Lemming Enemy Fleet

So I declared war on Huatama because he wants to "liberate" the people of Earth.

I have a whole bunch of true battlesuits + centurions and Punishers on their way to suppress his insolent ideas. Few turns later, I completely forgot that huatama sent several fleets into the area..

And my City of Aquaria was ambushed by one of the fleets as the result.



They torn themselves to shreds attacking a str 177 aquatic city. They did manage to knock off 1/3 of its' hp but the fleet was sunk by end of second turn. It would've been a different story if he had bunch of ranged ships firing at it for few turns with melee ships waiting in the wings.

As I've said somewhere earlier, the AI really loves their melee ships. Now that those and subs have been added, the AI's regular ranged ships far and few between. They'd probably be more formidable on the water if they made more, like in this case.

One of several reasons I made a mod to eliminate the total nonsense melee unit damage when attacking cities.

Requiring ranged units for city capture is arbitrary and pointless...and the mod helps the AI's strategies to be a little less horrid.

*rolls eyes*

Please do some deeper checking before making incorrect conclusions.

The AI use ranged units, but due to the ranged being slower and arriving later, they blow up their melee units and then the ranged arrive taking the city down to zero hit points, but now without a melee unit to take it.

It's purely a problem of coordinated arrival, due to movement difference between units. Eliminating melee units is a horrible solution to the erroneous diagnosed problem.

I think you may have misread what he said. The way I read it, his mod increases the damage done to cities by melee units. I don't think that the mod eliminates melee units entirely.

Yeah, I gathered that he removed the city attack penalty melee units suffer by default.

Emptiness said:

I think you may have misread what he said. The way I read it, his mod increases the damage done to cities by melee units. I don't think that the mod eliminates melee units entirely.

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I seem to have worded my description rather poorly.

The mod makes it so that, when a melee unit attacks a city, it takes the absolute minimal about of damage I could code conveniently - 1 out of 100.

So the damage the melee unit does to the city is unchanged, but does not kill itself with repeated attacks on the city.

This makes it perfectly viable to take even high strength cities without a single ranged unit, though obviously the presence of an enemy army would complicate things.

In my opinion this is necessary to appropriately balance ranged and melee units.

Galgus said:

One of several reasons I made a mod to eliminate the total nonsense melee unit damage when attacking cities.

Requiring ranged units for city capture is arbitrary and pointless...and the mod helps the AI's strategies to be a little less horrid.

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What? Its good. It's up to firaxis's developers to improve the military ai not us. And plus they'll be less biased than you are. And me.

Plus getting up close and personal means you'll be getting shot at so melee ships taking damage is perfectly realistic enough. I'm not sure but I think those ships is tier 3 assaulting basically a tier 4 city.

Heck yes, but when it's a good balance change anyway I see nothing lost.

Units already get shot at by the city bombardment - why represent that twice?

And couldn't a faster ship potentially avoid and evade such systems?

Galgus said:

Heck yes, but when it's a good balance change anyway I see nothing lost.

Units already get shot at by the city bombardment - why represent that twice?

And couldn't a faster ship potentially avoid and evade such systems?

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Umm, something tells me that you don't have much experience with real ships in real life.

If you remove the component where melee units take damage in melee.... you might as well turn them into ranged units instead. For they basically got turned into a ranged unit.

Galgus said:

Units already get shot at by the city bombardment - why represent that twice?

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The reason is two-fold: on the one hand units can and do swarm cities, which are static and can only attack once.

On the other hand, and this is more fundamental, every combat-capable unit gets a chance to fight back no matter how many times it's attacked, as long as it's not destroyed. Even ranged units. And since Civ5, cities are unit-like from the combat standpoint, so you can't just deprive them of their reactive defense capability.

Galgus said:

And couldn't a faster ship potentially avoid and evade such systems?

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Ships can't outrun guided missiles. Frankly, I don't think they can outrun any kind of modern ammunition. Countermeasures, electronic or otherwise, can make a ship harder to target, but they're largely unrelated to vessel speed.

Callonia said:

Umm, something tells me that you don't have much experience with real ships in real life.

If you remove the component where melee units take damage in melee.... you might as well turn them into ranged units instead. For they basically got turned into a ranged unit.

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Many things in BE aren't very realistic, but the melee ships are supposed to be more nimble in-game.

They still take damage in melee, just not against cities. And they can capture cities.

@Lord Shadow

Cities should not be able to fend off swarms of units, of any type, on their own.

Civ BE made a good move in drastically weakening non-unique ranged unit combat strength so that melee units could easily kill them.

This step forward should be carried over to cities, though their health should take some time to whittle down.

Cities should be things to be defended, not fortresses that somehow hold off armies.

It makes the game far more interesting in war time, and the bonus healing and ready availability of reinforcements keeps defender bonuses alive and well.
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Though it may not be good logic, maneuvering on the water better is the game's reason for Tidal Navigation's defense against ranged units.

Perhaps it is in combination with countermeasures?

Galgus said:

@Lord Shadow

Cities should not be able to fend off swarms of units, of any type, on their own.

Civ BE made a good move in drastically weakening non-unique ranged unit combat strength so that melee units could easily kill them.

This step forward should be carried over to cities, though their health should take some time to whittle down.

Cities should be things to be defended, not fortresses that somehow hold off armies.

