how does combat in this game work?

[Buttercup]

You use artillery to counter the high amounts of units.

I know, that's why I wrote:

And what's the workaround to the terrible RNG and awful enemy AI? Building even more military units.

Because having 20 canons, 5 Musketmen and 8 Cavalry is so much more fun than having 20 Cavalry and 4 Musketmen. In any other strategy game you'd be cleaned off the map in seconds if you fielded an army of over 50% artillery. And, heh, I guess that's why it's a forum-only cheese rather than an *oh, why didn't I think of that*. I have no idea why you think your line in any way contradicts what I wrote. I honestly have no idea why you responded as you did. The way to counter unit spam is to unit spam is it? Oh right, thanks for that. Perhaps you could elaborate more on how using artillery prevents huge stacks? Maybe I'm just not interpreting your words properly.

And usually the stacks arnt a huge issue until a high difficulty.

I only ever play Regent to Emperor, and at Regent they're already absurd enough, like I said, sitting and watching dozens of Marines flounder on some ancient rubbish x20 while your republic disintegrates into anarchy because those musket pellets are clearly too much of a match for the obviously counterfeit bullet proof armour of your marines. Nevermind that one of the most fundamental aspects of the art of war is almost universally just the tiniest increment in technology, such as stirrups on horses, or automatic weaponry, but no, in Civ3 you just sit back and suck up 40 or 50 technological advances being the equivalent to the change from a pistol to a revolver and glory in the fantastical and wonderful variety of pure random. And it's all ok cos you can always just build 50 artillery units to make even the hilarious random go away. Leaving you what exactly? A combat where pixels with bars next to them fight other pixels with bars next to them, which you can cheese by building a bar-reducing unit. Which you have to click hundreds of times per turn to make it do anything. Lol, excuse me if I don't join the chorus of love for the system and prefer to use the game for more rational objectives and gameplay.

Civ3 excels at the scale of the empire management.

Again, I don't really know what you're saying here. You're probably right about something, but without knowing what that thing is I guess we'll have to take your word for it.

 

[WeirdoJoker]

The nice thing C3C has that Vanilla did not is a button that allows you to move stacks (whether an entire stack, or restricted to the same unit) with one click, rather than having to move every unit individually. You still have to attack on an individual basis, but at least you can put everything in place with far fewer clicks and thus using up less time and effort.

 

[Buttercup]

Yeah, the stack-movement button was obviously desperately needed, lol. It's not ideal for attacking stuff, but, wow, it sure makes pollution mopping almost bearable and helps alleviate at least the transportation aspect of combat

 

[Nathiri]

I know, that's why I wrote:
Because having 20 canons, 5 Musketmen and 8 Cavalry is so much more fun than having 20 Cavalry and 4 Musketmen. In any other strategy game you'd be cleaned off the map in seconds if you fielded an army of over 50% artillery. And, heh, I guess that's why it's a forum-only cheese rather than an *oh, why didn't I think of that*. I have no idea why you think your line in any way contradicts what I wrote. I honestly have no idea why you responded as you did. The way to counter unit spam is to unit spam is it? Oh right, thanks for that. Perhaps you could elaborate more on how using artillery prevents huge stacks? Maybe I'm just not interpreting your words properly.

I only ever play Regent to Emperor, and at Regent they're already absurd enough, like I said, sitting and watching dozens of Marines flounder on some ancient rubbish x20 while your republic disintegrates into anarchy because those musket pellets are clearly too much of a match for the obviously counterfeit bullet proof armour of your marines. Nevermind that one of the most fundamental aspects of the art of war is almost universally just the tiniest increment in technology, such as stirrups on horses, or automatic weaponry, but no, in Civ3 you just sit back and suck up 40 or 50 technological advances being the equivalent to the change from a pistol to a revolver and glory in the fantastical and wonderful variety of pure random. And it's all ok cos you can always just build 50 artillery units to make even the hilarious random go away. Leaving you what exactly? A combat where pixels with bars next to them fight other pixels with bars next to them, which you can cheese by building a bar-reducing unit. Which you have to click hundreds of times per turn to make it do anything. Lol, excuse me if I don't join the chorus of love for the system and prefer to use the game for more rational objectives and gameplay.

Again, I don't really know what you're saying here. You're probably right about something, but without knowing what that thing is I guess we'll have to take your word for it.

Well I did not really count artillery as a military unit, as they dont count to your military strength in civ3, as far as I know.

