Air units combat model : return to civ 2 model ?

[Lachlan]

Hi, i'm playing Civ since a long time, but i remember Civ 2 with the intuitive system of combat for air units, because with Civ 3 and Civ 4, air units were into a bad and unintuitive system...

I would like to easily able to use my nice Stealth Figthers and Stealth bombers, with one click of mouse or arrows keys

What do you think, dear "Civfanatics" ?

 

[Kissamies]

Haha, very funny. Very intuitive indeed
With that Empire/Civ1-2/SMAC flight system, I was always wary of moving the planes 1 move too many and finding myself running out of gas. Replacing that was one of the Civ 3's better fixes. It also sets the air battle apart from other types of fights nicely. I hope they don't mess with it with their eagerness of changing things.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I thought Civ2's system was terrible. Civ3's change was one of the best, imo. The only thing they needed to do was to make fighters able to escort bombers. Otherwise, it's handled fairly well. Civ2's air units didn't do much right. For starters, you couldn't attack behind the front row of units, you could block a land unit from entering a tile with a bomber, and the whole aspect of moving them was just so inconvenient (compared to point and click).

 

[Ahriman]

I think Civ4 treatment of aircraft works just fine, once augmented with the (modded in) mission for fighters to engage enemy interceptors.

The civ2 system was terrible. You could destroy all the AI's fighters by moving a bomber out and stationing a Mech Inf underneath it. All the fighters would rush to engage... and get shot down by the Mech inf stack defender.

Air missions as support missions make a ton of sense, and are very intuitive. Bombers as air units that hover out in the open between turns, where any land unit can run up and shoot at them? Ridiculous.

 

[Roland Johansen]

I do wonder how they will implement air battles and bombing in civilization V. Firaxis claims to have looked at Panzer General for ideas about a battle system. I don't know if this was limited to the ground troops or if they also used this model for air combat.

I have actually never played the panzer general series, but I did play a predecessor of this series namely the Battle Isle series. In those games (a futuristic setting), planes would have a fuel value. Moving the plane from one tile to another or leaving it on a tile for a turn required a certain amount of fuel. After several turns of moving and fighting the plane had to return to a landing area to refuel or it would crash. Later versions of the game even allowed aerial refuelling. I think, all of that is likely too complicated for a game like civilization which isn't focussed on combat that much.

Maybe a system like Civilization IV BTS, where cities are allowed to hold a limited number of planes which can fly aerial missions from that city might work well. I think, it would work best if airplanes were only allowed in cities with an airport. The limited number of planes per city would ensure that air combat would be balanced versus the limited ground units in the area. I never liked the Civ4 BTS model in Civ4 because it limited the air units versus unlimited land units but in Civ5, there will also be a strict limitation to the number of land units in an area, so this might work. It of course depends on the number of land units involved in a modern war to find a good value for the number of planes allowed in a city.

 

[JordanN]

The only game series I see that system truly works is in Advance Wars.
The way it was back in CivII was horrible. Stick to the CivIII model but with escort added to it.

 

[Lachlan]

I see that few people didn'nt liked Civ2 system of air units...

Explain, please, why Civ 2 is stated as reference 15 years after ?

And CTP 1&2 system of air units is better in your opinion ?

Thanks Roland for your explanations... I agree with you...

 

[Auncien]

Bring back radar towers!

...and maybe add an airbase tile improvement?

Also, I would like to see a modified version of the civ IV air war except, as previously noted, with an "air superiority" mission for fighters.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Urgh... back then, the CivII way was okay, but I couldn't go back, nowadays, so *please* not!

The CivIV system just needs a little extra (i.e. Fighter engagement) and is otherwise pretty good. Most importantly, it separates land and air units from each other, which gives air units a distinct feel and avoids weird things like airplanes taking damage from spearmen. Not to mention the clickery to get planes back for refuelling and the need to find the best path for them by hand.

Cheers, LT.

 

[sputnik323]

which gives air units a distinct feel and avoids weird things like airplanes taking damage from spearmen. Not to mention the clickery to get planes back for refuelling and the need to find the best path for them by hand.

