Air-raids and city structures.

In reality, air strikes without invasion are a way to punish a far away nation without risking much. Of course only if the other nation is weaker and cannot retaliate properly.

In civ4, on larger maps, there is very little point in wars with nations that are not your direct neighbours - at least before the modern age and airplanes. You can't even bomb their harbours with frigates.

IMO we need more ways to weaken civs without full scale invasion, not less.
Espionage is gone already (not that it was powerful in Civ4). Ships being able to do harm to coastal cities is a good move. Air strikes that can weaken an enemy economically should be in. Commando missions should be in.

 

It's terrible idea because it forces me to NOT make a choice. I just don't use bombers against cities.

Also, what's gameplay value it has? I understand special mission on stealth bombers if you attack enemy cities behind the front line to weaken infrastructure. But what it adds to attacking a city you're capturing this turn?

 

So you choose to be blind to any other strategy than the one that you have already predetermined in your mind.

See the bold. You've made a choice. You're just not happy about the choice that you've made.

 

There's no choice if one variant has clear advantages over another. If I can attack city or unit with my bomber and attacking city could damage building in the city I'm conquering, I'll attack unit with bomber and city with something else.

 

One variant having an advantage over the other is a factor of game balance, not game design. If the damage should be take 10% to repair or 25% is game balance. If there is a higher chance or lower chance of damage happening is game balance.

I think we can all agree that a 1% chance upon bombardment of disabling a building until 1% of it's hammer cost is repaired would make it an easy decision to save your troops and bomb the city hard.

I think we can also all agree that a 100% chance of destroying all buildings in the city upon bombardment would make it an easy decision to swarm the city with troops and avoid bombarding it.

Based off of that, there would be some point of balance between the two that would encourage you to size up the situation and make a strategic decision about the best way to proceed in conquering the city.

You are arguing that game balance in the past has made you always choose one choice. This is a strawman argument that you are using as a way of saying that you don't want to make hard decisions.

 

A random number of citizens is killed and a number of buildings destroyed anyway in Civ4, when you capture a city. Making this dependent on the style of combat we choose (mass bombing vs. careful, but weaker precision strikes) would add to the game.

 

No, I'm applying it to the current model. For example, with 1UPT you always have other targets. Ok, back to the point.

There are 2 city bombard scenarios:
1. Tactical bombing to reduce city health before conquering.
2. Strategic bombing to destroy infrastructure if you're not going to conquer the city.
If these operations are performed with the same command, you'll make one of them unusable. If the building destruction is high, you don't want tactical bombing, if it's low, you don't want strategic bombing.

So if we want both scenarios working, we need to make strategic bombing a separate mission.

 

What if the bomber is more effective than the something else? You'd have the choice of risking not capturing the city (but, if you do, you keep the improvements) or definitely capturing the city (but without the improvements). That would add a genuine gameplay choice and would be quite realistic in real life (trying to avoid "collateral damage" by not bombing cities).

 

That's a very rare choice. With 1UPT you'll have multiple targets each turn and bomber has quite wide selection, so in most case you'll be able to avoid attacking cities with bomber.

Anyway, I see no single reason for combining strategic and tactical bombing in one action. You could also suggest, for example, tanks automatically destroying any road they move on, or archers removing deers from a tile they are going through. It looks the same for me.

 

I would much prefer that strategic bombers used something like the Axis and Allies system; they suppress the production of the enemy city.
Like: each bombing strike knocks 50 hammers of the city production of its current project, or something like that.

In Civ, cities depend so much on buildings that destroying things permanently just does too much economic damage.

And a building in civ represents much more than just the physical infrastructure that gets destroyed; its also the human capital and the institutions. If you bomb a factory, that knocks it out temporarily, but then I can rebuild it and put the same workers back to work.
Which is very different from the whole process of industrialization of constructing a Factory building in a city.

* * *
In a related note, I'd really like them to get rid of how a ton of buildings are destroyed every time a city is captured. In historic wars, cities changed hands many times without permanently crippling their economic output. War would be much more fun (and losing a city temporarily much less annoying) if cities kept much of their productive capacity when they changed hands. If you take my city, and I recapture it 2 turns later, its still almost as good.

Originally this was in to slow down conquest (conquered cities aren't much use to you for a while) and stop cultural expansion in conquered cities.
But the first effect is achieved better with large happiness penalties in conquered cities, and the second is unimportant since now capturing a city gives you all its land.

 

Dale's Combat Mod added this with techs to add missions and improve mission success rates. It adds an extra layer to modern combat by allowing you to have 'war' that is more along the lines of the current trend of punative wars rather than wars of conquest. It also gave you the ability to have 'Pearl Harbor' style attacks against your opponent's navy holed up in a city.