In the succession game that I played with some people with the Vikings on Emperor, was not done with too big of stacks, and very little artillery was used, if at all (I dont recall, as Lanz said it was not needed on Emp). Now you could say Berserks are OP.... but we also used many knights, and while the AI did send a few somewhat large stacks, I dont really consider them "large". I consider 30+ units large, not 15.

You dont really need 50+ unit stack on the lower difficulties to take out cities, although, I havent played many huge maps, so I dont know what the state of the AI is very well. But from my experience, it is not needed.

 

[choxorn]

It's not so much that artillery don't matter at Emperor as it is they don't matter in the first half of the game. Catapults and Trebuchets aren't very effective anyway, and the smaller cities and lower defensive values mean you can usually do fine without them. It's later in the game, where cities become metropolises and the defensive units are better than the offensive units that the artillery becomes a necessity. In the Mid-Industrial Age, you're attacking stacks defended by 10-Def Infantry with units with only 6 Atk. And if those Infantry are fortified in a Metropolis, that's at least a +135% defensive bonus, higher depending on the terrain. Bombarding the Infantry with lots of Artillery is the only way you can weaken them enough to kill them without suffering heavy losses yourself.

Also, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about with the 50+ unit stacks thing, I hardly ever see AI cities defended by more than 10 units at the very most, and that's what you'd see in a capital or another really important city, I've also seen AI cities defended by 2 or 3 units. I sometimes see some large AI stacks, but 50+ would be highly unusual. I've built up a few ridiculously large unit stacks myself, but that's mostly because if I'm going for a conquest-based late game I've often just gotten really big and built lots of units purely because I could, not because I really needed 87 Cavalry and 45 Infantry to conquer my neighbors. I could have done that with like, 20 of each, building more just made it easier.

 

[Kirejara]

Thats why I favour medium maps with small landmasses. I rarely encounter stacks with more than 20 enemies at once at regent level.

And the results are (with some exceptions ) predictable.

Also sometimes the player can have extrem luck in battle.

In my current game I invaded Greece (7 cities) with about 15 Texas Rangers (6/4/3, flavor Cavalry) supported by Horse Artillery (2 MP), Rifleman and a defensive Rifleman-Army.

I run out of Texas Rangers at the third greek city.

And no, I did loose only a single one, but I gained 6 (six!) leaders in battle and all remaining Texas Rangers are in Armies now. I never have got so many leaders in such short time before.

I had even to slow my tech research to build some more before I reached Replacable Parts, there they would be replaced by US Late Cavalry (8/4/3) in the building lists, so that I could fill the last Army without a unit mix.

But I admit, that I rarely use Marines. I usually land my forces with strong defenders (best be a defence Army) next to my invasion target, take it the following turn and then let the enemy waste its units in their counterattacks before I conquer the weakened remains. Strong defence, naval and land artillery support is absolut necessary for this tactic.

 

[Buttercup]

But I admit, that I rarely use Marines. I usually land my forces with strong defenders (best be a defence Army) next to my invasion target, take it the following turn and then let the enemy waste its units in their counterattacks before I conquer the weakened remains. Strong defence, naval and land artillery support is absolut necessary for this tactic.

That's exactly the problem. I've experimented with Marines on numerous occasions and almost no matter what you do, they simply aren't as competitive or efficient as practically any other more regular Civ3 method of conquest.

In theory, and on paper, they should be the perfect unit for Archipelago maps. One should be able to conquer an entire island in one turn, war declared, assault, Civ eliminated, no fuss no bother, just with marines, but, no, the numbers simply aren't strong enough. Even if you pull it off by having two full transports of Marines outside every city (12 Marines), then you'll lose so many and have so many severely injured that it drastically slows down any movement towards the next island. And if just one of them fail, you're wracked with war weariness and two transports full of half dead marines with nowhere to go.

Meanwhile, simply landing about ten infantry/mech infantry, loaded with a few Cavalry/Modern Armour/Armies and a stack of artillery requires less units, sucks all the troops out of all the enemy cities, leaving a second, smaller, landing party on the other side of the island to quickly perform the same job, with far fewer casualties and much less war weariness. Usually you still have enough troops and so few casualties that you can move onto the next island without any further/negligible military production.

The drawback of the more efficient method though is that you give the enemy a few turns to be at war with you, which is sometimes detrimental to diplomatic situations.

The fundamental problem with marines is the cost versus effect ratio. Sure, you can make it work, but it takes so many more units, significantly extremely more, that no-one in their right mind would bother going that route just to save a few turns of conflict.

