C2C - Units

[Faustmouse]

All I know is that the Roman army was able to lay siege to a chief's village in Britannia and win the battle with no loss of life on their side by using a number of scorpions to pick off the chief's family from a safe distance. When enough were dead the village surrendered.

So the Scorpion could be excluded from the Siege-Line and be the first unit in the Sniper-Line then?
Not we could (and I also think SHOULD) give Snipers the ability to target heros / lead by warlord units first in combat.

 

[Hydromancerx]

So the changes I am making now are ...

Archer (4) -> Bellybowman (5) -> Oxybeles (6) -> Scorpion (7) -> Ballista (8)

Lithobolos (6) -> Mangonel (7) -> Siege Onager (8) -> Trebuchet (9)

And the Catapult will be renamed the Mangonel since all of that line are types of Catapults.

In addition the Siege Onager is named that instead of just Onager, because we already have a Donkey unit called the "Onager". Which is where the name comes from.

 

[Faustmouse]

Hmm... in vanilla the Catapult was good against stacks of Units while the trebuchet was excellent at attacking cities. Also, in AoE II the Onager-Catapults was very usefull against units (and to a lesser extent against buildings, yeah...), while the trebuchet was almost completely useless again most units.
Therefore, I'd recommend seperating a city attacker line (Trebuchet), an antipersonnel line (catapults like Onager) and another anti-personnel line with Ballista and the like. At least I wouldn't make the Siege Onager upgrade into the Trebuchet.

Maybe it could work like this:

Mangonel (7) -> Trebuchet (9)
|
V
Siege Onager (9)

 

[Thunderbrd]

Where is the scorpion!

I thought some of this was going to be sorted by equipment promotions. So that you have Archer str 4 with promotions
- obsidian tips +25% str ie str 5
- copper/bronze tips +50% str ie str 6
- iron tips +75% str ie str 7

This means that you may have inferior archery tech but superior units because they have better equipment. I thought that was what we were after.

To address about equipment, strength is not going to optimally be a common modifier for equipments I think. Yes we were initially discussing that but I'm more and more thinking it's not the way to necessarily go.

We will want to have a game balanced with and without equipments in play and make the equipments entirely optional. So it helps to have a good base strength gradient throughout the unit upgrade paths upon which equipments can add depth and detail rather than redefining the strengths for the units.

That's the main purpose of many of the new combat tags and dynamics. Precision, Dodge, Armor, Damage Modifier, Puncture, CombatModifer/rnd (exhaustion and rage), Power Strikes and more all are designed to play into an equipment mechanism that deepens rather than attempts to truly redefine the base statistics of the units.

As the concept has been considered for a long time, the original idea of replacing numerous units with equipment upgrades has evolved and faded from the plans and intent of the equipment designs somewhat. It can be further evaluated as we start getting further into equipments though and hasn't been entirely unwritten from all possibility.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Therefore, I'd recommend seperating a city attacker line (Trebuchet), an antipersonnel line (catapults like Onager) and another anti-personnel line with Ballista and the like. At least I wouldn't make the Siege Onager upgrade into the Trebuchet.

You're certainly on to the siege subcategories and it would indeed be nice if upgrade lines would keep these concepts in mind. We have Defensive, Urban (city attacking), Field and Gatecrasher siege subcategories and generally this is actually divided into Defensive (Cannot attack and while it may bring a unique ability to the stack, is mostly there to defend the plot very effectively - machine guns for example), Urban, Field, Urban AND Field (good at both but not perhaps as good as one specialized only in one of those), and Gatecrasher (Rams).

So if we can align those 4 types by upgrade and logical mechanism we'd do very well to clean up a presently very confusing siege unit portfolio. We could also consider a few new 'combination' categories (Defensive Urban and Defensive Field).

 

[Hydromancerx]

I will be posting my chnages soon on the SVN so you guys can see. One big chnage I made was getting units that had + Attack vs Catapult and Trebuchet instead + Attack vs Wooden Siege combat class.

However I am running into a problem. There are a bunch of mounted units that have a Flank bonus vs Catapult and Trebuchet and others bombard and cannon too. At any rate can there be a general flank bonus vs a combat class rather than specific units? Otherwise I need to all types of siege units. Since the other types of wooden and cannon siege are not listed.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Didn't I make a tag for that already? Lemme check.
EDIT: Yep... the tag would be properly formatted as follows (and I must apologize for the naming conventions utilized here - I've since learned improved more generic ways to term sub-tags.)

