One-feature-a-day articles: #14 Garrisons and raids: the ‘petty’ war

[DooberGuy]

This is a re-posting of Pocus's original posting on the Paradox forum. I believe he has probably been insanely busy getting PoN ready for us, so I am only attempting to help him out.



One-feature-a-day articles: #14 Garrisons and raids: the ‘petty’ war

With a game of such scope as Pride of Nations, we are always trying to reduce micro-management, if it is not detrimental to the (allow us the word) ‘finesse’ of the game. As such, we took a look at the smaller forces that still make a vital part of your nation: garrisons.

Garrisons are there by necessity and by definition are spread all over the (important) places, and for some countries like Great-Britain and to a lesser extent others countries (Russia and its vast empire, United States and the numerous territories of the Frontier, etc.), they are present over several continents.

So a potential chore would be to check and maintain an adequate level of force everywhere for the player. For the AI the matter is even worse, because AIs are not as proficient as a player when it comes to ordering small, unimportant units in the home country to board ships and garrison faraway places like the Falklands, Madagascar, Hong Kong and such like.

The idea then is to have a kind of ‘auto-garrison’ feature. It is in place in PON, and will spare you many hurdles, so you can concentrate on others things. For each structure, we defined if it could shelter a garrison, and of what type (plus in which quantity). When one of your structures is besieged or even as soon as an enemy enters the region it is in, then auto-garrison triggers. Should the structure survive the attack and no enemy is around, then the garrison is disbanded automatically. This is a nice feature because it also helps the AIs quite a lot against native raids, as you can bet that historically, there were always some soldiers protecting a colonial fort. The same happens in PON.

In metropolitan regions, auto-garrisons are also in place, but are more massive, particularly for fortresses. Here you get garrisons numbering in the thousands of men, with dedicated fortress artillery.

Now, there are also some control freaks among us (I’m a former member myself of Control Freak Anonymous ). Rest assured bean-counters! You can supplement the automated garrison system with extra fortress units, should you really want to have this brand new multi-level fortress behind the Rhine (or Volga, Danube, whatever) a really hard nut to crack.
Now, some words on raiding. Because PON is the most recent incarnation of the AGE engine, you can do raids with it, as easily as you did if you ever played Wars in America. All units have a ‘hide value’ (a sneak or stealth factor). Should you manage to have a value high enough to not be detected, it is quite possible to place yourself in the region of your enemy without him seeing you coming. That done, several opportunities await you. You can stay there, and provide from turn to turn some recon value. Or you can pillage the region, or you can assault the structures by surprise. Should you manage to capture them, then your enemy will lose prestige points (burning the governor’s residence of your foe in one of his colonies is quite a valid tactic).



Raiding mechanisms are an integral part of the game, because PON also handles partisan warfare. It is quite possible that should you lose most of your territory to an enemy, you will see new units pop up in wild regions, ready to respond to your orders. These are partisans, and they are defined with high stealthiness and low need for supply. They can even use the special order ‘ambush’, for maximum havoc. And as with the other units of the game, each of these units is illustrated with a custom, portrait, just for fun and historical pleasure.