Air Units

[Lexicus]

The effectiveness of area-bombing German cities is still debated, though there's general agreement that it wasn't as important to the war as the people who ordered it thought. The figures of German production actually increased each year of the war (not counting 1945) despite the heavy bombing which began in 1942. The actual fighting, with armies maneuvering across the countryside, accounted for far more devastation. Particularly in White Russia, where the Russians destroyed everything they could as they fell back in 1941, and then the Germans did the same thing as they retreated in late '43 and '44. As far as strategic bombing is concerned, when Allied air forces began targeting the German petroleum infrastructure is when you can discern measurable setbacks to the German war economy.

For realism (WW2 modders, take note!) any combat involving industrial or modern-era units should destroy the tile improvement on which it takes place, automatically. So, if artillery bombards a unit, the tile improvement (if any) on which the unit is sitting is destroyed. Ditto for air bombardment. The tile being attacked onto in melee combat has its improvement destroyed.

Artillery and bombers should be able to target improvements, city buildings, and city population.

 

[General Awesome]

So why doesn't civ v allow for strategic bombing on resources such as oil or aluminum?

Same (non apparent) reason you cant bomb infra. ect.

IMHO Civ3 had the best ari attack system in the series. There were a lot of things about Civ3 that I carried on to later games... like the colony system. If they had that in Civ5 You wouldnt have to found 500 cities just to get enough resourses or trade for it...

 

[Drawmeus]

So why doesn't civ v allow for strategic bombing on resources such as oil or aluminum?

No idea. It probably should.

The effectiveness of area-bombing German cities is still debated, though there's general agreement that it wasn't as important to the war as the people who ordered it thought. The figures of German production actually increased each year of the war (not counting 1945) despite the heavy bombing which began in 1942. The actual fighting, with armies maneuvering across the countryside, accounted for far more devastation. Particularly in White Russia, where the Russians destroyed everything they could as they fell back in 1941, and then the Germans did the same thing as they retreated in late '43 and '44. As far as strategic bombing is concerned, when Allied air forces began targeting the German petroleum infrastructure is when you can discern measurable setbacks to the German war economy.

For realism (WW2 modders, take note!) any combat involving industrial or modern-era units should destroy the tile improvement on which it takes place, automatically. So, if artillery bombards a unit, the tile improvement (if any) on which the unit is sitting is destroyed. Ditto for air bombardment. The tile being attacked onto in melee combat has its improvement destroyed.

Artillery and bombers should be able to target improvements, city buildings, and city population.

I have considered exactly that mod (artillery/air combat/ground combat pillaging tiles automatically). I think it'd play well.

As far as air power having less impact - that's a fair point and should be reflected in the odds that a strategic bombardment actually will set the target back (and the rates at which you recover from bombing).

 

[TyBoy]

I'm not sure what you mean by counterbalance. World War 2 hit Europe so hard that it took massive overseas capital investments to recover from the devastation, and that it catapulted the United States from a reasonably powerful nation (a status it had achieved in the wake of WW1) to a superpower simply because the United States had not been bombed out. This was achieved largely due to strategic bombing.

If anything, industrialization exacerbates the impact of strategic bombing by creating strategic targets. In a feudal/medieval economy, production of things like bows is decentralized; you can target an individual bowyer but the impact will be minimal. In an industrial economy, tanks are produced at gigantic factory facilities. Bomb that factory and production will be massively set back.

I have to admit, I don't have an extensive understanding of post WWII reconstruction. I did pick off wikipedia that the entire sum of the Marshall plan to all nations was 13 billion dollars along with 12 billion not from the Marshall plan against a U.S. GDP of 258 billion dollars (tough to translate exactly into civ terms, but doesn't seem that massive to me). In addition, 6 years (approximately the length of the war itself) after the war had ended the economic output of western european nations was 35% higher than before the war started.

