How to defend your afriendly city state from AI attack, without diplo consequences

Why couldn't you gift the City-State fighters so they could defend themselves? This would make them stronger (help with future attacks as well) and would weaken the attacking force to where you could attack them yourself if you wanted.
 
It is an exploit, not because of the strategy, but because the AI isn't sophisticated enough to detect this as a deliberate attempt by the player to hinder them. As someone said earlier, if someone did it to you, you would declare war.

This. And possibly this is how the issue could be resolved; a diplomatic option to request a tile be vacated. Possibly at two levels, one a request for when the AI would just prefer to have access to the tile, without real consequences for refusing. Two a demand for when the AI has a definite plan that requires it to move through the tile in question. The second would generally result in war if refused.
 
Seems a fac simile of the settler blocking of civ III. I could see this coming ... but it looks that a avid player/modder of civ III like the lead designer of civ V was couldn't remember that :/
 
It's basically an exploit.

It's called 1 unit per tile though. Combined with traditional unit blocking like in civ3 which was mostly universally hated and no one remembered that as rolo rightly points out
 
It is an exploit, not because of the strategy, but because the AI isn't sophisticated enough to detect this as a deliberate attempt by the player to hinder them. As someone said earlier, if someone did it to you, you would declare war.

FTW, yes a diplo option would resolve it. And I wish there was one because with 1up there are quite a few blocking situations that happen. A critical mountain pass may be blocked for a millinium by an AI worker. I've see CS workers blocking hexs in AI city ranges when I'm attacking and it makes thing more difficult.
 
Blocking someone's workers or settlers would be very difficult to do. They can still move through your troops, as long as they don't end their movement on your troops (and they're not at war). So you'd need two layers of troops to effectively block a worker or settler, or catch them in a large forest or something.

Blocking their city would require open borders, and something like 6-12 units (depending on terrain, coast, etc.). I think they'd probably get their workers/settlers out before that happens.
 
The AI did this to me last night. I have no idea if it was intentional or not but there were two scouts standing by a city state on a peninsula. I ended up farming the city state units for xp while waiting for research agreement to come up. Then eventually went to war.
 
You could surround another civs capital to prevent him from bringing spaceship parts there :crazyeye:


EDIT:
I guess the AI could be programmed to recognize a bunch of units around a city. It could count the number of units in the cities "inner circle" and complain.

"your troops are blocking our city" or "your troops disturb our military actions"

It would be much harder to make them recognize blocked chokepoints.
 
Blocking settlers, workers, ANYTHING is a not so fun reality in this game, because its so easy to do. HIlls/forest/rivers cost 2 movement, so you just need a choke point on a hill, one or tow units, and nobody will get through you. Its not really fun this way. Stacking in this game should be more flexible. Workes and settlers of other civilizations should be able to stack with non hostile military units.
 
Why couldn't you gift the City-State fighters so they could defend themselves? This would make them stronger (help with future attacks as well) and would weaken the attacking force to where you could attack them yourself if you wanted.

I did this and the CS successfully held off the invaders (on very low difficulty level). I kind of wish I hadn't though. I could have liberated it and used the free influence...

I really wish though, that the AI would simply DOW the player in an instance where they are blocking their movement. That's what I would do if another player were doing that to me...
 
[Civ IV TMIT mode]

Bah, this was foreseeable since the moment the game was designed for 1 upt. Aparently someone forgot to think this could be done .. I blame this on lack of beta testing :p

[/Civ IV TMIT mode]
^
|
Irony ;)
 
Why couldn't you gift the City-State fighters so they could defend themselves?
Because they will use them suicidally to rush off into enemy territory and get bombarded by the enemy cities.

You could surround another civs capital to prevent him from bringing spaceship parts there
You'd need a ton of units to do this, because they can still move "through" your units. So if they're on a railroad, you'd have to block all the railroad tiles a looong way out to stop them movnig into their city in a single turn.

The moving through is also important if you're trying to block-protect a city state. You need to be right next to the city state.
 
Maybe 1 unit per tile should instead be 1 unit per civ per tile, so two non-warring civs can stack their units on top of each other. The only way to block someone is to declare war. Which makes sense.
"I'm going to station my army in your fields and not allow any workers to enter. But don't worry, this isn't an act of war."
When civs go to war, their units can once again block each other. If someone else is at war with both of the people stacking and tries to attack the stacked units, he gets to choose who he attacks.
Maybe someone will make a mod like this.
 
A simple fix would be to let civs at peace share tiles.

In other words, turn 1UPT into 1UPTPC (1 Unit Per Tile Per Civ).

edit: D'oh, I was ninja'd!
 
Maybe 1 unit per tile should instead be 1 unit per civ per tile, so two non-warring civs can stack their units on top of each other. The only way to block someone is to declare war. Which makes sense.
This has exploits too: what if Civ A and I form a pact to declare war on Civ B. Now, Civ A and I can share tiles during the war (we are at peace with each other), and have 2 units per tile vs the one unit of CivB?

Thats a horribly broken military advantage, and opens up the old stacking questions (which unit defends? when that tile is attacked).

There's really no way around some kind of exploit in a 1upt system. Its the price we pay for ending stacking.
 
Generally I like 1up except for the annoyance when you're doing go to commands. I.E. when a unit is moving on a road and it has a fraction of movement point left but not enough to get by the unit in the next square on the road. It leaves the road on that last fraction which slows it down getting back on the road to start the next turn. It would be nice if it was smart enough to realize it should just eat that last movement fraction and stay on the stinking road.
 
If you surround your neighbors first city with enough units, they can't get a settler out. You wouldn't see that as an exploit?

No. Because you would have to make a massive expenditure to do so in building units and carrying their associated maintenance costs. Also, the AI would most likely ask you to move your troops that are on their border, and when you didn’t would likely get the message and start preparing for war – not expansion.
 
I had a situation like this in my game.

I was at war with Bismarck, and I was allied with a city-state (I forget which, let's call it Bob). Eventually I got peace with Bismarck. Then I tried to get Bismarck to make peace with Bob, but when hovering over Bob in the "make peace with" menu in trade, it said Bob had declared permanent war on Bismarck, and so it was impossible.

My only option to save Bob seemed to be to wipe Bismarck off the map, however I had just made peace with him and so I could not declare on him until the treaty was over. By that time, I'm sure Bob would have been conquered (again). So, I put six units around Bob's city. Bismarck shelled Bob every turn with artillery and had a ring of units two deep around my units, around Bob's city. It was impossible for Bismarck to conquer Bob, and impossible for me to do anything other than sit there in his way.

The permanent war feature doesn't feel right to me. Maybe if I'm allied with Bob I should be able to get him to call off the permanent war.

Also, the AI needs to be smart enough to know that it has to kill you to get to Bob. This gameplay felt pretty degenerate to me.
 
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