Patch .141 Battles & Wars

[maltz]

Observations so far:

Good:
- After the war breaks out, the AI does not actively go all-out attack, and in fact avoids attack and prefers defense.
- When facing elimination, the AI acts like a man and does not propose peace in exchange of everything it owns and produce. Although we can still ask for it and may get an Yes and tears in the eyes.

Bad:
- The AI retreats injured units from the front line but does NOT heal them - instead the AI runs the dying unit back and forth in the back of its own territory even though it is its last living unit.
- The AIs ignores pirate ships. It frequently walks its unit into the range of pirate ships and stays there to be scratched to death. (That's what happened to that last unit!)

[Horizons]

Post-patch battles: cities without walls = easily conquered, cities with walls = unconquerable. No balance, no fun.

[bryanw1995]

no, you just can't warrior rush a city with walls. even horses will still work on a walled city with enough of them, but you might lose one or two units.

in general most city attack strategies that don't involve attacker losses require era-appropriate siege (archers for very early game pre-walls). however, with a decent conquer rate going you can just use the proceeds from conquest to replace the lost units for those very early and/or iron-less warmongering scenarios.

playing mods pre-patch helped prepare me for the higher difficulty now. I remember one game I was playing 4 corners balance combined (cities have 30 hp and walls are +10 combat power but cities only heal 1hp/turn), the last japanese city had hills/walls and I was horseman only. so str 11 - 40% city attack, actually I did have 1 sword but that city was 23-24 str. I still managed to take it without any casualties, but it took a few turns.

edit: in general I much prefer stronger cities. 30 hp cities that only heal 1hp/turn are probably about the same as 20 hp cities that heal 3hp/turn (with walls), the real changes now are the terrain bonuses not applying to city attack. now there is no way (other than GG) to counteract city attack penalties for mobile units or to get that 12 to 1 city attack advantage for longswords that just fostered a steamroller for the runaway civ(s). I actually got a 12-1 advantage last night with a gdr/gg combo, it's the first odds that I've seen better than 7-2 post-patch on ANY unit. cities might not be the veritable fortresses that some of us might like, but they're definitely moving in the right direction.