Cities are too strong

McGreggD

Chieftain
Joined
Jun 19, 2006
Messages
43
I played my first game on prince as Rome on the giant earth map with TSL. This map is very crowded in europe so my only option was to expand by conquering but it was a struggle to even take the first city state. I had to restart several times, rushing legions didn't work because by the time I got them the city state had walls and my legions were doing pathetic damage to the city. I even had statue of zeus but it still wasn't enough. Restarted and tried archer rush but the damage is pathetic and the city is healing too much, they didn't even have walls but my archers would have taken far too long to bring the city health down. Restarted one more time and rushed sailing to try siege them down with ships, this tactic worked and the city fell eventually but it was still tedious.

I think cities shouldn't be that hard to take early in the game, the healing or HP should be nerfed.
 
@McGreggD ,

1) Archers are quite weak against cities - that's intentional to prevent easy early archer rushes. You should bring some siege units.

2) I think city states are a bit stronger than normal cities (I could be wrong).

3) If you take the drill promotion line on your melee units, you should be able to deal significant damage to cities. If the (non capital) city does not have walls, you should be able to take it even with just melee units.
 
2) I think city states are a bit stronger than normal cities (I could be wrong).
City States are capitals. Thus, they have palaces. Palaces give a city 3:c5strength:
 
Rushing cities, or at the very least capitals, with archers should not be viable. Even catapults is dubious, I'm not sure I like what happens to the game dynamic with total conquests so early, but maybe conquerors need it. Other than these super-early edge cases, though, cities are way too tanky. There's health bonuses and CS bonuses everywhere. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to siege down a city even with minimal defenders, every battle feels like Constantinople or Vienna. City ranged strike also does so much damage, sometimes it takes %50 health off a unit in a single turn.

Shilling my point from the version thread here, agreeing with Gregg's frustrations: if your navy is dead, or your army is dead, the city should also be dead. It should not be equivalent to having to fight 6+ more units in health to drain and shots to tank.
 
If your new to VP it can probably feel that way.
If your not far ahead in tech you need exp for your units (including siege), compared to vanilla you need siege (range or heavy promoted other units) with melee to tank.
There are also religious options to helps, orders (religious building) for exp and later when religion is big enough, reformation beliefs.
Heroic epic provides a special promo for +10% combat strength.
 
New to current VP versions. Currently war planning at the moment. When does it become viable to capture a coastal plains city CS=23 with walls and palace using only a navy? How many melee/ranged naval units would I need and what era assuming enemy offers no defense except for city ranged attack? Thanks.
 
New to current VP versions. Currently war planning at the moment. When does it become viable to capture a coastal plains city CS=23 with walls and palace using only a navy? How many melee/ranged naval units would I need and what era assuming enemy offers no defense except for city ranged attack? Thanks.
A good mix of 6-7 Caravels/Galleass should suffice, but that depends on how many coastal tiles you can attack the city from.
 
I find strong cities really hurt the AI, and for humans it's just a longer practice in tedium of how long can you farm city states and other AI's for super promoted units.
Naturally everything has it's problems..

So some crazy (and sane :)) suggestions

1) I don't know what the consensus is on land vs naval balance, but naval promotion power against cities should probably be reduced, and Ironclad's bonus to cities dropped entirely. If flavor is a concern maybe give them cover that's lost on upgrade instead?

2) I don't think Lighthouse/Harbor should give CS bonuses at all. Some cities are already extremely hard to conquer under certain terrain conditions, and I feel this extrapolates that. Naval unit's are way harder to ̶k̶e̶e̶p̶ ̶a̶l̶i̶v̶e̶ promote than land units so.. XP?

3) So while I believe certain civ's need low city CS to function well past the early game (else they tend to fall behind) I think it may also necessitate a city CS scalar for AI's against other AI's whom they are greatly outpaced by. I don't know though, that sounds complicated assuming it's even feasible and I'm really just working under the assumption that steamrolling could be a big undesirable side effect. If only to slow it, not stop it. Any bonus should be small.

