From the Devs: Improved Naval Combat

[UWHabs]

I am looking forward to those changes. I recently had a weird behaviour from this hybrid melee/ranged combat as it currently is applied. I was playing Great Britain and used my Revenge to attack a ship across a 1-tile wide strip of land tiles. The Revenge used a ranged attack to sink the ship but then literally drove across the land tiles to occupy the tile on which the attacked ship used to be. And I was able to reproduce this several times with other ships across the same strip of land tiles.

If I understand the changes correctly, such things should no longer happen in 1.3.0

Yeah, ships right now basically use a ranged attack, but take reciprocal damage, but when they defeat a unit they occupy the new tile. And fleet commanders just completely fail to figure out what's in range and what's not in range.

 

[pjotroos]

Yeah, ships right now basically use a ranged attack, but take reciprocal damage, but when they defeat a unit they occupy the new tile. And fleet commanders just completely fail to figure out what's in range and what's not in range.

Commander actions in general seem to be an awful mess - as of last patch, I'm still seeing:
- the action fizzle out (e.g. I press focus fire, commander movement gets expended, nobody shoots even though it is a legal action for units in range)
- attack actions causing units to wander off if they don't have direct line of fire (i.e. it just emulates right click on the tile; if the unit can't shoot at it, it will treat it as a move-to-tile command)
- attack actions using up all movement on unique units, cancelling their special ability (so no moving after firing for Voi Chien, no second attack for Kalam)
Whenever I press one of those buttons, it feels like a 50/50 between success and disappointment, so most of the time I just don't.

 

[Takfloyd]

It's nice to see at least some diversification of units in Civ VII. Ever since Civ V, units have become less and less interesting in these games because they're all forced into one of just a handful of unit classes that upgrade linearly throughout the game. It's just soulless and boring design that way. Earlier Civ games put interesting design, ludonarrative cohesion and historical accuracy before the dreaded "streamlining" that has crippled the series. You had a larger variety of different units available at any one time that could fit similar roles, and had to pick which ones to build depending on factors like available resources and production(you couldn't build elephant units without access to elephants, for instance), road quality and terrain(wheeled units couldn't move through harsh terrain without roads), specific tactical needs (an AEGIS cruiser deals less damage than a battleship but is faster and far more versatile) or plain flavor preferences (crossbows and longbows have different niches, but similar stats and you could go with the one you think is cooler).

Now with the game partitioned into ages, my impression is that units are even more rigid, pigeonholed and boring than before. So changes like this are one step towards making me interested in buying the game, but many more steps are needed.