ADRArtillery - Artillery Rebalance mod

So, my first post on the forums and I already have a mod to post. Its not thoroughly playtested yet, though after my initial attempt I did nerf catapults even more in return for them showing up with TECH_MATHEMATICS as has been traditional in Civ. Trebuchets and Rocket Artillery are back, as well. Also, the withdrawal rate on artillery has been improved at all levels, with a significant jump when moving from direct fire artillery such as cannons to indirect fire such as modern artillery and particularly rocket artillery.

Oh, and to make the mod more easily integrated with other mods, everything I touched has <!-- MOD: ... > <!-- /MOD --> around it. At least in the Units directory. A future version will have it in the Text directory, as well as more... full-featured civlopedia entries. People to translate to languages besides English would be really helpful, too!

Actually, let me go into more detail on the changes included in this mod:
- Changed Catapults to have 4 strength, max of five units hit with collateral damage, 15% withdrawal rate, plus a few other changes designed to nerf it. It is available earlier, though. Costs 40 still.

- Added Trebuchets, which are the same as Catapults used to be, for the most part. Strength is 8 instead of 5, has a 25% withdrawal rate, and max of six units hit with collateral damage. Costs 65. Requires Machinery, placing it nicely between Catapults and Cannons.

- Cannons were basically untouched, save for their withdrawal rate being changed to 35% and being moved to chemistry (logic going that the advancements that allow for the cannons on a frigate allow for militarily useful cannons on land.)

- Artillery was entirely untouched save for its withdrawal rate being increased to 55% due to it being an indirect fire piece.

- Rocket Artillery was added after Artillery, with a withdrawal rate of 65%, a strength of 34 (it comes around at the same time as mech. infantry, so it fits fairly well, especially compared to modern armor), speed of two so it can keep up with a modern war, a max number of units hit by collateral damage of 9 and a cost of 220. Finally, it does require aluminum for game balance issues, as well as using the logic that the MLRS concept requires fairly light-weight rockets to work. It requires Rocketry and Robotics.

Version 0.3 added Rocketry requirement to Rocket Artillery, as well as the Aluminum requirement.

Version 0.4 added, borrowed the Trebuchet model from Sharick (Thanks!) and adjusted a few things to improve the balance. I'll go back and fix the description of what's been done to account for that soonish. Sorry for the disappearence, just now got up the will to update this for 1.61.

-Atma

To begin with: Welcome to Civ Fanatics!!!

Next: seems like a lot of good changes. I know I personally felt that artillery was severely weakened in Civ IV. I don't even use them really, and use bombers instead (I usually don't warmonger until the modern age anyway). I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone fixed it. I'll give it a shot, and let you know what I think (I put it in customassets, right?).

Just a couple of things first, though. The thing with the trebuchets really just jumped out at me. You mention that it has a max of 6 units for collateral damage. Unless I am mistaken, I think it was hard enough to hit 1 unit with a trebuchet, let alone 6. To me, collateral damage and trebuchets just don't go together, unless you're talking about knocking a building down onto a unit. What I would do is have the trebuchet extremely expensive, have a strength of about 3, and have a bombard of like 15-20%. For a medieval field artillery, I would put in a mangonel or something like that. I'd make it available at the same time as trebuchet, cost a lot less, have a bombard of like 5%, give that a strength of 8 and collateral damage of 6 max. I think that would be a little more historically accurate, because you need two different units for seige weapons and field artillery, just like it really was (IIRC).

However, these are just my suggestions, and it is your mod, so if you like my ideas, feel free to use them (I have very limited modding ability so I won't be using them anytime soon). If not, that's fine too. Just thought I'd offer some comments.

Thanks for the response, though the reason I used a trebuchet is because that's what Firaxis used with Civ3: Conquests. (= Beyond that, this is all rather abstracted. I mean, with a turn being a year, that just means a higher rate of fire, rather than anything else.

Beyond that, though, the idea is more that "These are the stats" and everything else follows. Oh, and catapults in the unmodded Civ4 can hit up to six units with collateral damage. I nerfed them down to five. (= Beyond that, what I did was fairly easy, all the tags are pretty obviously named, so I just went through and made a list of all the tags that each artillery unit in the original had different values for and what those values were, then started adjusting the stats until I had a nice progression for five artillery units instead of just three. The names were picked mostly due to tradition or already being in the game. For that matter, I misnamed the Rocket Artillery, should be Radar Artillery. Rocket Artillery would be more like the Kyushuu rockets that the Soviets used in WWII, but the name still fits fairly well for our modern MLRS.

