Are urban defenses too strong

[AriochIV]

On the other hand, walled cities were very difficult for most armies to deal with throughout history. This is hard for many people to recognize, because the few armies that could regularly conduct a successful attack on a walled city: Classical Roman or Chinese, Renaissance French - are all Famous and relatively well-known. Less well known is the fact that Hannibal, as good as he was in the field, never took a single walled Roman City by assault or siege, and in the late 17th century CE Sieges were more important than Field Battles in deciding a war, and having the greatest 'taker of cities' in history, Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, in his army was one of Louis XIV's greatest assets!

I agree with this, but it's not really the defensive strength of walls that is modeled in the game; it's the offensive striking power of cities in the game that makes them dangerous. Particularly the way that if you're even a little bit behind your opponent in the tech tree, city strikes can pretty much one-shot single siege units. A proper city/walls/encampment setup can make a city virtually impervious to any attack the AI can mount.

 

[leandrombraz]

A related problem is that the AI never builds any siege-assisting units. Battering Rams, Siege Towers, Balloons - the AI never builds any of those.

They build it, they just don't use it effectively. In my current game (I'm going for a domination victory), I saw some balloons running around like a headless chicken. The AI probably doesn't have a single clue of how to use it.

I do think urban defenses should be manually built, or have some other mechanism for building it - the automatic thing feels off esp considering the labor that goes into walls.

It could be a single project, like the Manhattan project and Operation Ivy.


Another thing that screw the AI (and the player) is how a lot of oil end up spawning in snow tiles, so you often need to actively try to get oil since it has a tendency to spawn anywhere but in your territory. I imagine that eventually the AI does that, if given enough time, but they can go quite a long time without upgrading their military to units that need oil, unless they get luck, which doesn't seem to happen often. Firaxis need to reduce oil spawn on snow and increase on other terrain types

 

[Sostratus]

I do think urban defenses is too much oomph, but only because it shows up everywhere at once.
I think you should be allowed to directly build the most advanced level of wall, and each level of walls should have fixed combat stats instead of scaling. (The blue bar, I’m talking about here.)
I don’t care if urban defenses are cheap or something military engineers can rush (there’s a thought!) but I’d be happy if steel gave all defenses +100HP and then urban defenses were basically cheap Renaissance walls (300hp) with a better combat value- modern era specifically, so that atomic/info units would have a slight leg up on them- but not really, since wall resistances are absurd. I just dislike the way city defense ratings scale right now.

A city center building that would allow an innate anti air defense would also be very useful to slightly curtail air dominance. (It could be gated behind having an encampment.) one for improved anti ship attack would be neat to play with too.

It would be interesting to see a modern day siege of a major city between two peers given how much things like air supply and logistics have advanced.

 

[Solver]

They build it, they just don't use it effectively. In my current game (I'm going for a domination victory), I saw some balloons running around like a headless chicken. The AI probably doesn't have a single clue of how to use it.

That's interesting! I've seen AI anti-air units, and since the first NFP update I see them build airplanes, but I don't think I've ever seen a non-Barbarian Battering Ram, Siege Tower or Balloon.

 

[Pfeffersack]

That's interesting! I've seen AI anti-air units, and since the first NFP update I see them build airplanes, but I don't think I've ever seen a non-Barbarian Battering Ram, Siege Tower or Balloon.

They do (especially late game - I haven't noticed yet Siege Towers and Battering Rams) , though neither reliably nor have I seen them (yet) using them paired with units - OTOH, if they just cluster randomly the battlefield with all those drones the effect might be still there:

Spoiler :

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I find urban defence to be quite strange, like why build or develop walls when you will get even better walls for free?

 

[AlanC9]

Because you might be attacked before getting to Steel?

 

[Linklite]

Because you might be attacked before getting to Steel?

Pretty much. I tend to hold off as much as possible before building walls, only if I notice the AI mustering do I rush them.
Although they can help provide tourism as well as potentially housing.