It's easy to just have armies with one number (combat strength) and smash them together. A common strategic element is that of "surprise". In Atlantis, a force with higher tactics skill gains one round of attacks with no counter-attack. This is actually pretty devastating, which has led to attempts to scale it back.
GURPS Mass Combat deals with surprise by giving the losing side a penalty to their strategy skill (they are "confused" until they can pass a strategy check). My previous post showed how critical strategy skill is to combat outcome.
I decided to measure the effect of surprise using two simple forces:
- Force 1: One unit of medium infantry (TS 3, cost $30k)
- Force 2: One unit of light infantry (TS 2, cost $40k)
Force 1 is stronger and cheaper. This is because light infantry have the "recon" class, which allows them to participate in the surprise calculation.
Because force 1 has zero recon, they effectively never have surprise. Force 2 will gain surprise about 60% of the time (it's random based on a quick contest of skill including strategy and intelligence gathering - 40% of the time there is no surprise).
As-is, the recon boost is clearly overpriced. Force 1 is winning about 99% of the time. Using a scaled sum, force 1 takes about $23k damage, and force 2 loses almost $40k.
I'll wait to try and balance costs until I run some more mixed force battles.
This graph shows the damage from surprise better. There is a slight shift upward in damage when surprise is gained. There's also a slight tick up in cases where force 2 can win (with heavy losses).
Or, if we just show cases where force 1 wins (and scale by the total number of battles of each case):