Again, thanks for the suggestion, but for this particular mod, I'm intent on keeping it to one general abstracted artillery unit placed at somewhat even places along the tech tree rather than two at each. It could be interesting to do a Rock-Paper-Scissors set at each point along the tech tree, but there're already so many units to build that adding in additional artillery at each level would end it up somewhat unmanageable, at least in the regular game. Some of the spacing is a bit close, even for the 660-turn epic game that ships with Civ4, I think, units don't tend to stick around long enough to actually see use, such as cannons, for example. That's part of the reason I did this, to get cannons some more time where they'll be useful. On the other hand, I've found the FexFX 875 and 1000 turn games to be quite nice for length, though I still tend to use it with my mod so catapults dun stick around for quite so long.

Could you mod in a battering ram that has zero attack but allows for bombardment of city defenses? I'd like to see that available always, like warriors.

Makeing catapults and other seige engines an moving them from city to city seems silly when most of the time they were built on site by the seige army. So hows about just making a seige engineer early in the game (defend only unit which lowers the cities defenses). Theory is he arrives with the army at the city walls, builds seige engines over time to help the army get past the defenses, then has to start over again at the next city.

Collateral damage should be reserved for cannons and real artillery anyhow.

Or maybe instead of him causing damage, he switches between two modes-

1) seige weapon mode- immobile, causes damage, can bombard cities

2) seige engineer mode- mobile, no strength

That way, you can build a seige engineer, have sit move in with your army, attack a city in seige mdoe, then change back itno an engineer and move to the next city.

Drakonik said:

Or maybe instead of him causing damage, he switches between two modes-

1) seige weapon mode- immobile, causes damage, can bombard cities

2) seige engineer mode- mobile, no strength

That way, you can build a seige engineer, have sit move in with your army, attack a city in seige mdoe, then change back itno an engineer and move to the next city.

Click to expand...

And, just to save time and instead of making two seperate units, you can assume a seige unit is representative of both the weapon and the engineer, depending on the situation the unit is in.

O wait, that brings us back to where we were when we started.

I think the crux of the matter lies in civ's continued lack of a good standoff attack model and poor representation of support units. Civ 3's standoff attack Model while tedious, was good I thought: just needed tweaking. As it stands in Civ IV, I'm hurling stacks of catapults at my enemies, dare I say, wtf? Some/most of us (hey anyone bothering to post here is probably a history and gaming buff) grew up reading about the tremendous battle plan known as siege warfare. It required patience, logistics, cruelty, expense, and engineering. For all our quibbles here I think we can all say, were are my siege towers? Where are my walls of circumvaliation? WHERE? (Shaking fist)Why stop at walls when there were also moats, ramparts, and keeps?

I have to agree w/ Jayone, most/all siege equipment was assembled in the field. This was the job of the engineers. Engineers are essential to warfare, ESSENTIAL. Engineers were some of the great military masters. Think WWII, think Alexander the great, think Hannibal. There should be some way to represent them, even if workers could do it. I was watching the history channel, about how Caesar built a bridge across the Rhine, in a matter of WEEKS, crossed his legions basically looking for some one dumb enough to oppose him, when none did he crossed back and dismantled the bridge, point made.

Perhaps archery units should play like CIV IV artillery units? doing collateral damage and such.

lastly: Atma ,the rockets you mention were, I believe, katyusha; "Stalin's Organs"
Kyushu is an Island near/part of Japan, something like that.

Rant over, urge to pillage, fading..http://forums.civfanatics.com/images/smilies/crazyeyes.gif

I know someone probably has mentioned this but I think it would be cool if artillery could return fire.

Well, after losing the will to do much due to a soul sucking job that I recently quit, I finally got together and updated this for 1.61. There've been a lot of changes, but overall I think its FAR more balanced. Trebuchets are rather weaker now, but they were... INSANE powerful for when they came around, before. Weakened rocket artillery a touch, too, and I lowered those withdrawal chances across the board. Do need to go back and add in the ability to give the +withdrawal promotion to artillery, eventually. Aside from that, thanks Sharick! I love your trebuchet model. =D

I can hardly wait to play Atma, thanks for posting it. Catch me on IRC for a MP game