[Idea] Realistic City Siege

Now we have a lot of siege units (rams, catapults, siege towers) that can be simply neglected to build because big stack of good troops with S&D promotions can capture every city.

It is unrealistic because even the best medieval troop is useless against 12 meters heigh walls. Commander must destroy city walls or destroy the gate first or use siege tower before meele fight will be possible.

Almost every highly protected city was captured thanks to siege units.

Did You saw Kingdom of Heaven movie. They took entire big army with catapults, rams, siege towers to capture holy city. This is what I want to achive.

TO do


- add dry moat, spiked moat, water moat tweak by Hydro
- add new tags Buildings Damage Units on Attacking the city mechanism to traps line by hydro

Spoiler :

- Buildings Damage Units on Attacking the city mechanism

This comprises three new tags for buildings that are designed to use in tandem or none are all that beneficial. The three tags are as follows:

MayDamageAttackingUnitCombatTypes: List under this tag the UnitCombatTypes that the building will potentially damage when they attack the city. The tag, when programmed is as follows:
Code:

<MayDamageAttackingUnitCombatTypes>
<UnitCombatType>UNITCOMBAT_MELEE</UnitCombatType>
</MayDamageAttackingUnitCombatTypes>

Basically, this is the primary indicator that this building will potentially cause damage to an enemy unit (of the specified type(s)) that attacks the city with this building active in it. The damage, if inflicted, will take place at the very beginning of combat. The only shortsight on this is that the odds are not influenced by this possibility. I had some ideas as to how to tweak the odds and show it in the combat attack help hover but I figured Koshling might be able to see how that should be done far better than myself. And I kinda like the 'hidden' or potentially surprising aspect of this effect myself. Perhaps next weekend I can update the combat odds section for this effect.

iDamageAttackerChance: The percentage chance the unit with the indicated CC(s) that attacks the city will be damaged. This is modified by the Attacking Unit's Dodge modifier when that starts coming into play more. Thus, units with a higher dodge value have a better chance to avoid this damage when attacking the city.

iDamageToAttacker: The percentage of the total HP that will be inflicted upon the Attacker when the building successfully deals damage to him. This is modified by the Attacker's Armor value for when that starts coming into play more. The armor value directly reduces this damage.

bDamagetoAttackerIgnoresArmor: as the tag states, accompanies the Damage to Attacker mechanism with an update that this damage will ignore the unit's armor value when assigning damage.

bDamageAllAttackers: You may use this boolean rather than specifying Combat Classes if you want the Defensive building to damage any and all attacker types. Definitely saves some text display space - I may also need to update the Defense Hover in the cities eventually to streamline the Damages attackers portion or put just that on another page - all the individual CCs will quickly add up to an overwhelming display for sure. But this will help if you can commonly use this.

- add new tags for rams so they will reduce defensese during normal attack reather than bombard
- add siege_gatecrascher combat class to rams (combat claa already added by TB)





- add ignoreNoentrtLevel tag by Thunderbird



CityDefenseReductionOnAttack by Thunderbird

- add S&D protection to walls buildings line (I belive TB doing it now) (added to towers line)
- add every walls line building required city defense reduction to attack the city
(like castle gatehouse in AND has required max 25% defense to allow attackers to attack the city)Done
- double the costs of walls line buildings (more powerfull than now)
- make archer bombardment BUG gemaoption enabled by default
- merge aid promotons code from Realism Invictus
(when ex catapult stay at the same plot where axeman. Axeman will receive free Siege aid promotion)
- add Siege Tower Aid promotion (when merged with StackAid modcomp http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=241245 )
(enabled for all meele, archer and throwing units except of mounted and whelled staying at the same plot where siege tower)
- teach AI to take Siege tower to city attack stacks

Siege Tower Aid - promotion
- ignores city defense reduction requirement (enables attack without defense reduction)
- +20% city attack for archers, throwing (at tower they stay at the same height as defenders)
(not ignore city defenses because fight from siege tower is possible but very hard for attackers)

Gameplay benefits
- realism. You must build siege towers or siege units to capture highly protected cities now.
- number of city defenders will be covered by required city reduction message (like in AND was) so you will be forced to send spies if you want information about city defenders
- siege towers are slow so blitzkrieg in medieval times will be imposible.

@Nimek

Siege Tower Aid - promotion
- ignores city defense reduction requirement (enables attack without defense reduction)
- +20% city attack for archers, throwing (at tower they stay at the same height as defenders)
(not ignore city defenses because fight from siege tower is possible but very hard for attackers)

Click to expand...

We do have a Siege Tower unit you know.

- double the costs of walls line buildings (more powerfull than now)

Click to expand...

If you have specific ideas I would be happy to look over them and tweak the walls and towers. Overall I think its a good idea to make walls more important.

@Nimek

I had an idea about using features we already have. You see the Castle Gatehouse has a a special feature that prevents units from invading until the defense reaches below 25%. If we were to use this for walls we could have walls at different rates. Here are the walls ...

Palisades -> Earth Walls -> Walls -> High Walls -> Barricades -> Barbed Wire Fence -> Cement Barrier -> Arcology Shielding -> Advanced Shielding

We may want to think about this for Castles/Forts too.

