Airships: Why are they even in the game?

[Peng Qi]

Because wiki articles are professional, well informed and not at all biased.

You know you can determine whether or not they are by checking the citations, right?

To make players wait until a parallel flight tech for bi-planes would be silly. Wouldn't everyone just bee-line to fighters? WOuldn't you? I would just trade later on to get the parallel bi-plane flight tech.

Not parallel. I'd make it linear.

Some reason? Biplanes couldn't intercept Biplanes

So explain why so many planes were shot down in world war 1 despite the "fact" that biplanes never intercepted one another.

 

[3 EMS]

Figaro's suggestion of having airships being able to hover sounds really good. Maybe even let them patrol with waypoints. This sounds, to me, like an ability that actually matches the airships abilities.

Jedoc suggested that they are defensive, to him anyways, and they come at a time when players are regrouping. Maybe they should be defensive, Not defensive like a machine gunner where they can only fight if attacked. Rather they can only be based in your CIV as it was when the war started. To rebase them into a conquered city a player will have had to reach a certain culture threshold, a certain number of turns will have to elapse, or maybe the player would have to build something. They could only be used to recon or attack enemy units within their range. I think it would be cool too if they could attack enemy units in a neutral civ.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well a few improvement Ideas
Make them require Steam Power as well as Physics
AND
Option 1. give them a -50% v. Riflemen, Cavalry, and Infantry... by the Time Marines and Paratroopers are out, they should have been eliminated.

OR

Option 2. Eliminate their Strike Capability (City bombardment only),

OR

Option 3. Make them an upgrade for Explorers... a pure recon unit (move 4, with the visibility of an air unit and moving over all terrain equally) (allow them to get huts they go over, and probably keep the ability to see subs)

If they can be made into an air unit that can 'hover' over land/sea units and not interact unless it is intercepted, then you have a really neat unit. (safe from all but Destroyers+Carrier Fighters on sea, and SAMs+MInf.+City Fighters on Land)

 

[Walkabout]

Long time lurker; even longer time player (Civ I, if you can believe it). But Airships annoy me so much that I finally decided to add my two cents. Let me count the ways:

1. Arriving with Physics makes no sense if you're talking about WWI style Zepplins. Maybe you could make a case for tethered observation balloons that early, but that's it. Not only was the method of propulsion not yet invented (as a number of people have mentioned) but there was no reliable means of communicating with the ground until radio (so any long-distance recon role is nonsense).

2. I have found no record of Zepplins ever being used in tactical role against either land or sea targets, much less any basis for their ridiculous X2strength against naval units. They were sometimes used in a naval recon role, but even then they were only effective insofar as they had the ability to direct surface ships to the target (radio again).

3. Zepplins flew at fairly high altitudes (in fact that was their primary defense -- they flew much higher than most fighters of the day) and had little more than iron sights, so hitting a moving target -- in fact, hitting ANY kind of a target smaller than a city -- was a pretty marginal proposition.

4. Perhaps you could make a case for Zepplins as a primitive form of strategic bomber. The Germans used them that way in WWI and struck a nerve, prompting a reaction that was out of all proportion to the damage they actually did. But in that case their effect should be on a city's productivity, population or perhaps happiness, not on individual units.

Yeah, yeah. I know it's just a game. But it's a game where verisimilitude is an important consideration. For me Airships didn't cut it. So much so that I modified the d___ things to have zero attack strength. At least that's a start. My question now is whether the AI is smart enough to recognize that they are no longer useful for anything except recon.



4.

 

[DemonMaster]

First, Z. was used to bomb targets, not effectively (but if you count stats, biplane wasn't so effective either), but their main function was probably as a morale breaker. You also have to remember that it was used (mainly) during WWI and most units there wasn't moving they where trenched and it was alot men per "area" and a unit is probably division size or larger, which mean 10k men or more.

Z. was used in the beginning of WWI to bomb troops (in/near belgium if Wiki is correct) but it wasn't very effective (they were used during daytime ?). They were later used as terrorbombers and although, not very effective at if you count casaulties, but as a morale breaker it was quite effective, especially when they started to be used at night.

