How will GamePlay change if there is no City Defense?

[Ll1442]

Have we seen if you can capture them? I'd prefer they disappear like great people when you enter their tile as a hostile. I always thought the whole "steal worker" was an exploit of sorts.

maybe, but there still should be some sort of benefit for war, so you don't fall behind when losing a lot of units.
also IRL you took slaves...

 

[rastak]

maybe, but there still should be some sort of benefit for war, so you don't fall behind when losing a lot of units.
also IRL you took slaves...

Taking cities and setting back civs is benefit enough for me.

 

[Sansa_Stark]

My personal hope is that it will make newly-settled cities much more vulnerable. One of the most frustrating things to me in V is that if the AI forward-settles you, you can't punish them unless you literally immediately drop everything and build up a huge force to take the city--a token city, far from their core and very close to yours should be very easy to conquer with a handful of units. By far the most annoying thing is when a settling party that's under fire just settles the city which immediately starts bombarding your units (ugh).

Forward-settling should be an extremely high risk move, but you can get away with it far too easily in V (or at least, the AI can, on higher difficulties).

Totally agree. It was absolutely frustrating that random settler beat you to settling a city for 1 turn, and the case was lost unless you totally changed early game strategy.

But it seems that they are heading right direction. No city bombardment w/o city walls, and weaker defense. I hope that in reality it will mean that there will be lets say 50% chance of capturing newly established city defended by single archer or warrior by an army of 2 archers + 1 warrior within 3 turns, and 100% chance of doing so w/ 4 units (or something like that).

 

[Binkov]

It would also be beneficial to getting rid of that random settler beating you to a good spot if you could kill a early game unit or even raze a far away early game level 1 city with a unindentifiable unit. Basically a privateer to every other faction. So one doesn't get a diplomatic penalty because some far away tiny village got razed. Because that's what happens when defenseless border cities get founded, owner of the city shouldn't always know if it was barbarians or some nameless faction.

 

[Deggial]

OR you could just adopt your play style and beeline towards this one oh-so-worthwhile city spot, if it is so important for you.

Really, I don't see the point of giving the player such an easy way out of strategical misjudgments and self-inflicted drawbacks!

 

[Binkov]

It was meant as a comment to a possible future feature. Of course AI needs to be very good to exploit it as much as a human player. But imagine having your settler or worker or scout killed by a force that's unknown to you. And it keeps happening over and over again. It'd add a whole layer of dread and mystery. Plus a way for peacemongers to gently nudge certain events without actually resorting to war. Not everything in combat needs to be black or white, not does it have to be war or peace.

 

[Magil]

OR you could just adopt your play style and beeline towards this one oh-so-worthwhile city spot, if it is so important for you.

Really, I don't see the point of giving the player such an easy way out of strategical misjudgments and self-inflicted drawbacks!

It works both ways, the player needs to defend their cities as well. The idea is to encourage settling cities in areas where they can be defended, and to make it harder to settle cities in a way to hamper enemy civilizations rather than build your own civilization up, which is frankly ridiculous anyway.

I don't really support the "privateer" unit idea... I don't mind declaring war to take a city/eliminate a settler that's try to forward settle me. I just want it to be a little more practical to actually take the city. It's a little absurd how strong newly-settled cities are in V.

 

[Talcove]

Well, for one, our starting warriors probably aren't going to be part-time scouts anymore.

 

[ftl]

They did mention that early-game wars are going to be more common and less diplomatically frowned on. So if you see an enemy settler going for your spot, just kill it.

 

[Binkov]

That would definitely be an improvement from current warmonger penalty. Also the fact cities are multi tile now allows bypassing the warmonger penalty by not taking the center tile but razing every other district around it.

 

[historix69]

They did mention that early-game wars are going to be more common and less diplomatically frowned on. So if you see an enemy settler going for your spot, just kill it.

Killing a settler in Civ5 was not a problem ...
The main penalty in Civ5 was based on cities. Taking a Civ's last or only city was like running into a mathematical singularity causing an unrealistic massive penalty ...

 

[stealth_nsk]

A bit back to topic, to sum it up:

1. Unit stacking allowed gathering very variable power on a single tile. In this case city strength didn't work, so instead cities provided bonuses for defenders. Also, with unit stacking it was possible to make units cheap, so having a unit in each city wasn't a problem.

2. In 1UPT units are more expensive and require more turns to build, so hard requirement to have defender in each city is a problem. Also, with limited number of units which could attack a city, it's easy to calculate the required city strength for each epoch.

This means for stacks it's natural for cities to provide defensive bonus, while with 1UPT it's more natural for cities to have their own strength. The Civ5 problem was not the city strength itself, but crazy ranged attack.

 

[historix69]

1UpT and Unit Stacking are different types of Game Design ... they are abstractions and do refer to different scales when depicting real conflicts, e.g. 1UpT is maybe applicable for distances (tile-size) of 1 m (single soldier) to 500 m (regiment or battalion scale and below, single type units) while Stacking is more applicable for distances of 100 m to 10 km and more (brigade or division scale and up, combined units).

A city defense in Civ5 is actually just a free, immobile and very powerful military unit (which can be stacked with a garrison unit) ...

If you settle enough cities that some of your cities are no longer border cities, you no longer need to have a military unit in each city. However with only 4 cities this is difficult since 4 cities are merely defining a border ...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

For the better. City defense is one of my most disliked feature in Civ5.

Or at least please no city bombard and less strong counterattack.

I'm ok with cities having HP and damage resist, the problem is definitely the ridiculous stronger-than-contemporary unit shot it can put down on attacking troops.

If they have HP invading armies can't do a run-by to snatch contested cities easily, and they'd rather deal with the defending army beating on them first. That's preferably in 1UPT to the insta-gib city loss if undefended in civ 4.

 

[rastak]

I'm ok with cities having HP and damage resist, the problem is definitely the ridiculous stronger-than-contemporary unit shot it can put down on attacking troops.

If they have HP invading armies can't do a run-by to snatch contested cities easily, and they'd rather deal with the defending army beating on them first. That's preferably in 1UPT to the insta-gib city loss if undefended in civ 4.

I always enjoyed in Civ 1 when on the second or third turn you'd see "Rome civilization has been destroyed" or "Mongol civilization has been destroyed".

 

[Big J Money]

"How will GamePlay change if there is no City Defense?"

Easy: A lot of people who were new to Civ in Civ V are going to lose games to barbs at first

 

[Ll1442]

too true

as we saw, even the experienced players where having a hard time at first, so it'll certainly require a bit of adapting

 

[darko82]

Very good, finally true early wars gonna happen like in earlier Civs.

I did not like in Civ 5 the inability to capture cities early in the game. That was quite stupid, untrue and unrealistic.