<FlankingStrikesbyUnitCombat>
	<FlankingStrikebyUnitCombat>
		<FlankingStrikeUnitCombat>UNITCOMBAT_SIEGE_WOODEN</FlankingStrikeUnitCombat>
		<iFlankingStrengthbyUnitCombat>20</iFlankingStrengthbyUnitCombat>
	</FlankingStrikebyUnitCombat>
</FlankingStrikesbyUnitCombat>

We can even make promotions and Sub Combats apply these modifiers to units with:

<FlankingStrikesbyUnitCombatChange>
	<FlankingStrikebyUnitCombatChange>
		<FlankingStrikeUnitCombatChange>UNITCOMBAT_SIEGE_WOODEN</FlankingStrikeUnitCombatChange>
		<iFlankingStrengthbyUnitCombatChange>20</iFlankingStrengthbyUnitCombatChange>
	</FlankingStrikebyUnitCombatChange>
</FlankingStrikesbyUnitCombatChange>

So in a perfect world we'd also have promotions that Mounted and Siege units can take that will give them enhancements to those innate abilities. Not sure if UnitCombats should control these values too much but if you can see a clear reason for establishing such an ability patently via a UnitCombat that unites a unit line then you can apply the ability there.


EDIT: I want to take a moment to note one upgrade path problem I noticed in the 'old' siege upgrade paths and I'm not sure if it's been brought to your attention or adjusted by your changes but should be considered if it hasn't. Ballista upgrade to Bombards, elephants, mammoth or otherwise. By their modifiers this really shifts them from Field to Urban when they progress. That means a lot of promo accesses would change and could cause some chaos and difficulty for players during the switch. It does make some sense but if we could perhaps find a way to smooth that transition, perhaps by making this line pretty much equally good but not a master of either field or urban attacking then we could perhaps improve clarity on the strategic purpose of those units that at current, switch from one role to another as soon as they are upgraded. This is understandably frustrating for a player because then when they upgrade they need to reconsider what their army is composed of and they may now have too much or too little of the roles they need to fill in any strong attack force.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ooooh, this is very interesting!

You drive a hard bargain, but fortunately - like Doctor Who's Tibetan-to-English dictionary - I just happen to have one lying around...

The frigate Valiant (TO11 iirc) is right at the north edge of the map slightly right of the 'middle'. Take it to the barb city of Yayoi - well within move range just SSW of it - and bombard (the units in) the watchtower which is directly NE of the city.

You could bombard the city but that stack is huge so it would be hard to tell if anything happened. The watchtower contains 2 units, and I tried it and my attempt did not 'miss', it just failed to do anything.

I looked into this and figured out very clearly why the frigate was unable to do damage in this scenario.

There's an aspect of unit bombard attacks that I know I wasn't aware of and obviously many people programming units up to this point did not know either.

A LOT of our units that can bombard aren't going to do any damage with it. The reason for this is because BOMBARD DAMAGE IS DERIVED FROM THE SAME MECHANISM AS COLLATERAL DAMAGE AND USES THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE THAT UNIT DISHES OUT TO DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE IT CAN DO!!! It also determines the amount of units it will harm based on the tag that determines that for collateral.

All a bombard attack IS is a way to have a chance to do free collateral without having to enter battle with the lead unit to inflict it.

Pretty simple.

Big problem.

Either I rewrite how bombarding WORKS and probably involving all new tags to do so or we agree that this method should stay as is. This 'rule' goes all the way back to vanilla when this rule was established - think back - in vanilla CivIV was there EVER a unit that could do bombardment damage without also being one capable of doing collateral when it attacked?

If we keep things as they are, we're going to need to accept that:
1) All units that can bombard will also be required to do that same damage as collateral when attacking.

and

2) We must immediately evaluate all the units that can bombard and appropriately chart out new collateral tag applications.


If we go with the alternative, recreating the whole structure we can differentiate the abilities so they aren't intrinsically linked and thus we can have units that can bombard for damage to units but don't by default also cause collateral damage when they attack. And I can easily do that with some new programming but it might not be so easy to update the AI on that - I might be able to mirror most of the existing bombard stuff.

