posted 03-17-99 02:49 PM ET     

The Civ1/Civ2/SMAC "series" has provided a good, and increasingly complex, model for strategic game play. However, I have always felt that the model for tactical combat was very weak which is a common condition for this type of game. SAMC has improved tactical operations over Civ1/Civ2, but it could be much better. I understand that the primary focus of SMAC is strategic, but the new ability to design units may be leading to better support for tactical combat.

Currently a SMAC attack is initiated by "driving" unit A over unit B at which point they fight until either one unit is destroyed or disengages from combat and that's about it. If unit B had other units stacked with it, they might sustain collateral damage, but they do not help out in the fight. The attack and defense values, used to determine damage do not, for the most part, allow for situations where a weapon might be totally ineffective against a given defensive system. It does not allow for hidden fire, line of sight, ranged weapons (other than artillery), supporting or covering fire, facing of a unit and many other little things that are issues in tactical combat.

I also play Steel Panthers 2 a lot (SSI). SP2 has an excellent tactical model but no support for strategic game play. What I would like to see for SMAC is this: Revise units so that a production "unit" is actually a group of units that function together (i.e. produce a platoon of, say, 4 rovers v/s a single rover). On the strategic map, the rover platoon would move and act as a single unit. When the rover platoon engages in combat, focus would "zoom" to a tactical map, detailing the strategic hex in which combat was occurring, and the four rovers in the platoon would move on the tactical map as individual units acting against multiple enemy units. As individual units the rovers would be able to use ranged fire, LOS etc. according to it's abilities like in SP2. A fixed number of tactical turns would pass and focus would revert to the strategic map where strategic play would proceed. If one side had not been completely destroyed or had retreated, during the tactical combat phase, additional units could join the battle, during the strategic turn, for use in the next tactical combat turn set. To support "combined arms" production should support creating platoons of mixed types up to a fixed maximum number of units per platoon. Further, several platoons might be "attached" to move and fight together.

There was a game called "Battles in Time" by QQP that used this type of system. "Imperialism" and "Star General" also use a similar system. I am not sure how well this would play in multi-player though. Anyway, this might be something cool for SMAC2!