That's not exactly my point though, though it is related. When you're talking about bombing a building the only counters to that are to stop the bombing from happening or rebuild the building. It's fairly hard to stop the bombing from happening entirely and I think CiV already skews a bit unrealistic towards letting bombers get through (certainly with regards to the range over which they can successfully bomb, but also a bit when it comes to dropping bombs in spite of interception).
That leaves rebuilding the building, which you do with your hammers/gold (which I'm equating with GDP). The amount of hammers and gold that a civ produces maybe doubles or triples going from the medieval to late-industrial ages. In reality, the GDP of western europe grew 20-fold from 1500 to 1913, 30-fold from 1500 to 1950. That's a pretty big gap between civ and reality.
But for game balance reasons you can't really have a civ which becomes industrial experience that productivity boom. It wouldn't be fun. Such a civ would dominate anyone who came late to that party utterly (incidentally, I think this would be pretty historically accurate).

I would argue that an industrial economy mobilized for war could replace a tank factory more quickly than a medieval one could replace a bowyer, but to get into that discussion requires setting some kind of definition of what constitutes a strategic bombing of a bowyer and I don't think that's a good road to go down.

 

[Lexicus]

Even if all the tiles in a large area are pillaged it doesn't take that long for workers to repair it.

Strategic bombing would have to be balanced, yes...perhaps a rebuild feature something like when a worker can rebuild an improvement quicker than he can build it from scratch.

 

[TyBoy]

Yeah, that would do it, it would have to be quicker than the worker repair though. The worker repair is actually not that much quicker than rebuilding the improvement. Takes 3 turns to repair an improvement and usually 4 turns to build it from scratch. I wouldn't mind seeing the repair time on improvements sped up anyway. They'd almost certainly have to speed it up if they made bombarding destroy the improvement under the unit. Even better, make some industrial age tech improve worker speed significantly.

 

[Lexicus]

Worker speed should improve with Steam Power, if it doesn't already.

Just make building rebuild take only one turn. That would be pretty accurate--but make it pretty likely that a bombing raid will succeed in the absence of anti-air defenses.

Bombers shouldn't take damage unless attacked anti-air units or cities. It makes no sense for my bomber to take damage from enemy riflemen or infantry.

 

[binhthuy71]

Would it be difficult/impossible to assign HP to tile improvements? I'm not a modder so I don't know. In that scenario, Worker action would "heal" a tile improvement at a given rate per turn. It would be easier, I think, to balance the effect of strategic bombing that way rather then nerfing bombers.

 

[Lexicus]

If tile outputs were higher I would suggest a system whereby bombing raids reduce tile outputs and "damage" improvements rather than destroying them.

 

[TyBoy]

Bombers shouldn't take damage unless attacked anti-air units or cities. It makes no sense for my bomber to take damage from enemy riflemen or infantry.

I agree with this, but on the flip side I'm really underwhelmed by the ability of anti-air and fighters to fend of bombers. Trying to bomb something with a bomber that is under the cover of an active anti-air should lead to a significantly diminished chance of success and significant damage to the bomber. Trying to bomb something with a fighter intercept active should pretty much negate any chance of the bomber doing damage and do significant damage back to the bomber. I feel like the point of the air sweep mission was to model fighters escorting your bombers, so you can force their fighters to engage yours. In practice it's not that useful since the fighters don't shoot down your bomber anyway and as soon as you take the city the fighters are destroyed anyway.

I think what binthuey said would be a great model, but I would be surprised if there's code in for something like that.

 

[headcase]

For realism (WW2 modders, take note!) any combat involving industrial or modern-era units should destroy the tile improvement on which it takes place, automatically. So, if artillery bombards a unit, the tile improvement (if any) on which the unit is sitting is destroyed. Ditto for air bombardment. The tile being attacked onto in melee combat has its improvement destroyed.

Artillery and bombers should be able to target improvements, city buildings, and city population.

I like this. Do you think melee units should also destroy an improvement when they attack a unit on that improvement's tile?