Fixing the Melee Line

[Unresolved]

Yeah, you can definitely use melee in a prominent role, but you really need to have favorable conditions. Old Peter was the only one who managed to do the melee-only challenge, correct? Doesn't leave the rest of us non-domination experts with much to work with.

 

[Matthew.]

Yeah, he did it on Deity, too I believe. Although it was mounted/tank units and IIRC that map had favorable enemy city locations.

Important to think of the topic from an AI stand-point, too. It cannot take cities without melee either, nor will it ever be able to effectively keep a single horseman aside for sniping cities. Which is another reason why I think something like a free cover promotion would be an easy fix. The AI needs to have melee units survive long enough to be of use, which means it needs to be able to break into ranged-defense lines and survive longer than half a turn.

 

[kaspergm]

Give ranged units a penalty to attacking cities(or a bigger one if they already have it) and change the placement of the swordsman/longsword on the technology tree.

This is pretty much what I did in a mod:
- Reveal Iron with Mining.
- Move Longswords and Swords back one level but cut Longswords a bit in stength (Longswords now unlocks in a skill that sits where Metal Casting currently sits, Swordsman appear under Construction at the same time as CBs).
- Swords and Longswords get a +25 % bonus vs. cities (lost on upgrade).
- All Ranged units get a -33 % penalty vs. cities.
- All Siege units start with Cover I promotion.

This imo. works great to fix the problem. Swords can attack cities without instantly dying, but taking a well-defended city with only Swords is difficult because they will take damage on return. Taking cities with CB's only is a lot more difficult, so you will want to bring Catapults. Also, Catapults have a chance of actually not being instakilled by city ranged attack.

 

[Babri]

My suggestions

• Increase the strength of resource melee units (swords= +2, longswords= +1).
  
• All melee units (except spears & pikes) take less damage from city attacks (about 10%) when fortified. They do additional 5% damage to cities for each adjacent siege unit. (more effective meatshield in sieges, can actually deal damage when combined with siege units.
  
• Siege units resist ranged attacks by 50% !
  
• Slight reduction in melee strength of archer units.
  
• Ranged attacks get a slight penalty directly proportional to the target unit HP. So ranged units would be better in softening up enemies but you may need some melee units to finish the task more effectively.
  
• Units garrisoned inside cities take considerable damage when the city is attacked by enemies. This can be significantly reduced by constructing defensive buildings. So no more destroying AI stack of doom with the help of just city attacks & 2 crossbows.

I am suggesting such changes because in my lastest game on King, I was able to annihilate carpet of dooms with just 2-3 chu-ku-nus. And I was kind of out-of-practice, still AI gave me no trouble because ranged units are so GODLY & very difficult to counter.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Just throwing some things out there, but here are the historical answers to 'ranged effectiveness':

1. Drop the 'combat strength' of all ranged units. Most of them don't have (historically) anything more effective than large knives as close-in weapons - against spearmen or swordsmen in melee, the result is a quick massacre or archers running for their lives, having thrown away bows, arrows, and anything else portable.

2. Program all melee units so that their reaction to being shot at by ranged is not to sit there and try to heal, but charge the ranged unit.

3. Penalize all ranged units against cities WITH WALLS. Against an open city, they are still effective: against fortifications, only specialized siege weapons do much good, or you resort to a 'storm' with melee units, taking nasty casualties on your way over the walls.

The result should be that ranged units with melee support are still very useful, but ranged unit on their own will get quickly slaughtered without forts or some incredible terrain benefits.

 

[Bino]

Just throwing some things out there, but here are the historical answers to 'ranged effectiveness':

1. Drop the 'combat strength' of all ranged units. Most of them don't have (historically) anything more effective than large knives as close-in weapons - against spearmen or swordsmen in melee, the result is a quick massacre or archers running for their lives, having thrown away bows, arrows, and anything else portable.

2. Program all melee units so that their reaction to being shot at by ranged is not to sit there and try to heal, but charge the ranged unit.

3. Penalize all ranged units against cities WITH WALLS. Against an open city, they are still effective: against fortifications, only specialized siege weapons do much good, or you resort to a 'storm' with melee units, taking nasty casualties on your way over the walls.

The result should be that ranged units with melee support are still very useful, but ranged unit on their own will get quickly slaughtered without forts or some incredible terrain benefits.

Can't agree more. From a realism standpoint at least. I can't really fathom why my beloved xbows act like they were laser guided mini catapults against cities, if those have walls especially.

 

[Knut_Are_M]

Lowering Ranged melee defence is surely needed. not only for archers but also mounted archers and frigates. Iron= win on island maps is pretty bad. only frigate navies get boring from a gameplay perspective as well. England can still own With galleasses but without iron they are better off delaying naviation.

