Global combat impressions from latest in-game footage

[William Blake]

I’ve watched recent in-game footage multiple times, frame by frame in some cases. I have no idea what is still just a placeholder value or what is close to a final state, but it bothers me to I see current state of military gameplay.

 

Strategic war is very lame or so it seems (I obviously take tactical RTS battles out of the picture because most of single player will be auto battles as well as all of multiplayer)

 

This is what I see right now:

• Every single mechanics reinforces blobbing. There is zero reason not to have max army and zero reasons to split forces
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• Realistically speaking a player will have 2 maybe 3 marshals max. Which already limits number of military action available to a player, but moreover, mechanics of ally aid with a second marshal joining a battle makes it very beneficial to have second marshal nearby.
  
   
• Cost of a marshal including books spent in skills and time invested makes any loss a significant blow to a player, such that risking a marshal with out maxed army is foolish. Maxing army is very simple both from global barrack upgrades and kingdom levies with units created instantly on a click. So players will have maxed out tech1 or tech2 army all the time if they want. Army refill is also instant and can be done at once in most of your cities.
  
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• Combat is extremely repetitive and bland. You can practically 100% see the result before armies even engage.
  
   
• All sieges are the same and expect zero decision making to be honest. Current mechanics of city garrison and town fortifications (% bonus to manpower) practically demands 2 max armies to overcome a city without much loses, especially with a potential reinforcement from an enemy (1 marshal plus garrison units), so running around with a weak single marshal has no reasonable goals whatsoever.
  
  
• Maneuvering is practically non existent, you can see a target you can take on – you move to it, you see army stronger than you – move away. Raiding any settlement is just locking one of your very few armies into place to give an enemy an opportunity to gather a gang force. All of the movement play I ever saw was tricking an enemy to siege and then add a bigger army to a city defense. Not impressive.
   
• Army refill is expensive, moreover “kingdom levies” and local worker resources are holding you from accumulating potential resources to recover in time from a big losses. (1k kingdoms levies resource limit is not enough for even 1 new full army in case of 1 marshal defeat. 150 levies per unit)
  
  

Such that from a play to win perspective any military RISK has to be minimized – get all forces into a blob and try to win with a maximum advantage over an enemy in a shortest time.

I really doubt this would be enjoyable and engaging experience for all of us. Since we all set on auto resolve battles being the main combat mechanics, I think we should think really hard to make it better.

 

I’m afraid thinking about an extensive new combat system is counterproductive at this time, so I’ve tried to do as much as I can within current system we have been shown:

 

1) Change siege mechanics. Separate 2 stages – siege, during which attacker and defender loose little to no men, but attacker is decreasing (destroying) levels of fortifications. Such that if siege is long enough you can destroy all of the bonuses for defenders. Second stage – assault, is a battle with actual armies fighting based on remaining fortifications. During siege both armies should use food a lot. In fact I propose to have a cost in food to even start a siege so you can just hop in and out of sieges. Player choice should be a moment when to switch from siege to assault based on current situation.

 

2) During siege phase allow attacker to target city buildings instead of fortifications, such that given time an attacker can inflict economy damage to a city without a lot of losses given passive defenders. An attacker choice would be either try to reduce fortifications and take city with economy buildings or destroy economy and retreat. Defending player choice should be either hold enemy army wasting time and risk economy buildings or break siege going into offensive.

 

3) Make food to be the main limiting strategic resource on marshal/army level. Add new selectable option on marshal/garrison level – “Rations” (double, regular, half rations). Which would affect speed of food consumption respectively. With double rations army should get movement and morale bonus, with half rations should get debuf obviously but not starve for longer. On army UI add time calculation of remaining army food with a given rate of usage so a player can track and plan food as basically fuel for an army.

 

4) Make retreat actions cost food (you drop stuff as you run away). But it should be more or less easy to hit and run if you have food without risk to a marshal or a lot of army, which would allow harassing action against bigger armies and let a player to plan losses in terms of food costs rather than a catastrophic marshal or huge unit loss.

 

5) Make any army bigger than 3 units to move slowly and waste %-tage of food over time with each extra unit. Such that bigger army would be harder to maintain and harder to move. Light small armies should be able to raid enemy at longer distances faster but if caught would be weak and won’t be able to survive a lot with retreats costing food.