But this leaves us evaluating units even deeper than we would need to with option A.

I need anyone who cares at all about units to chime in on opinions on this one!

 

[Faustmouse]

Uhm... can Sniper deal collateral damage? I remember that they deal pretty good damage with range bombarding, or is it another mission they use?

 

[Hydromancerx]

EDIT: I want to take a moment to note one upgrade path problem I noticed in the 'old' siege upgrade paths and I'm not sure if it's been brought to your attention or adjusted by your changes but should be considered if it hasn't. Ballista upgrade to Bombards, elephants, mammoth or otherwise. By their modifiers this really shifts them from Field to Urban when they progress. That means a lot of promo accesses would change and could cause some chaos and difficulty for players during the switch. It does make some sense but if we could perhaps find a way to smooth that transition, perhaps by making this line pretty much equally good but not a master of either field or urban attacking then we could perhaps improve clarity on the strategic purpose of those units that at current, switch from one role to another as soon as they are upgraded. This is understandably frustrating for a player because then when they upgrade they need to reconsider what their army is composed of and they may now have too much or too little of the roles they need to fill in any strong attack force.

I have been thinking this over as well. I think we may want the Ballista line to ugrade into the "Machine Gun" line. So like ...

Archer (4) -> Bellybowman (5) -> Oxybeles (6) -> Scorpion (7) -> Ballista (8) -> ? -> Ribauldequin (15) -> Organ Gun (20) -> Gatling Gun (25) -> Machine Gun (30) -> Trench Machine Gun (35) -> Modern Machine Gun (55) -> Unmanned Machine Gun (110)

Right now the Bombard is the connection, but like you said its unlike all of those. However we need some sort of early gunpowder siege unit to bridge the gap. Or alternatively a more advanced Ballista that exists during the first cannons. At the moment that's what the Heavy Crossbowman does. It exists when the Arquebus is around. And then merged back at the Musketman.

There may be one choice, the Polybolos. It is a chain drive Ballista. In other words a "Repeating Ballista". However its was WAY ahead of its time. May be better off as a "Sandalpunk" unit. The down side is that it doesn't have as much power as the Torsion based siege engines. Thus its more of a side branch than a main branch.

In addition there was also the Helepolis which is basically a siege tower filled with Ballistas on each level. Again this is very cool but more of a "Sandalpunk" style unit.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Ok I found some more weird siege units ...

- Sauterelle = A bomb/grenade throwing Crossbow/Balista in WWI.
- Leach Trench Catapult - A bomb/grenade throwing Catapult in WWI.

Talk about retro techs being used in new ways.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Uhm... can Sniper deal collateral damage? I remember that they deal pretty good damage with range bombarding, or is it another mission they use?

I believe its a different icon for that mission and is thus a different mission entirely and one that is set to specifically damage only one unit I believe. The bombard unit mission is intrinsically linked to the city bombard as well I think. I'd have to verify all that fully but I believe that's how it works.

I have been thinking this over as well. I think we may want the Ballista line to ugrade into the "Machine Gun" line. So like ...

Archer (4) -> Bellybowman (5) -> Oxybeles (6) -> Scorpion (7) -> Ballista (8) -> ? -> Ribauldequin (15) -> Organ Gun (20) -> Gatling Gun (25) -> Machine Gun (30) -> Trench Machine Gun (35) -> Modern Machine Gun (55) -> Unmanned Machine Gun (110)

Right now the Bombard is the connection, but like you said its unlike all of those. However we need some sort of early gunpowder siege unit to bridge the gap. Or alternatively a more advanced Ballista that exists during the first cannons. At the moment that's what the Heavy Crossbowman does. It exists when the Arquebus is around. And then merged back at the Musketman.

There may be one choice, the Polybolos. It is a chain drive Ballista. In other words a "Repeating Ballista". However its was WAY ahead of its time. May be better off as a "Sandalpunk" unit. The down side is that it doesn't have as much power as the Torsion based siege engines. Thus its more of a side branch than a main branch.

In addition there was also the Helepolis which is basically a siege tower filled with Ballistas on each level. Again this is very cool but more of a "Sandalpunk" style unit.

We could simply add a Heavy Ballista unit representing the advance of a larger weapon which if I'm not mistaken did take place historically.

Then we'd have to rethink the Bombards and the Elephant/Mammoth Bombard units as well and where they stand in relation to the other siege chains.