 

[Altisma]

Ok you guys who don't see the problem with melee units being useless aren't playing a game where your against another player. 6 Crossbowmen and a horsemen will always beat a 3 pikes, 3 crossbowmen. Range units take no damage when attacking, now have about 6 of these units combine fire on any units in their line of sight and you won't be do anything with melee units.

A melee unit has to be in a tile next you to attack you, range units before Gatling guns don't need to. At best, if your forced into a front line battle, you can only have 2 melee units at a time against 1 range. Add in the fact you take damage when attacking+any range unit with LOS can attack you means your not getting your moneys worth using any melee units at all against range.

Also some people say range is historically used to wear down defenses but that isn't true in this game. Siege weapons are what wear down defense, which so far are useless in game since you just use a spam of archers to do the damage. They only become useful when Artillery is researched, then the artillery becomes the new unit to be spamming.

 

[Verified_Confection_Being]

I know a fun way of making people think twice about archers.

Slightly lower the damage dealt to the target tile if it is range 2, and inflict a smaller amount of damage to the tile in between.

Usually, that's your own soldiers defending your archers. It would return archers to their role of bleeding the enemy before the melee fight broke out, when your archers would end up shooting at your men too if they fired.

 

[mitsho]

A simple way would be to make ranged units lose health when attacking since that is what seems to make them overpowered. Air units take damage when attacking, most probably due to the fact that you can stack them endlessly on one city tile.

The invulnerable ranged units in cities are another big problem. I would rather like a decision between which unit I garrison in cities, i.e. melee units triple the defence of the city (but can't attack), whereas archers give an additional ranged attack and cavalry allow 'sorties' (in some way)...

I'm not sure there is a easy way to create balance in civ5 between archers, cavalry and melee, but the quickest non-interventionist way of the proposals in this thread I see is to drop the experience gained by archers to 1 per attack and maybe raise the upkeep cost.

 

[GhostSalsa]

Trench warfare nuetralized small arms and artillery in real life and would be an interesting way to do the same in CiV.

Allow all industrial+ melee and ranged units to entrench instead of just fortify, and let the AI form lines that the human cannot pass without a strong melee push.* Trenches take ~2 turn to dig or whatever but keep defending melee units protected even after they attack. The protection would be +% against ranged (so artillery are more or less harmless) and mounted.

Obviously there would be a lot more details to hash out but the gist is that the human player now has to balance the preference for ranged units in early-game with a knowledge that a strong and fairly large melee force will be needed downstream. In the same way that spearmen units are retroactively less valuable because of their changed path to lancer, ranged units will look less valuable when they become defense-only. That would leave melee units as looking more valuable.

Additionally, this would give gatlings and machine guns a place in post-industrial warfare (in defensive trenches) that is historically accurate and has been absent.

*This all would be supplemented nicely by reducing city attack damage after classical era, especially at 2-tile radius, which was discussed in an older thread— so armies can engage each other freely (without most tiles functioning essentially as instant-kill zones).

**Introducing trenches at industrial era is not historically accurate but delaying it to modern would allow an artillery to stamp out the AI before it had a chance to respond.

***This would reduce the time range of mounted unit effectiveness. (But even before WWI, fortified rifle volleys were defeating calvary). But on the positive it would drive earlier adoption of combustion which imo be a huge boon to late era tech path and warfare balance.

 

[atahop]

All good ideas ghost salsa, but I think that some weaker version of this could be useful earlier. Maybe the fortify changes so that the defensive penalty remains after an attack, but lost after moving. The Romans and Spartans had tactics similar to this.

Also the return to the additive fortification bonus form Civ 4 would be nice. that way staying put and healing would be progressively better and better, from 15% to 20% to 25%. but their could be problems with barbarians sitting in their camps forever. I guess the honor barbarian bonus could negate a barbs fortification bonus.

 

[DudewiththeFood]

I think rather the way ranged attack works now dealing the same damage a melee attack on an equal strength unit without taking damage should be changed. For example, if an archer currently would do 36 damage to a warrior, all ranged strength gets cut by 25% meaning the archer deals 27 damage. Or cut production for melee units by 25% to show that through most of history, they have generally been favoured in larger numbers.

 

[Altisma]

I think rather the way ranged attack works now dealing the same damage a melee attack on an equal strength unit without taking damage should be changed. For example, if an archer currently would do 36 damage to a warrior, all ranged strength gets cut by 25% meaning the archer deals 27 damage. Or cut production for melee units by 25% to show that through most of history, they have generally been favoured in larger numbers.