If that will be a good thing in Civ 5 remains to be seen, however since city production *IS* such an important aspect of the game having a way to directly oppose that without having to engage in a full out war of conquest would be good. It would provide a way for smaller empires to inflict damage on larger opponents as well as giving the defender a chance to retaliate against the attacker's infrastructure to buy them some time or prevent/slow down the attackers ability to replenish losses.

Of course if you look at it only in the context of using bombers during an invasion with the goal of conquering cities it will seem like a bad idea.

 

While I feel that is a hyperbolic analogy, you do make some good points (especially in the post above where the chance of hitting buildings would likely either be too high for one option or too low for the other).

You're right, there is no need to combine the two actions (one action is directed towards harming the enemy, the other towards taking the city). However, considering the bombing action will be directed towards lowering the health of the city and strategic choices would likely be directed towards destroying defensive improvements (yes, I realize factories and the like are also useful targets, but I still feel those are secondary to defensive targets), it intuitively feels like the same action (lowering defense).

 

Consider this - basic city bombing is the same as artillery attack (except it could be intercepted by fighter or AA). So effects should stay the same.

And strategic bombing is completely separate mechanics.

 

I'm thinking about it and trying to evaluate the idea. The difficulty is in reconciling different motives for strategic bombing. If it's to cripple the enemy's productivity or morale, then having it as a separate option makes sense. If it's to destroy the enemy's ability to resist conquer, then it makes less sense. For example, if you want to destroy the city's walls (or perhaps modern equivalent). You wouldn't want to strategically bomb the city and have it destroy the temple. You'd more likely just bomb the city in order to reduce the health (even if it's harder to destroy that health). If they were the same option, you would clearly choose to bomb the city (over bombing a neighboring unit) in order to both damage the ability to resist attack and to try and weaken the city's health.

I'm warming up to your idea, but I hope you can understand that negative side-effects go both ways and would limit your ability to respond tactically accordingly.

 

Actually, thats a really interesting idea; terror bombing that causes unhappiness. Particularly since unhappiness can not affect military strength.

Of course, somewhat ahistoric, since most such things (like the Blitz) in part increased resolve of defenders, and made them more dedicated to the war effort.

 

Interesting arguments. I like the Axis and Allies approach too, and it hadn't occurred to me as an option.

All of this raises an interesting question though. With limited resources, and multiple units needing the same resource in the late game (oil for tanks and warships alike, aluminum for aircraft and modern armor, etc), how valuable will aircraft really be if they detract from these resources while being incapable of occupying territory or significantly affecting the course of war? The way things are set up now, from what we understand, it may be more valuable to invest the resources in tanks to occupy territory than air units that merely fly over it.

 

I dunno... I could easily see an infantry and AT gun and artillery force backed by aircraft beating a force that had a lot of tanks.

 

Well, not just tanks. I should've just said land units.

 

It's the cold war of Civ games, assuming they're effective enough. If you don't have any air units your opponent will have an advantage. So at a minimum they should have value in the fact that they can negate your opponents advantage. In theory, they should also have value in the fact that by having air units you force your opponent to have defenses against them which could mean a reduction in their defense against your land units.

If you have bombers that can decimate their cities they'll want to build city buildings to protect themselves. Those buildings will have maintenance costs plus their initial costs. In the right conditions this could give you the opportunity to force them into economic ruin without firing a single shot. Then again, if air power is weak they may just ignore your air force entirely and you'll send yourself into economic ruin

 

I have to agree that the idea of a single air strike taking out a, for example, factory building outright just always seemed off to me(as in dales's combat mod). A building in Civ doesn't really mean one building, but abstracts in the case of the factory an industrial base, in the case of a bank, a banking system. One air strike just can't utterly destroy such systems.

At the same time, just damaging current production as Ahriman suggested doesn't provide any type of long term type of damage to infrastructure. What comes to my mind, and someone suggested something like this at one point in the thread, is a partial damage system to buildings. So... if a factory provides x% increase to production, a damaged factory (remembering it acts as an abstracted system of factories) provides (100% - damage %) * x%, e.i. 20% damage to factory reduces it's bonus to production by 20%. Fairly simple, right?

Then, repairing the damaged building can be done with hammers or rushed with gold. Combine this effect with the potential for strategic bombing to damage current production as well and I think you've got a winner.

Now, I'm not naive enough to believe such a system will be in vanilla CiV, but it'd be great for a mod.

Chris