[NFP] [discussion] Major flaws of Civ VI - part 1: City combat strength and defense

[RohirrimElf]

I would like to see the gradual increase of city defenses to be lowered. Coupled with getting rid of the invincible ranged unit that can shoot without taking damage on defence. Defending should be more about placing down some units. Both offensively and defensively. Not about one unconquerable tile on the map. I understand historically there were cities that were almost unbeatable without the right equipment.

for a human player once you get range 2 ships and range 3 units while attacking cities from relative safety. You will be hard to stop on the offense.

 

[Catalytic]

I don't have a problem with the concept of city defense. As others have stated, historically, walled cities were hard to take. However, in Civ6, where unit costs are high, movement is slow, and it's hard to replace an army, the passive defenses simply offer too much protection, and in order to make the game fun, you should need to respond to the pressure of an incoming army with your own army and have it out.

If you, for example, try and assault a city with an encampment, the AI can station a cavalry unit in the city just to give it a full era's boost in strength, making your attacks that much harder. It doesn't need to though, because if it goes with a ranged unit in the encampment and in the city proper, you now have 4 shots raining down on your army every single turn. It is enough to eliminate any single same era unit instantly, so don't bother with siege units. Yes, they're supposed to be the solution. They don't live long enough with their intrinsic penalty of not being able to move and fire in the same turn. Meanwhile, you're hitting the city with your melee units and weakening them as you go working against that -17 combat strength penalty. And you can't actually hurt the archers. No army gets through. They simply can't. And it's not an issue of numbers where you need a bigger army. All I need are those 2 archers to stand down a huge horde because maneuvering them into place is so slow.

Games are supposed to be fun. And combat isn't supposed to just stop from the time walls go up til aviation techs get unlocked.

I don't think walls ought to be gutted, strengthwise, but you should have a way to brute force your way through. In fact, the AI needs it far more than the human player.

1) I agree with splash damage to garrisoned units. They must take damage when the city or encampment they garrison is attacked so that they can die
2) Reduce the penalty for attacking cities with walls. -17 is too high. It'll have to be playtested to get the right feel, but I'd try -10 and work from there.
3) If siege units retain the set-up/fire movement penalty, they should be given +1 range. This would force a defender to use light cav to defend, rather than letting the passive defense chew them up before they fire a shot.
4) Lastly, I don't like the idea of giving free hp when capturing a city either. If you can't hold it decisively, it should easily swing right back. It should start at 20 which is what you get for per turn healing. That way if the attacker manages to drag a unit with 1/100 hp across the threshold of the city but you've got reinforcements the next turn, you shouldn't have to relive the siege to crush that one unit and get your city back. You take it, you should have to fight to hold it, and units should do it not passive defenses.

I don't want to make it too complex. Simple is good. Let the strategy be in managing the units. Requiring food production for units is too much. We want more units on the map, not less in most games. What we want to avoid is like in most of my games where I look at the AI and they've got no army at all or a handful of outdated units for like 100-200 points all game. They never attack. They never get attacked, because passive defenses are all they ever need.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Walls in this game are absurd. You basically don’t need an army, just walls and encampments in all your cities because the defensive strength is so high. Once the AI has this warfare is basically reduced to border raids.

This is further compounded by 1 UPT limiting the force you can bring to bear, which is even further compounded by LOS usually limiting how many siege units can fire on the city, which is finally even more compounded by cities AND encampments having a ranged strike.

All of the above is grossly ahistorical by the way. At the scale of this game, a city put under siege that didn’t have a relieving army respond was usually toast before the age of star forts (Renaissance walls)

Gunpowder and cannon balls instantly rendered Ancient and Medieval walls obsolete, which had huge historical implications; it allowed kings with a gunpowder monopoly to break their nobles and make a truly centralized state, it also allowed the “Gunpowder empires” to utterly curb stomp the non gunpowder ones.

Bombards muskets and above should literally ignore ancient and medieval walls and assault the city directly. Gunpowder and cannon balls was an enormous paradigm shift that this game completely ignores

Cities and encampents shouldn’t get free ranged strikes. I have no idea what this is trying to represent. If you want strikes, station ranged units there.

The reason for this I believe is to keep the AI from getting rolled, which is basically solving a problem with an even bigger problem.

The reason the AI gets rolled is the combo of 1 UPT and low movement allowance, it is tedious enough for a human player to basically have to solve a sliding tile puzzle every time you move your units, so it’s no surprise the AI can’t do it. Then there is the LOS malarky which makes effectively deploying or even being able use ranged units another sliding tile puzzle with often no actual solution.