 

6) Make amount of food in an army cart to affect movement speed. Such that a small army with little food can have significant movement advantage. Small army with a lot of food would be slow, but could be used to supply another army. (also make UI to transfer food between armies, including other allied players). This would allow way more options for movement at different speeds and logistics (supply big army or a siege with food from far away). Max army with all the food is very slow but safest and needs no resupply.

 

7) Change upgrade system of the barracks from global to localized. Make localized upgrades (fletcher, swordsmith etc) cheaper, but easier to destroy during a siege, such that if you took a city you can’t just refill you army instantly based on your global upgrades but require to have appropriate upgrades to be present to refill respective unit types.

 

8) Add spy actions to sabotage food supply of a selected enemy marshal and cities in order to give non military way to harass a strong army or defense.

 

9) Probably add religion belies to reduce army food consumption, better bonuses from extra rations, reduced food waste of bigger armies. This would be easier to do at this point than adjusting/adding marshal skills or traditions.

 

The expected result of this changes (I wish would be) the following:

• Siege vs assault phases would change the dynamics from "only capture or retreat" to "trade time for defense or do economy damage over time"
• Changes to food consumption would allow logistics of war to step into spotlight instead of arcade roaming around forever
• Variable army speeds due to army size and food rations would greatly increase tactical options
• Small armies would become viable for raiding and fast food resupply of main forces
• Ideally the war will switch from blob on blob maxed armies to more intricate play of supply, food shortage, harassing strikes and strengths vs weaknesses of multiple options instead of one size fits all approach
• Local barracks upgrades would make local state of a province capital to be main factor of army resupply, while new siege phase would allow to economically weaken given province military production.

Hope I make my arguments clear. What do you think?

Cheers

Edited January 19, 2022 by William Blake

[Zerg]

4 hours ago, William Blake said:

1) Change siege mechanics.

Exactly this was already implemented in the first game and I doubtn it will be missing from the second game. I looked up the footage for a minute and found at least the possibility for the defender to break out of the fortifications. I'm sure it will be possible for the attacker, to start an all-out assault (just like in the first game).

 

4 hours ago, William Blake said:

2) During siege phase allow attacker to target city buildings instead of fortifications

I don't like the idea because it is unrealistic. Even thought trebuchets were fear-inducing they still were hard to aim, especially when the attacker doesn't know where the town stores their grain. Also look at my answert to 1) for the 'break siege' stuff.

 

5 hours ago, William Blake said:

3) Make food to be the main limiting strategic resource

Sounds good. I think that food will already be a limiting resource, but it can't hurt to add depth with rationing.

 

5) and 6) => These I don't like at all. I think that they are just limiting my fun of playing the game. I know that some people want to have a well-balanced game and want to be every strategy a viable option, but that just sound tedious.

 

5 hours ago, William Blake said:

7) Change upgrade system of the barracks from global to localized.

Yes, I fully agree. I don't know why they made the decision. Did they explain it on the dev-stream? Personally, I loved the decision-making involved in developing provinces and having to decide if I will focus mainly on military or economic buildings.

 

8 & 9) I have no opinion on them.

 

Some additional notes about the things you mentioned:

5 hours ago, William Blake said:

Combat is extremely repetitive and bland. You can practically 100% see the result before armies even engage.

I don't think it is. You can see if the enemy army is made up of infantry or cavalry. But if you try to attack a 2000-strength army with your 4000-strength cavalry and it turns out the army is completly made of halberdiers you're going to have a bad time. I think that's also a nice historically accurate implementation since most scouts only could estimate what weapons an enemy army carried with them.

 

5 hours ago, William Blake said:

Maneuvering is practically non existent,

We already saw that the second game has new pathing implemented. This means, that when an army marches along a road, it will increase its speed (about 30%, i guess). So there will be strategic possibilities to block of important roads. Of course this can only be utilized in mountainious or forest regions but then again we understand why the hordes in the steppes had a way larger proportion of cavalry in their army composition. So, in conclusion: terrain will be important to block of armies from entering regions. Also, as soon as you have 2 provinces you are also targetable on 2 positions.

[frujin]

5 hours ago, William Blake said:

There is zero reason not to have max army

This is wrong, and everything that follows is wrong too ....