These small changes aren't going to change combat from simply being a spam of archers with that one melee unit for taking cities.

Making melee units 25% cheaper in production isn't fixing the problem. The problem is, range units deal damage with no cost in doing so and they can do it non-adjacently meaning you can easily lose units that deal no damage in their lifespan.

The best way to solve this is to introduce a tile combat system. Currently when you move a unit onto a tile with a enemy unit, it attacks that unit and then goes back to its original placement. Instead when a unit attacks another unit, it stays on that tile with the other unit. At the end every turn, they deal damage to each other till one of them dies or if one of the units leaves the tile. Leaving the tile results in the combat ending and 1 movement point being used.

Now put this to work on a archer unit. A archer unit with a enemy melee unit on its tile is stuck in melee with that unit until it moves. Add in the movement penalty of leaving a melee means they just can't just launch another volley of arrows after running.

Now what happens when two units are on a tile together, with another range unit near by? Simply have it so if a range unit fires on a melee engagement it deals friendly fire.

Now all you need is a few stat changes such as lower melee strength for range units so that way some units like Pikemen aren't nearly killed by Crossbowmen who have 14 strength to the Pikemen's 16.

This isn't the full idea I have written out since I'm just going to post it later but you should get the general idea.

 

[Altisma]

There a a few distinct problems with the melee line.
Firstly, ranged units are too powerful. Secondly, pikes are too good compared to swords. Thirdly, the upgrade lines are all screwed up.

The latter is a smaller problem that, IMHO, I fixed in my mod, 9 ages of war, and won't go into other than pikes upgrade to muskets (because lancers are light cavalry rather than anti cavalry).

Making pikes weaker and (long)swords stronger is really a tech tree problem. Pikes are on the path to the godly education AND chivalry, while swords are on the back end of nowhere. It can probably be fixed most easily by either moving pikes to metal casting (which makes beeling education a risky gambit as there are no units on the way), or by making civil service require engineering. Gunpowder should also have another prerequisite (take your pick of any medival tech), to make longswords stick around a little longer.

The real problem, though, is the impunity of ranged units and their utter dominance at everything. I tried to do this in my mod by having light cavalry units with 5 moves, weak strength and +50% vs ranged units; but I'm still not convinced. I think they need to take damage on attacking. In the same was a planes always do, this can be rationalised as representing logistics and general wear and tear. It doesn't have to be large. Maybe just 10HP on average, independent of the target.

Wouldn't work. As I said small changes will not fix a big balance problem. It still would be easy to have 5 bowmen concentrate fire on any melee units that attempt to engage. I would just need to stop eventually, retreat or build a city to heal, then continue on.

 

[kirbdog]

Reach is nice, but machine guns > marines, so it's not just reach. It's the fact that every melee unit decimates itself every time it fires off an attack... with each of the sides having equal strength, the attacker doesn't even inflict any more damage than the defender. This is insane when compared to ranged, which never have a scratch.

Three possible solutions (and they have to be significant differences to save melee...):

(1) Make the health penalty for the attacker half, a third, or none (probably the best idea).

(2) Give them a bonus on the attack of 30% or so.

(3) Give all melee free March (rework the Carolean).

 

[kirbdog]

I know a fun way of making people think twice about archers.

Slightly lower the damage dealt to the target tile if it is range 2, and inflict a smaller amount of damage to the tile in between.

Usually, that's your own soldiers defending your archers. It would return archers to their role of bleeding the enemy before the melee fight broke out, when your archers would end up shooting at your men too if they fired.

I'd just leave my 1 horseman off to the side for capping cities, problem solved.

 

[digrosz]

What if every time an archer did damage to a city, it took some damage back?

Then there would be no difference between a ranged unit and a melee unit when attacking cities

 

[kaspergm]

Wouldn't work. As I said small changes will not fix a big balance problem. It still would be easy to have 5 bowmen concentrate fire on any melee units that attempt to engage. I would just need to stop eventually, retreat or build a city to heal, then continue on.

That is not completely true. Ranged units are very vulnerable to melee attacks courtesy of their low melee combat strength. You can only have that many ranged units target the same melee unit without having many of them vulnerable to attacks if you are fighting in open terrain - and if you are fighting in open terrain, your enemy should bring in cavalry to hit-and-run on your archers. If you are in hills and forest, sight limitations will cut the efficiency of your archers significantly. From what I've experienced, weakening Archers (against cities) and improving Swords (against cities) and Horses (overall) does go a good way in establishing a better balance.

 

[bagas12]

Just make ranged littler weaker against swordsman and longswordsman, they are heavily armored after all