Horrible Combat Mechanics

Calico, I stand with you in wishing battle was prolonged and thus different armies would "pile in" to the same battle with the added excitement and realism that would provide--the magnitude of their combined effect depending on the timing of their arrival as well as their strength.

In fact I was the first to make such a proposal, which I outlined in as granular and practical/thorough detail as I could muster without having access to the existing code.  I'd love to see this happen.

Just to clarify, however, this does involve converting the system from modelling to simulating.  In fact the prolonged version would not really take any more processor time.  Each new arrival and departure would trigger a recalculation, but so does each new individual battle in the current setup.  There isn't actually anything "happening" between such events, similar to how the server only knows your current resource levels at the moments when you manually observe or use them.

I hesitate before posting this because on the one hand I don't want to contradict anyone but on the other I'm not sure this whole simulating/modeling thing is right.  I always learned (as a controls engineer working in modelling and simulation at NASA) that a model is a physical or mathematical representation of "thing".  Modeling was the act of building/creation/development a model.  It wasn't some derivative of a simulation or a simpler simulation process.

Denizar wrote: The difficulty isn't in the actual "pile in" combat code (the algorithms for resolving combat over time), the difficulties would be in managing the suspended state of the combatants.  The combating armies would need to be placed in a "combat limbo" state.  Doing that could be fairly easy, the tricky part is you have to rework all of the code that works around and could affect those armies, commanders and resources while they are in "combat limbo".  There would be a million opportunities for interesting race conditions.

This brings to mind turn-based game mechanics - I hit you, then wait while you hit me, then I hit you, etc., etc., with the game recalculating hit points, defense, etc. in between turns. 
This approach has the advantage that it allows the possibility of a new player joining at any turn, or reinforcements being added, or a player retreating and so on.  If a turn was an hour long and it took, say, 48 turns to resolve a very large battle (1 or 2 for small battles), then maybe this would simulate "combat limbo."
Since a player may not be around to monitor the battle constantly, perhaps some sort of (semi)automation could be added such as retreat minimums per division (zero = kamikaze), or auto-reinforcing if numbers fall too low, etc.  Alliance members could join in at strategic moments.
I don't know how satisfying this approach would be but I suspect it may not require elaborate coding since events are not happening in "real" time.

 

I think the key is that you only know the result if you know all the factors.  What makes combat in Illy exciting is that in any PvP situation (and increasingly in PvE situations), we don't know all the factors.  We know terrain, we may have insight into troops from scouting, and we can perhaps make a good guess on commander skills, but in any extended war or tournament, there's plenty of uncertainty for me.

There are also situations where you do not have time to wait for a scout report.