[William Blake]

8 hours ago, Zerg said:

Exactly this was already implemented in the first game and I doubt it will be missing from the second game. I looked up the footage for a minute and found at least the possibility for the defender to break out of the fortifications. I'm sure it will be possible for the attacker, to start an all-out assault (just like in the first game).

 

This is not what I'm taking about, I'm talking about damage done to a city with a siege over time. As it is right now siege just goes through a progress bar and you win a city. This means that if you don't have army strong enough to take a city, you have no reason to even put any pressure on a city, because you don't make any difference if you don't win.

 

8 hours ago, Zerg said:

don't think it is. You can see if the enemy army is made up of infantry or cavalry. But if you try to attack a 2000-strength army with your 4000-strength cavalry and it turns out the army is completly made of halberdiers you're going to have a bad time. I think that's also a nice historically accurate implementation since most scouts only could estimate what weapons an enemy army carried with them.

No, it won't work this way. You don't have time or an ability to build up an army based on enemy units types. Building cavalry is questionable idea anyway, because all the real meaningful battles are sieges and cavalry is not good for that. And it is probably more expensive unit and an extra upgrade to barracks. This is why we probably never saw a cavalry units being used in the game. If there is low chance of cavalry and you need to take cities, then your army choices are reduced to assault infantry and archers. These would work the best and this is what we see in the footage all the time. Well apart from an idea that peasant armies are fun and engaging and you need to have a period of 6+ peasant armies roaming around.

If I have an army and you have an army, if you spot my army to be one unit type (because if its mixed types you won't really get a lot of advantage maxing out counter units) in order to change you army composition you need to have these unit types available than stash other existing units to garrison if it has enough space and then maybe you will have better composition. And you can't build a lot at once as you will be limited by local worker resource (1 per unit) and kingdom levies (1k limit globally), so instantly switching you army from archers and swords to all halberds to match my cavalry won't happen.  And then you would need to catch my army and force that battle. And I somehow should not see that you have better counter army and won't get away from you with an equal speed.

 

8 hours ago, frujin said:

This is wrong, and everything that follows is wrong too ....

I don't see any evidence for that. And I don't see that analytically too, given what you show in-game. With a few marshals you have and a cost of a marshal plus upgrades bigger that cost of a full army. (500 gold per marshal, + books + experience vs full tech 1 army = 8 by 70 gold), it would be stupid to even leave your lands without a full army. What can you even potentially do with a weak army? The moment you stop to raid a settlement you will give an enemy time to close in and you could instantly see that this is a weak army. You can't take or endanger any city with a weak army, because just garrison is 5 units plus defenses plus potential reinforcement marshal. So sending weak army is not just throwing you 1 out of 2 or 3 marshals away, it is also giving enemy an easy target to get experience from and waste all the price of weak army all together.

 

 

 

Edited January 19, 2022 by William Blake

[William Blake]

In fact, I can pretty much predict how a multiplayer will be based on what we have seen already. Assuming that you are playing pvp, not full coop and people are playing to win.

1) On economy side, due to the current rules of province governing:

we can clearly understand that a kingdom reaches practical maximum of income at around 6-8 provinces. Any extra province which you cannot assign someone to govern from the royal court is just 10% of its potential income. Meaning that going from 8 governed provinces to 9 without a governor is just 8 + 0.1 vs  8 province incomes. Yes, new province might be much better, bring different trade goods and so on, and you might switch a governor from old province to a new one. But the main relation stays - expanding over number of available governors is practically pointless. Especially on a short run which is always a factor for a multiplayer game when people can't stay in the game for the whole day non stop.

2) Let's put 8 provinces in perspective on a global map size wise - this smaller than a size of Spain. Just main UK landmass without Ireland is like 12 provinces. Keep that in mind.

3) An army at 1x time takes about 30 seconds to cross a province (lets make even numbers for now). UK and France is about 6 provinces tall (3 minute travel one way). From Baltic sea to south of Bulgaria is around 13 at a straight line (6 minutes travel one way).  A siege would take you a minute or 2 at least. All this means that a player is very unlikely to project military power far away - you cannot afford to send out your marshals for  15 minutes before they can return as you won't have any military available at home. In this case "far away" is roughly 5 province radius from your kingdom. 