Which, for me, is just a shame. It's also the reason I don't enjoy playing the Scandinavians. Their Vikings have the exact same problem, too high a production cost for what you get. For the same money you could have built Knights, or nearly two Medieval Infantry. Landing knights would result in less losses as they can retreat and have a defence of three instead of two, plus they can move quicker, plus all this gives them a better chance of generating elites and generals, or you could have 20 Meds + 6 Musketmen + 8 Trebuchets per 20 Vikings. Meanwhile the 20 Vikings, once they've taken a city, are so prone to counter attack you have to work even harder to constantly produce more and more of them to replace all the losses.

Like-wise, with Marines, 2 Marines is more expensive to produce than 1 Mechanised Infantry and one Cavalry combined, so this works out that:

16 Marines = 8 Mechs + 8 Cav + 1 Artillery.

And by the time you get to Mechs you'll already have hoards of Cavs/artillery sitting round twiddling their thumbs and you'll only need to produce the few mechs needed to defend the landing parties, but with Marines you'll have to start producing all of them from scratch. Again, same with the Vikings on this last point (at least with Berserkers you can pre-build via upgrades, but at a gigantic cost).

So I'm not sure what they could have done to make the Marines and Vikings more useful, but everything about the current state of it, which all starts from the over-random, makes this whole unit/s and their primary use a strategy dead-end for most games.

Which is just a huge shame.

At least with Vikings they can act as simply better Meds if you're flushed with cash, Marines don't even have that benefit.

 

[Kirejara]

While I do not use Marines in a large scale, I find them still far from useless as they are much more effective than Cavalry against Infantry.

Also like in real life it is allways the right mix of units and using them in their best potentials (Berserks on a pangea map are hopeless cannonfodder for Knights ).

They are ideal to conquer secondary islands. There are usually only a handful of defenders, who are often also hopeless antiquated (the KI keeps older units for centuries around).

And from the point of view of my enemies: they force me to garrison my coastal cities, once Amphibian Warfare has been researched or if Vikings are on the map.

And once I have reached Invention as Vikings, I usally roll up an island map with my Berserkers. Like all attackers, they need a good defence.

Oh, I allmost forgot: I play this game for fun, not for some statistics.

 

[justanick]

Even if you pull it off by having two full transports of Marines outside every city (12 Marines), then you'll lose so many and have so many severely injured that it drastically slows down any movement towards the next island. And if just one of them fail, you're wracked with war weariness and two transports full of half dead marines with nowhere to go.

The more natural way to go is to choose one weakly defended city, bombard it with ships, take it with marines and then unload a whole bunch of regular units like modern armour and take the rest of the island with them. Using them large scale is usually not a wise idea. There is the exception when the best other attacker has only 6 attack because tanks are not available.

The berserkers however can be used in large numbers. Combined with frigates or better ironclads they make an excellent unit in the early industrial age. Destroyers are faster than ironclads, but donnot have a higher bombardement value.

 

[Buttercup]

Oh, I allmost forgot: I play this game for fun, not for some statistics.

As do I. The point I was making was that you can't take full advantage of these units in the way they are meant to be used. But, yes, they can be the only way to get those small one square islands, of course.

The more natural way to go is to choose one weakly defended city, bombard it with ships, take it with marines and then unload a whole bunch of regular units like modern armour and take the rest of the island with them. Using them large scale is usually not a wise idea. There is the exception when the best other attacker has only 6 attack because tanks are not available.

The berserkers however can be used in large numbers. Combined with frigates or better ironclads they make an excellent unit in the early industrial age. Destroyers are faster than ironclads, but donnot have a higher bombardement value.

Nope, as I said, it's way more efficient to land a defensive stack, have them draw all the enemy units, then land your attackers on the opposite side of the island. You could have some Marines to take you straight into a city, but it's not required, as you'll still be at war with the enemy for more than one turn, unless it's a particularly small island, and all you do by starting off with Marines is increasing the chances of triggering War Weariness the next round, as they are terrible attackers, for all the reason already stated. For example, any units they do kill is wasted potential promotion material for the landing attackers.

 

[Lanzelot]

The point I was making was that you can't take full advantage of these units in the way they are meant to be used.

I' not so sure about that. I agree that they are a weak, rather useless unit, but perhaps that's exactly what they were meant to be?

Just consider: amphibious attacks against an enemy that was well dug in at land, often turned out to be inefficient and costly operations. Best example: D-Day 1944, as well as some other amphibious operations in the Pacific War. If the Allied would have tried to conquer all of France with Marine attacks, it would have turned into a massacre... So very naturally, they only captured the beaches in Normandy with marines (which suffered heavy losses), and then shipped in "better" troops (tanks, artillery, heavy equipment) to finish the job. Perhaps this is what the game designers had in mind, when they made the Marine unit so weak?

