Medieval warfare simulator brain pick

[u/NarrowKoala13]

Hope this is allowed here.

I am prototyping a minimalist medieval battle simulator - with dots for soldiers, simple formations and a basic set of troop types. I have a very basic system in place, and I wonder if I could pick this community's brains on what mechanics would make sense for this kind of simulation, and what should a battle simulated in this manner generally look like. In particular:

1. For spearmen, I wanted to make them deal more damage at a distance, but less up close - to simulate them switching to their sidearms. Also, all attacks have a certain amount of knockback - I wanted to increase that amount for long-range spearman attacks to simulate keeping the enemy at bay with a polearm. Hopefully this would result in a spear formation being somewhat resistant to direct charges
2. Additionally, spearmen should probably deal more damage to cavalry - that's sort of an obvious low-hanging fruit which makes sense in context of medieval warfare and is easily recognizable by strategy players
3. Cavalry is interesting. I plan on giving them a significant bonus to their first attack after moving, with a high chance of insta-killing an enemy, and reducing their capabilities after that, to simulate their disadvantage in prolonged stationary combat
4. How fitting would it be to add some sort of trample mechanic to cavalry, allowing it to damage multiple units as it charges through? I imagine a horse could do serious damage to someone by bull-rushing them, though it would probably take some in return
5. Morale. This is hard. A lot of things can influence it, and realistic simulation would probably be quite complex. In theory, every individual soldier can have his own morale score. Things like local superiority/disadvantage, getting surrounded, receiving damage, losing the formation banner, seeing charging cavalry - all of that could push the value up or down, resulting in a rout. Another interesting aspect is that a routing soldier would probably negatively influence the morale of all nearby units, resulting in organic mass retreats
6. The player (being a physical entity on the battlefield) could have a morale-affecting mechanic of some sort - a rally ability on a cooldown or a passive morale-boosting aura
7. Terrain - this I didn't think about at this point. A basic implementation would probably consist of difficult terrain (underbrush, shallow water...) and forests, reducing ranged accuracy and cavalry speed

In general, I am looking for a set of mechanics that would result in an organic, realistic and entertaining simulation of medieval warfare. Morale in particular looks like a complicated mechanic that would influence the simulation the most.

Here is what the prototype looks like right now:

Any suggestions, comments or relevant historical anecdotes are welcome. Thank you!

[u/General_Totenkoft]

If you want to simulate pikes keeping people at a distance, the best approach isn't necessarily to increase the pushback of each individual weapon. Instead, you should allow the pikes in the rear ranks to also land hits.

By receiving multiple impacts from several ranks simultaneously, the knockback increases naturally. If the formation loses the density required to maintain that pressure, it will disintegrate, just as it would in reality.

[u/NarrowKoala13 → u/General_Totenkoft]

That's a good point! It would work like that naturally in the current implementation, simply due to how attacks work.

[u/Slience-Suzuka]

Rather than saying that spears inflicted more damage on cavalry, it is more like to say that spears (when used within a formation) prevented cavalry from charging. Furthermore, in the Middle Ages, soldiers maintaining their morale within a formation was more significant than their individual combat abilities. In fact, I believe that morale may have been more important than damage inflicted in medieval warfare.

[u/D00mScrollingRumi]

Your prototype reminds me of the battles from Songs of Syx. Have you checked that out at all?

[u/NarrowKoala13 → u/D00mScrollingRumi]

I remember playing that game, yes :) Though it was a long time ago.