4) MOREOVER if I have 10 provinces and you come from far away and take even 2 of them,  from income point of view, anything more than my governor limit is practically no loss. But I can focus all my nearby provinces to build up army to take it back, and you can't reinforce from far away, because your marshals are here and travel takes another 6-10 minutes even if you had more. So you far away attacks risk you army, take away your military which can't return and can't reinforce in time to produce about 2% decrease in my total economy and you probably won't be able to hold it anyway.

5) At the same time, you can project power with spy actions all across the map practically instantly if you have gold. And you can instantly coordinate this power with other people regardless of the geo location. Such that it is clear to see that spy actions will become major attack, while military power will be localized threat.

6) Once you take the above into account and you are playing to win against people, your only reasonable conclusion is to choose a kingdom on a side of a global map. Choosing middle of Germany or Poland will make you reachable for everyone, while corners of the map are safe from most other people armies just due to travel time.

You also will have significant advantage  choosing starting location in a way to have 6-8 provinces of the same religion around you so you can expand to the optimal 8-9 province kingdom without religion issues with captured lands. Expanding over this soft limit is practically pointless from an economy perspective as it won't increase your overall income but create more problems. The more land you have to defend the more constrained you will be by the few marshals and travel times.

Once you build up in your remote corner you will then convert your economy income to spy power and start nuking weakest human players all around the map while being unreachable and defending military only from local AI if anything at all.

Playing anything more than that requires too much time which is unlikely for a random groups of people. Military action at a distance is not possible with the given map sizes and travel times in any meaningful way. So most of the games will be economy/vote victory or just annoying other people with spying and excommunications, sending AI to war with them and that kind of thing, to the point of them leaving the game they can't win in any observable time and not having unlimited play time.

Projecting military power far away from your core lands is doomed also from the point of religion issues. You will be in a very tough spot trying to attack from Normandy to Middle East and vice versa, because even with all the travel and economy factors aside - our religions won't match, so going far away and trying to get a hold of enemy province will have religion issue against the attack and help locals  to get the land back.

Yes, you can argue that a lot of people will play "for fun" and some people will "play long games with friends" and "the experience is more than a final result". I'm not arguing with that. My point is - as a potential for multiplayer competitive pvp game, KoH2 appears to be not well suited.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[frujin]

On 1/19/2022 at 5:27 PM, William Blake said:

 

On 1/19/2022 at 10:29 AM, frujin said:

This is wrong, and everything that follows is wrong too ....

I don't see any evidence for that. And I don't see that analytically too, given what you show in-game. With a few marshals you have and a cost of a marshal plus upgrades bigger that cost of a full army. (500 gold per marshal, + books + experience vs full tech 1 army = 8 by 70 gold), it would be stupid to even leave your lands without a full army

 

OK, so the thing is that the man power of an army depends on many things. Yes, there are 8 "slots" for unit types. But these are not simply "units". Think of these as 1/8th of the army composition. So, if you have for example archers in one slot, that means 1/8th of your army will be composed of archers. But how big this army will be depends on MANY factors, which are not easy to maximize out. Actually, there is a "soft cap" on the army sizes and it takes a lot of progression in various aspects of the game to be able to reach it.

Each time you "hire" troops of a given kind in a slot, they also come with a "base man power value". For example, if no other factors contribute, 1 slot of archers will give you about 250-300 basic man power (I don't remember the exact number, but it is not important right now). And then this number can be increased manifold depending on skills and level of the marshal, traditions, where he governs, what the army carry with itself, etc. etc. And now *these* things can't be maxed out so easily. In fact - it's quite hard and takes a lot of skill and strategic planning. If you aim exclusively for having huge armies, and even if you achieve it, it will come with serious *opportunity costs*. I mean, you can't have everything in the game 🙂

P.S. We paid a lot of attention to make the game much deeper than the first one, but still keep it similar on the "surface". How much "bigger" is the new game compared to the old one? Orders of magnitude 🙂

[William Blake]

Well, it appears that we are talking about different things and everything you just said is nice to know but completely irrelevant to the points I'm trying to make ) Let me try again with a more concrete example.

We are playing pvp. This is what you have at a 1 hour 20 minutes of game 1x time:

 

You income is +153 gold per minute. You have 2826 gold (saved 18 minutes of gold income). You want to attack another player - me. Your marshal is at least 500 gold worth (3.2 minutes of income). If you have 1 skill it is 200 books (28 minutes! of you kingdom book income). Now your choice is to add units to you marshal, say 70 gold per unit. If you add 3 units, it is +210 gold (2 minutes of income) if you add 6 units it is 420 gold (3 minutes of income), 8 units 560 gold 3.5 minutes of income.

