The Battle Subgame

I had no intention of turning Excalibur into a strategy wargame, so I kept the battle scene quite simple. There was no terrain, just a patch of bare ground with the units from opposing sides drawn up in two battle lines facing each other. Each unit was depicted by a shield, using the same crests showing up in the Gossip display. The battle was fought in real time, with units moving at high resolution; that is, they didn't jump from square to square, but instead oozed along at a deliberate pace. The player controlled each unit by clicking on it and designating an objective toward which that unit should move. When a unit attempted to move into a location already occupied by an opposing unit, it instead attacked that unit. Several units could gang up on a single unit, hastening its downfall. There was, of course, consideration for the facing of the defending unit: Attacks from the rear were spectacularly effective, attacks from the side not so effective, and attacks from the front were best defended against. If multiple units attacked a single unit, the likelihood of getting in a flank attack was increased.

The battle subgame also utilized my now-standard concepts of disruption, augmented by a new twist: The breaking point at which a unit's morale would collapse was set by the affection that its leader held for Arthur. In other words, loyal knights stayed in the field longer. Once a unit cracked, it ran until it felt safe. If the danger was merely local and temporary, the unit might recover its morale a short distance in the rear, at which time the player could send it back into battle.

Losses suffered in the battle subgame were carried over into the rest of the game. If a unit was wiped out in battle, its knight was killed and removed from the game. This might seem a good way to get rid of rebellious knights, but recall that such knights lose their morale and run away more easily.

If Arthur won the battle subgame, then he kept his spoils and could resume pillaging, but if he lost it, then all the spoils were lost and Arthur was automatically returned to Camelot in defeat, suffering much loss of prestige with his knights.

The battle could be reversed if another king came to pillage Arthur's territory. In that case, Arthur would enjoy a defensive benefit arising from the local peasantry's contribution to the fighting.

In design terms, the battle subgame is of minor interest. The notion of moving units pixel by pixel rather than square by square (or hex by hex) was novel for strategic games, but absolutely conventional in the videogame world. Order entry, unit display and movement, and combat results were all conventional, although the disruption system was a bit more elegant than in other games. There wasn't much room for complicated tactics, there being no terrain to work with. I had intended it that way, as I didn't want to create yet another wargame.