Chronicles of Mankind

[Drakarska]

This was not possible in BtS. There I needed to attack with the siege units and replace those afterwards.
Wouldn't it be better if the ranged bombardment does not do collateral and also does not reduce enemies defenses? That way you have more meaningful decisions what to do with your siege.

I'm not sure I'm following your line of thinking here. BtS has collateral with the available tech.
What's the point having units with range if your wanting to remove range bombardment? Not to mention wiping out the whole collateral line of promo?
Additionally, what's your plan for units starting in the IND+ that have range? No Arty? Missiles? What about sea units?
If i'm interpreting your thoughts correctly, your simply wanting more units to smash into a city without any softening up of the target. Which is specifically what RB and Coll are designed to do.

 

[<Nexus>]

Wouldn't it be better if the ranged bombardment does not do collateral and also does not reduce enemies defenses? That way you have more meaningful decisions what to do with your siege.

Well, I'm happy with the way ranged attacks work. But I'm always open for suggestions.

 

[Charriu]

No, no no I'm not suggesting to remove range bombardment. This is what you can do with a siege unit in BtS each turn aside from movement:

a) Bombard a cities defenses
b) Attack a unit/stack, doing collateral damage at the risk of loosing the siege unit in the fight, but winning XP

And this is what you can do in Chronicles of Mankind to my understanding

a) Range bombardment, which attacks the top unit, does collateral damage and lowers cities defenses
b) Attack a unit/stack, doing collateral damage at the risk of loosing the siege unit in the fight, but winning XP

Clearly option b) is almost always the better option in CoM. Why risk loosing a unit, when you can do all the damage of that unit without loosing it. The only thing you are missing is XP, which isn't to bad if you gain enough siege units thanks to survivability. What I wanted to suggest for siege units are the following options in CoM:

a) Bombard a cities defenses
b) Attack a unit/stack, doing collateral damage at the risk of loosing the siege unit in the fight, but winning XP
c) Ranged bombardment, which only attacks the top unit.

My main problem with it is that there is never a really good reason to attack with your siege unit and therefore risk loosing that unit.

 

[<Nexus>]

I see.

1. and 3. I see no reason to separate unit and ranged bombardment. They happen at the same time. Or rather: one after the other.

2. I think the best solution would be if ranged bombardment kills would also give experience. But that is far beyond my programing skills

 

[Drakarska]

RB does give XP for kills.
As for the potential of losing your units, that's part of the game?
I use mixed stacks ( Inf/Cav/Arty), plus any "specials" that go with the Civ in question.
I can potentially see your issue with Cats/Trebs, but once you reach cannons, Mixed/specialized stacks are the norm for me.

 

[Charriu]

I see.

1. and 3. I see no reason to separate unit and ranged bombardment. They happen at the same time. Or rather: one after the other.

2. I think the best solution would be if ranged bombardment kills would also give experience. But that is far beyond my programing skills

Ok so basically remove the ability to attack with siege units and only use ranged bombardment? That way siege units only die defending.

RB does give XP for kills.
As for the potential of losing your units, that's part of the game?
I use mixed stacks ( Inf/Cav/Arty), plus any "specials" that go with the Civ in question.
I can potentially see your issue with Cats/Trebs, but once you reach cannons, Mixed/specialized stacks are the norm for me.

Here is what happened in my recent game. I was being attacked by the AI, but was quickly able to go on the offensive. I had catapults, the AI already Trebuchet. They had slightly better mounted units. We had similarly stacks of 10 mounted units, 20 catapults (20 trebuchets for the AI), and some melee units. I won this engagment and all the following big battles, because I was able to use ranged bombardment first reducing all his non-siege units in HP. Cleanup with my units, which had no problem against technically superior units if they are at 0.1 HP.
Now that single battle wouldn't be so bad to win, but the fact that all my units especially siege units where basically unharmed enabled me to win all following engagements. This feels wrong. But if the goal of the mod is to replace suiciding siege into stacks with range bombardment then I will stop argueing against it.

 

[<Nexus>]

Ok so basically remove the ability to attack with siege units and only use ranged bombardment? That way siege units only die defending.

Isn't that how they worked IRL?

Here is what happened in my recent game. I was being attacked by the AI, but was quickly able to go on the offensive. I had catapults, the AI already Trebuchet. They had slightly better mounted units. We had similarly stacks of 10 mounted units, 20 catapults (20 trebuchets for the AI), and some melee units. I won this engagment and all the following big battles, because I was able to use ranged bombardment first reducing all his non-siege units in HP. Cleanup with my units, which had no problem against technically superior units if they are at 0.1 HP.
Now that single battle wouldn't be so bad to win, but the fact that all my units especially siege units where basically unharmed enabled me to win all following engagements. This feels wrong.

Well, I could simply call this case "superior tactics" (first striker wins) but I see your point

But if the goal of the mod is to replace suiciding siege into stacks with range bombardment then I will stop argueing against it.

Well, I see no reason to have suicide siege units but you are right: There should be a real risk of loosing them. The question is, how to do that?