On the other hand, I disagree that the Viking Berzerk suffers from the same shortcoming. Quite the contrary: in my opinion it is the strongest unit of the entire game, it is so over-powered that it almost borders on "cheating"... Why is that? Because at the time the Berzerk becomes available, the best defender it will encounter is the Pikeman. And most often not even that, as it is often possible to beeline to Invention at a time, when the weaker AIs don't even have Feudalism, and the stronger ones did not yet bother to hook up their iron... So here you have an attack-6 unit against defense-2 units, and you can evade most AI counter-attacks by simply retreating the Berzerks back onto the ship and sailing on to the next enemy town. The AI is completely helpless against this. On archipelago maps I managed to eliminate an entire AI in just a handful of turns, even on Sid level. (True, on Sid I sometimes faced Muskets as defenders, but even those caused only a moderate loss rate on my Berzerks.) See COTM127 for an example of that strategy: https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...-spoiler-game-submitted.606686/#post-14630691


Regarding the main topic of this thread: yes, I also think that the combat system is one of the weaker points of Civ3, and I like the game more for its other aspects like strategic planning etc. Other games at that time had much better combat systems, for example PanzerGeneral. However, I really like the combat system of Civ5 and Civ6: it really eliminates the dependence on probability/RNG-luck, making the military game-play much more strategic (almost like in chess) with only a very minor influence of "luck". (You'll never see a spearman winning against a tank in Civ5/6: it's technically impossible! Unless the tank is down to 1/100 hitpoint, which would basically mean the tank is already "destroyed for all practical purposes" -- I mean that would be equivalent to a tank that has already blown up, lost its tracks, has no fuel and ammo left and whose crew is dead or unconscious... Even a bronze-age spearman would be able to finish off such a tank... )
On the other hand: the combat system of Civ4 was not really better than the one of Civ3. It somewhat eliminated the "SoD problem", but introduced lots of other problems...

 

[choxorn]

Civ4's system didn't really eliminate the Spear beats Tank problem, but it did improve on it a ton- I've seen a few things happen in Civ4 that made me go "What, how does that even happen?!" but not nearly as often as some of the bizarre RNG results in Civ3. And I liked how it made the system a bit more complicated, with certain units being more useful in certain situations and certain upgrades being more useful, made the combat a lot more interesting made it so you actually had to build more than two types of units.

 

[Buttercup]

I agree that they are a weak, rather useless unit, but perhaps that's exactly what they were meant to be?

Just consider: amphibious attacks against an enemy that was well dug in at land, often turned out to be inefficient and costly operations. Best example: D-Day 1944, as well as some other amphibious operations in the Pacific War. If the Allied would have tried to conquer all of France with Marine attacks, it would have turned into a massacre... So very naturally, they only captured the beaches in Normandy with marines (which suffered heavy losses), and then shipped in "better" troops (tanks, artillery, heavy equipment) to finish the job. Perhaps this is what the game designers had in mind, when they made the Marine unit so weak?

You honestly think they were thinking about reality when they designed the combat system at all? Haha, good one. They probably worked fine when they were first designed but likely got the thin end of the wedge once the balancing and fixing stage took over, something that just fell by the wayside along with paratroopers and ironclads.

 

[Lanzelot]

I'm not talking about the entire combat system. Just the combat stats of the Marine. And I don't think my theory is that unlikely, if you consider, that in every edition of the Civ series the standard amphibious attack has some kind of "malus". So it's quite obvious that the game designers had the notion that attacking from the sea is not as strong as attacking from land to land.

In Vanilla and PtW the Ironclad is actually quite good. (And it would be in C3C as well, if it were not for the stupid idea of introducing an extra option tech for that single unit... )
But you forgot the Helicopter in your list... Has anybody ever figured out, what those might be good for...?!

 

[Nathiri]

I'm not talking about the entire combat system. Just the combat stats of the Marine. And I don't think my theory is that unlikely, if you consider, that in every edition of the Civ series the standard amphibious attack has some kind of "malus". So it's quite obvious that the game designers had the notion that attacking from the sea is not as strong as attacking from land to land.

In Vanilla and PtW the Ironclad is actually quite good. (And it would be in C3C as well, if it were not for the stupid idea of introducing an extra option tech for that single unit... )
But you forgot the Helicopter in your list... Has anybody ever figured out, what those might be good for...?!