What this all means for Civ6 is that it basically makes the game a paradise for peaceful builder turtles, and agonizing frustration for everyone else.

Here are the changes I’d like to see across the board, if only to see if it opens up the game.

+1 movement across the board to make 1 UPT less agonizing, OR allow one unit of each class to stack

Remove LOS for ranged units

Any unit that has nitre, oil or aluminum as build requirement ignores ancient and medieval walls

Garrison units in a city or encampment take damage after walls but before the city does, instead of this weird thing where they are completely immune to damage until the city falls, but apparently commit ritual suicide out of shame when the city falls

Change the AI to priorities having a field army over walls

 

[vortical42]

The other way to go would be to make sieges actually play like ... well sieges. An attacking army should cause starvation over time if they occupy enough of the hexes around a city. In an actual siege, the attackers would also have to worry about that, but you can use the attrition damage from the defenders inside the city to fudge it. It would actually open up a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities for both sides. You could give players an option to divert some of the food a city produces into emergency stores, creating a trade off between maximizing growth and preparing for emergencies. Once food runs low, you also have to make choices about where the resources go. Do you keep the army fed and take the loss of population or do you reduce the strength of your defenders to keep your city productive?

It would also give naval warfare a new importance since a costal city could resupply by sea if the attackers don't have ships to block those hexes. You could also potentially add a mechanic where defending millitary units could permanently raze their own farms for some food and to deny the attackers the option to pillage those hexes.

 

[Linklite]

The other way to go would be to make sieges actually play like ... well sieges. An attacking army should cause starvation over time if they occupy enough of the hexes around a city. In an actual siege, the attackers would also have to worry about that, but you can use the attrition damage from the defenders inside the city to fudge it. It would actually open up a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities for both sides. You could give players an option to divert some of the food a city produces into emergency stores, creating a trade off between maximizing growth and preparing for emergencies. It would also give naval warfare a new importance since a costal city could resupply by sea if the attackers don't have ships to block those hexes. You could also potentially add a mechanic where defending millitary units could permanently raze their own farms for some food and to deny the attackers the option to pillage those hexes.

They already have that in the game to a degree, besieging, albeit it's a passive effect, not an active one like you're suggesting.

 

[Naeshar]

OP has of course prepared some good points. I agree on the city strength, ranged attack and steamrolling points.

The rest is intertwined with the unit system. It is undoubtedly better than in the early civ versions, where you could be surprise attacked and have any city taken. Sure this should be possible to happen, I guess... Hussar tricks happen, spy could open secret doors, etc. However a city should always be able to defend itself, whether there is a garrisoned unit or not. Maybe you could have a troop stationed and the city could be able to quickly spawn a relatively weak garrison unit that would leave the city defenceless, if it left or was killed in foolish attack.

I think cities should stop being treated as units, especially now as they unrolled into terrain. City is more of infrastructure than actual fighting unit, that applies the same combat rules and can attack without being damaged. Capturing a city might be considered as successful siege, where you have to assume control of districts with your own instead of the enemy units. While sieges were not always about direct fighting, the units surrounded would take simply attrition without getting healed, and same rules could apply to besiegers, if their supply lines were obstructed by ZoC.
I would of course like to get rid of the ranged attacks until later eras, where actual bombardment of city districts applied additional attrition. Archers, like Pitatis are absurdly strong.

The unit costs are probably supposed to be high to reduce unit clutter on 1upt, but with the tactical element it brought, we should be having more units not less. AI likes to build a lot of military anyway. If it would treat cities as units as well, it would probably make less. Cities are currently very much like static super-strong units.

I have one more point, even though I am a builder, I sometimes go bloodthirsty. And one major thing is bugging me, how fast can the AI get walls when defending. E.g. I see the city just produces some building or made a unit but as I approach, within two turns it builds walls (which take 10 or more turns in my case) and is about twice the challenge to overcome. I have to reevaluate the attack, which again takes a few turns to do - bring more units, wait for upgrade, focus another city... The AI suffers much more from this, as its rules are different for sieging an unwalled and a walled city. The strength change to walled city is simply too high (with ranged attack), I didnt notice much difference between tiers of walls though.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

I'm hoping that the April patch fixes some of the OP wall issues but I agree with what most people have said here. The problem for me is how insane Renaissance walls are. For so little production (Especially with Limes in) you can curb stop BOMBARDS and FRIGATES. Like, what? I think this is a MASSIVE balance issue as you get medieval walls so early-when frigates and bombards aren't in play yet-and so when you actually get these crucial and essentially Renaissance/Industrial units, they're pointless. And this is the same case with artillery and battleships except with modern defenses-and you don't have to even build those! All I'm saying here is that warfare seems to decidedly STOP if people have from the same era which is non-sense and ruins your emersion since you apparently need modern artillery to blast through walls from 2 eras in the past.

