Civ III: Conquests Patch Notice

[Rampage]

Pretty Please Firaxis, release the patch soon, otherwise the holidays will be ruined

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by Commander Bello
I prefer interesting games as well. Do you have played the Napoleon Ages conquest as a Prussian?
There you are surrounded by potential enemies who all have better units than you (French Imperial Guard 8/8/1 vs. Prussian Fusiliers 4/4/1, to give just one example). Nevertheless you can win. Even if you face a two-fronts situation, that is if you have to fight the French and the Russians (having conquered half of Austria) simultaneously. And some Ottomans just attacking your open flank at the south..
And you can do it without the help of the RNG - you just have to analyse the strategic situation and make up your plans accordingly.

I agree with all you write here, but note that your A=4 unit has 14.3% chance of winning against a D=8 unit on plains (all veteran). Not good, but enough for a good player. Now, assume the new combat model, and your A=4 unit's chance of winning drops down to 0.2% This will make a difficult situation hopeless, and I seriously doubt the meaning was such a difference in effective strength.

Sorry, but this is just the argument, which already made me sick in this thread. Here, a single battle is taken into account and not the whole situation. Even, if the 2 attackers would have a 99% chance to win, the counter-attack would blow away the surviving 1 attacker (because you needed 2 attackers, it is clear that one would have died).
So, the 99% don't make you win the war. You still have to have reserves and - even more interesting - have to check, what reserves your opponent might have and how soon he can bring them to the theatre.

Yes, but those challenges are also around with the current combat model. But the current combat model also adds the challenge of uncertainty and having to know where and when to take chances. Those challenges have always been important in warfare - and in computer games.

And this seems to be the most obvious difference between your attitude towards the game, and mine.
I don't look for the nation with the "best" units. I choose one and then I try my very best to make my way. If at a given point of time, my opponents have better units and war cannot be avoided, then I have to develop a strategy which allows me to win anyway.

...and neither do I (although I can understand how my argumentation made you think so). I prefer all-random games to get new challenges each time.

If chances are better for the "better" units, the need for this successful strategy of mine becomes more urgent - it will be crucial.
If this doesn't prove for deeper strategy than I just don't know, what will....
To simply check the nation with the best Ancient Age units in my eyes is some kind of exploit. Maybe, some people have a different opinion. Maybe, these people think that they are really doing a hard job by choosing the "best" nation, possibly playing on a modified map which they know and so on.
According to my view, this is just simple.

I agree with all of this, and that's part of my point. A good game should not even have such simple, "best" solutions. A good game shall give the player several possible strategies to try out. With the new combat model, this balance would be severly skewed towards selecting Perisa or similar nations, or rushing towards iron before anyone else.
I'm not saying I would use this best strategy all the time, because that would surely not be fun, but it would also take away fun, knowing that there is one single, best strategy.

If it would have been a flawed change... Thanks to the complaints of many people, we will not know about it.

Well, even Firaxis has stated so. And there is good reason to hope that such an editable feature will see the light in the official patch.

As you stated above the ancient age is unbalanced anyway. Nevertheless, people manage to survive, even if the Persians are around.
To be honest, people seem to have been hypnotized by the mathematics but have missed to take into account that it is not just one battle which will be fought.

The fact that some nations are better than others in the ancient age now, is no reason to make a change that multiplies this unbalance.
And I have not missed the fact that there are several battles, quiote opposite, in fact. It is because there are many battles to be fought that I like the fact that each individual battle has a degree of uncertainty, but that I can control the outcome of the war by cleverly choosing where and when to take my chances.

 

[Harrison79]

Hey, will dynamic join ever make it to C3C? As most of you probably know it was present in civ2 multiplayer and made really large games possible where ppl could join and quit and then join again...

And, if not dynamic join is possible with the current engine (as we all know it has problems without it) - then please at least include a AI-takeover option. So if you play a larger non ladder game - you could choose to have the AI play that civ whos player suddenly decides to quit instead of just having it erased from the map by the hand of God.

Thank you for o otherwise really great C3C

 

[USC]

Hi all (and Firaxis/BA too, on the off chance you're reading this),

Any thoughts on what might happen if I just plain skip patch 1.02 and go straight to the new one? I'm not planning on playing the Conquests anytime soon, so the things it fixes are not really all that important for me. And I'm on dial-up, so 5+ MB for unessential stuff is a crying shame.

I have an English version, not sure if UK or US English -- if such a difference even exists. (We get English versions here in the Czech Republic -- luckily for me!)

USC

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by wilbill
I have to question this assertion, CB. What I learned in my military history classes was that the balance of power tends to shift from the offense to the defense and back based upon technological developments and improvements in tactical doctrine. There have been historical periods during which no effective defense was available for certain technologies. The reverse has also been true - perhaps you can tell us about the advantage the attacker had during WWI at Ypres, the Somme, or Verdun.

Although this is going to become more and more off-topic:
You are absolutely right about the fact, that technological advances will favor sometimes the attacker, at other times the defender. Nevertheless, assumed that both sides have similar military capacities AND technologies are balanced, the attacker is the one with the better deck.
Verdun is a rather bad example for the defender to have the advantage, since the German offensive there could have been successful, if the Entente would not have been successful at the Somme [edit] so forcing the Germans to re-locate large units to that theatre.[edit end]

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by Ridgelake

[...]

