Brainstorming a better Unique Ability for Brasilia

[KrikkitTwo]

By the sounds of it, you will use the military in almost every victory condition except possibly contact. So even a peaceful harmony game will not avoid combat. Once you start your victory wonder, it appears all opposing affinities will then DoW you.

Also, Harmony is not necessarily peaceful, they will kill aliens too.

 

[Liex]

For Brasilia, focusing it on melee combat is potentially interesting.
It basically means you want to use more ranged v. Brasilia and Brasilia wants to use more melee troops (including carriers in the water)

If they have fixed the OP ranged factor, that's not bad, and potentially interesting.

It's this focus on melee combat that has me worried.

If the UA was "+10% strength to melee units", it'd be plain and simple: your melee units would be a bit stronger both when attacking and defending against enemies of all kinds.

The actual UA gives "+10% strength in melee combat", which means that your ranged units are relatively stronger when defending against melee enemies, but your melee units are weaker against ranged attacks.

I don't think I like this, because it's easy to defend your ranged units against melee enemies without further help; you can use their range, the territory, the ZOC. On the other hand, it's not easy to defend your melee units against ranged attacks, specially because you need to march them there to conquer the city and keep them in the front lines to defend your ranged units. so they usually don't have much room for maneuver or rough territory to protect them. In the meantime, they're taking all sort of ranged damage from cities, garrisons, long range artillery, planes etc.

So yeah... if you're dealing with an aggressive Brasilia, just make sure you have a lot of ranged damage and watch how useful their UA will be.

 

[Lucius_]

The actual UA gives "+10% strength in melee combat", which means that your ranged units are relatively stronger when defending against melee enemies, but your melee units are weaker against ranged attacks.

Not sure if you meant it to sound this way, but your melee units would not be weaker against ranged attacks. They would be equal to everybody else's melee units defending against range. The way you word it and describe it comes across as they are strong in melee combat but have a *penalty* defending against ranged; which isn't what it says at all.

That said, an additional 10% bonus on cavalry units would be pretty exciting against said ranged units and artillery.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

It all depends on if they fixed ranged units being OP. If ranged units are only a slight bonus to a more powerful melee force, then brasillia's abilily is good.

(Although still not as interesting as FI culture->tech)

 

[Liex]

Not sure if you meant it to sound this way, but your melee units would not be weaker against ranged attacks. They would be equal to everybody else's melee units defending against range. The way you word it and describe it comes across as they are strong in melee combat but have a *penalty* defending against ranged; which isn't what it says at all.

That said, an additional 10% bonus on cavalry units would be pretty exciting against said ranged units and artillery.

Sorry, I meant relatively weaker. I was talking about the UA focus, melee units vs melee combat; comparing the later (actual) with the former (hypothetical) case, the melee units are weaker against ranged attacks, while the ranged units are stronger against melee. That's why I'd personally take the former case, "+10% strength to melee units", it seems more useful.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Sorry, I meant relatively weaker. I was talking about the UA focus, melee units vs melee combat; comparing the later (actual) with the former (hypothetical) case, the melee units are weaker against ranged attacks, while the ranged units are stronger against melee. That's why I'd personally take the former case, "+10% strength to melee units", it seems more useful.

However +10% to melee Combat is more interesting...and could be increased to 15 or 50 if it is too low.

 

[bhavv]

50% would be overpowered. 25% would be comparable to Miriam in SMAC, but in that game the leaders also had disadvantages (+25% attack, +2 support, +1 probe (espionage), great offense, but -20% research, and -40% in fundamentalism).