Airships in middle ages???

[SerriaFox]

How Air ever been used succefully in war?

YES

In world war two no convey escorted by airship lost a single ship to a sub attack.

Now as far as the game goes. Make it instead of an air unit make it a defensive only that can move over any terrain and see subs unit immune to everything but planes?

 

[Astat]

there definitely is potential for an airship unit in Civ4. several good proposials were raised in this thread.
i'd consider it the easiest (and therefore best) way to just remove the bombard ability, reducing them to recon vessels.

and let them see subs, yes. not that it'd mather much in the Civ4 engine, though..

 

[Walkabout]

In world war two no convey escorted by airship lost a single ship to a sub attack.

I've seen this repeated a couple of times, as if it proved something relevant to the way airships are implimented in the game. It doesn't.

In the first place, convoys were not "escorted" by airships. Airships provided general coastal reconnaissance; that's all. Surface units did the actual cross-Atlantic escorting; and many of them lost ships to u-boat attacks whether they started out under the airship umbrella or not. So I'm not sure what this statistic really means, much less how it was compiled.

Secondly, it was the increased use of the convoy system itself -- particularly convoys escorted by surface units -- that is generally credited with the decline in u-boat attacks off the East Coast. By the time airship reconnaissance entered the picture to any large degree, u-boat attacks were already way down. So all this statement really proves is that the US was allocating more assets to the fight, not that airships were responsible for winning it.

Thirdly, we're still talking about reconnaissance, not direct combat. Show me a documented instance of an airship itself ever causing damage to a u-boat and you might have some basis to justify giving them an attack rating in the game. Until then it's nonsense.

 

[Bigfoot3814]

Make it instead of an air unit make it a defensive only that can move over any terrain and see subs unit immune to everything but planes?

And AA of course.

 

[Mik1984]

Recon missions are a feature of annoyance also in this game. On some maps where you need to watch over the oceans, you'll be forced to issue up to 20 recon missions per turn, EVERY SINGLE TIME THE SAME MISSIONS. Otherwise you risk having an invasion fleet jump out unseen. It is a stupid MICROMANAGEMENT NIGHTMARE.

 

[r_rolo1]

Recon missions are a feature of annoyance also in this game. On some maps where you need to watch over the oceans, you'll be forced to issue up to 20 recon missions per turn, EVERY SINGLE TIME THE SAME MISSIONS. Otherwise you risk having an invasion fleet jump out unseen. It is a stupid MICROMANAGEMENT NIGHTMARE.

Signed under... why not a " repeat until ordered otherwise button" ?

 

[Mik1984]

Signed under... why not a " repeat until ordered otherwise button" ?

Yeah, exactly.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Nah it's easy. You just gotta eat a lot of protein, and peddle reaaaally fast.

Muscle = weight, and the bone density involved with improving strength via lifting isn't going to help either. You'd almost be better off setting one of those feather type 90 pound guys who are in spectacular shape but weigh practically nothing.

The conversion of strength input to lift is extremely inefficient, so you'd want to keep the weight as low as possible.

Airships are pretty significant as they are right now. They annoy me greatly when I'm charging the AI with Grens/Cannons. Fortunately, the tech-happy AI's that tend to get these reasonably early tend NOT to have massive stacks, so as long as I have enough units that some don't wind up taking significant damage, I'll just take the city where the blimps are based. Problem solved.

I've not used them much myself. Actually, I have surprisingly little experience with modern warfare, only recently having used bombers! Most of my games are won in practice well before this, prompting me to spam infantry and use spies, navy, or ground artillery for bombardment of city d. Bombers seem to deliver great collateral though, so I'm starting to like them. You need a lot of extra techs though .

 

[Gooblah]

I think hot-air balloons were used for recon during the American Civil War.

I agree with Wolfshanze, though: Combustion and Physics should be prereqs.

 

[r_rolo1]

If we had recon ballons with physics and airships with steam or combustion it would not be as stupid.....

 

[SerriaFox]

Recon missions are a feature of annoyance also in this game. On some maps where you need to watch over the oceans, you'll be forced to issue up to 20 recon missions per turn, EVERY SINGLE TIME THE SAME MISSIONS. Otherwise you risk having an invasion fleet jump out unseen. It is a stupid MICROMANAGEMENT NIGHTMARE.