My first idea is to reduce the collateral damage.
Now looking at the pedia I also see some inconsistency in the siege unit line:

Unit	Max # %	to # units
Ballista	50	4
Catapult	50	6
Trebuchet	50	6
Bombard	60	6
Cannon	60	7
Artilery	50	4
Howitzer	70	8
Mobile Artilery	70	8
Rocket Artilery	80	10
NLOS CAnon	90	10
Siege Droid	85	8

 

[<Nexus>]

Unit	OLD 'Max # %'	OLD 'to # units'	NEW 'Max # %'	NEW 'to # units'
Ballista	50	4	33	3
Catapult	50	6	40	4
Trebuchet	50	6	50	5
Bombard	60	6	60	6
Cannon	60	7	60	6
Artilery	50	4	60	6
Howitzer	70	8	70	8
Mobile Artilery	70	8	75	8
Rocket Artilery	80	10	80	10
NLOS CAnon	90	10	85	10
Siege Droid	85	8	90	10

(Editing a table in this forum is such a nightmare )

So these are my initial thoughts about editing collateral damage. Let me know what you think.

 

[Drakarska]

Looks like you have Cannon/Arty to # of units backwards. Shouldn't it be reversed? Cannon4, Arty 7?

 

[<Nexus>]

Looks like you have Cannon/Arty to # of units backwards. Shouldn't it be reversed? Cannon4, Arty 7?

Yes, that is what I referred to as inconsistency and I believe it is inherited from AND2. I'm surprised Vokarya didn't notice and fix that long ago.
I edited the chart to be clearer.

 

[Drakarska]

@Charriu
Could you toss up a SS of your units? If possible, specifically your promo bar for them. It's almost sounding like you have a FS promo in your stack.

 

[Charriu]

Well, I see no reason to have suicide siege units but you are right: There should be a real risk of loosing them. The question is, how to do that?

My first idea is to reduce the collateral damage.

That's exactly the point I wanted to make. There is no real risk of loosing the siege units. But I don't know how reducing collateral damage should cause this risk of loosing? My first idea would be that if the stack contains other units able to do ranged bombardment they could shoot back or rather the top unit shoots back.

The new collateral numbers though look better, but keep one thing in mind. Not every unit needs to improve in the collateral area compared to the older unit type. Take BtS Catapult and Trebuchet, which both do the same collateral damage, but Trebuchet is better in attacking cities and probably a better example BtS Artillery and Mobile Artillery, which both due the same collateral damage, but Mobile Artillery has a movement of 2 instead of 1 making it instantly better. Keeping this in mind you have a bigger collateral upgrade when it does matter.

@Charriu
Could you toss up a SS of your units? If possible, specifically your promo bar for them. It's almost sounding like you have a FS promo in your stack.

Sorry I don't have it anymore. I was producing those numbers from memory, which can be faulty.

 

[<Nexus>]

Not every unit needs to improve in the collateral area compared to the older unit type. Take BtS Catapult and Trebuchet, which both do the same collateral damage, but Trebuchet is better in attacking cities and probably a better example BtS Artillery and Mobile Artillery, which both due the same collateral damage, but Mobile Artillery has a movement of 2 instead of 1 making it instantly better. Keeping this in mind you have a bigger collateral upgrade when it does matter.

Good point

 

[Charriu]

Oh while I am at it. It's a bit annoying that you see all the trait related buildings, which you can't construct because you don't have those traits. I see that you can hide buildings in the BUG menu. Would make sense to add an option to hide those to if possible.

 

[<Nexus>]

I never use that option but doesn't it hide these buildings too?

 

[Charriu]

I tried all the hide building options and the unconstructable trait buildings remained visible. I usually also do not hide any buildings, but here it made sense to me because I can never build a tent if I'm not nomad.

 

[<Nexus>]

Unfortunately I'm not a programmer, so to make such changes I need a lot of help others, which I may or may not get.
This thing bothers me too but it's very low on my priority right now. Sorry.

 

[<Nexus>]

I have started working on corporations.

This is the current relations of who competes who:

As it it is visible, some have many competitors, while others only a few. E.g. Burgerworld has 8, while Ultimate Soldiers has only 1.

Now I have the following goals:

1. Add a couple more corporations
2. Restructure the whole thing in a way that each corporation has a healthy 3-4 competitors. For that I will create clusters, where corporations mainly compete others inside that cluster. E.g. Heavy industry, Grain, Seafood, Military, etc.
3. (If possible) allow the training of executive under certain conditions even when Realistic Corporations is ON.

 

[Drakarska]

Wow, lol, good luck.
I remember when Dac and I were discussing something similar while working on the TTT series and looking at the code, and going "This is going to be a PITA".
I will definitely be interested in what you come up with

 

[<Nexus>]

Well, I already have a sketch. Partly written, partly in my head

So just the categories and names:

- Heav industry
Aluminum Co.
Creative Constructions
Mining Inc.
Morgan Energetics
Ferrous Corp

- Grain
Cereal Mills
Standard Ethanol
Bread Pit *
Beer With It *
Pasta la Vista *
*probably will choose only 1 or 2 of them

- Luxury, jewelry
Civilized Jewelers Inc.
Girlsfriend
Reliquaria

- Seafood
Sid's Sushi Co.
Fishdom
Oyster World

- Livestock
Burgerworld
Mobby Meats
Meating Place

- Fashion
Emperors Clothing
Fashion House
HardWear

- Military
Ultimate Soldiers (infantry)
Skyborne (air)
Svensgaard Nautics (naval)
General Panzer (tanks)
Luttinen Cybernetics (high-tech)

- Sweets&Spices
Wonka
Moonbean Coffeehouse
Mr Tea

-Fruits&Health
MallWart
East West Traders
Gaia's BioCo

-Entertainment
Red Curtains
Mapster
Wis-Dome

-Tourism
Adventure Tours
Mile High Travels
Safari Hunters

And I also have plans for something that no one ever dared doing: FOUNDING MOVIES

...and I'm open to any ideas and suggestions