Civ3 style artillery - possible?

this is how you can make the catapults, etc, bomb like civ3. new animations would probably be needed to represent the long range bombing, instead of the front line bombing. play a little of the desert war scenario to see how airplanes bomb

edit: thing is, would the AI automatically know how to use the long range bombardment, or will they still send in catapults as they do now

 

this is how you can make the catapults, etc, bomb like civ3. new animations would probably be needed to represent the long range bombing, instead of the front line bombing. play a little of the desert war scenario to see how airplanes bomb

edit: thing is, would the AI automatically know how to use the long range bombardment, or will they still send in catapults as they do now

I quess that Python modification is needed for this.

 

Artillery should be disabled from regular combat altogether, which would also mean that they could not be used attacking enemy units directly. Some AI scripting would still probably be needed - although this may be avoidable by linking all the artillery's uses into the bombardment ability.

 

I don't know if im right, but UnitAIs in CIV4BuildInfos.xml can be the key for making the AI use Civ3 Arty correctly. Still i don't know what file does UnitAIs reference?

 

Hmm, gotta keep that in mind. First, however, we'd need to figure out how to mod in the Civ3 style artillery in the first place.

 

Personally I found the artillery in CIV3 immensly unrealistic. In history, if a modern artillery, or a catapult, attacked a bunch of units, these units would usually fight back--and in modern terms, fire back--so the fact that artillery units can die when attacking a group is VERY realistic. I'd like to see a bunch of cannons sitting on the hills firing at an army without the army attacking back at the same time; it isn't going to happen.

Thought there's one change they should make, but this would edit the entire game. Maybe if the Artillery is going along with a group of defensive units, the artillery should share the defensive bonus? This would be much more realistic than the artillery just sitting there, alone, and firing in all directions, especially as stupidly far as Civ3 allowed, and not being attacked back.

(When Arabic catapults attacked Jerusulem during the Crusades, the defenders of the city fought back by taking the Catapults, pelting them with arrows, and even firing back with other Catapults, and even with an army around the catapults, many of them fell, were set on fire by flaming arrows, or were destroyed by stones. Artillery units are historically not indestructable when they attack a city/group, so why make them? Don't act like Sid didn't know what he was doing; he had a very valid reason for making the Artillery the way they are.)

 

Modern artillery can fire to ranges in excess of 40 km. Ground forces can not fight them back, no matter how much they wanted to do so. Artillery isn't called the queen of the battlefield for nothing.

That doesn't mean however that artillery would be some invulnerable superweapon. If done Civ3 style, they are completely unable to defend themselves in "melee" combat, and thus need to be guarded by other units at all times. If that guard fails, the artillery will be destroyed or captured. Very realistic as far as modern artillery goes.

Now there could be counter-artillery artillery, where an artillery unit could destroy another artillery unit in a stack with bombardment, but I don't know how that could be implemented.

You do have a point there with pre-gunpowder artillery though. Engaging in melee combat can be justified for catapults, trebuchets and other such primitive, short range artillery. Still, I don't see why they should be able to reduce city defenses without any risk to themselves but not attack units? In any case, modern artillery is vastly different (unless the Civ4 artillery is supposed to represent field guns, but in that case real artillery is missing altogether).

 

The whole idea of bombarding artillery is so that the defender cannot just happily sit back in his city and defend. Just like pillaging the countryside brings the defenders out to deal with the "unfair" problem, bombarding artillery would do the same thing for city defenders.

I think that is the solution to our problem "catapults [etc.] would have been counterattacked in melee combat." Well, on the defender's turn, they can attack the attackers. To prevent artillery from becoming too powerful, there is no defensive bombard (I don't know how you would implement that anyway).

Anyway, just a thought.

Thanks.

 

Yes, that's my big disappointment with Civ4

 

Civ 3 Siege units:

-0 attack and defense meaninf it could not attack and if attacked, it would be captured and be usable by your opponent.
-Bombard value worked as the attack value when determining if damage was done and a Rate of Fire value determined how many hp the attacked unit could lose. There was no risk to the unit.
-This made these units closer to reality, for those that like it.

Civ 4 Siege units:

-Have strength value allowing them to attack and defend. In either of these cases, the unit is at risk.
-Can bombard a cities natural defenses to allow for easier attack. Just like the Civ 3 units, there is no risk to the unit.
-Can have Accuracy promotion allowing for greater damage in city bombardment and Collateral Damage promotion causing damage to all units in a stack.