Under the proposed settings, the game would revolve around the luck of acquiring necessary resources. If, in succession, a civ were to not have iron, salt, rubber, and then oil, they would be doomed.

Notice that I left out horses. Horsemen would be near useless. Even knights would struggle against fortified pikes. Forget attacking muskets with knights. But woe be the nation without iron. Their spears get run over by knights, MDIs, or longbows. The point of Charis' math is that it would take an obscene number of spears to hold off a modest number of attack-4 units. Or likewise, it would take an obscene number of archers or horsemen to capture iron from a spear-defended city. And forget about going after a pike-defended city with archers and horsemen, it would be near impossible.

CB, is that the kind of game that you want to play? That is what you would be getting.[..]

As far as I experienced it up to now, a civ without iron, saltpeter, rubber and oil will be doomed anyway. So, this cannot be an argument against the new combat system at all.

And to your second paragraph: this seems to be exactly, what has happened in history, so I would have no problems with that.
In fact, muskets ended the era of knights. And a (walled) town, city, metropolis is the CIV equivalence to a medieval castle, so I wouldn't be astonished not to be able to conquer it with just a handful of of archers and horsemen.
The answer to this lies in strategy. I will gladly agree, that a new combat system would require some re-definition of current strategies. Why not? Especially in the example of the cities, catapults and trebuchets would become essential - in my eyes this would be 'historically correct'.

 

[Grey Fox]

Originally posted by Commander Bello


As far as I experienced it up to now, a civ without iron, saltpeter, rubber and oil will be doomed anyway. So, this cannot be an argument against the new combat system at all.

Hardly. It's just about using the things you got effectively.

If you don't have iron and really want it, build an army of archers and go for a city with iron.

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by TheNiceOne

I agree with all you write here, but note that your A=4 unit has 14.3% chance of winning against a D=8 unit on plains (all veteran). Not good, but enough for a good player. Now, assume the new combat model, and your A=4 unit's chance of winning drops down to 0.2% This will make a difficult situation hopeless, and I seriously doubt the meaning was such a difference in effective strength.
[...]
And I have not missed the fact that there are several battles, quiote opposite, in fact. It is because there are many battles to be fought that I like the fact that each individual battle has a degree of uncertainty, but that I can control the outcome of the war by cleverly choosing where and when to take my chances.

TheNiceOne,

after your detailled answer it seems, that in principle our individual attitudes are not that different as I initially have thought.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Prussian Fusilier will have a chance of 1 to 7 to win against the French Imperial Guard (I did not calculate the odds by myself, I rely on you here) is way too high with the given stats - as far as I see it. [edit] And, by the way, is not proved by my experience. In fact, my win resulted from the fact that I've built some fortresses (barricades) west of Frankfurt and Brussels, thus controlling the French's path to Prussia. Then they got a garrison of Fusiliers and large batteries, and some counter-attack curraciers and whoooh... my victory points exploded.... although I had to produce my troops like hell, since the French took them out and out... It really was a massacre.
If you translate those numbers to individual men with clubs, this would mean that 4000 (Prussian) men with clubs will defeat 8000 (French) men with clubs in one of seven cases. Here, the one to five hundred assumption seems to be more 'realistic'.

I totally agree with you, that some uncertainty about the outcome of a single battle will be the 'salt in the soup' (German saying). What I for my person hate, is that the uncertainty at least in the majority of cases seems to be much too high.
This is caused by a very poor set-up of the individual stats, according to my view. Since all ADM values are integers, there is not much gradation. This could be solved be a re-definition, in which a spearman could have a defense value of 20 and a swordsman an attack value of 27 (just examples... could be anything else).

 

[The Last Conformist]

CB: Horsemen being useless being exactly like has happened in history? I do hope you didn't meant to say that ...

And I wouldn't agree that muskets ended the era of knights. When effective muskets came along, heavy cav had alread lost it's total battlefield dominance to pikes and longbows/crossbows, but nonetheless heavily armoured cavalry remained in use well into the 17th C, with armour weights peaking in the 16th.

But that's realism. Surely you must agree that gameplay would suffer if you had to beeline for Mil Trad to have chance to get thru Muskets? Now you can have other priorities, and still retain some realistic offensive capacity.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Commander Bello

If you translate those numbers to individual men with clubs, this would mean that 4000 (Prussian) men with clubs will defeat 8000 (French) men with clubs in one of seven cases. Here, the one to five hundred assumption seems to be more 'realistic'.

That's not making any sense. The attack and defense values were never intended to represent anything beyond abstract fighting ability.

That said, 4k clubmen defeating 8k would be unexpected, but hardly odd. One in seven seems alot more right to me than one in five hundred.

