Burn Baby Burn!!!

So just finished playing a tiny deity game with America and the 25 hp heal if you pillage seems way to powerful!!! I lost less than half the units I would usually lose playing such a game.

Anybody feels the same?

introducing imbalances to a wobbly structure in the name of innovation. the civ developers are like risk-taking jenga players, throwing too much to one side, forcing them to put too much to the other side, then calling it 'balance'.. sure it stands upright just barely but it's also wobbly as hell. let's see, increase strength of units so that battles tend to last longer/fronts are more solid - nice, ruin it by making cities giant death robots with super powerful attacks and virtually immune to the attacks of any but siege weapons. oh, let's fix that by letting units pillage/heal, maybe that'll balance things out.. oh darn, now battles come down to pillage wars where the attacker actually gains a bigger healing advantage in enemy territory than a defender in friendly territory.. woops.. but hey, at least it's 'innovative', 'new', right?

Yes I've been VERY worried about the introduction of Pillage healing.

You basically won't be able to play defense anymore. Cities are still giant death robots but now you can just destroy the crap out of the enemies economy; gain gold , XP and health and it forces your enemy to attack your units or go into a slow production/gold death spiral.

but and this is a big but, u can only pillage the tile once, then they have to repair it. not like its a endless supply of hp. so it seem balanced to me, ppl will ajust

woodshadows said:

introducing imbalances to a wobbly structure in the name of innovation. the civ developers are like risk-taking jenga players, throwing too much to one side, forcing them to put too much to the other side, then calling it 'balance'.. sure it stands upright just barely but it's also wobbly as hell. let's see, increase strength of units so that battles tend to last longer/fronts are more solid - nice, ruin it by making cities giant death robots with super powerful attacks and virtually immune to the attacks of any but siege weapons. oh, let's fix that by letting units pillage/heal, maybe that'll balance things out.. oh darn, now battles come down to pillage wars where the attacker actually gains a bigger healing advantage in enemy territory than a defender in friendly territory.. woops.. but hey, at least it's 'innovative', 'new', right?

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G&K introduced a lot of changes that made it incredibly difficult to take cities without overwhelming amount of ranged support which would quickly dwarf Melee units and tactics. You pointed it out by calling them GDRs, and this change means that if I move 4-5 melee units of appropriate tech and age around a city they will get a small boost so they can actually take a mature city that has appropriate tech walls.

It gives the attacker a small boost, that is even better when the opponent leaves the fields unopposed. It gives the defenders reasons to go meet the opponent outside the city walls. It gives a good bonus to attackers that manage to blitz and surround a city and if the attackers still lose, because cities and ranged units are still going to be really good on defense, they still come out with a little bonus gold and some lasting damage on the opponent.

They fixed a lot of problems, so I fail to see how this is irresponsible jenga playing...

1) Pillaging sucked, which meant UU and UA involving pillaging also were lackluster.
2) Mounted units when they don't have an overwhelming str bonus sucked, despite having more MP.
3) Melee units struggled to take any cities, while ranged units (despite cities being near GDRs) were doing mostly fine.

Maybe 25 is a little too much and it might need to be 20 or 15. I'll have to give my feedback after I've played a few games (probably this weekend) but I find the solution pretty elegant and interesting... Even if ya... It's "new".

I agree let's give it a chance. There is always room for balance adjustment later on.

Furycrab said:

G&K introduced a lot of changes that made it incredibly difficult to take cities without overwhelming amount of ranged support which would quickly dwarf Melee units and tactics. You pointed it out by calling them GDRs, and this change means that if I move 4-5 melee units of appropriate tech and age around a city they will get a small boost so they can actually take a mature city that has appropriate tech walls.

It gives the attacker a small boost, that is even better when the opponent leaves the fields unopposed. It gives the defenders reasons to go meet the opponent outside the city walls. It gives a good bonus to attackers that manage to blitz and surround a city and if the attackers still lose, because cities and ranged units are still going to be really good on defense, they still come out with a little bonus gold and some lasting damage on the opponent.

They fixed a lot of problems, so I fail to see how this is irresponsible jenga playing...

1) Pillaging sucked, which meant UU and UA involving pillaging also were lackluster.
2) Mounted units when they don't have an overwhelming str bonus sucked, despite having more MP.
3) Melee units struggled to take any cities, while ranged units (despite cities being near GDRs) were doing mostly fine.

Maybe 25 is a little too much and it might need to be 20 or 15. I'll have to give my feedback after I've played a few games (probably this weekend) but I find the solution pretty elegant and interesting... Even if ya... It's "new".

