Sirian said:
When has flanking ever been carried out on the scale of hundreds of miles?
Inch'on? That's like loading a few units onto a ship in port, moving a tile, and offloading on the tile behind the enemy. Whooptedoo in Civ terms.
Blitzkrieg through Belgium? Nah. That is like moving around the small line of forts called the Magninot Line. We're talking ONE TILE's worth of flanking, and in Civ3 strategic terms, the game accounts for that on par with what it was really worth.
Methinks you are too married to the nonsense "official" stance that tiles only represent ten square miles. Care to bet cash they don't stick with that line when it comes to Civ4?
The defender is already GREATLY disadvantaged by the vulnerability of fixed positions to defend. The SoD phenonomenon advantages attackers all the way. The attacker can pile all his forces into one stack, then charge. No risk. For defender to pile all his forces into one stack, he has to choose one point to defend and leave the rest wide open.
And you want to give the attacking SoD access to roads as well? What are you smoking?
There's already a game with all offense, no defense. It's called GalCiv.
Bob, ever heard of Napoleon's Maneuver of Ulm? Napoleon jumped hundreds of miles, outflanked the Austrian Army and forced it to surrender with nary a shot fired. All the way across Germany, and then Napoleon went on to win the battle of Austerlitz. There are other cases... what happened in the Soviet Union in 1941 is another example. And not even you can trim that down to a single tile.
In the end it depends on one's taste. You're entitled to believe that things are already in favor of the attacker, but I disagree.
The ability to muster your units at a border and use 3x normal movement to concentrate on things heading your way seems very defensive to me. I don't consider that fun. Every battle ends up like WWI where the attacker faces a horrible wrath of the defender. You need numbers to win, which isn't historical and isn't fun. That's not how I want to play my games. And before anyone says "well the larger army usually did win," I say that I'd rather have a chance to win with my smaller army by using strategy than by relying on the RNG to give me a few gifts. I don't play Civ to dance with the RNG.
And I thought we didn't really care about "realism," but only gameplay? If so, then throw out your miles-per-tile argument and focus solely on the gameplay concerns. I don't like things as they stand now, and assuming Firaxis does something like create a unit which damages all units in a stack (the long-requested "Collateral Damage") that will be even worse... just keep a few of these guys in reserve, throw them at the approaching enemy stack and watch it burn.
Yes, allowing attackers to use those roads would definitely cause a shift towards the attacker, but other things can be brought into the mix to help reestablish the balance again. For example, attrition, like exists in Rise of Nations. However long you sit in enemy territory your units lose HP. Give units a higher defensive bonus while in cities... that way the attacker can road around the countryside while the defender remains holed up in the cities or the forts. If that doesn't mimic history, then I don't know what does.
My point is that I like mobile warfare.
War in the past has often been a race between armies to acquire the superior position, the upper ground, the "good spot." This doesn't exist in Civ right now. Strategic vs. tactical concerns aren't really as much of an issue because in the past, even large armies often had trouble finding each other. Right now you can instantly see anything heading your way and prepare to meet it, knowing exactly where it is at all times and knowing exactly when to strike it.
Things like this are lost through abstraction, the necessary evil. In Civ, finding and engaging enemy troops is a matter of scrolling around the screen. One of the things I'd like to see is something which balances out attacker vs. defender
on the battlefield, rather than the defender getting the first strike being a foregone conclusion. There are ways to prevent the attacker from running wild. I just want my wars to be more interesting.