4) I've always been really disappointed with barbarians, and feel that they aren't much of a factor for the AI either XP or authority wise. So maybe every forest tile should have a 4% chance per turn (increasing by 1% for each adjacent forest tile) to spawn a barbarian? :lol: The naval barbarian presence is also particularly lacking, so what if starting in the medieval ages every turn there is a 20% chance to summon a random barbarian armada on the edge of the map?

5) Promotions are overpowered. They really should be limited by era.

6) Everybody should have France's UA that scales combat strength for each consecutive attack.. but reversed.

Spoiler :
In case you were unawares, those last three were a joke. Well.. half serious. Like 47%
 
@Snipergw , I agree with city RCS being too strong, but it seems the majority of people like it this way. I usually decrease the city RCS to deal about 10 HP to concurrent units. This does not work in the current version, so I remove the city RCS completely. I don't understand what's the appeal of the murderous cities.
 
cities aren't too strong, i think they're nicely balanced at the moment. if anything they're even on the slightly weaker side to how I'd prefer.

With several artillery, archers and melee units with the city bonus promotions along with ship bombardment you can take a city in one-three turns.

cities are supposed to be hard to take. go try taking an entire city in real life with just one platoon LOL.

Make sure you're using the right units for the right job. It's no use trying to take a city with a unit that has flanking bonus instead of city attack bonus for example. Same goes for artillery units, get those siege promotions.
 
New to current VP versions. Currently war planning at the moment. When does it become viable to capture a coastal plains city CS=23 with walls and palace using only a navy? How many melee/ranged naval units would I need and what era assuming enemy offers no defense except for city ranged attack? Thanks.

It ofc depends what era, in the early eras you can shoot and move with boats, then you need two melee ships, one to capture city and one to block with (depending a bit on sourroundings), keep swapping/moving around ranged ships out of city and ranged units bombardment range.
It the opponent have a lot of units around its likely to trade hands a couple of times, this sucks if it costs you a ship every time (affordable on low difficulties).

Later eras you want to wall of melee ships with ranged behind, say around 5 of each but more ranged than melee, the more naval battle you play the better you learn to judge the situation, this could be few if you control the seas or quite a lot if you're up against spain or carthage (I've seen diety continent games from other players with huge fleets).
Its often best with more ranged ships and go for dauntless (takes a bit of grinding to get that promo) melee ships.

As always, keeping your stuff alive so it promotes if better in the long term than trading units.
Something I struggle with is to keep track of the most experienced ones, and not go overboard with units (this can be good but also means exp is spread out).

You want to peak at the tech tree to make priorities.
There is only one pair of naval units in each era and upgrades are generally huge.
However the naval units arent always in the most (by human players) sought after techs.
 
In fact, cities are very easy to conquer in early game, if you eliminate the enemy army, there is absolutely nothing the city can do to stop your troops. Unless it manages to obtain walls, which if that were the case, by logic and balance you would be forced to use siege units, or very well trained troops.

It seems your Melee troops were not promoted for Drill and City Assault. That's a big problem.

How many archers did you use?, it's pretty rare that a city without walls can withstand the constant siege of +3 archers.

City states tend to be weaker than many of the players' cities early on, however by mid-game they gain a considerably higher amount of strength. Which is fine, honestly, city states have a very pitiful army, both in the quantity of troops and the quality of troops... Let alone tech, a weak city would only make it easier to conquer them.
 
It's the opposite, really, cities now very easy to take, even coastal capitals. I play last 2-3 betas on Immortal and have more problem on diplo front, as soon as you show yourself a capable conqueror take 1 (sometime 2 cities) then everyone is not happy with you. Then they don't want to trade and not friendly toward you, so I try to play peaceful game at least to late medieval or early renaissance, as much as possible.
More problem the game itself, diplomatic and happiness, you have to be very careful not to expand to fast
 
City states are really hard to take in the early game. Iirc they start with walls and got extra combat strength. I'd simply never attack a city state in ancient era... maybe if you brought catapults but it will still be a hard siege. As others have said, bringing drill and cover promoted melee units will help your range and siege damage the city enough for them to start the assault. You also picked quite a challenging start with those settings. I'm sure that after refining your tactics and maybe your strategy a bit you'd find cities to be not as strong as you thought.
 
You can take a city state early on with 6 spears. But it has to be a rush. Preferably, the spears have a few drill promotions.
 
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