 

[Hydromancerx]

@TB

Well I was thinking of a Heavy Ballista to exist at the time of the Tribuchet, but that still leaves a gap when the Bombard comes in. I know the first Bombards were unreliable compared to later cannons so there is some overlap of incompetent gunpowder units and pre-gunpowder units.

As for the Bombard Elephant and Mammoth, I am not going to worry about that until the normal Ballista upgrade path is figured out. Right now they seem to work ok. Since they act more like very early tanks.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ok I found some more weird siege units ...

- Sauterelle = A bomb/grenade throwing Crossbow/Balista in WWI.
- Leach Trench Catapult - A bomb/grenade throwing Catapult in WWI.

Talk about retro techs being used in new ways.

Both would be too far advanced beyond the far more crude Ribauldquin I think. However, it brings up an interesting progression potential for bombards that leads into a line including the Mortar which is suspiciously missing from our WWII era units. These type of units strike me as a good distance Bombarding Field & Urban siege - not perfect at either but can do a lot by sitting back and using its bombard attacks (strong collateral would be involved and unless they are mounted somehow perhaps they wouldn't even be able to attack - just bombard.)

 

[Thunderbrd]

@TB

Well I was thinking of a Heavy Ballista to exist at the time of the Tribuchet, but that still leaves a gap when the Bombard comes in. I know the first Bombards were unreliable compared to later cannons so there is some overlap of incompetent gunpowder units and pre-gunpowder units.

As for the Bombard Elephant and Mammoth, I am not going to worry about that until the normal Ballista upgrade path is figured out. Right now they seem to work ok. Since they act more like very early tanks.

We're both posting as the other does so the conversation is like a step behind with each post I make... kinda like that commercial (I'm meeting her at the hotel later.)lol

Aren't the Bombards already supposed to represent that 'early cannon' that really wasn't all that good a weapon until the cannon was perfected?

Interesting thought about those elephants leading into tanks... if we start with tank unit balance and walk backwards through these elephant types I think we'd begin to see a better unit chain develop there without trying to get them to match too closely to their non-mounted weapon equivalents which they currently do seem to do. If we created a blend between we could see some very interesting numeric results.

 

[Yudishtira]

If we keep things as they are, we're going to need to accept that:
1) All units that can bombard will also be required to do that same damage as collateral when attacking.

and

2) We must immediately evaluate all the units that can bombard and appropriately chart out new collateral tag applications.

If we go with the alternative, recreating the whole structure we can differentiate the abilities so they aren't intrinsically linked and thus we can have units that can bombard for damage to units but don't by default also cause collateral damage when they attack. And I can easily do that with some new programming but it might not be so easy to update the AI on that - I might be able to mirror most of the existing bombard stuff.

But this leaves us evaluating units even deeper than we would need to with option A.

I need anyone who cares at all about units to chime in on opinions on this one!

First of all:
Could Ranged Bombard be recoded to damage a fixed number of units (eg. 5 or 6), and derive its damage % by some formula from unit strength?

Otherwise I'm afraid units need to be considered individually.

I don't think Frigates should be getting normal collateral damage per se. In wooden ships combat one only ever has a single target at a time. (I think it's safe to ignore the "slow-motion dogfight" element.) Ballista Elephant is also in this category.

Siege Towers on the other hand do kinda deserve to do normal collateral.

And sorry but they're the only three Ranged Bombard units that I'm sure were not working...

 

[Hydromancerx]

@TB

Well the "Cannon Age" units work like this at the moment ....

Bombard (11) -> Great Bombard (23) -> Mortar (26)

Which are the main city attackers that breeak down the walls.

- Culverin (15) = Anti-Cannon
- Falconet (15) = Anti-Infantry
- Heavy Cannon (25) (aka Cannon) = Anti-Infantry / Anti-City

Since they have different specializations they exist at the same time. Sort of like the Axeman, Maceman and Swordsman.

Note we also have the Ribauldequin and Organ Gun but we already went over those.

 

[Thunderbrd]

First of all:
Could Ranged Bombard be recoded to damage a fixed number of units (eg. 5 or 6), and derive its damage % by some formula from unit strength?

Otherwise I'm afraid units need to be considered individually.