I liked many people's ideas on how to make garrisoned units more than just "extra defense" and garrioned units in general should play a bigger role. Maybe they can get an extra attack while in a city (With the city not being able to attack without them) but also take splash damage as a tradeoff.

 

[UWHabs]

I would say that the invisible defender is both a fantastic and flawed system. I do think it works much much much better than the old system, where you could happen upon undefended cities, and you would defend a modern city with a Phalanx sometimes just because. I would hate to go back to the old system - I think the current generic city defense, sieging, etc... is here to stay, and I do not want to see it leave.

That being said, there are some major flaws with the current setup. Primarily is that I can be attacked a city, and then across the world they develop an infantry unit, and suddenly all their cities are substantially stronger? Or their walls to no damage to my force, and then suddenly they develop a crossbowman and now they can 2-shot my army all day. And yes, the invincible garrison crossbowman is obviously another flaw, where other than one magical hero, nobody can touch him.

And finally, the fact that building these ancient walls lets your city shoot out the power of a modern gatling gun late in the game is certainly another flaw. The way the game seems to work, the marginal upgrade from no walls to walls is like 10X more valuable than the upgrade from walls to medieval or renaissance ones.

I don't know how to fix it all. I do think you should need to take a more active role in building up a city's defense - so maybe you get the base strength for free, and then basically walls unlock a project to upgrade the city's defenses through the eras. That way, you could actually make it so that ancient walls cap out your city strength at X, so you will need to update your walls to get the next strength tier. I'm sure you need more than just that, but at least that might balance some of the issues with magical combat strengths.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Buffing walls is a huge mistake.

IMO one of the following

-- Reduce city bombard damage to siege by half or more
-- Start catapults with 3 range but nerf movement, sight, combat stats vs units.

It is a bit silly that siege can easily get wiped out by the city center and there is no real way to stop it beyond overwheling with siege weapons. So that makes them good against cities which have their defenses destroyed. Which is when you don't need them.

 

[bbbt]

Maybe: no city ranged attack without city walls, and it scales with the city walls (making them more useful). Make all siege weapons as support/stackable, so they can't be taken out as easily. Reducing the city wall strength also reduces attack strength.

 

[ManoftheHour333]

Maybe: no city ranged attack without city walls, and it scales with the city walls (making them more useful). Make all siege weapons as support/stackable, so they can't be taken out as easily. Reducing the city wall strength also reduces attack strength.

I like the idea of siege units being able to be protected by other units and there's historical/strategic precedent for this. I don't think making them a support unit outright is necessary-maybe just allow them to form a "corp" with another unit early on. Coding this might be a nightmare but it'd fix one (Of many) issues

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Any unit that has nitre, oil or aluminum as build requirement ignores ancient and medieval walls

I like this simple idea which would make a big difference and is probably more historically accurate.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I like this simple idea which would make a big difference and is probably more historically accurate.

That's actually how Civ 4 worked. Starting at musketmen they would ignore walls, but in practice they didn't have the strength to break defenses because they were low strength (weaker than knights)

Which all and all was more realistic. Musketmen were not necessarily better units than previous counterparts, but required no resources to train and were cheaper.

This nuance is completely lost in later games.

 

[kaspergm]

Lots of great comments in this thread.

I have to say I basically totally disagree with the premise of your post, adding City Defence has been a great innovation to the series - no more city captures by a lone warrior on t5!!

Just to clarify: My suggestion was not to completely remove city strength, I just think it should grow less rapidly through passive tech progression and be more tied to fortification level, and I particularly hate the "city strength equals CS of strongest unit in empire" mechanism. When that's said, I actually think that a city strength of zero when no fortifications or units are present make some sense, and the problem you mention can easily be avoided by a) making the palace grant some fortification level (I actually use a mod that does this to prevent those silly very early warrior rushes), and b) having the player use his starting warrior for defense rather than using him as a reckon unit.

I feel like the OPs solutions would end up just being swings and roundabouts. Sure, it would be easier to take a single city, but when you do, the local cities get (effectively) free military units? In my games, that would effectively render them invulnerable. I'd be at more risk of losing a city, but substantially less risk of losing the game. Also, requiring population to build military units would absolutely nerf offensive play in the game. Pop increases so slowly and desired for districts etc that requiring it for military units, until your cities reach that plateau where pop becomes largely irrelevant, would cripple warfare in my opinion.