Now, what can you potentially do to me, best case scenario? You come over, I have no marshals, you take a city. A city will have garrison, 5 units max. It could be less, but obviously when I see you I can add to garrison something. So lets be realistic, you might at best case scenario have a city with 5 units and no my marshals around. Given that, are you going to leave you home with less than 5 units? No, because that would be a certain weak army even in a best case scenario for you. So you need at least 6 to be sure. If you are already invested in 6 and marshal costs, there is zero reason no to take all 8, to be a bit stronger.

Now, lets say you need to travel 4 provinces to reach a battle. If you go 2 provinces a minute, engage in a battle and return back we are looking at 5-6 minutes of game time. This is 153x5 = 765 gold income for you. Which is more than a cost of 8 units for 70 gold each. Implication of that is that just travel times required will allow an enemy to generate enough income to build up garrison, so you can't buy an advantage leaving just a few minutes earlier. This is completely unreasonable for a player to leave safety with such expensive investment as marshal and and not have max army you can potentially hire at the time. Leaving with less than 5 units is practically pointless because most of the time you will have no valid targets. (tell me how much gold you generate by pillaging a settlement and how much time it takes and I'll tell you how pointless it is)

Ok, that was the BEST case scenario for you. Lets say I have a marshal around. Potentially if I have full army + garrison it would be impossible for you to take a city. If I have half an army AND you manage to catch me on a move you still cannot say that more units and men would be worse. In fact if you travel and I'm at home, even if you win battles and do not return each time you will benefit by all extra men you could bring to stay fighting abroad longer. So again, it is very questionable to leave without all men you can get into an army.

And this escalates further. Because I can have 2 marshals at home and if they are together they will beat your 1 marshal to a great loss for you, so it might be wise to have 2 marshals moving at once. If you attack with 2 marshals maxed you can certainly take any city with even my marshal in it. And you can take on anything else. Since 2 marshals and 2 full armies is amazingly costly but most effective (you can't have more than 2 per side per battle so they cannot be overpowered just by more marshals at once) that will certainly become the main strategy the moment you can afford it. If you don't do that you are only creating opportunity for someone else to catch your 1 marshal with 2 and you are reducing potential targets you can take one.

An actual mechanics of how and what is calculated in a battle is irrelevant as you can see. It is all about times, incomes, army sizes, travel times and potential targets for a military action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 21, 2022 by William Blake

[frujin]

15 hours ago, William Blake said:

An actual mechanics of how and what is calculated in a battle is irrelevant as you can see. It is all about times, incomes, army sizes, travel times and potential targets for a military action.

Of course. It always boils down to maxing what you CAN max at a given time. My comment was about what "full army" means. Sometimes army with 5 slots filled can have more manpower than another with all 8 slots filled in.

The entire topic can quickly go very "philosophical". Overall, battles are only ONE element of a war. There are many more. Wars are multidimensional. The game is about winning wars, not about battles. Of course, you can't win a war without any army (although there are mercenaries in the equation too), but you can defend quite well even with less armies and make the invader pay hefty price for their attack.

Think of chess - it's a simple game and all "battles" are bland and stupid. We know that the queen always will take that pawn, the pawn has zero chance of winning. The entire game is deterministic and "theoretically" can be computed from any position to the end, therefore it "can't be fun".  If we had such powerful computers, of course 😉

So, battles in KoH2 are like pieces in chess moving and attacking each other. But the war is more like the whole game. I know it may sound a bit too "vague" but getting much deeper will sway us from the KoH2 topic, and we will get into game design, games theory etc. Not the place for that ...

Look, the question of all questions - is it possible to reach a situation where it is clear that one player will win and the other will lose even before war starts? Of course, that's the point of the game. It means that one of the players played his "cards" better and this is the reward 🙂 Think of chess...

P.S. Is KoH2 suited for competitive PvP multiplayer? Depends, on what "competitive" means. If we talk e-sports, ELO ratings, etc, then "no".  Is it fun to play PvP? Oh, yes .. a lot, especially with a group of friends 🙂

[William Blake]

No no no, don't go into any philosophical realms. I'm very concrete here and you'd better be too or you will never ship the game ) Although it apparently will take way more tries to express my concrete concerns then I thought. 

