Minor gripe about shrinking cities

It makes sense that by bombarding a city you might decrease its population. It doesn't make sense that you can decrease the size of the city: buildings might be converted to rubble, but that rubble doesn't just disappear.

A common tactic is to bombard cities that are size 12+ until they are smaller in order to decrease the defensive bonus the enemy gets. However, I figure the defensive bonus is terrain based, i.e., the sprawl of buildings in the city gives the defenders plenty of cover. Piles of rubble give cover pretty well, too, so I think large cities should retain their defensive bonus even if they've been bombarded enough to lose significant population.

Also, it just looks silly to see a the metropolis graphic suddenly be replaced by the city graphic (or the city replaced by a town) just because of bombardment. C3C or PTW (can't remember which) introduced ruins that appear when a city is destroyed. Why not also have partially ruined cities. What I mean is this: when a metropolis is bombarded below 12 population, instead of being replaced by the city icon, it is replaced by a different metropolis icon in which some of the buildings are just piles of rubble. Same thing for dropping below size 6: have a modified city icon showing the damage instead of just using the town icon. These new icons wouldn't be hard to implement, and they would give a visual clue that, even though a city had less than 12 population, the city itself was still large and still gave the defenders the higher defensive bonus.

I do sought of agree with you, Judgement. I have long felt that city SIZE and city POPULATION should be two different things! My personal opinion is that they should keep the old civ 'city number', but have it represent the physical SIZE of the city-and have that size be related to the maximum population that the city can comfortably hold. Certain improvement types and technologies will increase this city radius, but the population will grow in relation to food, water, wealth and the like.
This could create the interesting situtation of a size 8 city having a population for a size 12 city! Of course unemployment and rampant unhappiness would result from this MASSIVE overcrowding! By the same token, you could have a size 8 city containing only enough people for a size 4 city-a virtual ghost town!
Anyway, just a thought! Will discuss it more tomorrow!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Originally posted by Aussie_Lurker
I have long felt that city SIZE and city POPULATION should be two different things!

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That's a pretty cool idea, it would definately add some interesting changes to the game (in terms of how overcrowding, unhappiness, etc were dealt with). My original idea, of course, would barely change the game at all: it would simply let large cities keep their high defensive bonuses when they had been bombarded and lost population (and have graphics to indicate that). Mainly, it bothers me to see the icon of a city shrinking when I've been hitting it with artillery.

Didos

I disagree. Bombardment kills citizens and reduces parts of the town to rubble. Even if rubble can provide cover, the fact that entire areas of the city are abandoned does make them easier to take and hold. If there are no secure buildings, no eletricity or water, then that section of city is less valuable to defend. Also, invading forces can move less tentatively without fear of collateral damage. Fighting an army of 10,000 in a city of 1 million is very different than fighting an army of 10,000 in an abandoned city.

As an alternative idea, I would like to see population spread over a city's area in the form of urbanized tiles and the introduction of refugees. Capturing the city center would not mean capturing the entire city and all it's inhabitants. Resistors as a percentage of the population would be eliminated. Instead resistance means you have to fight for every productive square of a city that you want control over.

I agree with Pirate for the most part. I also view the cities defensive bonus as a little help from the citizens. When the city pop drops, those citizens are now unable to assist in the town's defense.

Sealman and Pirate, those a reasonable arguments (although I obviously don't completely agree). Personally, it always feels a little like an exploit to me to bombard a city until it gets less defensive bonus from its size. Certainly the AI never does this to me.

Refugees are a great idea, and the subject a whole separate discussion. Certainly, I can't think of many times historically that huge percentages of a city's population have been killed by seige engines, but there have been countless occurrences of large numbers of civilians fleeing the area. As far as I'm aware, even famous aerial bombardments like the Battle of Britain or the Bombing of Dresden didn't reduce cities to small fractions of their original population.

I also really like Pirate's notion of urbanized tiles, in fact, I recently suggested a very similar thing in a different thread.

But I disagree somewhat with this part...

Even if rubble can provide cover, the fact that entire areas of the city are abandoned does make them easier to take and hold. If there are no secure buildings, no eletricity or water, then that section of city is less valuable to defend. Also, invading forces can move less tentatively without fear of collateral damage. Fighting an army of 10,000 in a city of 1 million is very different than fighting an army of 10,000 in an abandoned city.

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You say "easier to take and hold" but those are opposite things: if someplace is easier to hold, that means its harder to take, and if its easy to take, that's because the enemy had a hard time holding it. In any case, whether or not civilians are present, the invaders don't necessarily know where the defending military forces have fortified themselves, prepared ambushes, and so on, so they must proceed cautiously no matter how much of a city is abandoned. In fact, large abandoned sections give the defenders even more strategic options, since they don't need to worry about their own citizens being in the way. They can bulldoze houses to make fortifications, set booby traps without worrying about hurting their own people, and so on. They can defend abandoned outer areas and still have someplace left to fell back to (as opposed to a small town, where once you're overrun, there's no where else to go). The value of defending part of a city is related to how useful that part is to accomplishing your goal of defeating the invader, not necessarily how well the utilities are working. Defenders would gladly defend a ruined area if it provided the best defensive positioning, and, vice versa, would probably cede undamaged, fully functional parts of a city to invaders if those parts were not easily defensible. Regarding the invaders' fear of collateral damage, that whole concept is only a relatively recent development. For most of history, invaders didn't really try too hard to avoid hurting or killing civilians. I agree, fighting an army of 10,000 in a city of 1 million is very different from fighting the same army in an abandoned city, but its not immediately obvious to me which would be easier. Also, consider that the defensive bonus is the same whether you are defending a city full of your own (friendly) people or defending a city that you recently conquered and the original owner is trying to take it back. If, as sealman says, the city defensive bonus is supposed to represent a little help from the citizens, then it should vary depending on how friendly the citizens are with the defending military (maybe that's not a bad idea, but it isn't the way the current defensive bonus works).

In any case, my minor gripe can really be separated into two different ones. (1) It feels exploitative to me to decrease a metropolis's defensive bonus to that of a small town via massive bombardment, and (2) it looks silly when the graphic for a city is replaced by the graphic for a town after you sucessfully bombard. Even if you disagree with #1 (as it seems you do ) you surely must agree with #2: it would be a nice touch (and very little trouble) to add graphics to represent large cities that had been significantly damaged by war, instead of just using the small town graphics.

I can see how you can say it may be an exploit. However, I do not bombard a city to reduce the size. I am attemting to redline the defenders so I can take it easier. I could live with the defensive bonus remaining. In other words, once a city reaches town status, its defensive bonus will remain the same even if it drops down to town level. Same with the Metropolis bonus. I could also live without it. What I would really love to see is the AI using artillery in the manner it is designed for.

Regarding the icon. To tell you the truth, I never really pay attention to it. That is more of an "eye candy" feature to me. While I do appreciate the graphics in the game, that is not the reason I play.

Originally posted by sealman

Regarding the icon. To tell you the truth, I never really pay attention to it. That is more of an "eye candy" feature to me. While I do appreciate the graphics in the game, that is not the reason I play.

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Yes, its very much eye candy, and that's not the reason I play, either. That's why a called the thread "A minor gripe"... its really not important at all, just something I noticed and thought "well, now, that's kinda silly!"

Still and all, sometimes its minor touches like this that can make a game more or less immersive... I don't want them to waste too much time on eye candy, but on the other hand, I do like a game that feels polished.