In Humans vs Humans game, they are a quick surprise attack. But with AI, they put units in all their cities. I guess it could help in blocking reinforcements, but that isnt always that helpful vs AI.

But, helicopters can also be good for a fast reinforcement if ships arnt fast enough, not easy ship access, no airport, no road etc.

 

[Lanzelot]

In Humans vs Humans game, they are a quick surprise attack. But with AI, they put units in all their cities.

You are talking about paratroopers, right? But I tried it once: in Civ2 it was possible to drop a paratrooper directly into an undefended city and capture it that way, but in Civ3 the paratrooper simply dies, when dropping onto a city, even if the city is empty! (But the game lets you drop on a city anyway -- looks rather like a bug to me?!)

And dropping next to a city is of no use: by the time the paratrooper becomes available, railways have been around for a long time, so your opponent won't have any problems sending reinforcements to the threatened city. And then your paratroopers are much too weak to do anything: defense 9 is no match for the tank's attack 16 (only if dropped on a mountain, but even then with 2-3 artilleries it won't be much of a problem ), and even if the enemy doesn't yet have tanks, he'll certainly have infantry, and attack 4 is nothing against defense 10 in a city...
So a paratrooper is useful only, if your enemy has no railway and neither tanks nor infantry. And if this is the case, you can simply win by "ordinary" means... no need to research an optional tech and try fancy things with paratroopers...

And even the "modern paratrooper", which comes with Synthetic Fibers, is a joke: attack 6/defense 11 at a time when he'll be up against MechInf (def 18) and Modern Armor (attack 24)...

Haven't tried helicopters, though. Can they drop into an empty city?

 

[Nathiri]

You are talking about paratroopers, right? But I tried it once: in Civ2 it was possible to drop a paratrooper directly into an undefended city and capture it that way, but in Civ3 the paratrooper simply dies, when dropping onto a city, even if the city is empty! (But the game lets you drop on a city anyway -- looks rather like a bug to me?!)

And dropping next to a city is of no use: by the time the paratrooper becomes available, railways have been around for a long time, so your opponent won't have any problems sending reinforcements to the threatened city. And then your paratroopers are much too weak to do anything: defense 9 is no match for the tank's attack 16 (only if dropped on a mountain, but even then with 2-3 artilleries it won't be much of a problem ), and even if the enemy doesn't yet have tanks, he'll certainly have infantry, and attack 4 is nothing against defense 10 in a city...
So a paratrooper is useful only, if your enemy has no railway and neither tanks nor infantry. And if this is the case, you can simply win by "ordinary" means... no need to research an optional tech and try fancy things with paratroopers...

And even the "modern paratrooper", which comes with Synthetic Fibers, is a joke: attack 6/defense 11 at a time when he'll be up against MechInf (def 18) and Modern Armor (attack 24)...

Haven't tried helicopters, though. Can they drop into an empty city?

In Simultaneous moves, when dropped end of turn timer, you can walk into city before it is reinforced, or at least pillage. You dont need to drop on empty city.

 

[Lanzelot]

Ah, so paratroopers can move in the same turn the have been dropped? That's different from Civ2...
Or do you mean, you drop right at the end of the turn-timer, keep your mouse ready and at the start of the next turn immediately move into the city, before the opponent had a chance to react? (So basically "man with faster mouse wins"...)

My only multiplayer was PBEM, so no experience with simultaneous moves...

 

[Nathiri]

Ah, so paratroopers can move in the same turn the have been dropped? That's different from Civ2...
Or do you mean, you drop right at the end of the turn-timer, keep your mouse ready and at the start of the next turn immediately move into the city, before the opponent had a chance to react? (So basically "man with faster mouse wins"...)

My only multiplayer was PBEM, so no experience with simultaneous moves...

Turn-based MP would be too slow in real-time, so Simultaneous moves is used. And yes, you move right at start of next turn to enter city. Faster mouse is not entirely true. If its the last unit you move, and then make sure you click the unit as fast as possible, the player may not even realise, as that is the first unit you yourself move. Since you have more seconds to achieve your plan, then you likely win. The enemy player is caught off-guard and has to scramble. These "Double Moves" are usually allowed. But End of Turn attacks directly on a city (with a stack), is not allowed, because it holds up the timer to quickly finish all the battles and causes bad results, where you cant reinforce well. It can also cause an empty city bug, where the city is empty, but you cant walk into it.

 

[web25]

I do the same thing, right now im in a war with inca.
The americans and iroquois are fighting all the units roaming around, im taking cities w resoirces.

As for the battles, always take more units than yoi think you need. Cannons/artillery r a must if the units are equal.