Warfare and Civilization

Generally speaking, I think one of the weakest point of Civilization series is how much a pain waging war is, especially during the later eras/in the bigger games. It has improved in Civ4, but it was a kind of improvement like moving from Somalia to Iraq, if you get what I mean.
The reason? Tedious, unnecessary micromanagemt assosiated with it. One-on-one unit fight, constant reselecting, useless eye candy in the form of animations. Click Click Click.
There are many games that manage this stuff much better - Total War series, Europa Universalis/Hearts of Iron series. No, I'm not asking for tactical combat of the first or the elaborate wargaming stuff from the last one. What I want is something simpler: Army vs. Army fight (instead of individual units), the possibility of doing actual sieges instead of all-out assalut on cities. This brings me to the second point - warfare in Civ is all about conquering cities (well, perhaps with some raiding). What about the huge pitched battles in the open field? Why, it seems this was actually the main way of waging wars for thousands of years, yet in Civ it only happens by accident.
What do you people think?

I understand the general idea, but I don't really like it, and I have no idea how it would be implemented. Siege definitely needs to be improved, and open field battles need to be given more importance and weighting, but the overall war mechanisms work fine, IMO. Having army vs. army would just increase the predominance of the stack even more (which isn't a good thing), and taking away micromanagement from it would take away what little tactics there are.

Maybe fighting in a city kills population, even if you succeed in capturing a city it will lose massive population.

The defender won't want that, so probably will move the stack out.

Also, an attacked city should cost more maintainance if not conquered: lots of Corpses to be burned.

Finally, we need more 'Leveled' Improvements: Mines and Farms! Lumbermills! Windmills and watermills!

BTW, when an enemy unit gets a tile in BFC and leaves, that tile is forever unuseable until allied units 'liberate' it, peace is declared, or if nothing happened for X turns.

Charles Li said:

Maybe fighting in a city kills population, even if you succeed in capturing a city it will lose massive population.

Click to expand...

It already does. Whenever a city is taken in war, it loses one population point. Hence why 1 pop cities are automatically razed.

The defender won't want that, so probably will move the stack out.

Click to expand...

Why would the defender care if the population of a city its enemy controls is less?

Also, an attacked city should cost more maintainance if not conquered: lots of Corpses to be burned.

Click to expand...

Do you mean if it is razed? Or if the attacker is unsuccessful in their bid to take the city?

BTW, when an enemy unit gets a tile in BFC and leaves, that tile is forever unuseable until allied units 'liberate' it, peace is declared, or if nothing happened for X turns.

Click to expand...

So if an enemy warrior enters your territory, only to leave a turn later, you wont be able to use a tile again for quite a while? Well, I suppose it would increase the economic disadvantages of war...

So first: Attacked Cities has a chance to lose population, buildings for each unit V unit combat.

Attacked Cities that survive and stay in defender hands have higher maintaince for a few turns.

Therefore, to reduce damage to the city, the Defenders will move to a fort system and fight it out there, unless it is known they will lose and they fight to cause as much damage as possible. (japanese)

Your last example is correct, that is why you should kill the unit. Or at least get the territory back. Imagine, if Germany retreated from France IMMEDIATELY after D-Day but the americans and allies didn't advance. France is still german right?

Charles Li said:

So first: Attacked Cities has a chance to lose population, buildings for each unit V unit combat.

Attacked Cities that survive and stay in defender hands have higher maintaince for a few turns.

Therefore, to reduce damage to the city, the Defenders will move to a fort system and fight it out there, unless it is known they will lose and they fight to cause as much damage as possible. (japanese)

Click to expand...

Okay, I see what you're getting at. But if the defenders were going to lose anyway, they would want to damage the city as much as possible, to hinder the enemy. So, they would only stay in the city to increase this damage.

Your last example is correct, that is why you should kill the unit. Or at least get the territory back. Imagine, if Germany retreated from France IMMEDIATELY after D-Day but the americans and allies didn't advance. France is still german right?

Click to expand...

I was thinking more of a situation, say, like the initial invasion of France. What if Germany invades France, goes 2km, and then completely retreats, the territory was never controlled by Germany, although it set foot there, and would therefore still be under French control.

Yes, but the land will still be disrupted. What If I sent a tank division to, say, Outskirts of Detroit, disturbing a few suburbs, from Canada, it will take a few turns for them to be naturally reincorperated to the world, faster by sending a military force.

One your example, even if it retreated they still disturbed the economics, people left, roads are burned, looting ect.

Isn't that what the pillage feature is for?

Yeah.. except this is shorter term, less devastationg, but possibly worth enough to get the AI to fight more out of city battles, which was your (rack's I mean) original idea about pitched field battles.

I guess it could work, but I prefer the ideas in here:
On siege warfare, §L¥ Gµ¥, 16/3/09

Improvement? Civ4 did not improve warfare, it took it from Somalia to Carthage. Civ3 got the idea, Attack values and Defense values. Civ4 compensated (badly) by using promotions.