Logistics.

[reddishrecue]

I like siege weapons and they should be taken care of wherever they're taken to even if there's attrition damage. Workers should be taken with to be able to repair the damages, then.

Is this really the case? As far as I'm aware, the multiplayer meta is mostly centered around heavy cavalry, so I was assuming those are the strongest units.

Archers could take melee units up but not fortifications that well. However, if archers really have that veteran status that could be an exception with more range in civ 5. I prefer siege units in civ 6 when it came to fortifications though because they caused so much more damage on walled up encampments and cities than archers.... Even though they don't get that repaired. I know what it is to be 1st and power and lose crossbows to walled up fortifications (China) in civ 5. In civ 6 I used the bows for defense like they did in civ 4 and got the siege weapons up for the fortifications. TBh, I haven't tried the trebuchets, but about a half a dozen catapults are good enough to take ranged hit from early fortifications. Later siege get even better because they have recon units like hot air balloons and drones that help them out.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Could you expand on this further? I find it hard to imagine how five or ten thousand people could live completely off of the land. Then again, I'm not exactly an expert, so maybe I just don't have a good view of things.

They spread out. 10,000 men can't feed themselves from the food supply in, say, a village of 100 people, but when 'foraging' (stealing) they spread out to all the villages within 10 kilometers or more (half or third of a day's march) and take everything from all of them. Then they keep moving, because a day or two later they are hungry again but there isn't anything for anyone to eat within 10 or more kilometers from where they are. That means ancient and later armies (up to the Napoleonic Wars, in fact) feeding themselves off the land have to keep moving constantly, and are very dependent on what the terrain tile is already producing: there is simply nothing to steal in a desert or tundra.

Is this really the case? As far as I'm aware, the multiplayer meta is mostly centered around heavy cavalry, so I was assuming those are the strongest units.

Ranged Units that can damage/destroy the enemy without taking any loss in return have been 'overpowered' since Civ V. Heavy Cavalry, though, is also an example of a type of unit severely constrained by Supply. The horses big enough to carry a man in full metal armor have to be big and muscular (not necessarily tall, but heavily built and heavier in weight than the 'wild' horse) and therefore cannot just crop grass to feed themselves - they need grain to maintain their strength, and they need about 4 - 5 times more of it each day than even the most gluttonous human. By sheer volume, Fodder, when it has to be supplied, is the most significant of all 'food' supplies.
Another consideration is that even the most successful cavalry action will result in dead, wounded, or broken-down horses, and replacing them is not a matter of grabbing the nearest plow horse from the nearest farmer: trained war horses take a long time and a lot of money to raise, train, and maintain. That is why everybody from Rome to Byzantium to the medieval European states to Tang China to the modern USSR (which, after all, maintained 230,000 cavalrymen as late as April 1943!) had large stud farms and horse pastures to maintain their cavalry forces. That's expensive, because every acre/square kilometer used to feed horses is NOT feeding people - and in many of those states, that resulted in people afraid of starving revolting against the state.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Late game siege in Civ 6 is actually potent, though air power is probably better. Even so, grape shot + 3-4 range + army status with indirect fire doesn't have too much trouble deleting AI units. Artillery armies can even kill modern era stuff like that in a few shots, and these can hit cities without them shooting back/move to shoot next city with great general next turn easily.

Early game siege is a joke, doesn't outrange cities and is somehow seriously threatened by city fire + archer fire from inside it. Though I've been on record that "city fire" shouldn't be a thing. Walls, strength, okay. But free shots w/o a garrison? Nah, and it makes a very common historical capture method of all (sieging cities/fortifications into submission) irrelevant.

Civ games already massively over-favor the defender. It's been true in every version, though more so in 5/6. With a possible exception for nukes, especially civ 4 nukes finally made the attacker favored.

 

[Leyrann]

Civ games already massively over-favor the defender. It's been true in every version, though more so in 5/6. With a possible exception for nukes, especially civ 4 nukes finally made the attacker favored.

I'm again calling doubts based on what I've seen from the multiplayer meta. If someone gets to tanks first (and therefore also has artillery), their neighbor can at best delay, but practically never hold. Even with tanks of their own it can be tough to hold.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm again calling doubts based on what I've seen from the multiplayer meta. If someone gets to tanks first (and therefore also has artillery), their neighbor can at best delay, but practically never hold. Even with tanks of their own it can be tough to hold.

