Just a thought about the combat system

The combat system in Civ IV is always unforgivable. You win or you loose, and sometimes, with a limited number of units, you can escape the battle. While I first loved the combat system in Civ V, I miss the randomness of it.
To me, the best rational of combat system is in the game "The Battle for Wesnoth".

So, what if we change the combat system with the following:
- Add a base chance to quit the combat of 15% for ALL units.
- This chance is down to 0% if the unit has less than 1/3 of its life BEFORE the combat.

It will make the battle more tactical, especially with xUPT, where you can set a limited number of units on a tile.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. Please do not do this. Please do not do anything that makes units more likely to survive. There are already a lot of units on the map already, especially for those of us who DO NOT play with xUPT. This will make that problem worse.

This is a strategy game. I do not want anything to make it more "tactical". In a tactical game where you have limited numbers of units, can control their actions more directly, and have it be more difficult to replace them, then this sort of survive-and-run makes more sense. Civilization is not that game.

As far as I am concerned, this mod is nearly complete and I really do not want to see anything that rewrites basic rule mechanics. I quit C2C when too many new rules started to pile up. I don't want to go through that again.

I have given this thought before, providing a withdrawal chance for all units. The immediate problem is units with a very high withdraw chance already, like mounted units. With promotions, those units can reach 75-90% withdraw. Adding even 15% base withdraw would give mounted units with the right promotions 100% withdraw chance.

Other problems to consider:

Defender withdraw: Do defenders get a chance to withdraw? If so, do players get a chance to choose where defenders will withdraw to? If not, is withdraw a big advantage to attackers?

City Combat: Do units withdraw from defending cities? I think most players would not be happy with defenders leaving a city.

My initial impression is that there are a lot of unknown problems here and that this change would have a lot of unintended consequences.

deleted.

Afforess said:

...With promotions, those units can reach 75-90% withdraw. Adding even 15% base withdraw would give mounted units with the right promotions 100% withdraw chance.

Click to expand...

It's already possible to get units above 100% withdraw chance with the use of Generals. It's lots of fun to attack with a unit who is on the verge of death and has a near-zero chance of winning, but whose survival is nonetheless guaranteed: because he does survive, he gets the maximum amount of experience, and can do this each and every turn there's an available enemy unit. I guess this is cheating.

The suggestion to eliminate withdraw chance when a units starts off injured would reduce this problem a bit - the unit would have to heal between charges.

Cheers, A.

I'm mostly with Vokarya here. Especially about withdrawal, there are already options and promotions, that's enough for me. By the way Defender withdraw is an option probably causing Out of Sync errors in MP.

Also, problems mentioned by Afforess are one more reason in my view to leave things as they are. If it's not broken, don't fix it. And I'm not eager to change one of the most complex game mechanics and see possible new bugs popping out.

Ok. You have convinced me, especially about the balance part.

I still think there is something to dig there but it is a quite large change, and it should be optional if implemented. About max widthdraw chance, i think it should be capped to 90%.
About cities, i've seen units on the battlefield that can retire of the battle (mainly ballistas) and stay on the same tile. Isn't it possible to do that ?

With this post, i only wanted to discuss about an alternative combat system, not to replace the actual one. However, that seems to be a too intensive task. Don't worry, Vokarya!

Defender Withdraw:
I play with this option, and when attacking cities sometimes the defenders "withdraw", but they always remain in the city.

I agree that, especially starting from late medieval-early reneissance, there begin to be LOTS of units on the map, so having each of them able to withdraw would make it really difficult for a war to progress, and have the total number of units grow immensely.
And we know that the AI has its problems in war already...

To be honest I would VERY MUCH like a base withdrawal of 15-20%

I think it would be more realistic because in history battles seldom ended with complete anihalations...

I would suggest you focus on how good AI is with victories/victory as chosen. I suggest if AI is better with victory mindset, you advance the game somewhat.