Complaints about bombardments

[Flynn]

Perhaps the biggest change in military tactics from Civ2 to Civ3 is the effect of stacks. Does anyone here remember how they worked in Civ2? If you had a stack of units that was attacked, the strongest unit defended. If it lost, you lost the entire stack.

Obviously, this affected tactics a lot. Like... you avoided stacking your units unless they were in a city or fortress (duh). While this was a frustrating aspect of gameplay insofar as the lack of unit support, it also reflected an important aspect of military manuveur: you should keep your forces dispersed to prevent area-of-effect attacks. See Sun-Tzu and General Robert E. Lee for lessons on this matter.

Just as obviously, Civ3 doesn't work this way. But what's the effect of that?

Well now, it makes sense to stack your units like crazy. And that is, of course, just what the AI does, packing upwards of 30 units on a single square during wars.

Here's my problem. I can see that when I send a units of tanks to fight 30 units of horsemen, they should only be able to injure 1 of those 30. That's a targetted fire engagement.

However, when I *bombard* 30 units of horsemen, what I'm really doing is attacking the TERRAIN on which the horsemen reside. And therefore, it should affect all of them. If 30 units of horsemen are packed into a single tile, and I shell the snot out of that tile, I attacked the *TILE*, not the unit. Everything there should be wrecked, not just one unit that happened to be sitting under the wrong tree.

As it stands under Civ3 today, the only way to attack all the units in a stack is with a nuke. That's just silly. Bomber runs hamper dozens of military units in close proximity. Just ask the Taliban.

I can live with the idea that a bombardment shouldn't kill a land based unit -- just injure it heavily. But it should distribute injury across all the units sharing that terrain. When a stack of 30 knights gets bombed by a squad of B-52s, they're *all* going to be feeling the pain.

Picking up from another thread, I'd like to complain too about Naval Bombarding. That is, when you bombard a ship. There's absolutely no question: you should be able to sink a ship with bombardments. As it stands today, you can only sink a ship with another ship! Did Firaxis never here of the Pacific theater in WWII? Do we need to count the number of ships dropped to the bottom of the ocean by aircraft?

Perhaps there is some argument to disallow shelling from land-based bombard units. But even that is, I think, fishy. Artillery is used against ships approaching the coastline. You shell me from the water, I'll shell you from the beach. Damage to a ship should be damage to a ship, whether bombardment or direct.

How about the idea that precision bombing only hits city improvements? I'll tell you what it should hit: UNITS! If I'm going to capture a city, I don't want to blow up the cathedral or the aquaduct. I want to blow up the garrison of riflemen stationed in it. That's what a precision bombing campaign would do. At the very least, allow me to bomb *non-fortified* units.

I haven't messed with cruise missles or nukes yet, but I'm wondering how disappointed I'll be in their implementation as well. We'll see. But as it stands, bombardment in Civ3 is drastically underpowered, and fails to reflect the serious military value of artillery and air-bombing campaigns in the last 300 years of military history.

To recap...

1) Bombardments on non-fortified stacked units should affect all the units in the stack. At the very least, all the units of the same types.

2) Bombardments on ships should be able to sink them. And easily.

3) Precision bombing should allow for the selection of targets, including units.

4) Cities under bombardment should be thrown into disorder for one turn. A continuous shelling of a city should prevent it from producing.

The theme here is that you should be scared to death to let your enemy get too close to you with artillery. As the game stands today, I couldn't care less when I see enemy bombard units.

Since Firaxis obviously has to produce a patch in the near future to fix several matters, including precision bombing, perhaps there's a chance to get this idea to them.

 

[ironfang]

I disagree. In most respects anyway. I believe you should be able to stack units, and the concept of killing 1 unit kills them all was completely ridiculious. Stacking units does have a disadvantage of the enemy being able to concentrate fire on one spot as opposed to alot of units all over the place. It also gives civs the advantage of being able to use common sense tactics like defending catapults, and even armor with defending units.

I think this aspect of the game works fine.

ironfang

 

[Ferd]

I like to keep as many of my troops alive as possible. If I can send in 10 units and bring back 9 of them wounded but alive, I prefer that over sending in 5 units and losing 4. Even if they accomplish the same thing. Granted that's sometimes not tactically efficient, but it's a personal preference.

Maybe that's why I like bombardment units. Sure they have their disadvantages, but they have one major advantage: THE ENEMY ISN'T SHOOTING BACK. I can bring in a stack of cannon and bombard a city back to the stone age, and none of my guys will die. It's a lot easier for my veteran cavalry to beat those last few fortified pikemen if they only have one bar of life, as opposed to 4. Sure, I have to escort with defensive units for protection, and offensive units if I really want to kill anything, but this allows me to keep my losses down.

As far as realism goes, no, it isn't realistic. But then it isn't realistic to be able to stack 30 horsemen, either. Or ships. If a "tile" is small enough that your bombardment should affect the whole thing, those horsemen are going to be running into each other so badly... and those poor ships are going to be ramming each other into oblivion.

They decided where to skip the realism and make the units playable. They could have done it any number of ways, but I think I like it how they did it.

 

[Flynn]

Okay, Ferd... I hear ya. But the result is that artillery is only useful for attacking cities. Other units are comparatively invincible when being attacked by artillery.

There *should* be a disadvantage in the game to stacking all your units, just like there is in reality. If Wellington had lined up his infantry on an open plain in one gigantic force, Napolean's artillery would have cut them down, as he had so many foes before.

I'm not looking for something drastic here. Just an effective means to discourage enormous units stacks. And the best way to accomplish that is distributed damage from bombardments.

Have you ever seen what cannons do to infantry? There's an excellent example in Mel Gibson's "The Patriot", when there's a line of militia closing on a cannon-supported infantry unit. The cannons fire into the formation, and clear *entire columns*. A skipping cannonball is a frightfully destructive force, and armies would *not* loiter within firing range of one.

Perhaps if the game supported troop morale concepts, then you could find another way to accomplish it. But that's more of an elaborate war simulation than Civ needs to me. You can't simulate the troops being deathly afraid of taking cannon fire, but you can simulate the general (i.e: the player or the AI) being afraid, by forcing *some* dispersal of units when approachable by heavy firepower.

You don't have to kill them -- leave some line of retreat by allowing only reduction to one hit point. But if you line up 30 infantry, they get jumped by cannons, and cleaned up by cavalry.... well, frankly, it *would* be a slaughter, and we only have to look at American military history to see that.

Think about it this way... if you have *more* people in a given area, are those people *more* or *less* vulnerable to shelling and bombing? The premise of being protected from shelling is that you can run and hide, but if there are more people in a given area, there's a lot less space to hide, right?

Another alternative, if you bombard a stack of units, it automatically disperses to the 9-square block around it. If the units are unable to move, then they take damage. You bomb 10 cavalry crossing an open plain, 8 of them scatter off the square and into the surrounding area, and only two stuck on the attacked square take damage. If you bomb them while they're crossing a narrow strait between two coasts, then only 2 of them can move off, and the remaining 8 take a pounding.

These aren't complicated ideas to implement, and they would make the war cycles much more realistic. *Plus* they would make armies a helluva lot more useful, since an actual army unit wouldn't take as much per-unit equivalent damage. As it stands today, who the hell wants an army? Since you can stack units indefinitely, it makes more sense to stick 10 tanks on a single square and get 10 attacks with nearly unlimited stack defense! But if stacking 10 tanks left them vulnerable in some meaningful way... ahhhhhh... then you have to *think* about what you're doing.