Defending your city..

[KrikkitTwo]

A sort of power in CivV can make this more viable: pillage.

Three stipulations are necessary to make horse units viable as harassment and pillage troops:

1. They must be nearly invulnerable to missile fire. They're going to take a lot of fire from cities so they have to be pretty much invulnerable to missile fire to be of any use. This might also make them great on the field as "anti-missile" troops - a hard counter to focus-firing archers.

2. They have to be able to pillage without using movement. There's a lot of hexes to cover and a few horse troops have to be able to manage it quickly enough to matter.

3. Normal horse must be somewhat or greatly disadvantaged in attacking cities and encampments. Of course, Spearmen line units will make mincemeat out of them, but there's little incentive to build infantry if horse units will be just straight up better all the time. Some horse units in some eras for some Civilizations can be just straight up melee unit replacements, if it fits the Civ.

Well #1 is the real issue..horse units are not UP, ranged units are OP.

Having the ability for horse units to pillage (or attack) without using movement would be good. (You could probably make them good if they moved 6-8)

 

[Haig]

Maybe solution for horse units and others is rock-paper-scissors system.

The warrior in preview has a bonus against spearmen and pikes (could be that he received a promotion for it though), so maybe all horse units could have a bonus against, say, ranged units.

In Civ 5 ranged units are too powerful, we don't know yet how they are in Civ 6. They should be weak in close combat. (side note: if there are longbow men I hope they arent just +1 range but some other bonus)

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Maybe solution for horse units and others is rock-paper-scissors system.

The warrior in preview has a bonus against spearmen and pikes (could be that he received a promotion for it though), so maybe all horse units could have a bonus against, say, ranged units.

In Civ 5 ranged units are too powerful, we don't know yet how they are in Civ 6. They should be weak in close combat. (side note: if there are longbow men I hope they arent just +1 range but some other bonus)

That was one thing they recognized in civ BE, the close combat of ranged units was tiny (~1/3 to 1/4 their ranged combat strength)

 

[Gali]

Forcing defense of district will make horse and melee units more useful. Range units have poor DPT and need to be massed. They are also weak to direct attack. When all you have to do is defend a massively strong city tile against an AI that dances around forever those weaknesses don't matter. IF they program the AI to actually pillage more and shut down your districts you will need to defend a much larger area. That will increase the value of more mobile units and tougher ones. Spread out a range defense and it is far less efficient.

Actual barbarian invasions of 3-5 units at a time rather than 1 unit trickles will also overwhelm a purely ranged defense. Add in that you need to kill barb scouts QUICKLY and an archer might not be able to do it quickly enough. Barb scouts will probably be fast and ignore terrain which will make killing them difficult. Especially if you are spread out by expanding.

Add in siege tower support making melee powerful against cities especially when they are corps and armies and a range defense probably won't be enough. You can't place districts next to a city and they have powerful adjacency bonuses making placing them in ideal defensive locations costly.

Finally actual mod tools will allow for mods to reduce ranged power and improve AI if base civ 6 does not do those things. You could also mod that range units can't be made to corps or armies or do so much later than horse or melee. Heck you could probably make range support units.

 

[redwings1340]

I agree, the larger area makes a huge difference when it comes to balancing. I hope we can create a real system where horse units are faster/good for pillaging, but weaker on their own, iron units are powerful but slow, and ranged units are good for support and in strategic locations, but can't overwhelm everything themselves. Meanwhile, spearmen will be the poor civ's substitute for the powerful iron based army.

I feel that's where civ V wanted to go, but the fact that cities were everything really restricted that. Swordsmen probably either weren't strong enough, or weren't available in time for warmongers to really use them effectively. Civ VI seems to be making a better attempt at this strategic balance, and I hope they succeed.

Also, when you add in support units and corps like battering rams or catapults, having strong and powerful units to escort them becomes more important. You probably won't want an archer protecting a catapult, but a swordman protecting a catapult or battering ram can be a way to make siege units a bit more viable before artillery. I have a feeling that ranged units will be less of a be all/end all for civ VI armies.

 

[Acken]

Really the problem of civ5 is pretty simple. Ranged units are simply too good and melee units too inefficient at taking cities.

Get rid of both problems and melee units have their place.

 

[AriochIV]

I think they should introduce a ranged damage mechanic similar to that in Civ III, in which ranged attacks lose effectiveness as the health of the target decreases (for infantry, anyway, not naval units).

 

[dexters]

I think they should introduce a ranged damage mechanic similar to that in Civ III, in which ranged attacks lose effectiveness as the health of the target decreases (for infantry, anyway, not naval units).

