Combat speculation

[Babri]

I would be too. But I hope they also adjust the promotions accordingly. We shouldn't have Level 4 promotions just after a few battles, excepting specific situations with UU/UA. I also still would like to see insta-heal as a level 2 or 3 promotion.

I would prefer that they remove insta-heal as I'll go mad if if a unit is left with 4HP & then AI insta-heals it & all my 4-5 attacks go waste.

 

[AlextheGr8]

Maybe I am the only one, but I love the fact that you can't go charging into combat with your units. They just get eaten up by artillery. You need to be smart about where you attack, scout first to see where their artillery is, etc. The only complaint I have is how dumb the AI is as protecting their artillery. and not keeping a fighting line, or setting up a good defense.

 

[Babri]

Maybe I am the only one, but I love the fact that you can't go charging into combat with your units. They just get eaten up by artillery. You need to be smart about where you attack, scout first to see where their artillery is, etc. The only complaint I have is how dumb the AI is as protecting their artillery. and not keeping a fighting line, or setting up a good defense.

But the problem is that it slows down the pace too much without any action like SoDs & AI gets on a big disadvantage.

 

[Buccaneer]

The more I read about combat modifiers, health point damage, AI increased ability to generate a better mix of units and embarkment defenses, the more I get a feeling that warfare will really be dragged out at higher difficulties. It's one thing to re-balance overpowered units but with more units on the map which will be harder (or take longer) to kill, what do you think offensive and defensive warfare will be like?

 

[Duke Maynard]

worst part was that most of the artillery deads where from their own fire

Only about 10% of deaths were from FF, actually. Ever since around the American Civil war virtually every war has had artillery/mortars deal at least 50% of the casualties. In WW2 a whopping 70% of casualties were from artillery fire, even higher than in WW1!

 

[NotSure]

The more I read about combat modifiers, health point damage, AI increased ability to generate a better mix of units and embarkment defenses, the more I get a feeling that warfare will really be dragged out at higher difficulties. It's one thing to re-balance overpowered units but with more units on the map which will be harder (or take longer) to kill, what do you think offensive and defensive warfare will be like?

It could be impossible to defend early rushes on Deity. That's the impression I've had since they announced the XP anyway...

 

[MadDjinn]

It could be impossible to defend early rushes on Deity. That's the impression I've had since they announced the XP anyway...

that's what walls are for! and archers...

 

[Zhahz]

I'm quite looking forward to this actually.

Same.

I'll believe the drastically longer battles when I see it.

I think the best part of this is that damage can be more accurately dealt with in relation to unit power, so you won't have ultra weak units doing 1 pt out of 10 damage as a 1 pt minimum. A 1 pt mininum or any minimum out of 100 will be much more reasonable. And units with much higher attack strengths can do damage more in line with their power value instead of getting their damage scaled drastically down.

 

[Gough Whitlam]

To me, the biggest change is likely to be on higher difficulties where you may be more advanced or with a stronger defence than the AI but the AI can still capture cities due to many archers hitting for 1 HP damage.

It should mean that where a unit is significantly underpowered it hardly does any damage, rather than hitting for 1 HP regardless of how weak they are.

Currently, it's possible for 20 archers to capture a city with over 100 defence simply through their numbers. The new combat system should stop that happening.

 

[sumodaz]

I think having more unit HP could be a real game changer. I've just been playing the demo of Warlock: Master of the Arcane, where this is already the case and the combat seems to work a lot better. I find that I care more about the individual units and building up unit promotions than i do with Civ V.

 

[nokmirt]

Also, in WWI more soldiers were killed by artillery than anything else.

Yep, 70% of casualties were because of artillery. That is the number they use generally speaking. The Germans say artillery caused 85% of casualties. Of course, there were 25-40 million more civilian deaths caused by influenza, which can be attributed to the WWI death toll.

 

[Civsassin]

It could be impossible to defend early rushes on Deity. That's the impression I've had since they announced the XP anyway...

If they are going to change the hit point scale for units, they will have to do the same for cities or you're right; early rushes would be impossible to defend against.

