be the best way of representing that fact.

I'm not entirely happy with that measurement personally, so I'm hoping this thread might open up some discussion on other ways the player would be encouraged to buck the obvious trend of just letting attrition win the war for you. Why take risks before you have the means to carry them out effectively? We need a mechanic that forces you to attack before you have the technology that makes it easier to do so successfully. So bring on the ideas. :D
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