 

[Arathorn]

To follow up on the 8 vs. 4 example, even under CB's very odd interpretation of 8000 clubmen vs. 4000 clubmen...one of the biggest problems with the proposed rulechange is that the 8000 clubmen would kill all 4000 clubmen with 8000 clubmen left (absolutely ZERO casualties/damage) well over half the time (57%) [assuming 4 hps for each unit]. THAT'S THE "REALISM" YOU WANT????

As to the realism of a civ without iron/saltpeter/rubber being destroyed, while it may or may not be true, it makes for a LOUSY game. With the Civ3 game as it is, I have had a number of games with no access to important strategic resources, even on high difficulty levels, and made it work. In CB's game, I guess the luck of starting position is the only all-important random number of the game...can we just cut cards next time and get it over with faster?

Arathorn

 

[Aggie]

This thread is getting old very very fast

CB, I know where you stand now after 20 posts explaining it!!

And you won't convince me. Sorry.

EDIT: I'm not saying that you aren't allowed your opinion, but I really hate endless discussions that go nowhere.

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by Aggie
This thread is getting old very very fast

CB, I know where you stand now after 20 posts explaining it!!

And you won't convince me. Sorry.

EDIT: I'm not saying that you aren't allowed your opinion, but I really hate endless discussions that go nowhere.

So I really have to apologize to have forced you to read. Sorry, sorry, sorry!

It is very strange, but very common as well at all internet forums that people complain about being forced to read postings, they don't want to read. Coincidentally, most times these postings express opinions different from the complaining one's.

Well, I'm a nice guy, so I will give you a little hint: There is a scroll bar to the right. Simply make use of it.

 

[Commander Bello]

Originally posted by The Last Conformist


That's not making any sense. The attack and defense values were never intended to represent anything beyond abstract fighting ability.

That said, 4k clubmen defeating 8k would be unexpected, but hardly odd. One in seven seems alot more right to me than one in five hundred.

TheLastConformist,

I think the pure fact of knights having been the most dominant unit type during centuries already proves that horsemen became obsolete after some time.
And knights have become obsolete as well. Since you are German like me, maybe you know about Soltau (Lower Saxony). Somewhere there is the place of the last knight's battle on German soil, which took place around 1550, if I remember correctly. The fact that knights weren't dominating the battle grounds any longer mainly is linked to muskets, indeed.
Crossbowmen (btw, not included in CIV for some strange reason) were unsuccessfully banned by the pope in the early 1100s. Nevertheless, both the crossbowmen and the knights played their role during the following centuries.(your posting one before the one I quote here)

Of course, the ADM stats shall not substitute real numbers of men involved. I just put the example to express my point of view.

Since you think a 1 to 7 chance of 4k men beating 8k men to be realistic, and me thinking about this very differently, this will be a point in which we obviously cannot meet.
Anyway, I would invite you to discuss via email, if you would like. No need to bother others with a discussion about this special point.

 

[Qitai]

Commander Bello> I think one of the problem is that we do not really have a choice to "try thing out". God knows when the next patch is going to be. So, we just have to make do with the best analysis we can have. And it does seems that the proposed new changes will swing things to the other end. As to whether the current combat model is balance, there is no right answer. But as you can see, a lot of people thinks it is balance already. Personally, I think it should be less random, but the proposed changes is indeed too much.

 

[Ridgelake]

I am going to bow out of this thread. It is clear that all parties involved are not likely to change their respective perspectives.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Commander Bello


TheLastConformist,

Totally off-topic, but I'm curious as to why you left out the spaces in my nick?

I think the pure fact of knights having been the most dominant unit type during centuries already proves that horsemen became obsolete after some time.

Yes? I honestly fail to see your point here; my and TheNiceOne's complaint was that Horsemen would be hopeless at defeating fortified Spearmen, their "natural" enemy.

And knights have become obsolete as well. Since you are German like me, maybe you know about Soltau (Lower Saxony). Somewhere there is the place of the last knight's battle on German soil, which took place around 1550, if I remember correctly. The fact that knights weren't dominating the battle grounds any longer mainly is linked to muskets, indeed.

Actually, I'm not German; I'm simply making a year as an exchange student here.

And no, the knights' loss of dominance was not due to muskets. They'd already lost it when muskets became commonplace in the 16th C.

Since you think a 1 to 7 chance of 4k men beating 8k men to be realistic, and me thinking about this very differently, this will be a point in which we obviously cannot meet.
Anyway, I would invite you to discuss via email, if you would like. No need to bother others with a discussion about this special point.

In the spirit of your reply to Aggie, I think those uninterested can simply skip this discussion. But I really don't have anything more to say on the topic beyond refering to the plentitude of historical battles where a smaller force has defeated a larger one (of roughly equal technological level) thanks to superior leadership, favourable weather, catching the enemy off-guard, and so on. One in seven is probably too high, but, I dare say, more realistic than one in five hundred.

 

[kring]

Looks like Monday at the earliest for the patch, according to Jesse.

 

[Thunderfall]

Here is a message from Jesse about the patch:

C3C Community:

Unfortunately, the patch will not be released today. We had to fix a problem with choosing Random Civs in MP which slipped the schedule. It looks like it will be Monday at the earliest.

Thanks for you continued patience! -- Jesse Smith

 

[Grey Fox]

no!