As for how much maybe like this ...

Palisades = 100% or Less
Earth Walls = 80% or Less
Walls = 60% or Less
High Walls = 40% or Less
Castle Gates = 25% or Less (Note this comes about around here)
Barricades = 20% or less
Barbed Wire Fence = 15% or Less
Cement Barrier = 10% or Less
Arcology Shielding = 5% or Less
Advanced Shielding = 1% or Less

What do you think?

I'm in total agreement on just about all of this. I do have to do some work on coding for the support promos like you suggest. That's fairly low on my already enormous list.

I'd also like you to consider implementing the Repel for local unitcombat types tag I added for defensive buildings. You'll want to review what Repel means (and Overrun since its the counter ability) in the Third Combat Mod intro page. See what you think.

@Hydro... agreed

What I'd like us to move more towards also is specifically bombarding buildings (primarily the defensive ones) and breaking them down to remove their benefits from the city rather than simply bombarding to break down such a simplified defense value. This is one major reason why I'd like to be able to track HP and Integrity (damage resistance) on buildings and some automated though player choice assistable rebuilding/recovery process. If we make it impossible to attack without breaking down the gate, and tough to get through (likely to be repelled and getting denied any s&d bonus) without breaking down the walls (which are adding greatly to the archer's strength as well) then we start making the tearing down of those buildings specifically even more important than wearing down the unit resolve to defend the place (cultural defense).

@Hydro
Agree. Also ask Thunder how to add S&D protection to walls line.

So first step will be tweaking walls line

@Thunderbrd

Glad you like the idea. So here is my plan but expanded to take advantages of gates.

Palisades = 100% or Less
Earth Walls = 80% or Less
Walls = 60% or Less
High Walls = 50% or Less
City Gate = 40% or Less
Castle = 35% or Less
Castle Gate = 30% or Less
Star Fort = 25% or Less
Barricades = 20% or Less
Barbed Wire Fence = 15% or Less
Cement Barrier = 10% or Less
Arcology Shielding = 5% or Less
Advanced Shielding = 1% or Less

Note that lets say you take out the City Gate you lower it from 50% or less to 60% or Less because the High Walls are still there. So it should work with your idea.

Also if you notice I chnaged the Castle Gate from 25% or Less to 30% or Less so it would have a more even spread across the Walls, Gates and Castle/Forts.

EDIT: And for future reference the code is ...

@Hydro warning I just updated your tower mod with a minor fix. See svn thread. I reused my last post there.

Dancing Hoskuld said:

@Hydro warning I just updated your tower mod with a minor fix. See svn thread. I reused my last post there.

Click to expand...

I am not sure if they merged ok when I committed to the SVN. Please check it over to make sure I did not undo your changes. I am sorry if I did. I saw your message after I already committed.

EDIT: From what I can tell looks like they merged ok. Both yours and my changes seems to be in the current version.

We must wait for Thunderbird Tags to do it but stats can be like this

S&D protection from walls line
Palisades = 5% protection
Earth Walls = 20% protection
Walls = 40% protection
High Walls = 50% protection
City Gate = 60% protection
Castle = 65% protection
Castle Gate = 70% protection
Star Fort = 75% protection
Barricades = 80% protection
Barbed Wire Fence = 85% protection
Cement Barrier = 90% protection
Arcology Shielding = 95% protection
Advanced Shielding = 99% protection

Note that even city defense reduction dosent means that walls are completly destroyed. It only means that gate or some part of the walls are destroyed so troops can enter the city but not from every side (so S&D protection should stay even if city defenses are reduced)

- double the costs of walls line buildings (more powerfull than now)

Click to expand...

Do you still want these doubled? Here are the current base costs (before difficulty is figured in).

Walls
Palisades = 5
Earth Walls = 25
Walls = 50
High Walls = 100
Barricades = 250
Barbed Wire Fence = 400
Cement Barrier = 600
Arcology Shielding = 7800
Advanced Shielding = 8900

I personally think the costs are reasonable thanks to ls612 building cost tweaking we did a few months ago.

Yes they are too cheap to build. Please double its cost If you Can.
Now walls are berg powerfull. Much more than before. It will be even stronger wten we finish.

Nimek said:

Yes they are too cheap to build. Please double its cost If you Can.
Now walls are berg powerfull. Much more than before. It will be even stronger wten we finish.

Click to expand...

Adding some Repel to the equation, and perhaps some penalties to particular combat classes attacking the city as was suggested about the palisade in regards to penalizing attacking mounted units, these defenses will certainly grow very powerful. Given that, yes, they should certainly be more to build.

Ok reluctantly done. We shall see if they don't cost too much now. We want to make sure the AI will still build walls. If they are too expensive I worry the AI will not build them.

I've also been considering that we might want to make city gates (in part) an unmoving UNIT.

I was thinking that perhaps it could have a feature that causes it to inherit the strength and abilities of the strongest distance fighter (archer, thrower etc) in the city when attacked but have a huge amount of iArmor of its own - to which units like battering rams have a huge amount of iPuncture against the gate combat class. Thus it'd be possible for other units to bust the gate but very hard to without a unit specifically made to. It would also have a tag that makes it so units MUST attack it first before they can get at any other units regardless of the strength evaluation.

