Artillery Lends Dignity to What Would Otherwise Be an Ugly Brawl
AshesoftheSingularity ForumsThe Blob: "The Ugly Brawl"
The danger of having combat be decided at close quarters by relatively tough units is that the entire large-scale war essentially boils down to the collision of two blobs, where generally speaking the larger blob will win. Like two barbarian hordes colliding in an open field, whoever has the larger army almost always wins, and that single confrontation decides the strategic picture of the entire conflict.
Currently, Ashes of the Singularity battles look very much like the "ugly brawl" of two colliding barbarian armies. And not the chess match on a prodigious scale played out in a protracted, limited engagement that it could be.
Defender's Advantage
"The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided."
- Sun Tzu
Part and parcel of having a strategically interesting large-scale conflict is having different areas of advantage, some areas where one side will have an advantageous fight, and other areas where the opposite side will have an advantageous fight. The terrain and static features that determine which side has a local advantage need to be relatively immobile, meaning that more mobile units are forced to decide between attacking into a disadvantageous battle on purpose, or declining to attack.
The "walled city" quote refers to the fact that a protracted siege is a nightmare for an attacker. It's slow, ties up huge amounts of resources for a long period of time, and results in more losses for the attacker than for the defender. It's a problem. But, a day may come when the strategic needs of the war require beseiging a walled city, although the fact that it is so unfavorable means that other methods should be preferred, and tactics employed to avoid ever needing to do so.
Mobility and Positional Play
"He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight."
- Sun Tzu
Deciding whether to attack, or not to attack because the enemy's defender's advantage is too great is certainly one important consideration. But it is important to understand that an attacker should have vastly more options than just "all-out assault." A complete commitment is the final resort, from which there is no follow-up or contingency except either winning or losing the battle.
Limited engagements using small forces, such as scouts, picking off isolated enemy units, probing, envelopment, and various other maneuvers of less than a full engagement can potentially gain ground or kill enemies, or force the enemy to retreat, fearing a bad engagement, without ever needing to push all your chips into the center of the table.
The most important of these that Ashes should focus on is envelopment. Getting behind an enemy allows you to destroy their squishy and valuable rear echelon, cut off their reinforcements, and block their option to retreat. You can then destroy the encircled enemy at your leisure by whatever method you prefer, such as by bombing them to powder, or a direct assault from multiple directions.
Fire Support
"The best generals are those who have served in the artillery."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Artillery is the single most important fact of military strategy since its invention. In any confrontation, artillery is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the actual kills. Artillery units also spend a lot of time firing at nothing at all, either on purpose for suppression, to block movement, or just by mistake because of incorrect information about where the enemy is located.
Artillery has the unique ability to remove enemy units from existence with very little risk to any friendly forces. Additionally, their incredible range allows very distant forces to be supported without needing to bring the full force along with them.
Fire support enables a radically different kind of deployment than simply blobbing together the largest possible army. It makes more sense to use artillery as a force multiplier to multiply the strength of numerous smaller forces. Instead of deploying a huge army, deploy dozens of smaller groups, all intended to find the enemy, and rely on distant artillery to inflict grievous damage.
The problem with artillery is that it is helpless in a direct battle. Enemy units slipping past the front lines can either directly attack and destroy it all, or even just spot it, enabling the enemy's artillery to counter-battery and wipe it off the map. That front line of smaller units needs to be solid enough to protect the artillery and other soft units (like anti-air, logistics, engineers, airbases, etc) which stay behind the lines.
Air Support
"Air power may either end war or end civilization."
- Winston Churchill
Aircraft add an entirely new dimension to battle which allows for extremely rapid long-distance attacks with enormous firepower. But they are also expensive, fragile, and transient assets that cannot hold territory or locate ground targets for themselves, placing them strictly in a supporting role for ground forces.
Many aircraft in RTS games are treated mostly like ground units with a different set of weapons that target them. What should happen instead is that air units move on the board in a fundamentally different way than ground units. Fast, but transient. Powerful when aiding ground forces, but helpless without. Capable of quickly unleashing a lot of destruction, but with insufficient payload to loiter for long and destroy an entire army by themselves.
Aircraft should sortie from an airbase, unleash hell, and head home. If you place an air strike mission inside the enemy's air defense, your planes will take fire and may be destroyed, meaning you should be careful sending your planes too far ahead into unscouted enemy territory, as you are taking a risk to do so. In this regard, air support is more similar to artillery fire support than it is to having units in the field. But air support has very different properties, such as being speedy and flexible, and a more powerful burst attack, but susceptible to anti-air and requiring many more assets to make a sustained bombardment.
Intelligence & Deception
"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near."
- Sun Tzu
Deception can, in the right hands, have an enormous and immediately apparent force multiplying effect. For example, Zhuge Liang once encountered the situation of needing to defend a fort with only 100 men, against an advancing enemy army of 100,000 men. Winning a battle was impossible. So instead he ordered all the gates open, and instructed his men to hide inside the fort, while he stood on the ramparts playing a lyre. The enemy general, aware of Zhuge Liang's reputation as a careful and cunning tactician, and therefore convinced this could only be a trap, ordered his army to withdraw. Mission accomplished.
Deception allows un-winnable battles to be avoided, and impossible objectives to be achieved, by causing the enemy to do something stupid, such as declining to attack where you appear strong, or foolishly attacking where you appear weak.
In order for deception to be a factor, information must be hidden. Making it harder to get good information about what the enemy is really doing, coupled with the ability to expend time and units to get better information.
Strategy
"He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces."
- Sun Tzu
All of the above features have the effect of enabling a smaller force, if used cleverly, to defeat an enemy with a larger force. This fact opens up the possibility of spreading forces out into several smaller groups, anticipating a favorable engagement against a larger enemy, either through superior tactics, providing fire support of some kind, or as a deception to achieve some other objective.
Because of this possibility to engage and defeat a larger army, the game is only truly over when one side's ability to fight is destroyed. Even a string of poor engagements against a larger enemy do not necessarily lead to inevitable defeat due to an inability to catch up in force size after the casualties in those defeats.
Conclusion
"Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead."
- Carl von Clauzewitz
Ashes of the Singularity is in the unique position of creating the largest real time strategy sandbox ever. However, because of that fact, it is vitally important that the strategic layer of the game is actually interesting. If it isn't interesting, then the shiny special effects of watching two blobs destroy each other is going to get very old, very quickly.
To make a strategically interesting strategy layer, Ashes of the Singularity needs to significantly build out its defender's advantage, mobility warfare, artillery, air support as support instead of another flavor of combat unit, intelligence, and deception.