Z. do not explode if you hit it with bullets, they are most of the time only forced to land.

 

[Rusty Edge]

Well a few improvement Ideas
Make them require Steam Power as well as Physics
AND

Option 3. Make them an upgrade for Explorers... a pure recon unit (move 4, with the visibility of an air unit and moving over all terrain equally) (allow them to get huts they go over, and probably keep the ability to see subs)

If they can be made into an air unit that can 'hover' over land/sea units and not interact unless it is intercepted, then you have a really neat unit. (safe from all but Destroyers+Carrier Fighters on sea, and SAMs+MInf.+City Fighters on Land)

This is more the way that I envision them. Perhaps giving artillery in the base city a first strike to represent the spotting advantage, and causing one unhappiness in any enemy cities in the surveilence zone during a war to represent them as a psychological weapon.

 

[peter450]

I think airships are ok as now, remember that while they may not be too historically acurate they need to be balanced in a way that makes them fun, an viable to use.

Biggest problem i think is that they have no counter, which goes against the whole grain of every other unit in the game, personally i think they should introduce a basic early fighter, with a 50% interception chance rating an short range.

Or leave things as now, move airships to combustion teck and give them a 50% evasion chance based on the fact they can fly at very high altitude, vs the first propellor based fighter.

This seems to balance the unit in the game without reducing it's functions

 

[Evil Twin]

Why does everything have to have a counter anyway? Siege units stacked with other units have no counter when bombing defenses - why doesn't anybody complain about that?

 

[Spearthrower]

Why does everything have to have a counter anyway? Siege units stacked with other units have no counter when bombing defenses - why doesn't anybody complain about that?

I'd say it was because the siege units are not being used as a troop as such there, they are themselves the only counter to a city's culture.

Further to that, there is the much loved lol: ) flanking brought in with BtS which is a counter to them even when stacked with other troops.

If the Zeppelins could only bombard defenses, I doubt anyone would complain - it's their use against troops which is the problem as far as I can see. Really, it is the player who tends to abuse such mechanics, not the AI.

 

[DemonMaster]

Why does everything have to have a counter anyway? Siege units stacked with other units have no counter when bombing defenses - why doesn't anybody complain about that?

Guided Missile has no counter either

 

[Jedoc]

The airship is really taking a beating in this thread. 10% chance to spontaneously crash? Vulnerable to being shot down by riflemen?

Airships are tougher and more resilient than most of you seem to be giving them credit for. WWI zeps had a relatively tough outer skin, multiple non-connected gasbags, defensive machine guns, and the ability to flee to altitudes beyond the reach of any contemporary airplane. A couple of biplanes taking on a zep wasn't that cut-and-dried of a procedure until the Allies started fitting their planes out with Pomeroy explosive bullets that were capable of piercing the outer skin, rupturing a gasbag, and igniting the escaping hydrogen gas. If your Civ happens to have access to helium, which the Germans did not, even this tactic wouldn't have been nearly as effective.

2. I have found no record of Zepplins ever being used in tactical role against either land or sea targets, much less any basis for their ridiculous X2strength against naval units. They were sometimes used in a naval recon role, but even then they were only effective insofar as they had the ability to direct surface ships to the target (radio again).

Airships were the only real weapon the Allies had against the U-boats up until the invention of radar. The year that airship escorts began in earnest, the number of merchant ships sunk by U-boats along the Atlantic seaboard dropped from nearly 500 to 64. No ship escorted by an airship was ever sunk, and only one airship was lost in combat with a U-boat when its engines failed and the U-boat's deck gunner finally managed to puncture enough gasbags for the airship to lose buoyancy and crash.

The airships were capable of calling in support from Catalina bomber squadrons and surface ships, but they were armed with depth charges and were generally capable of taking care of business themselves.

If anyone's interested in reading more, check out the book Blimps & U-boats : U.S. Navy airships in the battle of the Atlantic by J Gordon Vaeth.

The point is, airships were not abandoned because they were slow, lumbering deathtraps which could be destroyed by a bored rifleman. They were simply outclassed by fixed-wing aircraft as power-to-weight ratios started to improve. And as technological history has shown, no innovation is guaranteed to follow another. Lighter-than-air flight is relatively simple and based upon extremely basic principals of physics. Heavier-than-air flight is counterintuitive, difficult, and was widely denounced as a crackpot's dream up until the day the Wright brothers did their thing. Given time for refinement and experimentation without the pressure of fixed-wing aircraft, the airship fleets could have become extraordinarily effective against ground and naval forces.

