Zone of Control, can there be an option to enable it?

The zone of control concept from Civ2 was greatly missed, and I really wish that there can be an update to add an option to enable that in the game. It is rather pointless to have the enemy units just walking pass your units like they were nothing. In this new mod, there is only zone of control for the forts, but I believe that the Civ2 zone of control concept should be honorably continued in this mod. It makes battles more strategically interesting, and it makes more sense and realistic. However, it is not something that everyone likes, hence making it an option that can be enable and disable to the player's liking. Hopefully the developers can see this and consider adding it in into their new update.

ZoC is already in the mod, both as a promotion for Great Generals and ships and for some buildings like Moat.

It exists for forts too.

Never played civ2, so this is really a silly question.

Can someone explain the zoc promotion for a great commander to me?

Does it mean the enemy cannot get to the 8 titles immediately adjacent to my great commander? Hence they cannot attack me unless I walk next to them?

Or does it mean extra movement cost if they need to pass those 8 tiles?

Or does it mean they have to stop at those 8 tiles and can only attack the next turn?

Aciv4playerA said:

Never played civ2, so this is really a silly question.

Can someone explain the zoc promotion for a great commander to me?

Does it mean the enemy cannot get to the 8 titles immediately adjacent to my great commander? Hence they cannot attack me unless I walk next to them?

Or does it mean extra movement cost if they need to pass those 8 tiles?

Or does it mean they have to stop at those 8 tiles and can only attack the next turn?

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If they enter any tile under your zone of control, they cannot move into any adjacent controlled tiles. So they can still move into your ZoC and still move to attack you, but they can't move into any of the other ZoC tiles from that controlled tile

xxx
xox
xxx

Like that - the O being your Commander/Fort/MoatCity, and the x's being the Zone of Control. If they entered onto the top middle tile, they wouldn't be able to move from that tile to the top and middle left/right tiles from that top middle tile.

Sounds confusing when explaining it, but it makes sense once you try it out a few times. Or more than a few times

Rezca said:

If they enter any tile under your zone of control, they cannot move into any adjacent controlled tiles. So they can still move into your ZoC and still move to attack you, but they can't move into any of the other ZoC tiles from that controlled tile

123
xox
xxx

Like that - the O being your Commander/Fort/MoatCity, and the x's being the Zone of Control. If they entered onto the top middle tile, they wouldn't be able to move from that tile to the top and middle left/right tiles from that top middle tile.

Sounds confusing when explaining it, but it makes sense once you try it out a few times. Or more than a few times

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I see. interesting. I suppose they can move to a different tile the next turn, right? i.e., following your example, if they want to move to tile 3 from tile 2, they will have to do it the next turn?

Aciv4playerA said:

I see. interesting. I suppose they can move to a different tile the next turn, right? i.e., following your example, if they want to move to tile 3 from tile 2, they will have to do it the next turn?

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No, they can't move from tile 2 to tile 3, or from tile 2 to tile 1, as long as they're in tile 2.

If they moved OUT of Tile 2 and thus outside of the ZoC, then they could move into 1 or 3
ooo
xAx
xGx
xxx

So 'A' is where your army is. 'G' is where the Commander, Fort, or whatever exerting the Zone of Control is. 'O's are valid movements from that current tile, 'X' are not.

You can't move onto a ZoC tile while you're already inside the Zone of Control, but you can move into them from outside the ZoC, as well as attack the source of it from inside it. You can't move further into a ZoC from inside it however, but you can move out of it or into the source.

Let's put it this way: When the bad guy enter the Zone of Control tile (whichever one), that bad guy is stuck with just two choices basically. Attack or retreat to tile out side of ZoC.

os79 said:

Let's put it this way: When the bad guy enter the Zone of Control tile (whichever one), that bad guy is stuck with just two choices basically. Attack or retreat to tile out side of ZoC.

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A very good way of phrasing it

45°38'N-13°47'E;13781905 said:

ZoC is already in the mod, both as a promotion for Great Generals and ships and for some buildings like Moat.

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Thanks for the info! I was hoping that they add zone of control in the mod for all the military units, land and sea, instead of just, as you mentioned, as a promotion and or certain buildings. In civ2, zone of control is for all the units, so if one of your men stumbles upon an enemy unit, you are force to either attack or retreat. I love this mod because of the customization capabilities. However, without the zone of control as a general concept for all the units, the AI units are just walking all over you, rendering strategic placements of all your units unnecessary. Unlike in civ2, for example, where you can strategically place your units outside your city to produce great defensive tactics. In civ4 in general, you can basically just walk all over place and around the enemy for a cat n mouse game, and the computer units also do the same. I just thought if they can bring back zone of control in its more glorious form from civ2 to this mod, it would do wonders to the battle concept in the game.

