Love the game, but...

N

Noopy

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
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Florida
I've put so many hours into Civ IV and C2C. I love the mod. I love the game. I love everything, but the combat system. I just feel like I'm stacking people on each other and running them into stuff. Is there anything I can do to change this or shift my feelings? I love everything in this game but I just stopped because the combat was so "eh." I really want to put more time into this game and mod but it hurts to fight. :sad:
 
There's also a lot more Combat Mod stuff to come to deepen this even further. I've also got a lot of AI improvements to make eventually that should make it all really click for the game play as a whole.
 
I'll also point something out:

If you are throwing a whole stack at an enemy stack you are doing worse than you could. Selecting the order your units attack gives you better results than letting the computer decide which unit is attacking.
 
Thank you all for your replies. I'll try all your suggestions out. Hopefully it rekindles my love for this mod and game. Thanks :)
 
Hydromancerx said:
Also do you utilize Surround and Destroy features?

And do you use Field Commanders?
Click to expand...

I'd recommend these most of all. Putting swift agile little units in your stacks, such as light cavalry or helicopter gunships, help you annihilate an enemy on the battlefield with Surround and Destroy, even if the surrounding units never attack. Think of it as cutting enemy supply lines and harassing their logistics and recon assets, and forcing the enemy to devote precious resources protecting a flank while your main force takes care of the rest. The mere presence of a menacing little fleet Apache helicopters behind and to the side of you, staring hungrily at your squishy artillery pieces, will make anyone incredibly paranoid. After the enemy has been shattered, then they can attack, cutting down the fleeing survivors as easily as stalks of wheat, and hopefully still have enough movement to retreat to the safety of your stack before the end of turn.

(Reminds me of this idea I had to have two separate cavalry lines, specifically for classical+medieval+renaissance, with mounted infantry -> knights -> mailed -> cuirassiers -> cavalry -> early tank as the heavy line-busting full charge heavily armoured group with mobility and firepower. And horsemen -> light cavalry -> hussar -> trench cavalry -> armored car -> gunship as the swift flanky annoying screening-force reconnaissance element, with mobility and more mobility.)

Turning a great general into a field commander provides you with a unit that, once it gains experience, turns even the most terrible scrub army of conscripts with outdated equipment into an unstoppable death machine. Sound unbalanced? Well people have spent months making the AI learn to use them too! And the AI will use them against you. Actually the AI will use their general against animals and barbarians as practice until the general becomes a bronze-age version of Erwin Rommel, then use it against you.
 
(Reminds me of this idea I had to have two separate cavalry lines, specifically for classical+medieval+renaissance, with mounted infantry -> knights -> mailed -> cuirassiers -> cavalry -> early tank as the heavy line-busting full charge heavily armoured group with mobility and firepower. And horsemen -> light cavalry -> hussar -> trench cavalry -> armored car -> gunship as the swift flanky annoying screening-force reconnaissance element, with mobility and more mobility.)
Click to expand...
I won't quibble the details but this plan is basically in the works. You should quite appreciate the S&D tags once they come into use and the Heart of War Combat Mod option will enhance some of what you're suggesting there even further. If I only had all the time in the world (or didn't have to work) you'd already have these adjustments in play!

At the moment I'm working on this naval restructure and I fear that'll probably lead to other unit line evaluations before I can implement Heart of War which is the next Combat Mod option on the development table.
 
The AI has no idea about Surround and Destroy so using that option in SinglePlayer games is cheating.
 
I concur. :)
 
+1

Even koshling told us that back 2+ years ago. That's when I stopped using it.

There are probably 3-5 options that either don't have AI coding Or are broken in C2C.

S&D, Adv Economy come to mind right away.

JosEPh
 
That's part of why I like Afforess' connected cities mechanics so much. It gets rid of an opaque, barely controllable mechanic (trade routes) and obviates the need for any sort of "advanced" economy by giving better versions of city maintenance and inflation.
 
I haven't been on the C2C subforum in a while, but I often played with Surround and Destroy regardless if the AI knows how to use it or not because it sort of 'counters' the game sending in bad choices for units when attacking in a stack. I know 'advanced' players will pick units manually, but I don't have the patience for that sort of micromanaging 24/7 in a game sad to say. If I have a stack of 20 ~ 70 units, as is common in the latter parts of the game, I really don't want to sift through each and every one of them - one at a time - every time I attack. And in a 9,000+ turn game, that's just a big fat no. As such, my games rarely ever make it out of the Classical era (Prehistoric and Ancient are my favs anyway :king: )

It is currently and long has been the biggest thing that turns me away from being able to actually finish my games in C2C: The combat just becoming so tedious and un-fun for me. I even dug around trying to find the old version I had originally downloaded before discovering the wonderous SVN feature, which I do not recall having this combat tedium (Lead from Behind, IIRC?) and after several very long downloads on that Atomic Gamer site, I came to find both versions still had the "feature" there (Game displays 95% odds for an ideal unit, suicides a completely different unit that would have 8% odds instead, while keeping the 95% odd unit sitting behind in the stack)
 
(Game displays 95% odds for an ideal unit, suicides a completely different unit that would have 8% odds instead, while keeping the 95% odd unit sitting behind in the stack)
Click to expand...
I've come to understand that this is often due to units that will defend first against particular units or combat classes and/or units that will attack first against particular units or combat classes that throw off this assessment - not inaccurately, just not the way you've been told to expect.

Again there's still about 80 hours of debugging work to try to address that further.
 
Thunderbrd said:
I've come to understand that this is often due to units that will defend first against particular units or combat classes and/or units that will attack first against particular units or combat classes that throw off this assessment - not inaccurately, just not the way you've been told to expect.

Again there's still about 80 hours of debugging work to try to address that further.
Click to expand...

80 hours.... :eek:
I actually cringed reading that :lol:

Seems to be a very complex issue then, wish I understood it better. Now I feel all rotten for complaining about it though xD


I suppose for the time being there's a few things I could do.
1) Since the Prehistoric ~ late-Classical is my favorite segment of the game, I could just stick to that...
2) Just try and learn to be more patient :p
3) Stick to slightly smaller maps (Standard/Epic instead of Huge/Marathon)



On a slight off-topic, I was looking at the 'ideas' on the last page of the Transhuman thread, and think that 'Thunderbird' idea for the Mythological Bestiary was a pretty cool concept :) A "living" powerplant!
 
I was already wondering about this "Lead From Behind".

If you look at this in CvSelectionGroupAI::AI_getBestGroupAttacker

Code: 
						// From Lead From Behind by UncutDragon
						if (GC.getLFBEnable() && GC.getLFBUseCombatOdds())
						{
							PROFILE("AI_getBestGroupAttacker.LFBgetBetterAttacker");

							pLoopUnit->LFBgetBetterAttacker(&pBestUnit, pPlot, bPotentialEnemy, iBestOdds, iValue);
						}

It bypasses the complete odds calculation and uses a simpler but faster calculation. But if this faster calculation gives bad results we should use the normal calculation.
 
Ah so thats what's been happening in my games!!!

I was wondering how i was losing units in 99.81% (and similar) odds when attacking with a stack ... Made no sense to me, especially since it happened quite often too.
 
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