Town battles

Well most of the large battles in this game take place when you attack cities. But this isen't true in history. A alot of important battles took place in fields,towns and beaches. I think battles out side of cities should be more importaant.

I also dislike seeing lots of units piled into cities...

Perhaps deciding who the city belongs to depends on how many units are in the city area. If the city has lots of units inside it defending and there are enemies all around in the tiles.. it essentially gets cut off and has no population/production. Simply a scene of urban warfare.

The only way Firaxis could do this is by making the cities larger than one square.

I think that would be pretty cool.

Or by allowing units to claim territory. This would require separating cultural and national borders, but is possible. If after however many years of occupation, perhaps using some minstrel units which have been suggested in a different thread, the tiles changed nationality because the military had eliminated the enemy culture then you'd have to leave your city or your enemy would steal all your land and your city would be isolated.

Another option would be to make defending less beneficial, so that people were more willing to sacrifice the bonus. My favourite suggestion for doing this is to allow attacking in stacks so that the defender only chose best defender for the first pair of units, and then for the next pair the attacker chooses.
This would mean that instead of sitting in a city being bombarded you might choose to meet the enemy in the open where he has no defensive bonuses of his own.

Soil said:

I also dislike seeing lots of units piled into cities...

Perhaps deciding who the city belongs to depends on how many units are in the city area. If the city has lots of units inside it defending and there are enemies all around in the tiles.. it essentially gets cut off and has no population/production. Simply a scene of urban warfare.

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I agree with sentiments expressed here. Often in history a city/civ chooses its location (at a mountain pass or river crossing etc) to defeat an attack (eg's Greek city states at Thermopylae, Brussels at Waterloo). Most seasoned players do this now in the current game of Civ (although the AI tends to be naive when it comes to making decisions about committing forces to particular terrain, instead opting to pile units into cities).

Given that urban combat results in a lot of destruction of city infrastructure, an aggressive commander is denied the fruits of victory because the city taken over is a shambles. It would be interesting if a defeated opponent from a "decisive battle" (see thread on this) was given the option of handing over a city basically intact, as part of a peace settlement.

Its a great idea to have cities bigger than one square, it makes battle more interesting as you have to deploy your troops top different pats of the city. Also claiming territory when you attack is a good idea.

Urban warfare is actually a relatively modern development. Before the 20th Century, battles usually took place in the undeveloped area outside the town which was the objective, in large part owing to the need for massed maneuvers and central control (this was before automatic weapons and radio communications).

So when you send your unit "in" to attack the enemy city, the actual fighting is probably outside the city limits rather than in the streets.

Also, given the scale of a non-scenario game of Civ, having a city being two squares could be equivalent to a city being the size of Portugal.

Ever heard of Stalingrad. A battle that lasted five months because of urban battling.

In all fairness, I think they have done more to address this in CIV than in previous Civ games. Cottages are REALLY important to your economy-especially once they grow into towns. Now, if an enemy wants to really hurt you he doesn't need to invade your city centre (where he stands to take massive casualties) he simply goes about laying waste to all your towns, villages and hamlets (not to mention your pastures, wineries and plantations). Suddenly a player is forced to either sit it out behind the 'walls' of the city centre, or come out to fight over this or that town/village. In some respects this does represent 'Town Battles'.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

I would like to see towns get a defensive bonus. Cities get a defensive bonus based on the fact that all the buildings would make it more difficult to attack, so why should a town get the bonus. It should be lower then a city as it is smaller and more open than a city. All to often i see the ai stacking all their units in a city leave everything around it easily to attack and pillage. If villages and towns had a defensive bonus that might encourge the ai to place some units outside of their cities.

its also a bit dumb that a city with a population of 20,000 takes as much space as a city with 5,000,000.

Ultimate: I've probably read about 5000 pages about Stalingrad... being that next to Verdun it had the worst conditions ever and was without a doubt the biggest military debacle ever (at least from the Germans' point of view), its hard not to read about that battle!

I agree with Aussie though, the towns probably do an adequate job. I guess you could have a "Stalingrad" that involved fighting in the towns, and a defensive bonus for towns (and maybe a lower one for villages but nothing for hamlets or cottages) would make a lot of sense.

Having said that, unless you were doing a scenario that was just the area from Voronezh in the north to Sevastopol in the west to just east of the Volga in the east and the Caucausus mountains in the South, I don't think it would be justified making even Stalingrad more than one square. One square simply represents too much land in a globe sized map, even on huge.

Panzer General III SE had several really cool Stalingrad scenarios (as the Russians or the Germans; in the latter case attacking and then trying to escape). In that game, the city was several squares (maybe 10) but Gumrak was also a town square; the scale was really tiny.

Oh man! I might have to install that game again... I think its minimum requirements were like a 16 MB graphics card... that would run ridiculously well on a new computer... it was sooo slow on the computer I had at the time... I need to keep studying. Thank you for being part of this stream of consciousness.

Giving Towns and Villages defensive bonuses would be very easy to mod, even for a complete modding moron like me. What level would work? +25% for towns and 10-15% for villages? (And, while I'm at it, +50% for forts) What level is balanced?

ToV said:

Giving Towns and Villages defensive bonuses would be very easy to mod, even for a complete modding moron like me. What level would work? +25% for towns and 10-15% for villages? (And, while I'm at it, +50% for forts) What level is balanced?

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What i had in mind was 2/3 of the city bonus for towns and 1/3 for villages, while anything below a village wouldn't receive a bonus. As for forts, i think they should give units a zone of control because as they stand they are fairly useless unless there is a choke point.

Simplest solution: Limit number of stacks you can put in a city and in each tile so people are forced to fight outside the city instead of just wait them to come in

Simplest solutions: Limit the number of stacks you can put on each tile (and inside a city) so everyone is forced to stretch out the battle instead of turtling in the cities

What i had in mind was 2/3 of the city bonus for towns and 1/3 for villages, while anything below a village wouldn't receive a bonus. As for forts, i think they should give units a zone of control because as they stand they are fairly useless unless there is a choke point.

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Ah. Well, in that case, I cannot help you. Unless you have an exact number in mind, I cannot edit it in XML.

It just so happens that one or two of the civics options in my civics mod gives negative happiness for the presence of military units. The idea is that in more free and democratic societies, the people actually will be ANGRY at the presence of troops-forcing you to place units in forts or station them close to the city instead. It is very crude, as I wanted a system where barracks increased the # of units you could have in a city before it became unhappy-and for the unhappiness to be based on the ratio of City Size to number of units.
Still, better than nothing I guess.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Veteranewbie said:

Simplest solutions: Limit the number of stacks you can put on each tile (and inside a city) so everyone is forced to stretch out the battle instead of turtling in the cities

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yes yes yes!
i believe it is a real good solution to increase civ's warfare strategy!

what if a max number of units per tile exists??
- it is possible to have bombard system like it was in civ3.
- thus collateral damage and kamikaz artillery isn't needed anymore
- forts become usefull
- SOD really dead
- in two simple words: strategy enhanced!!