1upt Conquest without sieges - Making warfare open field

[GhostSalsa]

This thread proposes an innovation to the terms of conquest in VI to put the AI and human players on a more level plane, in terms of being able to perform the tactical/logistical challenges of warfare.

The first post reviews the problem of city sieges and 1-upt and the second describes my solution.

This thread presumes the following:

-1-upt is a feature that should stay in the game (it's fun), but creates a ton of problems for AI

-The new movement rules in VI are terrible. Even human players can feel confused about how to travel one unit in a straight line. The AI needs to be freed from these rules even if the human is not, or it will never get armies anywhere.

-Human players will always be able to exploit ranged attack and focus fire, and essentially "opt out" of using other types of units, except as support for ranged, which is backwards.

-Opting out of units creates automatic incentives to beeline economic techs for optimal play, and makes the tech tree less interesting. In V, the melee line was completely ignorable, as three defensive units on the economic path of the tree were always sufficient to resist invasion.

-Focus fire is even more abusable around cities. VI has nerfed city ranged attack strength, but increased movement requirements for the attacker (in order to damage the city), and added encampments, which create swaths of tiles that are triple-bombard zones at all times before the defender's ranged units even come into play.

This is the fairly apparent reason why the AI can't take cities right now: it's too hard to get to the city without dying. But it's also just a bad system regardless of the intelligence of the AI or human. Tiles that behave as "hot lava," and eat up attacker units, further compress the tactical game into a network of corridors, compounding the logistical difficulties of moving several units around terrain obstacles.

-All of this was true in V, and after 4 years of updates they never coded an AI that could deal with bombard hotspots. Therefore: it is not possible that VI's AI will ever be able to cope with the new, even more complex siege system.

-What was needed between V and VI was an innovation to the terms of conquest to move battles to the open field. There are several things VI could have tried, and they all would have raised their own problems:

-AI parks its armies 3+ tiles from cities, pillages and inflicts war weariness until the human player brings an army out to it. (This is effective but tedious, in that it lacks any danger of instant loss for the human.)

-Unfolded battles, as in Endless Legend. (I don't like this system though, feels too removed from the game.)

-Unstacked turns, where the AI and human are moving units in alteration, so that the AI can move before several ranged attacks hit the same unit.​

However, it tried none. It made things worse, and promised an AI that would be smart enough to cope.

Whereas the first two example solutions move battles to an open field without cities, my proposal is an alternate approach:

 

[GhostSalsa]

Move the open field to the city.

Civ warfare should model its rules of invasion as an abstraction of Napoleon into Russia, or of blitzkrieg: armies which are unopposed can sweep straight to enemy capitals.

Along the way they redefine map ownership by pillaging satellite cities. Satellite cities do not behave as towers, but as tiles. Territory under invasion is imagined just as a historical map would describe conquest: moving zones of color.

Territory around pillaged city tiles enters two transition modes, and stays in these modes until conquest of the original capital, or peace settlement.

Satellite city transition modes:

Satellite cities are tiles. If an invading army pillages the city, it becomes ransacked: RED. It doesn't produce or behave as if belonging to anyone until it is repaired by any melee unit.

Repaired cities become contested: YELLOW. The city is not productive, but the territory allows for improvements and unit healing, to whichever player repaired it. They behave as cities under revolt always have, regardless of if the defender or invader repaired the city tile. The only difference is that the invader has to wait 10 (or whatever) turns with a parked melee unit to repair-to-YELLOW an enemy city.

These two changes alone achieve the following:

Warfare in all areas besides around enemy capitals behaves as open field. The only main objective is destroying the enemy's army with yours.

It also creates buoyant levels of threat for defender and attacker. The defender can easily lose cities if no army was in place, but has a time limit to recover before the attacker can use this territory for healing and roads. If the attacker presses in too fast, the parking of melee units will weaken their invasion force.

Making conquest official: suing for peace.

Pillaged satellite city territory does not leave RED or YELLOW status until peace is declared. Then it can by default go to whichever player repaired it, or default to ownership of the defender but be haggled for by the invader, or default to the invader with different diplo penalties for not returning them - there is a lot of room for fine tuning here.

In cases where a capital did not change hands, peace treaty is the only way to officiate the conquest of satellite cities. How cities behave after treaty-conquest can be fine tuned.

Whether encampments (which I think should turn into castles in Medieval) still behave as towers before Industrial era, can be fine-tuned.

The other way territory leaves Red or Yellow status, is by conquering the capital.

 

[GhostSalsa]

Capitals: They behave as towers, but can be insta-killed as well :0

Capitals should be able to fortify with walls and castles as they do now. Once conquered, the following two things happen:

The invader gets official ownership of all RED and YELLOW territory they already had.

The capital moves to a new city of the player's choosing, and all their remaining satellite territory behaves as in stage one of the war above.

Most likely the player has lost at this point if they do not have a stronger army than the invader's, but if they do (and it was just in the wrong place), revanche is easy, because their lost capital behaves as a tile in the invader's hands.

The above changes would make warfare more even between AI and human by reducing the logistical concerns of choke-points and hot-tiles, and bringing to the fore the logistical concerns of unit advancement and flanking, which is easier to code.

But alone, they don't make conquest nearly as scary as it could be for higher difficulties.

On Emperor and above (presuming Emperor should be actually hard, as most video games are "Hard" when they say "hard"), there should be a condition under which the human player can't use city defenses at all:

AIs could instantly conquer human capitals by touching them with a great general.

Whether this expends the GG, and whether the human can resist this by having their own GG in the capital, can be fine tuned.

This change would make high-difficulties have a very low survival rate without sincere military and melee focus by the player. Such a change alone imparts a lot of balance to the tech tree by making economic beelines more risky.

I also propose turning ranged units into true support, by removing their attack function, and allowing them only to damage the first enemy unit that attacks it or a friendly neighbor unit, same as AA guns.

 

[grizlob]

I like most of your ideas, but I don't think this will appeal to most builder type players...
some suggestions, fine tuning needed:

1) defense buildings increase the (integer) hit points of the satellite cities, i.e. they cannot be conquered with one move by one melee unit, but each attack removes one defense hit point. ancient walls: 1 hp, medieval walls: 2 hp, renaissance walls: 3hp; I also suggest a industrial defense building, e.g. bunker/trenches

2) support siege units give +1 on city attack for the carrying melee unit, i.e. a sword with battering ram conquers a city with ancient walls in one turn

3) only a melee from the same age as the defense building can conquer a city in one hit; each age below reduces the city damage by one. so a sword cannot conquer a medieval walled city, a sword with ram in 2 turns, a musket in 2 turns, a musket with siege tower instantly and so on

4) cavalry cannot conquer cities with defense from the same age; no horses climbing city walls or tanks driving through mined, fortified trenches; maybe light cavalry cannot even attack city and heavy only after defense is down

this way, you could still protect your satellite cities from a rush by barbarians or other low-tech nations, but a determined assault with siege units gets even a walled city in 1-2 turns without defense units in the area; it also reduces the amount of units you have to keep on guarding duty around.
still, this concept leaves a lot of questions open, i.e. a new role for the bombard units has to be found, how do naval units work against cities, how is population affected from a city changing the owner multiple times in a stalemate war,...

It also gives the cavalry units their proper role: hunting melee units before they reach a city as defense unit or destroying the defensive units in fornt of a city as spearhead.