Cheers, LT.

That is an easy fix... just have planes automatically return to base when low on fuel. Like real life, if planes are hovering above the battlefield and have to return, the ground forces dont know when that will be. There could also be a return function, so after they refuel they return to the position above the battle where you commanded them to go.

Yes spearman was annoying vs helicopters - there should be an upwards cap where if the damage is too low, it doesn't even scratch the unit. eg. tank 15 / spearman 4 = spearman can only damage units lower than 10...

 

[NA00]

I like the CivIV system, but it needs some improvements. I would mostly like to see airbases brought back from CivII.

I always got annoyed when my aircraft, in CivII, ran out of fuel because I accidently took them 1 tile too far out.

 

[mjs0]

I'm in favour of anything that reduces pointless micromanagement.

With that in mind some sort of patrol interface for air units ought to be a no-brainer.

I get very tired of sending my planes out over the ocean to watch for enemy naval movement for example.

If they don't want to automate patrolling fully (I can see how that might be annoying if you wanted to use the plane for something else this turn but the patrol had already happened) then how about a repeat last patrol button (with visual cue to what this would actually do) so I don't have to remember where each plane was going?

 

[Dragonlord]

I'm in favour of anything that reduces pointless micromanagement.

With that in mind some sort of patrol interface for air units ought to be a no-brainer.

I get very tired of sending my planes out over the ocean to watch for enemy naval movement for example.

If they don't want to automate patrolling fully (I can see how that might be annoying if you wanted to use the plane for something else this turn but the patrol had already happened) then how about a repeat last patrol button (with visual cue to what this would actually do) so I don't have to remember where each plane was going?

I totally agree on this.

The best way IMO would be to give planes a Patrol mission like the Intercept mission, so the plane would reveal the surroundings automatically between turns.

 

[Kissamies]

Yeah, automated patrol to make the aircraft recon the same piece of the ocean every round. I suggested that in the other thread along with ability to assing a patrol route to naval units (and why not toground units as well?)

 

[toft]

I actually liked elements of the civ2 airplanes. They felt more like real units than the civ4 version did. Airplanes in civ4 felt a bit detached from the game, both in combat as in movement.

This might be offtopic, but how will airplanes and ships work with the one-unit-per-tile concept? Can we have airplanes in cities with ground units, and can we have ships in cities with ground units?

 

[Yakk]

I'd like it if air and water both became more abstract.

Ie, both boats and air have a range.

You build air bases to land air planes, and find ports to land boats.

Boats based out of a port can be given orders like "blockade an area", which makes them auto-attack enemy ships that try to move through that area (and the enemy is told that there is a blockade in the way).

Now, your ships don't just wander to the other side of the world unsupplied -- instead, you have to take and hold ports to provide a route. Naval bases become extremely important.

Modern era navies start breaking these rules -- nuclear boats can base themselves in the ocean, for example.

Airplanes follow a similar path. You build them and base them somewhere, and they attack from that base. Airplanes can be overrun by enemy forces (it happened in WW1 and 2) on the ground, with only a small fraction (if any) managing to retreat.

Dunno if that would end up being too abstract, however.

 

[sputnik323]

How was air handled in PG? if ciV combat is based on PG then it would be good to look at.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I was just thinking, one unit per tile can't apply to aircraft or you'd have to evacuate a city to have a air unit stationed in it. So either the rule doesn't apply to air units, or you need outside the city airfields for them. Also there couldn't be carriers or transports if there was only one unit per tile so there must be some flexibility.

 

[Ahriman]

I was just thinking, one unit per tile can't apply to aircraft

The most likely implementation is that 1 unit per tile means 1 unit of a domain: air, land, water. So you can have a city with a land unit and a bomber, or a carrier with a fighter in the same tile.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

The most likely implementation is that 1 unit per tile means 1 unit of a domain: air, land, water. So you can have a city with a land unit and a bomber, or a carrier with a fighter in the same tile.

In that case a fighter will have to represent a squadron. It probably always did, but the graphics was always a single plane.