Hi all,

Some questions: Is there a possibility to account for the changing defence values of fortresses and cities through the ages? I know that walls and castles already loose their significance after gunpowder is invented. Still, warfare still is centered on taking cities in Renaissance era. That doesn't seem historic. While there still were siege, the ratio of warfare was much more in favor of open battle in gunpowder times. Could this be reflected in LoR? And what about castles? Their defence value doesnt seem to change after any of the major tech changes.

My proposals:

1) You have to construct fortresses newly after the invention of certain techs which change warfare. That way you have different kinds of castles (ancient/medieval, gunpowder, modern). Older castles loose their significance after the development of new tactics, but still stay there. You can upgrade them with workers. Medieval fortresses multiply terrain bonuses (Castles on plain terrain get no more bonuses, on rivers get 25% extra, on hills 50% extra).
2) There's a cap for how many units can stay in a fortress (similar to planes).
3) Gunpowder units like musketmen and bombards gain a bonus against archery units (which mostly defend towns).
4) Bombards and Cannons get bonuses against cities per se.
5) Large stacks get health maluses in cities (representing plagues in large armies). Also, the cities themselves suffer from large stacks (say, more than 8 units).

Are these proposals implementable at all? What do you think of their usefulness in terms of gameplay and historical accurateness?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Good ideas but that would be a fairly radical change at this point of development. Not to mention all this would have to be "taught" to the AI, and a whole bunh of playtesting involved. Also more than just your proposals would be necessary to shift the focus away from just city siege. All in all this would make things more historically accurate but we may have to wait for Civ V for that.

EDIT: Also changing the focus of cities would also focus revolutions mod and thats its own component. These kind of changes would seem to be something a major combat based modcomp would handle.

Honestly the best way to deal with this would be to implement a unit tile cap, and let forts increase them. I just don't think it would be possible to get the AI to understand it without some serious dedication.

I agree with Phungus that a unit cap per tile is required to force more spread out combat (which includes out of the cities). It would also help if a civilisation gets a small bonus in combat based on the cultural strength in the tile. This would make culture more significant and would make attacking a unit within your cultural borders more attractive. It would also work nicely combined with the influence driven war component.

I agree with both Achilleszero and Phungus that this would need to be taught to the AI which is probably not so easy. It makes the positioning of units and the quality and diversity of the smaller stacks more important which is hard to teach the AI.