City sieges

[Naokaukodem]

Just an idea out of the blue.

A number of buildings would allow hammer only specialists. Example : small walls : 3 one hammer specialists. Forge : 3 two hammers specialists. Average walls : 3 more one hammer specialists. etc.

Ground enemy units would produce a ZOC that forbid the citizens of the enemy city to work the tiles around them, and the ones past them from the center of the city to its periphery.

Now, the city defense would depend directly on the number of hammers produced.

When a city is besieged, it can defend with its specialists. The more the siege lasts, the more the city population decreases, and the less they can have specialists producing hammers therefore defense. Big cities could resist longer and better. You could besiege a city doing nothing and wait it to die.

What do you think ?

 

[gunslinger6792]

i like the idea of having your cities production factor into its defense it really makes sense.

 

[Esoteric Arcane]

You can do this to some extent already.

Your units sieging the enemy sits on their improvement tiles, causing the city not to be able to use those tiles, i.e. starvation will occur making the city weaker in a long siege.

And you can also pillage their improvements, a good way to make a buck, plus you wont have to keep a unit there, although they would be able to work the default tile as opposed to not having access to it.

 

[Atwork]

Check out this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=459396


The idea I proposed was a specialist called a "city defender."

...a defender should be able to convert citizens to "City Defenders," each of whom would boost city defense by 2 points. The penalty would of course be that you're not working tiles, possibly placing the city in starvation. If a city was population 12, you could take the 12 workers off tiles and place them into city defense, yielding +24 city defense--but obviously the city would be dying rapidly.

The thread had some good ideas; it was a pretty good discussion, until the thread died

 

[Naokaukodem]

In fact it's not that much an idea out of the blue. I just forgot where it came from when writing it. It came from this :

A city shouldn't be able to defend alone without walls.

And it sounds plain logical. Without walls, units could enter the city and take the buildings easily. With 1UPT, it should be the story of 1 or two fights. I then imagine that in Civ6, planted cities should have automatically a wall, as this seems so vital. But I realise that letting the player to decide whether he wants a faster and lot more risky growing or a slower and more standard one to be pretty interesting.

Why this question ? Because I think that city sieges are badly represented, in nearly all iterations of Civ. When I prefer the more brutal march of Civ2 on lowly defended cities, I think that city warfare in History, except for famous sieges, haven't been that a big deal at all. To say all, most fights happened in campaign. When I'm trying to imagine the differences of urban warfare from one era to another, I feel there's something wrong, like something that has never been exploited in reality. Incidally ! most fights happened in the field, from antiquity to WWII and probably beyond.

It comes from two things IMO : first, the attackers don't want to risk their armies in cities, especially if they have the advantage of the number (more troops than the defenders). In cities, it's tricky to keep the control of the battles, as they are scattered and unpredictable. So the attackers must burn the more buildings they can in order to make the defenders to go out.
Second, the defenders do not want to see the attackers make their cities ruins with fire. So they prefer to fight out.
Third, the attackers don't want to take ruins. So they avoid as long as it's possible to attack cities.

It should be reflected in Civ.

First off, it shouldn't be such a big deal to take cities without walls. Without walls, regular units should use fire, as they actually do in Civ5. It should be easy to take a city without walls as long as we use fire. But, most of the buildings would be destroyed.
With walls, they should use ladders, rams and else. Artillery could use fire too.
BUT, it would make the taken cities ruins. You could choose not to use fire, but the battles would be a lot more difficult. Use this when your forces as far better and numerous.

Second, buildings importance should be higher. There should be more buildings in the game, and their bonuses would be key bonuses. So that, a defender would not want to fight inside his cities, and an attacker would not want to make those cities ruins. Field battles would be more numerous.

Taking a city without fire would be nearly impossible, even without walls. With weak Civ5 cities, it should be possible to sneak one or two units into them, what seems stupid. With the fire/no fire bit, it's completely a different matter. In order to take a city without walls, you would need either a very good adapted and big army without fire, or a couple units with fire. (But the city you would take would be a ruin.)

What do you think ?