I am assuming equal tech. Rifles dunked on medieval junk in Civ 4, too. But if both sides had rifles/cannons, you could again forget about it. Defender could use roads, attacker couldn't. So unless defender was horribly out of position, they would get to hit opposing stack with cannons first before attacker, and then absolutely shred attacker's army (even in defensive terrain).

It defies belief that similar numbers of tanks on both sides favors the attacker, even in MP. It might be closer than earlier eras, but defender still has vision advantage and should be able to not only hold, but trade favorably assuming at least similar numbers of tanks/arty. Even worse if defender has arty in/behind city oriented such that attacker can't reach it.

Even here, note the first thing you bring up is the era where siege can finally out-range cities.

 

[Leyrann]

Even here, note the first thing you bring up is the era where siege can finally out-range cities.

That's fair enough.

And it's also not as if I can claim to be an expert just because I watched some 20-30 hours worth of much better players than me playing against each other.

 

[AntSou]

One thing I would like is the return from one of the old game where you couldn't use infrastructure freely when moving through enemy land. Some sort of attrition damage if not having a line home would also make sense to me.

When I tried to incorporate attrition from terrain in my games, the AI would just fortify and try to heal on the spot, thus taking more damage and sitting there indefinitely . Still used it in Hotseat mode. IIRC I just used Mamluk's ability with a negative value.
---

It might be straightforward to abstract Logistics and Attrition into Civ 6 by making use of the already existing system:

How the game works: units do not heal and lose combat strength when there aren't enough strategic resources to maintain them;

Might be possible: Check tile for "Road", and if there isn't one, apply +100% strategic resource maintenance and +50% gold maintenance cost.

 

[aieeegrunt]

“Trace a line of hexes free of enemy units and/or their ZOCs to a friendly supply source” has worked as an abstraction for games like this for literally a century

The AI in Civ wouldn’t be able to handle this anymore than it can handle 1UPT or city strikes unfortunately

 

[Zegangani]

Yeah, unfortunately Ideas like that oftentimes tend to break the AI even more (or making it another advantage the human players has over the AI), so comming up with innovative Ideas in civ6 is something that can be indeed possible/moddable, but when you try to apply something to AI then you quickly hit a roadblock or see AI completely ignoring your changes (like having limited stacks in civ6 that the AI doesn't utilize but actually preventing Units from entering tiles with other Units even if they can enter it or trying to unstack at the end of the turn).

It might be straightforward to abstract Logistics and Attrition into Civ 6 by making use of the already existing system

Exactly, that's the best way of doint it (for anything also AI related). And I had similar Ideas on how to make Attrition/Supply Lines work for AI, like with reduced healing rate, increased maintenance, combat penalty...etc.

One other possible solution to things like this, is to make them only apply to the Human Player, or at least, make the penalties much less severe for the AI. This way we would get more challenges from the Game without AI struggling at them, so that those challenges don't turn out to be something that make the AI even easier to win against, and it would also be a way to remove the huge Bonuses the AI gets at higher difficulties, balancing out the challenges that only the Human Player gets.

So, instead of:
- AI getting increased free Bonuses the higher the difficulty is.
we would have:
- More challenging things for the human Player the higher the difficulty is (even if it means getting more penalties than the AI).

And it would be pretty fine IMO if some things don't apply to AI too. The AI in the Civ Game is primarilly a passive Threat, and was never meant as the Game's main Challenge for the human Player. It's the gameplay challenges that we are after in this Game. After all, it's the different and multiple ways to achieve X and Y that make us love and enjoy this game so much, so more things like that, even if they don't apply to AI, would certainly not hurt the Gameplay.

Btw, you made an awesome Job with Silk & Spice!! really great Mod, a must have in every Game. I actually have disabled the Portugal DLC, but for this I will activate it again and sacrifice some Asset Mod.

 

[AntSou]

One other possible solution to things like this, is to make them only apply to the Human Player, or at least, make the penalties much less severe for the AI

I'd definitely go with this. Of course I want the AI to just be better, but if Firaxis doesn't put more weight into designing the AI, I would at least hope for better AI cheats/Human handicaps in the future rather than just "here's a bunch of free s***. Kill the human quickly before he catches up!"

Btw, you made an awesome Job with Silk & Spice!! really great Mod, a must have in every Game. I actually have disabled the Portugal DLC, but for this I will activate it again and sacrifice some Asset Mod.

Thanks . Not sure how well balanced it is yet, but it's a simple mod, tweaking it should be a straightforward matter.

