Cities are too strong
- Thread starter McGreggD
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Snipergw
Warlord
"With several artillery, archers and melee units with the city bonus promotions along with ship bombardment" This is a ridiculous amount of units. When the enemy army is defeated, a few units should be enough. Even one siege unit, while uncontested, should take a city. The game is supposed to be fun and carpets of units are the opposite.
"cities are supposed to be hard to take. go try taking an entire city in real life with just one platoon LOL." A platoon is obviously too little but a small division can often be more than enough. Cities are civilian centers. Cities, if they realize their armies have been defeated, are notoriously prone to just raising a white flag and declaring themselves an open city, because a city without an army is basically meaningless. Even if you're the most defensible city in history, like say Tyre, it's only a matter of time until you fall. War is and has always been a matter of armies, sieges are rare and undesirable by everyone. On the topic of the game, sieges are just plain unfun: either you are strong enough to siege the city and it just stalls, or you are not, and it's a waste of time.
I took 80 damage, as Babylon with a Bowman in a forest, a 12 Combat Strength Composite bowman replacement against a walled capital. 80 damage! I can't maintain a siege when the enemy can basically knock a unit off the board within two tiles, every single turn. My UU Spearman was barely doing better, taking high 60.
City bombardment is far too strong. Cities should be far more vulnerable to land forces and fall fairly easily if you take out all the defending units. At the moment, you have to have multiple siege units and lots of infantry with drill, because the city will quickly murder the siege units when they get in range.
City bombardment is far too strong. Cities should be far more vulnerable to land forces and fall fairly easily if you take out all the defending units. At the moment, you have to have multiple siege units and lots of infantry with drill, because the city will quickly murder the siege units when they get in range.
So, are you Babylon or are you facing Babylon? I'm confused because you said you have a UU Spearman.
Either way:
What difficulty are you playing?
The Babylon Bowmans are very useful, they have indirect fire and this can be used in very interesting ways to defend and to attack from positions where nothing can attack them. If you're facing them... Watch out. If you're using them, try to put them in a position where the city can't attack them (they don't have indirect fire yet).
To conquer a city with walls you need siege machines, you can't expect to break walls with arrows haha... If the target is called "Babylon" it is preferable not to fight them as the classical era is the height of their defensive power.
There are other factors to consider:
1) What Pantheon got your enemy?
2) Tradition?
3) City on Hill?
Tradition yes. More health would be fine. But not essentially acting like a ranged unit an era or two ahead. Their own composite archer did about a fourth of the damage.
3rd and 4th UC mod. Babylon gets a UU Spearman. My target was the Celts.
And this isn't about attacking the city. This is purely about the city pummeling my units.
Can you upload a screenshot of the situation? It would help to know why the city is so powerful.
In any case, it is perfectly normal that a city of 20+ CS can do so much damage to a Compo. I don't know if the Celts have any kind of pantheon that makes their cities more powerful.
No doubt a capital with tradition is quite capable of doing that damage at that stage of the game, that's why siege machines are necessary.
My recommendation is the same as always:
Unlock the catapults and create 2 or 3 ASAP. In the meantime, you can keep fighting to get more experience (put your archers in safe positions) or else accept peace until you have your catapults and/or your war weariness is under control again.
The city will continue to do considerable damage. But so will you, and unlike the city you can move your troops to safety... In a few turns the city will fall, and in fact, if I'm not mistaken, when the city has little HP left it tends to focus the Melee troops.
I do think there is a key difference between a city's offense and defense in this discussion.
The offense is the most sensitive subject. A city that can two shot current era units is not in a good place to me, tradition or not. My personal sweet spot is for a city to do about ~15 points of damage, with a super city like a capital doing 20-25. And then 10ish damage against highly defensive units. The 5 or lower club I reserve for the units with the half damage against city effect.
Than we come down to the defense. With defense we actually have 3 levers in the design that we can pull:
1) Raw CS (aka how much damage the city takes per shot)
2) Health (how much damage the city can take overall)
3) Healing (how fast the city recovers).
Coming out of the last patch (I haven't played the newest one enough to say for certain)...I think healing is too low. Even if a city can take mountains of punishment, it takes forever and a day to heal it right now (even if my city survived a war...I knew it would just get taken in a war 15 turns later...as it was still very hurt). So I wouldn't mind if we lowered the CS a bit and looked at adding more healing to walls and castles (not a lot, even just 5-10 more is a pretty solid jump). Or if you didn't want to give it straight up more healing, you could modify the defense project to increase healing based on walls/castles/etc. But regardless of what we decide, we have a lot of flexibility with defense. So I would rather the CS number be used to get the offense to a good place...and then lets tune the other levers to get defense in a perfect position.
vyyt
Deity
I think there is something wrong with the city RCS. I agree with @Stalker0 about the desired numbers (maybe I would go for even slightly lower numbers). His thoughts on defense sound good to me too.
Does anyone know how the RCS (and other numbers) are (or should be) calculated? There are some strange reports on GitHub about units affecting the numbers - sometimes even negatively. I created this thread:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/city-hp-and-rcs-how-do-they-work.657343/
Can someone with knowledge about the calculations respond here or there?
Does anyone know how the RCS (and other numbers) are (or should be) calculated? There are some strange reports on GitHub about units affecting the numbers - sometimes even negatively. I created this thread:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/city-hp-and-rcs-how-do-they-work.657343/
Can someone with knowledge about the calculations respond here or there?
The difference between how effective ranged siege units are against cities (catapult, trebuchet etc) in vanilla game and community patch is massive. I do tend to agree that taking cities with community patch is considerably more difficult (and yes I am aware melee units trump ranged in community patch now).
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