Things I learned about the science of warfare through Civilization IV

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1. A sword is sharper when attacking a city than when defending it. This is due to the geo-magnetic effect on the blade's sharpness, such that when pointed toward the center of a town, it has more cutting power, but pointed away from the center of down, the weapon becomes an overweight iron club, and ineffective.

2. An axe has the reverse sharpness polarity of a sword. When facing toward the center of a city, the axe is useless, but pointing away from the city, the axe can cut effectively.

3. The effective firing range of a bronze pike is farther than that of a rifle used by a 19th century-era cavalryman. These pikes are imbued with special magic that enables the point of the weapon to elongate past the 100 meters or so that the cavalryman can effectively fire his rifle. In order to carry these 100+ meter long pikes, the pikemen go into a special trance that invokes superhuman strength. In the presence of a mace, however, the pike shortens to about an inch and a half, and the mojo of the mace causes the pikeman to shrivel up into a bed-ridden dwarf scarcely able to carry his own bodyweight, let alone wield a weapon effectively. Heisenberg discovered this principle in his physics lab but his discovery was overshadowed by Schroedinger's Spear Beats a Tank When His Cat is Watching from the Ceiling, abbreviated over time to simply, Schroedinger's Cat.

4. When a catapult or trebuchet launches its missile at a defensive position, if the missile misses its mark, this causes the siege engine to spontaneously explode, killing the entire crew.

5. There is no effective stand-off range for catapults and trebuchets, such that an axeman hiding behind a wall can cause catapults to spontaneously explode when launching their missiles at them. The mojo of the axe comes into effect, of course, because it's facing outward from the city.

6. Two or three 19th century cavalrymen are guaranteed to eventually overrun a machine gun position. A machine gun can only kill one attacker, after which all others, no matter how outdated their weaponry, will make it past the hail of machine gun fire and slaughter the machine gun crewmen. This is because the hundreds of rounds of ammunition, after killing their first cavalryman, are required by international law to fire straight up into the air, on pain of incarceration at the Hague.

7. City walls disappear in the presence of muskets, and reappear in the presence of swords, spears, and catapults. The sorcerers causing these alternate transformations are busy day and night in their deep-underground bunkers watching every city everywhere and switching the space-time continuum and vibrational frequency of matter, several times per minute in the heat of any given siege battle. Some erroneously believe that musket balls are able to pass through several feet of stone city wall, but this is only an illusion generated by the hard-working city-wall-disappearing sorcerer's guild, whose job is thankless and unsung.

8. When field artillery does collateral damage to units, enemy field artillery is immune to it. This is due to the hyperspace quantum force field generated by artillery wheels that render its crews 100% invulnerable to shrapnel.

9. A couple of artists in a nearby city are far more able to conquer a neighboring city by writing a few plays, than a large army of swordsmen and catapults. Art is a magical power known throughout history for its world-conquering abilities. The Romans especially were deadly to the Gauls when fielding their 18th Sculptural Legion which created lethal statues that toppled the highest of Vercingetorix' city walls. Only the modern French with their elite existential novelists division were able to withstand the Roman military artistic assaults, and everyone knows the Cold War was about who could paint the prettiest paintings. During a siege, it isn't the city walls that protect against catapult volleys, but sailor's ditties, limericks, and dancing a jig.

10. Borders cannot be negotiated as conditions of peace talks. These are settled by artists' guilds in a dancing contest. When a city flips due to culture-conquest, the unanimous cry by the conqueror is: "You got served!"

11. The cost of maintaining a couple of peasants with spears is exactly equal to the cost of maintaining the same number of soldiers driving around in modern tanks with sophisticated targeting systems, depleted uranium munitions, special fuels, and early warning systems. This is due to the power of a spear to beat said tank!
 
Changes? You mean this isn't the way war really works?
 
:lol:

Remember though that it's a game. Fun and interesting gameplay > slavish realism. Units that counter other units make for strategic and tactical options. I sure wouldn't want to only have "ancient melee" "medieval melee" etc type units that were generic and interchangeable.
 
:rotfl: very amusing
 
:lol: There's some more to add...

#12: Getting shot in the head by a Musketman or Rifleman doesn't hurt if the Musketman or Rifleman batallion is depleted enough. The power of the bullets is proportional to the strength left in the Musketman/Rifleman. If the guy with the gun is horribly battered, the bullet projectile amounts to no more than a light slap in the face. The Pikeman/Maceman/whatever melee soldier will just shrug it off and club the last weak guy to his death.

#13: 17th and 18th century Frigates and Ships of the Line are, in fact, comparable in length and taller than most oil-powered modern steel warships.

#14: A small pack of wild animals is capable of overwhelming 1000 cavemen armed with clubs. (Not so easy that a caveman could do it...)

#15: Catapult stones and artillery fire never killed anybody from a distance--they were just for wounding batallions. They can kill entire batallions, though, if the soldiers walk right up to the weapon and get blasted at point blank. But sometimes, the large projectiles just graze them at point blank and don't do much.

#16: Bombers were not capable of killing anyone on the ground either, for that matter--again, just wounding. And levelling cities? Urban legend. Carpet bombing of entire cities in WWII was literally sneaking spies into the cities and lighting as many carpets in as many buildings as possible on fire.
 
#17: Oil is only required to build planes and tanks, not use them. If you lose access to oil, production will immediately grind to a halt; but existing planes & tanks will keep working indefinitely, because they are solar-powered.

#18: It only costs a few hundred dollars to make an elephant become a helicopter.
 
19. A stone age warrior with a wooden club can singlehandedly wipe a modern megalopolis and all of its inhabitants off the face of the world. Comparatively, a nuclear bomb can only kill off half of its inhabitants, and the city itself will still remain.
 
20) A Destroyer is capable of shooting down a metal plane that has jet engines, but not a big, slow, floating bag of gas.
 
21) You can have a large effective military in the modern era without access to oil; just build Mech Infantry as these units are powered solely by psychokinetically trained crews.

22) Also, don't despair of never getting to the stars as Rockets and Space Ships can be constructed without knowledge of airplanes or access to oil.
 
You don't even need computers to fly to Alpha Centauri, you can use an abacus instead.
 
You don't even need computers to fly to Alpha Centauri, you can use an abacus instead.

Damn, I knew I was forgetting one. :lol:

Don't forget to number that one #23.
 
24) The Three Gorges Dam is so powerful, that when completed, it will be the sole source of power for all of Eurasia. On hearing this news, France was going to decommission their nuclear plants, but discovered that they can't as regulators insist that once plants are built they can't be demolished.
 
Nah, that's just "never let the woman drive".
 
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