I don't think Frigates should be getting normal collateral damage per se. In wooden ships combat one only ever has a single target at a time. (I think it's safe to ignore the "slow-motion dogfight" element.) Ballista Elephant is also in this category.

Siege Towers on the other hand do kinda deserve to do normal collateral.

And sorry but they're the only three Ranged Bombard units that I'm sure were not working...

Yeah, I THINK the mystery is solved by this revelation. Sadly, I also tend to agree with you that it might be more appropriate to approach this from an angle that doesn't expect that all units that can ranged bombard MUST also be able to do collateral damage - to me that doesn't seem right for a fair model nor for providing us with the ability to diversify our units.

As to your suggestion, that wouldn't be terribly different to archery bombard I suppose but there's a couple of problems with that solution:

1) It would immediately divulge from the classic method by which CivIV has always resolved Bombardment (I'm not against this as long as it's a much IMPROVED mechanism.)

2) A hard coded solution like that seems to be a rough patch. It would be preferable for many reasons to build something more intricate. As I look forward to equipments and further proliferation of specific unit ability enhancing promotionlines, it would be nice to be able to enable units to enhance/manipulate their bombardment capabilities.

However, this is why I feel it leads back to a VERY involved unit evaluation to establish distinct Bombardment tag applications. The first thing we'd need to do is isolate and identify all units that should be able to bombard then arrange them in unit upgrade charts that at least loosely track the eras in which they come into play. From there we can look at assigning improving gradients of bombard damage, accuracy (which we already do have a tag for), and an amount of units that can be bombarded.

I'd also want any applicable protection vs collateral, unit precision, puncture, damage modifier, dodge etc... to the calculation picture for bombardment which is something I wanted to work in eventually anyhow. We already have it with the protection against collateral but it should still play a role in defending units against bombard damage.


Question: Does anyone besides me feel that it's not quite fair or right that the lead unit in a stack is NEVER going to be damaged by bombardment? If I'm going to consider reworking the mechanism, I'd like to propose changing that part of it which will easily be done moving past the Collateral = Bombardment method. Seems to be a problem for city battles in particular that the best unit there, the unit closest to the front, will never be injured by bombard attacks.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Question: Does anyone besides me feel that it's not quite fair or right that the lead unit in a stack is NEVER going to be damaged by bombardment? If I'm going to consider reworking the mechanism, I'd like to propose changing that part of it which will easily be done moving past the Collateral = Bombardment method. Seems to be a problem for city battles in particular that the best unit there, the unit closest to the front, will never be injured by bombard attacks.

But won't city defense buildings damage them? Such as Bombard Towers? Even if they are not engaging combat, standing next to a city will hurt you.

As for "in front" it may be true for a Battering Ram but a Trebuchet would be near the back of the invasion. Possibly out of the range of the defending Archers.

 

[Thunderbrd]

@TB

Well the "Cannon Age" units work like this at the moment ....

Bombard (11) -> Great Bombard (23) -> Mortar (26)

Which are the main city attackers that breeak down the walls.

- Culverin = Anti-Cannon
- Falconet = Anti-Infantry
- Heavy Cannon (aka Cannon) = Anti-Infantry / Anti-City

Since they have different specializations they exist at the same time. Sort of like the Axeman, Maceman and Swordsman.

Note we also have the Ribauldequin and Organ Gun but we already went over those.

That Mortar is called a Motar in the game... I never suspected that was a misspelling but always thought it was something other than the 'Green Army Man Mortar guy', basically just a crude cannon going by the artwork on it. My point being I'd love to see those simple tube mortars that have been employed extensively in WWII and for a long time thereafter (mentioned in the articles on those last two new proposed siege weapons you linked to wikipedia on that I think would make great bridges between the Motar (or whatever it should be called) and the Modern Mortar.

- Culverin = Anti-Cannon
- Falconet = Anti-Infantry
- Heavy Cannon (aka Cannon) = Anti-Infantry / Anti-City

Ah... THAT's what they differ on huh? They're very confusing to decipher their purposes. Wouldn't it be easier to follow Field and City specialty applications? That's how I look for their uses as a player. I need 'those' to take down the city (like a trebuchet) and 'those' to take units in the field (like a catapult). They are similar units but the Treb is weaker in the field than a cat while being stronger against cities by far. If we can keep that kind of progression along upgrade lines it will clear up a lot of confusion in army building strategies.