And in a game where the Zulus regularly mount tank invasions of an isolated and technologically backwards England, historical plausibility must always take precedence over historical accuracy.

 

[hoopsnerd]

The airship is really taking a beating in this thread. 10% chance to spontaneously crash? Vulnerable to being shot down by riflemen?

Terrific post, the entire thing. I stand corrected on my assumption that the zepps would have been easy for rifles to shoot down. I also don't think anyone can argue that a regimen of ~10,000 soldiers (1 unit) would definatley be "weakened" by 20% due to disorder if say... the Goodyear blimp flew overhead dropping firebombs on them and they were forced to take cover, having no alternative means of destroying the blimp.

 

[Kissamies]

Ah, Jedoc said what I was to lazy to write. An excellent post. The airship appears in many alternate history settings. Mostly because it's cool, I think, but the points in Jedoc's post do carry some weight.

10% spontaneous crash just wouldn't be fun gameplay.

 

[Rusty Edge]

Why does everything have to have a counter anyway? Siege units stacked with other units have no counter when bombing defenses - why doesn't anybody complain about that?

Gameplay for one. Usually gameplay takes precedence over historical accuracy .

Realism for another. Armies are forced to innovate and adapt when faced with a weapon that has no counter. In this case they adapted artillery to become high velocity flak, and adapted biplanes with special bullets and bombs.

Actually, there were complaints about siege weapon stacks, moreso from multi-player , and now we have the mounted flanking attack doing collateral damage to siege weapons.

 

[Figaro]

I'd still prefer them as hovering-types, X# of moves per turn type units, like Air units in Civ2 only with unlimited range and unable to attack. That way they could be genuinely useful as recon stuff, you could just leave them hovering if you were so inclined. Even if Zeppelins were faster than people imagine, I believe I am right in assuming they could just stop if they wanted? So why do ours have to return to base at the end of every turn? I know it's not realistic that they be able to move around away from base indefinately, but nor are they that realistic as they are, and I think it would fit the constraints of Civ4 better. Besides, its not as if ships, tanks or indeed anything can be away from base completely indefinately.

As an added bonus, implementing them like this would

- Make them a more "optional" unit, like in real life only a few nations bothered with them much.
- Make them much better at recon. Keep the Sees Subs just for that extra edge.
- Mean they'd need less of a counter because they couldn't actually hurt anything (damage was never much anyway).
-It would let them escort ships, which they can't currently do unless you use an aircraft carrier, which is just ridiculous.

Anyone play Empire Earth? The way the airships worked in that was cool, they had unlimited fuel and you could just put them on auto-explore or hover over places you wanted to keep an eye on. Only some units could actually attack them back.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

^ Agree, if they can be made into a hovering air unit (even keeping their weak bombardment/strike ability at short range) then they may be made useful [also it would be nice to have them as an upgrade to Explorers]

 

[astrologix]

You can set several recons up with the shift key and mouse left click on the target tile

 

[dalamb]

Yeah, that's totally stupid. I think it must be a bug that airships can actually intercept and damage surperior air units -- give me a break. Airships should only be useful against units that couldn't possibly counter them (archery and musket units).

Does any other kind of unit work this way (totally ineffective againts units of later techs)? I thought the classic complaint was spearmen killing tanks (i.e. small, but nonzero, chance) so your complaint would require a new mechanism, wouldn't it?

 

[pi-r8]

Airships are the most annoying unit ever. So many times, I've spotted a backwards civ next to me still defending with longbowmen, and put together a big stack of riflemen to attack them. When the time comes to invade, I think "great, it's clobbering time." Then I'm forced to watch as my army is relentlessly pounded by airships during the course of it's march towards the enemy cities. If it's a hill city, airships can pretty much prevent me from taking it, at least not without massive losses. I suppose you can build your own airships and bombard them, so that it evens out, but it's still frustrating being completely helpless against their airship attacks. I find myself beelining for flight a lot in BTS>

 

[GenocideBringer]

If they have so many hammers to spend on airships, they could simply have built more military units. I don't know about you, I'd rather take on an enemy unit that can't kill my troops than one that can.