If the Civ 3 method was introduced into Civ 4 this would be the result:

Units that can't attack or defend that can bombard a cities defenses to weaken it (at no risk) and can then bombard the units themselves (again at no risk). They can get the same promotions (from Barracks, West Point, Civics, etc. and/or from highly successful bombing attacks) which means that a siege unit with double collateral damage and accuracy could devistate a city or group of units at no risk at all. This would make siege units very overpowered. This is why these units attack and defend just as all other units do.

The only way to implement the Civ 3 style would be to remove the possibility of promotions from siege units and give them ROF. They do no collateral damage, only X damage based on the roll with X number of rolls allowed.

Still part of the problem is that even the Civ 3 siege units were overpowered. Take a stack of 10 Artillery to a city you wanted to take, bombard the crap out of their units and then easily sweep in with Tanks.

While the new system is not realistic, it prevents siege units from being too powerful and forces more tactical war. With the Civ 3 system, just bomb the crap out of a city and sweep in with a single type of unit.

 

The new artillery system sucks thats true but if artillery could lower city defense and do collateral damage at the same time it would be a bit overpowered so it should only do damage to units in forts and cities once the defenses have been reduced to 0.

Maybe to avoid huge artillery stacks bombarding a city and weakening it to the point where it could easily be taken all in 1 turn there could be both increased cost of artillery and defending artillery can automatically fire on the attacking stack.

 

I think that artillery should be able to fire from more than 1 square away. Its silly seeing a catapult or cannon attacking a swordsman/musketman or what not. As to bringing 10 artillery to take a city, wouldn't the defender just need 1 or 2 artillery in place to bring down the attacker's tanks and support units also? If artillery can fire from say 3-4 spaces out in the later years when tanks are available, then there's little chance that an invading stack could roll in and clean the town out in 1 turn. That means the attacker would have to spread his units out, which opens up the ability for the defender to use quick strike units to counter attack the flank and the exposed artillery if the attacker had spread them out also.

While I think capturing artillery would be novel, I think it should be random, and pretty infrequent, as its not as likely you wouldn't destroy the equipment during the attack (or the previous owners sabatoged it).

Never played civ 3 too much, never got to experiance artillery. I'm not sure I like the idea of zone of control though. Seems it should be up to the player to attack which unit is in his radius, rather than it happening automatically. Does it happen for mutiple units that enter the control? That seems unbalanced to get 2+ longe range strikes per turn.

Personally I would set it up like this to begin with, tweek if necassry:
Catapult - range of 2 spaces out from center. 5-20% collateral dmg, 2-3 units max.
Cannon - range 3 15-30% collateral dmg, 3-4 units
Artillery - range 4 25-40% collateral dmg 4-6 units

Hopefully this is doable. If not now, later when we get more control with the SDK.

 

You could give artillery a bombard range of 1 (or 2 for modern stuff) with the stealth characteristic to make it very hard to intercept.
You could also just give it a very high retreat rate (70-90%) so that you wouldn't risk it every time you attacked with it. This could simulate the difficulty of attacking artillery as it bombards you.
The only thing that really disappoints me about Civ4's artillery is that it can't be captured and it can't bombard across water.
Oh, right. Also the whole no defensive bombard thing.
Hm.

 

Artillery's effects would obviously have to be reduced drastically if they were changed to Civ3 style non-combat units. Lowering city defenses should also depend on the units strenght, just like damage to units. Artillery doing damage to both the units and the city defences with the same attack isn't necessarily overpowered either, since the remaining city defences reduce the damage done to the units. So to getting to the units would mean long bombardments to first reduce the city defences and gradually increasing the damage done to the units.

 

==While I think capturing artillery would be novel, I think it should be random, and pretty infrequent, as its not as likely you wouldn't destroy the equipment during the attack (or the previous owners sabatoged it).==

I agree, especially because in Conquests you paid no maintainance on captured arty, but it had no handicap like captured workers. So I would have 10-15 catapults and cannons from early conquests, and when I got the tech I would upgrade them all and have 10-15 artillery pieces with no maintainance costs.

==Never played civ 3 too much, never got to experiance artillery. I'm not sure I like the idea of zone of control though. Seems it should be up to the player to attack which unit is in his radius, rather than it happening automatically. Does it happen for mutiple units that enter the control? That seems unbalanced to get 2+ longe range strikes per turn.==

I believe one gun fired at every unit. So if you had three seige weapons, the first three units to come into the ZOC would be fired on once each. It was a good system and a good replacement for the Civ1&2 way where you could not move through territory adjacent to hostile <i> or neutral </i> units, which allowed a few primitive units to block off and thus claim an entire continent. Although you could fool this system by sending cannon fodder units through first to exhaust the autofire. Also, seige weapons and fighters (and until Conquests bombers) could not actually kill a unit, just reduce it to one HP, and in Civ3 that did not reduce combat stats as it seems to in Civ4.