Or maybe a pop up at the beginning of turn, would like to:

Repeat all recon missions?

so that if you want to change the recon pattern it will not auto move your planes so you will not have a plane available. The pop up would still be annonying but it would not be as annoying a twenty planes asking for orders.

 

[ScribJellydonut]

I swear I had an airship intercept and shoot down my Jet Fighter on a game recently...

 

[brades]

Airships were real, and came about much earlier than airplanes. Take a look at the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airships. Just an excerpt:

"In 1784 Jean-Pierre Blanchard fitted a hand-powered propeller to a balloon, the first recorded means of propulsion carried aloft. In 1785, he crossed the English Channel with a balloon equipped with flapping wings for propulsion, and a bird-like tail for steerage.[2]

The first person to make an engine-powered flight was Henri Giffard who, in 1852, flew 27 kilometres (17 mi) in a steam-powered airship.[3] Airships would develop considerably over the next two decades: In 1863, Dr. Solomon Andrews devised the first fully steerable airship, the Aereon although it had no motor.[4] ...."

Airships come at a very realistic time, they hardly do any damage and are fairly accurate to there historical counterpart.

 

[r_rolo1]

Airships come at a very realistic time, they hardly do any damage and are fairly accurate to there historical counterpart.

Did you noticed that they can do more damage to a ship than a jet fighter?

 

[Mik1984]

Did you noticed that they can do more damage to a ship than a jet fighter?

Yeah...

 

[Khamul]

I changed airships so that they need Physics and Steam engine, and they can do only 20 % damage.

Now I can live with them.

 

[brades]

Did you noticed that they can do more damage to a ship than a jet fighter?

No I don't think because I've ever actually built one on purpose. However, an airship would be able to damage a destroyer more than a jet fighter for a few simple reasons. The biggest reason is pure size, an airship would be on the order of 100 times as large as a jet fighter? Therefore the bomb payload could be much much larger and in effect cause a lot more damage to the destroyer. A jet fighter is meant for air-air combat with small heat-seeking missiles to destroy other jets, which aren't going to do anything to a monstrous steel warship. Giant bombs that could be carried on an airship however would cause massive amounts of damage.

Adding the prerequisite tech of steam power makes the most sense to me. In the wikipedia article I linked earlier the first crossing of the english channel by an airship occured in the 1850's and was driven by a steam engine. I suppose you could make airships available earlier (i.e. human powered) and then add a few range points to them with steam power.

 

[r_rolo1]

You are assuming that a destroyer would let a slow moving airship to put himself right over him and drop huge bombs...... given the not briliant manovering ability of both ( especially of the airships ) that is somewhat risky to assume.

If you are assuming inteligent bombs a F-16 can easily carry them as well...

 

[brades]

You are assuming that a destroyer would let a slow moving airship to put himself right over him and drop huge bombs...... given the not briliant manovering ability of both ( especially of the airships ) that is somewhat risky to assume.

If you are assuming inteligent bombs a F-16 can easily carry them as well...

I agree I am making a lot of assumptions, but the nature of the argument is silly since we are putting a late 1800's technology against a mid 1900's piece of work. If we are giving the f-16s intelligent bombs than we must also allow the airship to carry these as well and more of them at that. In fact in the article it noted that airships were fairly innefective until the advent of the homing torpedo. To poke a little fun at this whole thing though I think the point we are neglecting is that no airship/f-16 would get close enough to a destroyer with surface-air missiles with mile+ ranges.

Payload-Airship
Maneuvarabilty-jet
range-jet

Still, under the right circumstance, the airship would cause more damage.

 

[r_rolo1]

Yeah, this is getting highly in to the Gedanken area But as we in Civ IV can have both airships and jet fighters bombarding destroyers... ( a airship in fact may have more chances because it can work in higher altitudes than a normal jet fighter , thus having more possibilities of hovering above a destroyer without being shot by the destroyer SAM ).

Of course that if Civ IV had the concept of payload for air/rocket units things would be pretty diferent ( and better IMHO )....