What's the issue with Portugal DLC and assets? I saw another comment of yours somewhere mentioning an "asset limit bug", but I don't know what that is.

 

[Zegangani]

What's the issue with Portugal DLC and assets? I saw another comment of yours somewhere mentioning an "asset limit bug", but I don't know what that is.

There is no Issue with the Portugal DLC.
The Issue is the Asset limit Bug, which is a Bug that breaks the Game (CTD or just breaking the Visuals InGame) when using Mods that add too many new Assets to the Game (hence Asset Limit - and some modders have roughly counted the number of asset enries that the Game can handle). The Bug was introduced with NFP and exists since September/November 2020 at latest, and some players report it existing much prior to that.
For example in my case, I can't use the Game with warfare Expanded Reloaded at all, even with no other mods active. So, although it's possible to add some few Asset Mods without the Game breaking, if I want to play the Game with Mods that add lots of Assets to the Game, like JNR's Urban Complexity Mods all at once, I need to disable some DLCs/Mods to reduce the Asset count, so that the Game runs normal. And since I don't use the Zombie Mode and rarely play with Portugal and AI is bad at handling its Unique trait, I disabled it to reduce the asset count.

What that means is:
- you can't enable as much Mods as you want or any kind of mod, which wasn't the case pre NFP.
- It discourages many Modders who want to work on Mods that add new art to the Game. A reason why we probably won't have a Mod that reskins assets and add variations of the same Model (like different Visuals of the same district based on the Civ), until the Bug is fixed

 

[_hero_]

It seems to me that if you wanted to implement logistics in a meaningful but intuitive way, you'd need to replace the hit point system with a manpower system and make population more of a real thing instead of the pops system civilization has always had.

I don't think Civ necessarily needs such a system but I do feel that combat in the game has been moving in the wrong direction, especially in regards to the AIs ability to use it effectively. 1UPT has basically meant that no matter how much of a production bonus you give the AI, the battlefield gets narrowed to roughly equal numbers with the AI having a ton of backup units unable to actually contribute. The hitpoint system means that any clever player can effectively nullify the AIs number advantage by rotating units in and out of the front lines. The only real combat advantages the AI gets are very slight damage bonuses on very high difficulties, but that's a lever the devs can't really fiddle with much due to the way the combat system works.

A manpower system would give the devs a highly adjustable lever that they could use to increase AI difficulty without causing many of the headaches that the other levers would cause. Ramping up production means the AI just paints the map with units, causing gameplay to be sluggish. Pulling the damage lever makes it feel like the AI has an unfair advantage. If the AI is at the same tech level as you and their units are just doing 25-50% more damage to you than you are to them simply because of some modifier, that feels bad and makes it feel like you have to have a tech advantage to even fight the AI. That's a frustration point for the player that just means most of the time they're going to feel like quitting the game instead of slugging through. A manpower system means that the player feels like they're on level footing with the AI when they engage in combat, but behind the scenes, the AI is getting bonuses that let them survive better than the player in the long term. If properly tuned the player overcomes this disadvantage with long-term planning and sound strategic play instead of simply learning the AIs tendencies and then baiting it into poor choices repeatedly. Manipulating the AI will still be a part but that's always going to be the case so long as the "AI" isn't really a proper AI.

 

[CoconutTank]

IMO, an easy way to simulate supply logistics in Civ6 would be to disable healing outside of friendly territory for all units as a baseline, not just naval units and air units. Units that are too far out can't be resupplied, and thus they can't recover from losses.

I would be totally okay with a nerf to walls to some extent in tandem with such a change.

 

[aieeegrunt]

IMO, an easy way to simulate supply logistics in Civ6 would be to disable healing outside of friendly territory for all units as a baseline, not just naval units and air units. Units that are too far out can't be resupplied, and thus they can't recover from losses.

Healing requires being adjacent to a Baggage Train; a support unit that unlocks with The Wheel and also requires Animal Husbandry to build

Up till the railroad, a LOT of military strategy revolved around them

I would be totally okay with a nerf to walls to some extent in tandem with such a change.

Get rid of city strikes!!!!

 

[CoconutTank]

Healing requires being adjacent to a Baggage Train; a support unit that unlocks with The Wheel and also requires Animal Husbandry to build

Up till the railroad, a LOT of military strategy revolved around them

I could believe that, though I'm hoping your suggestion is for replacing healing outside of friendly territory, and not for replacing all healing. Basically means players would have to keep something similar to a Medic/Supply Truck support unit around, and opponents that take those units out could temporarily halt an advance.