Yeah. I would add to that by making certain units unable to strike lethal blows and capping damage, with say archers capping out with % damage done and % of total HP ; ie: each archer can take at most 10% of a unit's HP, capping out at 30% of total HP for all damage taken by archery tpes Doing this and or removing lethal bombard mechanic would be a pretty big step forward. In Civ3, most units not having lethal bombard was overcome by simple numbers allowed by stack mechanics. You could Redline a bunch of infantry and you could still take a position/city with inferior units like cavalry and even medieval infantry. It was an effective way to get rid of obsolete or near obsolete units we didn't want to upgrade. But with stacks gone, non-lethal bombard might actually be a reasonable mechanic.

 

[AriochIV]

I don't think ranged damage should be capped like in Civ III, just that units become harder to damage as they lose strength.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

I tend to disagree with complicated mechanisms.
Instead make ranged units much weaker in melee (say make archers strength 3, crossbow strength 6)

Cities is the other issue....
I would remove cities' ranged attack in favor of a ranged response... The city can't attack you, but if you attack the city from within its range, it does damage to you
(That would benefit siege weapons and mean you need an army to stop pillaging)

Or just give ranged units a big penalty v. cities (since siege seems to pair w melee now)

 

[dexters]

I don't think ranged damage should be capped like in Civ III, just that units become harder to damage as they lose strength.

The capped damage mechanics is my own addition , there were IIRC none of that in Civ3, though bombard units can also miss and do no damage and most artillery/catabult type units had non-lethal bombard so the most we could do was red-line units. Giving distinction between those units and bombers, which had lethal bombards.. Again, stack mechanics rendered this somewhat irrelevant.

But yeah, I think this nerf you are proposing is fair and a really good thing. I would not mind removing lethal bombard from most ranged units as well and giving it only to air forces and or certain specialized units.

 

[AriochIV]

The capped damage mechanics is my own addition , there were IIRC none of that in Civ3

There was. Each unit capable of bombardment had a cap on what % of total health it could do (the best was like 90%), and further attacks did no damage. The exceptions were naval units and units with a special "lethal" bombard (the H'wacha was one).

 

[Acken]

I don't think that's really necessary to make it diminishing.
Really just :
-Buff melee to sustain more hits and make more damage
-Diminish Ranged strength to be crushed when attacked by melee
-Remove logistics
-Make melee take less or no damage when attacking cities

and you have a game where I'll make melee units consistently.

 

[dexters]

There was. Each unit capable of bombardment had a cap on what % of total health it could do (the best was like 90%), and further attacks did no damage. The exceptions were naval units and units with a special "lethal" bombard (the H'wacha was one).

We probably talked past each other there. Yes, each bombard unit had a maximum damage it is able to do, and most bombard units are non-lethal, meaning the last bit of health can't be taken away.

Since non-modded Civ3 units had at most 5 units of health (excluding Armies) plus you had stack mechanics, the % cap mechanics wouldn't make a lot of sense and would be hard to enforce as units had health bars ranging from 2 ticks to 5. So a catapult could in theory take 50% of a conscript infantry's health vs. 20% of an elite infantry per round.

In terms of 1 upt, Simply adding in the non-lethal mechanic would make a difference, but what I am also proposing that wasn't in Civ3 was damage per unit type can be capped at a set % of health, so not only is their damage non lethal, they can't take it below a certain % (say archer's can't take health of units below 50%).
To discourage spamming only 1 type of unit for ranged damage. But it's not something I'm arguing strongly for, just a twist I added to the discussion.

 

[Dunkah]

The issue is that trying to compare unit movements strategically on a large scale map versus moving them locally is very different.

A mounted army can move very fast during combat compared to foot soldiers however if that mounted army had to move across the country it wouldn't move much faster than any other army due to the fact it needs to have support troops to stay alive. Cooks and kitchens and stable boys etc.

In my opinion all units should have a strategic movement that allows them to move around the map as an "army". But once they get into combat it should simply be between two armies. The local movement and maneuvering should be done above board and factored into the combat results as such. (or a second map pops up that represents the current battlefield).
Same thing with ranged units. Only strategic bombing such as artillery or modern missiles should be allowed to shoot from hex to hex.

But since that isn't likely to happen I think that pillaging probably shouldn't be allowed if you are in the zone of control of another enemy army. This will allow you to protect two or three hexes with one army. (This assumes the army is preparing to fight the enemy rather than rampaging across the country side simply burning everything in their wake).