Obviously linking military units to population is a massive change that could not just be implemented without considering other things for overall balance. But when I suggest a mechanism of a military unit being a citizen assignment rather than just removing a citizen, it was exactly to account for things like district limits. As for the food issue, I'd like to point out that Civ6 currently has the potential for massive food overflow courtesy of the farm adjacency mechanism - one of my favorite features of the game, I could add - but sadly the overall game balance means that for optimal play, carpets of farms are not really optimal strategy because of housing and happiness limitations. My point here is: If population and food tied into military, the game already has a framework to support that, which is currently not really used.

As for the swings and roundabouts thing, if I understand you correctly: Actually what you sketch out is kind of what I would want, not to make things overall easier, but to move emphasis from unit vs. city combat to unit vs. unit combat. The reason why I suggest spawning new units when a city is capture is because of the well known situation from Civ6 (and Civ5) where, once you make an initial military break through, you're basically facing an enemy without any army. Once you reach late game and have artillery, that basically means once you've taken the first city, you can freely take the entire empire (which may not be entirely unrealistic, btw.). I'm not suggesting a fully equipped army should spawn, but if anything between a couple and a handful "militia" units spawn in neighboring cities, that would at least buy the defender some time to rebuild a defense to a certain degree. But the details of how such a mechanism would work is not something I can claim to have an exact image of.

The other way to go would be to make sieges actually play like ... well sieges. An attacking army should cause starvation over time if they occupy enough of the hexes around a city. In an actual siege, the attackers would also have to worry about that, but you can use the attrition damage from the defenders inside the city to fudge it. It would actually open up a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities for both sides. You could give players an option to divert some of the food a city produces into emergency stores, creating a trade off between maximizing growth and preparing for emergencies. Once food runs low, you also have to make choices about where the resources go. Do you keep the army fed and take the loss of population or do you reduce the strength of your defenders to keep your city productive?

It would also give naval warfare a new importance since a coastal city could resupply by sea if the attackers don't have ships to block those hexes. You could also potentially add a mechanic where defending military units could permanently raze their own farms for some food and to deny the attackers the option to pillage those hexes.

I can only say I agree 100 % with this. I love that sieges actually made it into the game, and I would love for it to have much bigger impact (and wouldn't mind it having stricter requirements, like occupying ALL tiles, not just have ZOC over all tiles). Besieging a city should make it unable to work all tiles without the besieged limits, and in general, a town should not be able to work a tile occupied by a hostile unit (as it was in Civ5).

Buffing walls is a huge mistake.

IMO one of the following

-- Reduce city bombard damage to siege by half or more
-- Start catapults with 3 range but nerf movement, sight, combat stats vs units.

It is a bit silly that siege can easily get wiped out by the city center and there is no real way to stop it beyond overwheling with siege weapons. So that makes them good against cities which have their defenses destroyed. Which is when you don't need them.

Giving siege weapons a range of 3 is a pretty dangerous move, as it can extremely difficult to counter them, particularly when you are down to one city. I did like a suggestion made by someone in another thread some time ago: When a city is under siege, it's ranged attack ranged should be reduced from 2 to 1. The logic of this is that the city attack can be interpreted as raids from the city against the hostile units outside the city. When the city is under siege, those raids can only target units imediately next to the city. This would mean that once you bring a city under siege, you can move in your siege engines without having them completely slaughtered.

A ranged unit stationed in the garrison should still be able to shoot to second ring, however.

 

[Equilin]

Therefore I think the 1UPT rule needs to be reworked for cities, to allow you to station a number of units for city defense, possible scaling with presence of military districts and wall levels.

I believe vanilla Civ5 had that at release? it was removed later (was quite buggy tbh).

 

[Archon_Wing]

Giving siege weapons a range of 3 is a pretty dangerous move, as it can extremely difficult to counter them, particularly when you are down to one city.

But I feel that is the point. You have to be proactive to break the siege. Otherwise you'd get starved out.

Pretty much every strategy game I've played uses siege as long range defense breakers; this forces people to come out and fight instead of turtling forever.

And this also sorta exists in the game already; just too late.

 

[Socrates99]

This might be an odd take but I fully think early conquest is supposed to be slow and hard for game reasons. It seems like the designers attempted (maybe a little imperfectly) to make it so civs cross that VC finish line relatively close together. Not being able to quickly steamroll cities until bombards and artillery makes sense. A domination game can get caught by a focused science or culture game before rampaging through every capital, depending on map size and layout of course.

Cracking an early city isn't as hard as it sounds, just slow. Bring a ram or tower and infantry. Walls are fine where they're at imo. Weaken them much and it'd flip the opposite way. Just approach them right, take out encampments before city centers so the extra ranged attack isnt so painful.