Click to expand...

i think the core of the problem is the cities being overpowered currently and dominating any field of battle. pillage-healing just complicates the problem. what generally happens when you pull up to a city with some melee/preartillery siege? the city bombards you two tiles away somehow shooting over mountain ranges if need be, if this doesnt kill your unit (which it often will if the city has the tradition city attack bonus), then the unit stationed inside the city will perform the knockout kill. it doesn't matter that you've completely killed the enemys entire army and they are down to one city. what do most players do to deal with this situation? they keep the melee back, or use them as expendable targets (hoping the ai targets them instead of siege), while they flood every tile with siege simultaneously in order to take the city down so that one melee can take the city. i really don't think pillage-healing is going to change these sorts of tactics, because cities can still one-shot kill (or one-shot with the garrison shooting too). the only difference is that now attackers have higher survivability in enemy land while engaging with other units away from cities (where they can't be one-shot killed). this results in loads of annoying tiles pillaged and requiring fixing, not to mention fluctuating happiness/resources from pillaged tiles and i suspect the ai is going to struggle with this new system until several patches down the road. the problem boils down to cities are too strong currently, making for very tedious battles and armies composed almost entirely of ranged units. is it fun to walk into enemy territory and have only a two hex narrow path to safely walk in, without being shot at by city A to one side or city B to the other? is that enough room to have any fun tactical manoeuvring? sort of defeats the purpose of 1upt when cities dominate fields of battle, negating any sort of possibility for elaborate and interesting battlefield tactics. ive gotten to using my cities offensively, like the classic towncenter rush in age of kings. build a city as close to the enemy capital as possible, use a great general to plant a citadel right beside their city, have the citadel killing any garrison inside and have your city ping off any enemy units that try to come out to attack your siege. or, if the ai has a huge army compared to mine, provoke war, wait for them to walk up to my city and wage my wars there, where my city will even the odds in my favour and i can annihilate the enemy army thanks to my city attacking, great way to wittle away at any unit advantage the ai might have.

Woodshadows...

Anyone ever tell you that just a little bit of formatting would make it HUNDREDS of times easier to read?

Anyways. On higher difficulty, or more to be precise, on even tech, cities and defenders (even with tradition bonus) don't really 1-2 kill. However you did point out a key point. Ranged and pre-artilery siege can take cities despite the fairly strong strength. Melee units on the other hand act as fodder or quickly get melted decently quickly before they are in position to cover said siege and ranged units.

If you weaken cities, you won't make people want to use melee all the sudden, players will just do the same song and dance to take cities, it'll just be easier. Ideally they want it to be a situation where 4-5 even tech units of decent mix can take 1 city with just 1 defender, and that if you bring up the count on both sides you need more to take or defend. Right now if you bring ranged units that's true except when terrain favors the defenders. If you make horse units or melee units the defenders will win every time. THAT's the problem.

The AI is programmed with the patch to get an extra worker or 2, so I wouldn't worry about AIs having to manage pillaged tiles.

Personally I like the solution because Melee units problem isn't that they aren't strong enough to do good damage to cities, it's that by the time they are in range they are too beat up to do so. They also fixed Cover and Cover 2 promotions so it might become interesting again to use melee units to break someone who is using tons of ranged defense. I don't think it's perfect, but I don't think it complicates things, since ranged units are usually almost never in a good position to pillage so there's no change there, and it just gives an oomph to people who used melee units instead which was sorrily needed.

I have to say the AI is much more competitive post patch.

Playing an immortal game where Napoleon has rolled over 2 civs Aztecs and Celts at the same time. Now hes taking out the #2 in tech Babylon.

I took Rome's capital in this game. 3 AI Caps were taken on a standard map by other AIs by turn 150
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On higher levels this only makes the AI stronger so far in my experience. They are easier able to become runaways partially because of the attacker edge and actually makes game in my opinion a difficulty level higher than they were pre patch (haven't done any emperor below post patch so can't say 100% yet)

Furycrab said:

Woodshadows...

Anyone ever tell you that just a little bit of formatting would make it HUNDREDS of times easier to read?

Anyways. On higher difficulty, or more to be precise, on even tech, cities and defenders (even with tradition bonus) don't really 1-2 kill. However you did point out a key point. Ranged and pre-artilery siege can take cities despite the fairly strong strength. Melee units on the other hand act as fodder or quickly get melted decently quickly before they are in position to cover said siege and ranged units.

Click to expand...

my text is impenetrable to all but the most keenly eyed

i have had different experiences than you, for me cities/defenders do 1-2 kill at tech parity (with tradition bonus). generally the city attacks and then the archer stationed inside finishes the unit off. that's a loss of 1 unit per turn which no amount of healing/retreating can do anything about. the way i take cities is to pour a bunch of catapults into range on the same turn as i push some melee onto some defensive tiles, hoping the ai targets my melee (which they often will). ill lose one melee per turn, or if targeting my siege one siege per turn.

anyways, you may be right that weakening cities might not provide a huge incentive for people to start using melee again. i do recall however in vanilla that i would use melee far more than range, or at least an even mix, in fact i even used a fair amount of mounted. units like mandekalu and conquistadors could completely rip open a city, similarly berzerkers/samurai/longswords, etc. these days when i try to rush a city with any sort of melee i lose so many it's ridiculous and just not a profitable way to attack a city. as you point out, by the time you get to the city you're so beat up and even if youre not, attacking the city will wear out half your health bar making you easy pickings for the ai to take you out. walls/castles/etc adding hp to cities can make the amount of damage done by a melee attack MINISCULE, you need almost 20 units to take down some cities with all the defensive buildings.

my solution is - reduce city attack range from 2 to 1 but let it be an automatic attack that hits any units surrounding the city.. just like a citadel works. this would represent the idea that an army camped outside a citys walls is going to take harrassing fire.. whereas what on earth is supposed to be represented by units being hit two tiles away?