Imagine Spec Ops being useful for sniping support units

Get rid of city strikes!!!!

I would actually be down for that

 

[aieeegrunt]

I could believe that, though I'm hoping your suggestion is for replacing healing outside of friendly territory, and not for replacing all healing. Basically means players would have to keep something similar to a Medic/Supply Truck support unit around, and opponents that take those units out could temporarily halt an advance.

Ya that is what I was thinking. The baggage trains are slowwww, so a fast advance relies on plunder

France’s Unique unit is a Line Infantry that can heal by plundering ANY improvement

Imagine Spec Ops being useful for sniping support units

Imagine building more than one scout a game!

[quote
I would actually be down for that [/QUOTE]

It’s such a dumb mechanic

 

[Leyrann]

Imagine building more than one scout a game!

I usually start my game by building two.

 

[DeckerdJames]

Think of the units as a group. When the unit takes damage, the group loses members of its unit and equipment is damaged. If you are in friendly territory and the unit fortifies for a turn, it "heals" +15. Logistical support is most effective in territory controlled by the player. In neutral territory it is +10, and in enemy territory it is +5. Think of the healing as the unit receiving reinforcements and other supplies/equipment. If you think of "healing" as reinforcements/resupply it might address the logistical realism.

 

[Zegangani]

Think of the units as a group. When the unit takes damage, the group loses members of its unit and equipment is damaged. If you are in friendly territory and the unit fortifies for a turn, it "heals" +15. Logistical support is most effective in territory controlled by the player. In neutral territory it is +10, and in enemy territory it is +5. Think of the healing as the unit receiving reinforcements and other supplies/equipment. If you think of "healing" as reinforcements/resupply it might address the logistical realism.

If Healing represents anything but that, then I don't know why it's even in the Game. I always perceived it as you described, and never as an actual Health Bar like how you know it from RPG/RTS Games.
The Request for a propper Supply line and Logistics mechanism, is for nothing but to develop and enhance that system and to make it more important and visible, in other words, we want it to be less abstract but more fleshed out.

Well, Healing is one of those things that work quite well in the Game and don't actually need a rework IMO, so it's ok if they keep it abstract like it is. But nothing speaks against an improvement/rework if it means a better gameplay experience without much micromanagement.

 

[DeckerdJames]

If Healing represents anything but that, then I don't know why it's even in the Game. I always perceived it as you described, and never as an actual Health Bar like how you know it from RPG/RTS Games.
The Request for a propper Supply line and Logistics mechanism, is for nothing but to develop and enhance that system and to make it more important and visible, in other words, we want it to be less abstract but more fleshed out.

Well, Healing is one of those things that work quite well in the Game and don't actually need a rework IMO, so it's ok if they keep it abstract like it is. But nothing speaks against an improvement/rework if it means a better gameplay experience without much micromanagement.

Totally agree. If they can make that aspect less abstract and create a sub-game of Logistics that enhances the strategy but doesn't make it tedious or over complicated, I am interested.

I think it could be enhanced many ways. Imagination is the limit. Perhaps, a kind of fort can enhance "resupply" effect within a certain distance. The legionnaire unit can place its fort outside of city boundaries. If it could add +5 to units in neutral or enemy territory, that might create a logistical effect, but still in the abstract, yet still simple and requiring some thought about when and where to place them. The military engineer could also get the ability to place forts outside of city territory. Normal forts cannot be placed outside, afaik. Once the later eras comes around the supply convoy and the medic can be built that is essentially simulating the faster resupply (or heal) of adjacent and stationary units.

That is kind of the limitation though. Resupply and healing are kind of rolled into one thing. Probably for simplicity. Once those units are built, they are able to move with the combat units and do their job even on the other side of the world.

I think that if they were to add "outpost/resupply" sort of building that could be built in neutral territory, like the legionnaire fort was suggested to be above, and then add a "point a to point b" unit, like the trader, that you can send between these buildings, that could simulate a supply line. Then the outpost/resupply building enables the supply convoy to function when it is with a certain distance to the outpost/resupply building and an active "resupply" (trader-like unit) is connected to it.

This of course is just something that might work with civ 6, but I am sure an entire system of logistics could be created from scratch, things like having pools of resources like men, horses, etc. that is simple and allows enemy players the ability to interrupt resupply units.