Reading through the thread I'm seeing others looking back at V the same way I do. Movement rules were better and the AI built more units. This led to some pretty epic wars where it felt like an accomplishment to outsmart the dumb AI with all their bonuses.

One thing that really helps VI are the mods that bump all unit movement up one point. AI will move and shoot, flank, etc when they have the mobility to do so. That's been an always on mod for me since day one. If I ever find a mod that incentivizes AI to build decent armies I think I'd be pretty happy with things

 

[Taefin]

I’m finding that with a mod that gives a 25 CS boost to AI against all district defenses (AI or player), but no bonus to the player, the AI can be a reasonable threat, I get wiped out in ancient if I don’t focus on military, and the AI continues to capture each other’s cities throughout the game (most games they capture 5-7). This really effects coastal cities, as a galley can capture a city, requiring you to build/buy a few in defense. I recently had to sail my Renaissance navy across the map to defend against Norway who captured a coastal city before I could counterattack. I also no longer take cities until the area is secure, since with +25 CS any unit can few 50 damage to a city, killing the unit I just took the city with.

Part of why this works so well seems to be that AI can take out walls using units, without siege. They do much better with siege, but it suggests that even a little more CS against cities could really balance things. I really like the idea of walls having diminished protection against units of later eras, to take advantage of this dynamic.

You can also play around with the pseudoyield_city values to increase overall aggression. One in particular, you could remove the effect of neighboring units to prevent the AI shuffling their plan whenever you move defenders. Though the AI does do pretty well when they attack your undefended front.

I’ve been plying 1UPT recently, since I had found I abuse stacking better than the AI, but when using ARS strategic movement (stacking, +1 move), whenever the AI rolled up a catapult guarded be a swordsman, it did get pretty scary. I’ve been playing with pacing mods lately that effectively make units cheaper relative to game pace, and at least with real strategy, this causes the AI to build up pretty meaningful armies, usually 1500-2000 by early Renaissance. I think I’ll turn back on ARS when I try the update, since in my most recent game, I know I would have taken much higher casualties with the stacking, when my and the AI’s full armies squared off on their border. Stacking seems to help the player avoid casualties when battles are smaller, whereas not stacking helps avoid casualties when battles are larger.

Edit: Oh wait, it was when I played with stacking against Gaul that I stopped.

 

[Unmitigated Gaul]

This might be an odd take but I fully think early conquest is supposed to be slow and hard for game reasons. It seems like the designers attempted (maybe a little imperfectly) to make it so civs cross that VC finish line relatively close together. Not being able to quickly steamroll cities until bombards and artillery makes sense. A domination game can get caught by a focused science or culture game before rampaging through every capital, depending on map size and layout of course.

Cracking an early city isn't as hard as it sounds, just slow. Bring a ram or tower and infantry. Walls are fine where they're at imo. Weaken them much and it'd flip the opposite way. Just approach them right, take out encampments before city centers so the extra ranged attack isnt so painful.

Reading through the thread I'm seeing others looking back at V the same way I do. Movement rules were better and the AI built more units. This led to some pretty epic wars where it felt like an accomplishment to outsmart the dumb AI with all their bonuses.

One thing that really helps VI are the mods that bump all unit movement up one point. AI will move and shoot, flank, etc when they have the mobility to do so. That's been an always on mod for me since day one. If I ever find a mod that incentivizes AI to build decent armies I think I'd be pretty happy with things

I also don’t find city combat all that annoying.

I sort of like the requirement to use a combined arms approach and mix Calvary, melee and siege units for the attack.

If you have a strong fleet that helps too.

You just need to plan your attack well for loyalty/walls/encampment purposes.

The way GGs interact with siege units is the key for me. Getting 2-3 catapult or bombard shots off in the first turn of the attack makes a huge difference.

It makes an appropriate era’s great general very valuable. Unless you’re playing a Civ with major encampment bonuses(Shaka, Alexander) it’s really the only good reason to build many encampments in a domination game.

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

it is as if the devs dont want us to take cities , they are hard to capture if walled , and unhappy if they are far away from your other cities and of course you pay diplomatic penalties ( very severe i know ). However if you just go the pillage route , which is my go to strategy in multiplayer , just train 3-4 light cavalry and level them with barbs and city states and go on a rampage in a territory , you really dont need to conquer a city to defeat a player , if you pillage everything in sight and they cannot repair it till they defeated you will win anyway also the pillaging rewards are great. Surprising number of players tend to agree with most of you here that they dont need much of a defence since they have walls and stuff. I keep giggling when they figure out that i wont attack their cities and lose my army to capture cities but just pillage them to the stone age.