City capture

Thalassicus

Thalassicus

Bytes and Nibblers
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I've seen several people talk about city capture. The main concern seems to be when an enemy recaptures the city and instakills units inside it. It can be discouraging to lose experienced units that way. I suppose the unit could retreat from the city instead of dying helplessly. I don't think we can change that, but we can alter this value:

CITY_CAPTURE_DAMAGE_PERCENT = 50

Would people like to see this higher, perhaps around 75%?

Volver said:
Capturing enemy cities seems by far the riskiest action one can take with a military unit. No matter how diligently one works to clear out all the enemy units in the area, the AI far too often manages to conjure up a half-dead carrack or arquebus or whatever, seemingly out of nowhere (a "rallied partisan" maybe?) which sweeps in next turn to retake the defenseless city.

This wouldn't be such a problem, except that the garrison (capturing unit) is killed in the process. A warmonger has no more valuable commodity than veteran troops, and losing a level 6, 7, 8 unit you've had since you discovered the wheel in this way is totally lame and depressing. I have no doubt I lose more troops this way than in proper combat.

It's so bad, I'm reluctant to take a city with a unit that can't move back out the same turn. That's right - the only surefire way to preserve my troops is to abandon a newly claimed city, let the AI recapture, and repeat. It's quite ridiculous really, and entirely too easy for an overmatched opponent to exploit.

To that end I think a defense building or at least some health for newly captured cities is a preferable arrangement. Not back to their original health and defense, by any means, but enough that retaking needs a halfway legitimate counterattack, not just a lonely ninja boat.
Click to expand...
 
Although it is historically accurate that wars can bounce cities from one occupying faction to another in a short amount of time, like Volver points out, "retaking needs a halfway legitimate counterattack, not just a lonely ninja boat."

Even one turn of decent enough city health could give the player the tactical choice to mount a better defense against counter-attack if possible, or, if recapture is inevitable, evac the hero unit garrisoning the city to fight another day.

75 might make it too difficult for an embattled AI to recapture without decent available reserves and 50 feels too ineffectual to defend with already battered units. Perhaps somewhere in between - 60, 65 - might be a good balance between the two poles. If the recapturing force has overwhelming fire power, the city will fall anyway (ringed by enemy arty/battleships, a single melee unit retaking the city is "legit").

60 or 65 should make it more difficult for a lone and heavily damaged unit to one-hit the city and garrison with no or minimal support. This seems to be the standard to meet.

- Erikose
 
I mostly do conquest victories, and I think 50% is perfect. People who are losing cities they march into the next turn need to think ahead a little more, that's reality. You don't walk into a city where you can face a counterattack that leaves invading armies trapped.

Thinking ahead means softening nearby enemy units or wiping them out entirely before risking an advance into the hornet's nest that a foreign city often is.
 
Yep i agree with the disapointement of people, but in the other hands it's normal to me, that taing a city, let it defenseless.
Is it possible maybe to give a unit 1 movement point after the unit capture the city. Like this the player can withdraw it or let it in garrison.
 
I'm not 100% sure of this but do the defensive structures of a captured city get removed upon first capture?

I always took it that that is why the HP bar jumped around so much. It would fall until the first layer of defenses went, then jumped up to show the next layer at full strength. Then repeated until it was the city's strength that was left to take damage. Is that not correct?

If that is the case, could we reinstate a couple of tiers of defenses upon re-taking OUR city.

I think the initial health of a city is about 300, not sure. The extra tiers of defenses bump that a bit.

Or perhaps the strength of the city could be restored to full, reflecting the rallying partisans being overjoyed on their liberation. Again, only for OUR cities.

Or perhaps partisan units could appear outside the city in a protective ring, designed to soak up damage until the city heals to an acceptable level. These units could be limited to only serve this purpose by having penalties on them, if used outside your home territory and also be timed to disappear after an allotted time.
 
This problem gives added value to the Liberty policy that gives a free defensive building or the Exploration policy that gives free tier 1 buildings which includes walls. It would not hurt for things to get a little stronger.

The problem was by far the worst many versions ago when the AI had a ridiculous city attack bonus but since you toned it down it has been manageable.
 
I'm not sure that there is a problem, and if there is I'm not sure it is to do with hitpoints but rather than city strength overall seems to be a little low relative to unit strengths (I think it might be that city strength needs to increase slightly more with tech or population): I've seen many units able to do 150+ damage in a single shot.

One possibility would be to get rid of having city defensive buildings be destroyed on capture, or to have only the most advanced building be destroyed.
 
This would be rather simple to allow; we could just change the conquest destroyed modifier on walls to say 50-75 (or 100?), and the modifier for higher level defences to be 25-50. This would both allow for higher hit points and a higher strength.

I am also not persuaded this is a huge problem though.
 