Furthermore, it would have a very direct correlation with an equivalent building - the unit is given to the city for free once the building is built and if the unit is destroyed, the building is destroyed along with it. Thus it can then be rebuilt.

Of course, the building would rely on the wall being there as well and if the wall were somehow destroyed, the building would go defunct and the unit would vanish until the building was recovered.

It'd take some tricky programming but what do you think?

@Thunderbrd

Interesting idea. I know in one of the other mods (I forget which) that they have immobile defensive siege units.

@hydro
That mod is realism invictus

Nimek said:

@hydro
That mod is realism invictus

Click to expand...

Yeah I was not sure if it was that or History Rewritten or The History of Three Kingdoms.

With the increased cost for the walls will their Crime reduction be upped accordingly?

And Guard towers never had any Crime reduction put on them, why not? Do castle gates have any crime reduction?

This doubling of the build costs for walls will give the AI less incentive to build the better walls impo.

JosEPh

JosEPh_II said:

With the increased cost for the walls will their Crime reduction be upped accordingly?

And Guard towers never had any Crime reduction put on them, why not? Do castle gates have any crime reduction?

This doubling of the build costs for walls will give the AI less incentive to build the better walls impo.

JosEPh

Click to expand...

Is it clear that there is less incentive? The whole point of this change was to increase their defensive value. They might be better value now (I couldn't say, but the point is both value and cost have increased).

@TB - of course (in regard to the AI) that is only true if the (new?) tag is evaluated in the building evaluation...

Nimek said:

Yes they are too cheap to build. Please double its cost If you Can.
Now walls are berg powerfull. Much more than before. It will be even stronger wten we finish.

Click to expand...

I just thought about something that might be reflected further:

For instance, your city is size 1 when you build a palisade, then grows to size 2 and gets attacked - realism would have it that only one part of the city is palisaded and the new quarters aren't. Well you could say that would be upgradeable then by some automechanism but how to do it?

Or as another example you build walls in a size 6 city and it grows to size 13. The new houses aren`t inside the original walls!

What could be done to adress this?

a) when clicking on the buildings list inside the city screen, the defensive buildings could get a little "+" and a popup would enable to rush-buy wall/palisade improvements, so the defensive buildings get adjusted to the new city size

b) when a city grows, you could assign some hammers to improve the original defenses, so for example if your city grows from 6 to 7 the hammers to have walls around the new "quarter" would be a % of the original walls costs.
For faster game speeds there could be a game option like "autoassign production to defenses upon growth"

The twist for micromanagers like me could be to decide for each and every city what to do about the defenses and when to do it.
For example you build palisades in your capital when starting the game but now you have other borders. No enemy is near your capital so you don't want to assign hammers to have the palisades expanded, surrounding your whole - now big - capital -> nothing happens there.

Your border cities, however, are threatened by a big enemy stack nearby, you could decide to autoassign hammers there for defenses - or do it manually by the buildings list or another button somewhere (like the sort buildings buttons (there is a little castle icon)).

If you wouldn't have upgraded your walls and the enemy attacks a size 7 city that had its walls built when being size 6 you would lose the population point or a building you recently constructed if the enemy wins the fight.

Strategically the impact would be as following:
As the newest (and probably more expansive) buildings would be in the not per se defended quarters (because there is still place for them to be put to), you'd have an incentive to protect the new quarters and expand your walls to include them quick - at least in border cities.


Another complementing idea would be to have walls etc adjusted to the surroundings - as for example a city that is surrounded by water and has just one side to be attacked from land doesn't need the highest walls on its sea sides. The walls costs would also be lower as the walls would only cover 1/4 of the surroundings.

The idea came to me when reflecting the constrcution plans of the walls of Costantinople. Yes it had also walls to their sea side but the land side walls were way better.

In game terms: lets say you are a seafearing civ and you have a lot of coastal cities, controlling the seas, you wouldn't fear an amphibious attack but only land stacks, you could save the hammers for the sea side walls.

Or you would have a lot of land troops and control the hinterland but an advanced enemy threatens you (viking-like) with a lot of amphibious attacks and a superior fleet: you would most likely build the sea walls first - and maybe only. Cities with a lot of sea tiles surrounding them would have more expansive sea walls, of course.

How could this be implemented?

For instance by deviding walls into walls and sea walls. Sea walls would be cheaper and only balance the effects of "amphibious" promotion. You would not need siege towers to clear them but the siege ships from ancient instead, how are they called - quinceremes? Later gunpowered ship units could bombard the sea walls as well.

Regarding the AI implementation: Sea walls would be favourited for mainly seaside cities and walls for mainly inland cities.
Further specialization could be by deviding the strength count of enemy troops into naval strength and land strength. So, if an AI (war) enemy has more naval strength than itself it would be favouring sea walls as well. If Ai enemy has both, more naval and more land strength seaside cities would favour walls (as amphibious attacks are not that common).