It makes the game far more interesting in war time, and the bonus healing and ready availability of reinforcements keeps defender bonuses alive and well.

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I get what you're saying, but go for reduced city strength instead. Don't attack one of the game's fundamental conventions (the right to fight back if able).

Concurrently, the penalty melee units suffer attacking cities could be removed. But does that still exist? I can't recall.

I still want cities to take awhile to fall, I just don't want them to be very good at defending yourself.

Even I don't want random units casually three-shotting medium-sized cities, which I've seen happen in Rising Tide.

That fundamental was severely reduced with BE's ranged unit combat strength, which I consider a huge step forward.

Melee units were incredibly weak in Civ 5, often being relegated to last-hitting a city for a ranged army, so I don't view it as a good balance paradigm.

For melee units to truly be on equal footing with ranged units, they need to basically run over them in melee combat and attack cities with equal impunity.

Melee units not taking damage when they attack and cities not being combat units in their own right are good design ideas, but I don't think you'll be able to implement them well without redesigning the AI, which is currently impossible for modders.

It actually helps the AI when they are on the offensive, as they don't really use the ranged bombard into a melee unit finisher tactic well.

Galgus said:

Many things in BE aren't very realistic, but the melee ships are supposed to be more nimble in-game.

They still take damage in melee, just not against cities. And they can capture cities.

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A warship being nimble is one of the very last things you will expect from a warship. All that stuff does have weight. In addition to people having their own weight. One hundred people on a destroyer for example could weight from 100 to 200 pounds each.

Nothing is free. Unless you achieve contact victory and succeed in creating god level tech.

But a warship can be nimble.... it just come with very severe drawbacks in conquering a city.. check out the PT Boats. They're Patrol Torpedo boats. They have fire power plus nimbleness but lacking in personnel and toughness. Five soldiers on a boat cannot conquer a city on their own. They is exactly what you want.

And then there is modern warships today that is all electric OPs and speed with total disregard of armor. Then they found out the very hard way that when a single missile gets through, they're out of action instantly very bad when compared to moderately armored warships that can take several noncritical hits.

And then there is a reason why you want a good amount of personnel on each warship. Its for redundancy. It can carry on fighting even when its sailors die in a fight as long as not too many die that is.

What firaxis needs to do is to drag several civ players and ask them how do they create their armies and then adjust the tactics for AI. Good civ players, not horrible ones! Generally, I bring more Melee than ranged units to take a city. But I never set out to attack someone if I only had one ranged unit. A few needs to be built first then I start besieging the cities one by one.

Victory is pretty much assured if Enemy don't have armies ready to protect it's cities.

Melee is there to act as safety net for ranged units because ranged units is pretty much primary damage dealers in civbert. Melee units generally fight defensively unless the army outnumbers the enemy army by a significant factor.

Every unit in BE is a squad, and those are warships with appropriate cannons: not random tiny boats.

Cities likely can't defend every angle well at the same time, and what defenses there are can simply be destroyed.

Ranged units should not have a claim to being the primary damage dealers, nor should they be exclusively the ones damaging cities.

Naval combat aside, it would be good if most ranged units couldn't even defend in melee - make players really mindful of their positioning and make cavalry a hard counter of sorts.

Galgus said:

Every unit in BE is a squad, and those are warships with appropriate cannons: not random tiny boats.

Cities likely can't defend every angle well at the same time, and what defenses there are can simply be destroyed.

Ranged units should not have a claim to being the primary damage dealers, nor should they be exclusively the ones damaging cities.

Naval combat aside, it would be good if most ranged units couldn't even defend in melee - make players really mindful of their positioning and make cavalry a hard counter of sorts.

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Ranged is "Exclusive" damage dealers for attacking a static position.

And Ranged units cannot defend very well in melee for they have low melee strength.

It's teh same in civ5, i've occasionally seen insanely tough AI cities with skyhigh strength from time to time. The result is always the same. Wrap the enemy city in a net with melee units and fortify then let the ranged units wear it's hp down in several turns until it's low enough then I do an allout attack with melee units and cap it.

Only times melee units is primary damage dealers in a siege battle is when they have similar strength to enemy city or surpass it. But if Defenders have the strength advantage then it shifts to ranged unit's job to wear it down.

And plus, a well prepared net will give "cavalry" very hard time to reach the ranged units. Because for that to happen in first place the defenders must've had very few units in the area or their local army got squashed.

Because a real siege will have the city encircled plus reinforcements ready to go and have arty firing on it with shields in strategical locations to engage the counter attackers whose sole task is to protect the arty from being hit via ground attacks.

That kind of siege battle happened four times in several years of playing civ5 for me.

edit: oh and make sure to look up Constantinople. That damn city protected the west from muslim invaders for centuries. It was founded in 330, and fell in 1453. That's 1123 years. And that isn't mentioning various cities in similar situations.

That traditional style of taking cities is tedious and needlessly tactically limiting.

Flanking is typically the name of the game for cavalry, or cycling hit, run, heal attacks when that can't happen.

In real history, cities were starved out and trying to somehow open the gates (disabling defenses would be an analog) was a big deal.

Fundamentally though, cities typically fall without an army to defend them.
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And I repeat that from a game-play perspective it trivializes melee units if one is ever actually winning a war.