In CEP right now, defense & happiness buildings are destroyed on capture, while other buildings remain intact.

City health starts at 300 and multiplies by 1.35 for each defense building:

300 - Basic city
400 - Walls
550 - Castle
650 - Arsenal
900 - Military Base (plus 50% less damage from nukes)
(+100 if a Capital)

City strength is more complicated. The formula's in the cities spreadsheet. I'm okay with small increases to strength, health, or building durability if we feel they're needed. I feel sieges are well balanced at the moment, so I want to limit the changes.

How about several small tweaks:

  • 1 :c5strength: city strength per 3 :c5citizen: citizens (was 1 per 4).
  • Walls have a 25% chance to remain in cities (was 0%).
  • +3% health from defense buildings.
  • 60% health remains after city capture (was 50%).
 
I'm in favor of small tweaks. I think city capture is not a great problem in its current form.
 
I'm in favor of the modest strength increase to +1 per 3 pop. However I'm not sure we really need to raise the HP to 60% or anything else. People who capture cities need to be smarter about it.

Having cities retaken has never been a problem for me because I prepare for it. Taking a city is serious business and should come with consequences for being reckless or haphazard.
 
I think I found what might be the issue. I just captured Atilla's Court and its HP didn't go to 50% (unless I'm misunderstanding). It was more like 20% which if attacked by a sufficiently powerful unit could easily be one shot and retaken (it was his only city so this wasn't a possibility in my game. 2 turns later its still in the red.

Does this have anything to do with that I chose "Mercy?" So perhaps the issue is a bug and not that the setting is too high/low (of course if its a game bug then we may have to try to compensate for it).
 
I think what may be happening is that it reduces the city to 50% immediately, then it removes the defensive buildings, which subtracts HP from the city, thus it ends up with much less than 50%.
 
That's very likely because Firaxis made serious mistakes with city health bonuses before (they used to not save in savegame files!). The mistakes happen because the interface designer failed to show city health on the tooltip when we hover over a city. There's no easy way to check how much health a city has, so bug testers can't test it. I need to get a fix to that back in the mod again...
 
Thalassicus said:
How about several small tweaks:

  • 1 :c5strength: city strength per 3 :c5citizen: citizens (was 1 per 4).
  • Walls have a 25% chance to remain in cities (was 0%).
  • +3% health from defense buildings.
  • 60% health remains after city capture (was 50%).
Click to expand...

I'd disagree with the first and third. Siege warfare feels like it's in a good spot right now and these would both make cities harder to capture initially, when the problem you're trying to address is what happens after the city is captured.
 
I feel honored to have been quoted in this thread's initial post :blush:

I think some clarification is in order. Most of the time, in my games, newly-captured cities bounce back with only a small sliver of health. Is this how it should work? I mean, if I capture with a Samurai, which has a city defense bonus in addition to buffed base strength, shouldn't it be able to repel a single attack next turn?

But more often than not it can't - the city only has a small red slice of health that anything can overcome.
 
Delekhan said:
I think what may be happening is that it reduces the city to 50% immediately, then it removes the defensive buildings, which subtracts HP from the city, thus it ends up with much less than 50%.
Click to expand...

This is right! This happens to the great majority of my captured cities.
 
I think most of the problem here is that it is a ninja boat. Ships like frigates and destroyers move vast distances in a turn, and are very hard to form a defense against if your army is land-based (like you are attacking an enemy shore from the continent). And a naval unit taking the city your army just captures doesn't make sense.

Personally I could even see taking cities with melee ships being impossible. I mean how come a navy unit holds ground and occupies a population? We are assuming it comes with marines? But then you can do that with an actual ground unit escorted by the frigate. The only problem could be AI not getting it? I doubt it cause a problem, however, because the AI does usually use ground units in naval invasions, even to the point where the ground units get slaughtered because they fight on water with huge penalties.

Other solutions to ninja boats?
 
Sure, it's annoying to lose a city immediately after you capture it, but you can easily strategize against it, if you know what you're doing. First off tough: cities in Civ are not only cities but also the surrounding areas. Capturing a city doesn't mean you bomb it from afar and send a little unit in, it SHOULD mean capturing the whole area and dominating it militarily. If you do exactly that, you're going to have a unit on every tile around the city (including oceans), so there's no way for your opponent to recapture it the next turn. It shouldn't be possible to just sneak in a city when your opponent isn't looking and to use it as a weapon afterwards.
Also, if you look at sacking in reality: in most eras it was about surrounding the city with an abundance of troops with many of them hanging around afterwards because obivously you have to tear down that wall or break the gate or whatever. Take into account public resistance and a single unit without help from a surrounding siege army would be no match for an incoming enemy.

One difficulty is that policy from the liberty tree that immediately builds walls upon capture which could be interpreted as citizens enjoying their liberty and helping mend the walls because the invaders are such nice people.
 
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