Getting rid of pillaging

[Juriel]

I like pillaging as a concept, but I hate that all it does in the game is force me to redo all the improvements after an army attacks. Or completely ignore defending my towns and just roam the country with a Pack Of Doom that seeks to attack enemy forces before they reach any towns.

So, I removed the ability of any unit to pillage. Well, except for Workers.

I figured that since units make the squares they are in unusable by the town, one can still tempt defenders out of a town by denying them resources through that effect.

What obvious pitfalls does this change have?

 

[velger]

Couldyou post this mod or how to do it (if it's something easy -- I dont know anything about modding the game's files)

Pillaging IS very annoying. It seems to serve very little purpose vs. the time it takes to redo all the stuff. (and automated is useless since the AI for the workers is very..not good as far as what needs to be produced)

 

[Juriel]

I'm not posting the mod since it's so easy to do. Here's how...

In Assets\Xml\Units\Civ4UnitInfos.xml, replace every
<bPillage>1</bPillage> with <bPillage>0</bPillage>
(don't change the original file, but put the changed one into CustomAssets)

For fun, I enabled pillaging back on for Workers.
Since it might be interesting to use them as ninja saboteurs.

Anyway, made the original post in case someone could point out how things break horribly without pillaging going on. I did a long night of battling an island clear now, and the lack of pillage didn't seem to do anything but allow things to progress more smoothly and much less aggravatingly.

 

[velger]

Where's custom assets?

Edit -- Nevermind! Found it. Just put it in there?

 

[Juriel]

You need to place it in the same location in the directory structure. In this case, Assets/Xml/Units. Then it works in every game (but makes you unable to participate in multiplayer games, like any mod would).

 

[Vietcong]

y dont u just Not press the pillage key??? that whold be alot easyer....

 

[snepp]

y dont u just Not press the pillage key??? that whold be alot easyer....

Tell that to the AI.

 

[Juriel]

After playing without pillaging, I'd like to say that it's very much improved my game, and I no longer feel an acute sense 'oh crap, such a bother' when a war comes about.

When invading, the AI does SEEM to take useless steps around the cities as it goes from resource to resource but cannot pillage them before attacking. However, this is minor, as the AI isn't stuck in some logic loop of not doing anything else.

It isn't worthwhile to just leave the enemies standing outside a town, either, as they do block your access to the squares they are in.

There is still micromanagement afterwards, as the city's working squares are not seemingly placed where they were before that square got occupied...but this is tolerable. Much more so than after every attack needing to place people back into squares manually AND command every worker to individually restore each square.

I did enable pillaging for the Workers, because after invading an opponent's country and razing his towns, I wanted to be able to get rid of improvements that I had no use for, and which would only benefit the enemy if he made a town near them.

This would also enable Workers to act as your attack force's pillaging units if you took them along for the fight...which would be interesting, as they can move fast. Would be very interesting with the Indians' Fast Workers with their speed of 3, but I can live with strange things like that.

 

[CdGGambit]

Juriel: are you sure they aren't just staying in defensive tiles or trying to move around a river?

 

[Juriel]

It's just the feel I got. I'll comment further on it after getting dragged into more fights.

 

[popewiz]

Good job on making this mod, but I really think it takes a lot away from the strategy in the game. In the real world, countries have to protect their resources, they can't just build the infrastructure and then leave it. It also makes it very difficult for a civ that's behind in tech a little bit to ever win a war, at least with resource denial, a smaller civ has a chance.

 

[Armed_Maniac]

I used to love pillaging in civ 3... I sent out defensive units to capture ressources and defend strategic locations...If i found a weak enemy i would start pillaging his territory, cutting off ressources, and unconnecting the cities so it would disrupt their production while my offensive unites pumped out of my cities towards the enemy. Gave a real utility to paratroopers... It also disrupted their food income, creating famine, redicing the number of citizens and thefore reducing production even more.

Pillaging was great, and all ya had to do to protect yourself was either 1) protect your borders. If they can't come in, they can't destroy anything. 2) keep alot of offensive units as sentrys in your cities. Since the enemies will waste their turn entering your tile (probably with offensive units), you could use that turn to attack them, kill them, and perhaps retreat back into town.

I know there isn't a defense/offense value in civ4, but still. Spearman and archers are defensive, while others are obviously offensive (depending on their various bonus against various things).

 

[Juriel]

Even without pillaging, you can still deny them the resources - you just have to park a unit over that spot to do so. My change takes some things away, but it took a lot of FUN away for me when every little fight meant that I'd have to micromanage the workers to rebuild everything.

I'm still looking at it, and do think I would most prefer to make it so that you can pillage mines (to deny access to obvious things) and camps (to deny access to horses and elephants, since those are used in early units), as well as railroads, but leave everything else well enough alone. I want to defend stuff that matters, not inconsequential little things that just add to the management overhead and take time away from something more interesting.

I could set it so that only Workers could pillage, but the AI is not programmed to make use of them in this fashion, so that would be unfair.

I could make it so that when an improvement I don't want pillaged, is pillaged, it is replaced by an improvement of the exact same type. So everyone could pillage normally, but it would only affect the improvement I want. The AI could not handle this change either, though, and thus would waste its time pillaging standard farms and roads that are going nowhere, and as such this easy solution is no good either.

Hmh. I do play normal games with pillaging active as well, so perhaps I will gravitate to just living with it (since the AI is geared for using it) and having a Stack of Doom hovering near my cities, to make sure I can kill enemies before they force me to build the same farms over and over and over again.

Ah, solution three: look at AI files, in case there is an improvement priority number there for each different thing. Then I could drop stuff like farms and normal roads somewhere where they'll never get touched. Should have realized that sooner.

 

[wooga]

Rather than disabling pillaging, why not change the game so that rebuilding a pillaged improvement is faster? In other words, if it takes 'x' turns to build a particular improvement, it only take x/2 turns to rebuild a pillaged improvement.

I personally like pillaging, as it's how I ran my wars in civ3 (rampant corruption had reduced my desire to occupy enemy cities, so I simply set out to crush their infrastructure).

 

[Juriel]

Rather than disabling pillaging, why not change the game so that rebuilding a pillaged improvement is faster?

Because this is not about how long it takes, but about the BOTHER it forces on the player to have to visit each of those spots manually with a Worker, since automation is sucky?

In any case, there is no identifier for 'what improvement used to exist here'. If there was, and I could automate Workers to just 'restore pillaged things', all would be well.

 

[HourlyDaily]

The pillaging replacing annoyed me in Civ 3, but only a little bit. Someone declares war on you and pillages some improvements before you have the opportunity to crush them.

Apart from that - I love the idea. It forces people not to camp their units inside their cities all the time. Wouldn't want it removed in my games.