We won't do that but you might like Surround and Destroy option. Have a look at it if you haven't already

45°38'N-13°47'E;13784004 said:

We won't do that but you might like Surround and Destroy option. Have a look at it if you haven't already

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Sorry for being persistent on the topic, but is there a reason behind not adding an option in custom game for possible zone of control to all the units? I know I can always go back to playing Civ2, but I find this mod very enjoyable so I thought I would make an effort to bring this up and hope to get it available. However, of course, if the mod team still thinks that it is not of significance to the mod to put time in adding it in, then I will say no more.

Thank you all in the mod developer team for bringing us this great mod.

Konquerian said:

Sorry for being persistent on the topic, but is there a reason behind not adding an option in custom game for possible zone of control to all the units? I know I can always go back to playing Civ2, but I find this mod very enjoyable so I thought I would make an effort to bring this up and hope to get it available. However, of course, if the mod team still thinks that it is not of significance to the mod to put time in adding it in, then I will say no more.

Thank you all in the mod developer team for bringing us this great mod.

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I'd say there are many reasons: I think it's not worth the effort of coding it; we don't want to introduce new possible bugs; we don't want to change gameplay, and that's what this option would do; we're trying to reduce number of options, not to increase it; there are a lot of options that other people would like to add to the mod but development is in the final stage so we will probably not add other features/options that we've not discussed before or that we are not currently working on.
There are options that I'd like to add myself but I prefer a well polished and working mod that delaying again a "final" version (which is still requiring some time anyway).

Konquerian said:

Sorry for being persistent on the topic, but is there a reason behind not adding an option in custom game for possible zone of control to all the units? I know I can always go back to playing Civ2, but I find this mod very enjoyable so I thought I would make an effort to bring this up and hope to get it available. However, of course, if the mod team still thinks that it is not of significance to the mod to put time in adding it in, then I will say no more.

Thank you all in the mod developer team for bringing us this great mod.

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Zone of Control causes a rather large performance hit when it comes to path finding. With only a few limited cases of ZoC, this is not a big deal over the course of a game. If every unit had a ZoC, turn times would probably be doubled.

It's not that zone of control can't be done. There is already a promotion that grants ZoC for naval units. You could probably tweak the XML to give this promotion to all units immediately, for free. But what I said above about performance would probably happen.

I am guessing this discussion begs the obvious question: Why is ZoC performance an issue in Civ4, a more modern game with faster computers, but not Civ2, which was made for slow machines and decades ago? Civ2 has a very simplified path finding meant for simple AI and older computers, which is easier to calculate (but produces poorer results). ZoC had a smaller effect on this simpler pathfinding. I am pretty sure Civilization 3, 4 and 5 all use A* path finding, which is a full and complete search algorithm that produces the most optimal path between two points. So Zone of Control is very expensive because any time a path intersects any single tile affected by zone of control, whether a unit can go throw this zone or not has to be calculated. The problem is that zone of control only stops movement through a zone of control, it's not a rigid barrier like a peak is, it is a complex, conditional barrier that only occurs when trying to enter and exit the other side of the zone of control. This means that only some of the paths through a ZoC are invalid, and others are valid, and calculating which are which is expensive. Actually, the calculation itself isn't too expensive, but because many possible paths are tested to find the most optimal path between two points, for each unit, for each possible mission they may take (or decide not to take), the effect is that zone of control may be checked tens of thousands of times for a single AI unit in a single turn. Add in thousands of units over all the AI players and this only slightly expensive zone of control calculation turns into a very large performance hit. Small calculations have an outsized performance cost when computed millions of times.

I am happy to go into more detail if you have more questions, I always love discussing inner workings of the game, and I wrote the ZoC for this mod.

Afforess said:

I am pretty sure Civilization 3, 4 and 5 all use A* path finding, which is a full and complete search algorithm that produces the most optimal path between two points.

...

I am happy to go into more detail if you have more questions, I always love discussing inner workings of the game, and I wrote the ZoC for this mod.

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It is interesting to hear about how the inner workings of the game has to influence design decisions. On a slightly unrelated issue, taking into account what you say above, is it a bug to be reported if instances of sub-optimal path finding is identified? I quite frequently see cases where a sub-optimal path is chosen, and I will report the next one I see if that is appropriate.

Hugh

Samson said:

is it a bug to be reported if instances of sub-optimal path finding is identified? I quite frequently see cases where a sub-optimal path is chosen, and I will report the next one I see if that is appropriate.

Hugh

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It depends. If you are talking about AI path finding, then probably not. The AI considers extra factors that it does not for humans.

For humans, probably. Assuming you have "use AI path finding" as an option off for humans.

The only instance I noticed where it seems obvious they take sub-optimal paths is when you move your Helicopters, which tend to follow roads as if they were ground units, instead of taking the shortest direct route between 2 points with no water inbetween.