 

[KillingMeSoftly]

A couple of things:

1. I agree with a few of you that ranged units are simply too powerful at this point. By making them do less damage, or by bulking up unit health, or whatever, that does remedy the situation somewhat. That said, does anyone worry that G&K will go maybe too far? The intent in the expansion seems to be to make melee units more meaningful by weakening ranged unit effectiveness, but the unintended consequence might be that ranged units that aren't specifically designed to target cities (archers, crossbows, and their UU's) will become a lot less useful since siege-style ranged units will have plenty of time to set-up behind the stronger melee lines, allowing siege-type ranged units to function like the old archers and crossbows.

I don't believe we have anything to fear about this. I remember reading that Siege units are only effective versus cities, now. They won't be as devastating against other units. Similarly ranged units won't be that good against cities, because if the city has defense buildings supposedly we'd need siege units to do any real damage. So I also don't think we'd need to worry about artillery being such a devastating unit because of its indirect fire and 3 range, since it will be a lot less effective versus an army.

 

[nokmirt]

I don't believe we have anything to fear about this. I remember reading that Siege units are only effective versus cities, now. They won't be as devastating against other units. Similarly ranged units won't be that good against cities, because if the city has defense buildings supposedly we'd need siege units to do any real damage. So I also don't think we'd need to worry about artillery being such a devastating unit because of its indirect fire and 3 range, since it will be a lot less effective versus an army.

We don't want artillery too less effective though. It is supposed to support infantry against infantry. As long as they have tested the right balance, which I am sure they did, everything will be fine. The devs are going to test these changes. Many posts I see in several threads seem to forget that.

 

[nokmirt]

Considering the game shipped with str 13 (?) horseman, we have a right to have reservations about the effectiveness of the testing.

About the original game sure, there are tons of reservations. We'll see what they do though.

 

[shaglio]

Considering the game shipped with str 13 (?) horseman, we have a right to have reservations about the effectiveness of the testing.

I don’t particularly care for this line of reasoning. When I first started my current job, I ran a report that, unbeknownst to me, slowed down our entire accounting software. When people found out that it was I who had been responsible they all got up-in-arms and told me not to run reports in the morning when the company is at its busiest, but rather wait until afternoon when things wind down a bit. To this day, whenever the accounting software is running slowly, people still come running to me asking if I’m running another report (as if I hadn’t learned my lesson the first time).

My point is, they may have released the game with highly overpowered Horsemen, but they made the appropriate changes, and I’d like to believe they learned their lesson from that mistake. I’d also like to believe the Beta testers for the expansion will be more alert for such things from now on.

 

[Montov]

I fully expect balanding issues. It's a tricky business while working on the foundation and/or bugfixing. But it is easy moddable and patchable, and it is not gamebreaking. So it's not the end of the world like running an performance breaking report.

 

[CTH]

The most obvious balancing misstakes should be seen more or less just by looking at the stats, it is not that many to take into account, movement, strenght and any special abilities (like bonus vs mounted). The fine balancing that has more to do with combining units and tactics is much harder for a small ammount of beta testers to test. I am pretty sure we are going to see some balancing issues of the finare scale and hopefully not the really big ones (like 13 strenght horsemen)

 

[Civsassin]

The most obvious balancing misstakes should be seen more or less just by looking at the stats, it is not that many to take into account, movement, strenght and any special abilities (like bonus vs mounted). The fine balancing that has more to do with combining units and tactics is much harder for a small ammount of beta testers to test. I am pretty sure we are going to see some balancing issues of the finare scale and hopefully not the really big ones (like 13 strenght horsemen)

Even after highly successful expansions like BTS for CiIV, there needed to be several patches, some extensive, to balance and fix. Expect several post G&K patches.

 

[elprofesor]

I’d also like to believe the Beta testers for the expansion will be more alert for such things from now on.

I believe the developpers didn't have time to correct all the issues pointed out by the testers. I've read somewhere vague complaints about this problem (vague because of non-disclosure agreements, etc.).

And personally, I think that horsemen have been overnerfed. They're better balanced than at release, but seriously, who builds horsemen anymore...