1) So you now agree that a player "wants" (has all incentives to) to maximize an army at a given time, especially to go abroad because it not only gives better chances, but it is also SAFER investment to have blob army in one place and it is also more PROFITABLE to because it is opening potential targets which cannot be even available for a small army.

2) The reverse side of this conclusion is that no one should operate or risk small multiple armies, at least in pvp environment.

3) The implications of above mean that military action will be less frequent BUT more devastating to humans. Someone will lose big army to a big army and this is setback is bigger the bigger your blob was. In my mind this is an undesirable state of things.

 

The game is called "Knights of Honor", it is not called "Merchants of Honor", nor it is called "Clerics/Diplomats of Honor"... You can't make war to be small support activity on a side.

 

Look, I'm not saying "you are making mistakes and your game sucks". Far from it. You made up a lot of mechanics based on multiple interconnected reasons. Fine it might be all valid and I don't suggest you go and throw things away. But when I look at what you are showing us all together, I see implications of this system and they are questionable.

 

I think it should be way more potential gameplay around smaller weak multiple armies. Because these are more opportunities to win small and lose small.

In order to make these small action viable I said that you can for instance to have variable army speed with variable food consumption (like a army = battleship, food = fuel, speed is a function of fuel consumption) to allow smaller armies to get away from huge ones and act faster in multiple place with a weak force. Variable speed allows for false hopes, miscalculations, inappropriate waste of food and so on - gameplay. Walking around with 2 marshals together at a fixed speed because it is the most appropriate way of winning war is not a good gameplay.

In order to make smaller force to be a danger and have more opportunities I suggested to have a siege type where you cannot take a city, but can damage a city over time. If this is not available it means that I won't even consider any city to be a target if I cannot take it with a small army. Moreover you will not consider any of my small army to be a danger if you have enough garrison. This reduces opportunity - less movement, less mistakes, less action, less gameplay.

In order to make more military traffic of weaker forces I said make food to be fuel which is always in use and always short and let small armies to run around supplying big ones with food, so it would be more movement and more opportunity to screw the things up or catch or harass or loose or win SMALL. Because a lot of small win/loses overall is averaged to a fun gameplay, but a single big loss is too huge of a punch in a real completive environment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[illbe85]

Hello everybody,

reading and observing William's comments and Dev Diaries, I think that some of the criticism he moves to the actual "battle/siege" gameplay are interesting, and I agree with him, as in a previous topic in which more or less the focus was about siege and depth of automatic resolved battles.

 

I'm not going deep as him but I simply want to say that some aspects he wish to be part of the game are crucial to have a less repetitive gameplay, and open up to a wider and, I think, funnier experience.

 

Assuming that in game you'll not have more than 3/4 marshalls, it would be great to have the chance to focus on a strategy based on 1 marshall army's fast moves and quick incursions tring to damage enemies bigger armies while they are moving to a target, instead of tring to simply resist the siege to come, or waiting two of our marshalls to join to be able to face the above mentioned bigger army.

I think having 3 or 4 armies widespread on the map fighting different battles with different opponents at the same time would be better than moving cautiously with 2 marshals together, or at least, I think theese two strategies should deliver different but equally profitable benefits. 

It would be great, not necessarily in a winning perspective, but in a multiplayer experience with friends focused on having fun, to open up to a high numer of small battles in a wide area instead of just moving war only when the chance of winning are high (you could always fail even with 2 marshall army, but you understand what I mean). 

I don't know if William's Idea of food consumption as a "fuel" for enemy speed is the right one (to me it seems great, but, as said before, don't have the experience to prove that) but it would be very important to not limit the gameplay making too risky to move around with 1 marshall armies, specially with army's strenght numbers well visible before the fight starts.

These considerations open up to the fact we discussed in the other topic, about a more strategical approach during autoresolved battles. 

If I have the chance to attack a bigger army and then retreat at faster speed (at a high cost, obviously), avoiding to sacrifice completely my army and marshall, or modulating my efforts during a siege, instead of passively wait the yellow siege bar to fill the space, I think the gameplay, far from become too complicated, would benefit in terms of variety of possible approach for the players.