 

Which isn't even close to a single tile. If we were looking at actual ranges, there isn't a unit in the game that can attack beyond the tile it's actually in.

Ground forces fight back just fine, because there isn't a single modern army in the world that doesn't incorporate organic artillery in an infantry division. Fighting back, in military terms, is called "counterbattery fire". Unless there's a huge disparity between the equipment and training of the two armies, artillery brigades will destroy each other in short order. It's painfully easy to calculate the position of enemy artillery the moment they let loose with their guns.

And let's not forget: artillery doesn't destroy units. Ever. Artillery softens them up so that OTHER forces can destroy those units. Artillery is of absolutely no value whatsoever unless used in a supporting role.

The most unrealistic thing about artillery in the game is that you have ENTIRE DIVISIONS of the stuff wandering about the map. Not attached to regular units, not used as support, but just thousands of pieces of artillery marching about willy-nilly completely independent of regular armies. That has NEVER happened in the real world; anyone dumb enough to use their artillery like this would be shot by their superiors for gross incompetence.

If you want realism then get rid of the artillery unit and just assume that it's organic to your infantry - which is exactly how it worked in real life. It would also solve every problem that a separate artillery unit now poses in the game.

Max

 

I agree, turning artillery into a normal combat unit, as it was in Civ 1&2, was a big mistake for realism.

That I don't agree with. Some armies, Napoleon's and the Russian/Red Armies for example, emphasized artillery to a much higher extent than other armies. An army beseiging a city needs more and heavier artillery than one fighting on an open plain where manuverability is what counts. Having an independent artillery unit is very good, it just shouldn't be able to operate well independently. This particular system was good in Civ3, returning to the Civ1&2 model is the problem.

 

You're confusing a higher-than-normal amount of organic artillery with actual, independent artillery units. No one has used, uses, or will ever use independent artillery as modeled in Civ. Despite what the organizational tree for any army says, artillery doesn't operate apart from the units it's supporting; it's whole purpose in being is support. It certainly doesn't operate as an independent unit civ-style.

One of the largest deployments of "independent" artillery in history occurred at the Battle of Borodino (Napoleon's invasion of Russia). Although most of the French artillery was classed as its own corps, and operated as such tactically, it never - and I do mean never - marched off on its own apart from the rest of the army. Even the Russians during that era wouldn't have done something that stupid. No matter that the artillery was classed as its own corp, it was entirely organic to the army it supported.

So historically you'd never get a Civ-style independent artillery unit. Just wouldn't happen. On the scale we're talking about all artillery is organic.

If you want to model *more* artillery support than is normal, you could just make special units for the nations in question and give them a higher combat strength. Or first-strike capability.

Max

 

I'm often confused but not this time I hope. I see where you're coming from, but it's hard to classify Big Bertha for example as "higher-than-normal amount of organic artillery". The German guns shelling Paris during Bismark's war were hardly acting in support of infantry operations. As for your point that artillery "never - and I do mean never - marched off on its own apart from the rest of the army", I agree completely, that's my only complaint (aside from bugs) with Civ4. In Civ3 you "wouldn't have done something that stupid" unless you wanted a warrior to capture or destroy your 20 Radar Artillery, seige weapons had to remain with normal combat units. In Civ4, artillery is treated as a fighting unit. You also lose the realistic ability to devastate a city with artillery as you could in Civ3.


The loss of bombard in exchange for a normal attack as in Civs1&2 also seems to mean that my having a dozen battleships off the coast doesn't make it any harder for the enemy to repulse my marines, unless they're in a city because ships can at least still shoot at <i> those </i>. That's just absurd.

 

For regular combat one of the things you might think about doing is creating two types of units: regular units, and units with an attached artillery brigade. The second unit would get x amounts of first strikes (to simulate the preliminary shelling of enemy positions before the primary attack).

As for shelling cities and doing damage, I don't really know how you can simulate this, nor do I see an easy way to simulate naval support of a marine invasion. You *might* be able to use the nuke routines for regular bombing, with much lower destruction percentages than an actual nuke. The marine thing - well, regular civ doesn't allow for one unit to support another. The mechanic just doesn't exist.

Max