Marsh should hurt, not help

[Fafnir13]

I have never seen a marsh...
Do they not work with fractal?

 

[MrPopov]

hmm. thinking even further, what about Jungle? I imagine a dense thick covering of plants and trees would severely limit unit cohesion as well. Why do they give a defense bonus?

 

[Neomega]

We also ought to recognize that the marsh in FfH may not be as forbidding as the ones we think of on earth.

I tend to think of them as more forbidding.... the swamps are where everything goes to die, and in a magical place, I would think even more so. More dark, more forboding. In LOTR the marshes were pretty bad, and in Magic the Gathering, IIRC, marsh/swamp is where death mana is generated.

*facepalm*

Um, no.

Think of it like mountains in FfH. You don't defend that square... because nobody can get through it. You defend the next place over, because that's where the advancing army is going to be.

I can swear... you just facepalmed me, then repeated what I just said.

hmm. thinking even further, what about Jungle? I imagine a dense thick covering of plants and trees would severely limit unit cohesion as well. Why do they give a defense bonus?

The ground of jungles can be somewhat soft, depending how close to a river you are.... But its not just cohesion, its also mobility... and yes supply lines are important in warfare, lots of things are, and the importance of mobility cannot be understated. Also forests/jungle give cover to movement (intelligence is also very important) whilst marshland is usually not heavily vegetated... it is usually more like melting permafrost. You can also have jungle marsh or forest marsh, as marsh is more a descriptor of the ground, not the vegetation thickness.

I have never seen a marsh...
Do they not work with fractal?

Only erebus and erebus continents, as far as I know.

 

[Snarks]

I could see the guerilla promotion improving marsh combat and recon units faring better in swamps than other units. This would make marshs a strategic zone for light infantry and guerilla fighters.

 

[Tasunke]

meh ... I think being in a marsh should grant -10% strength!!! attacking OUT of a Marsh would suck .. but picking off people stuck IN a marsh would rock ... except for the unit/units that in return end up in the marsh after killing the last defender. Aye, not -10% defense, but -10% strength, avoid when possible sah! please and thank you.

Lesson is adjourned. (yea, im agreeing with Bruenor, kinda)

 

[Diamondeye]

I think we're all agreed. Marsh is a disaster to an army. Being caught in a marsh results disaster. Hence, attacker bonus. But the attacker would then end up in the middle of the marsh himself, so the tile remains hideous.

Also, increased movement cost seems like a good idea, and major setbacks for anyone trying to drag artillery, cavalry, or even other units through it.

 

[Aeon221]

Marshes and swamps are two very different locations. For instance, coastal Carolina has marshes, while the Everglades is a swamp. There are also moors, which are again very different and generally found in Europe and Africa. It just sounds ignorant when people use the terms interchangeably. Feel free to examine the wikipedia articles on all three to familiarize yourselves with the differences!

Having spent much of my childhood near marshes of various types, I assure you that a boat (or better yet a kayak) is necessary to traverse a marsh. Without one, you'd be up to your knees in pluff mud and quite literally incapable of movement. Also, alligators.

It is possible to walk through parts of a marsh, but it's unlikely that anything larger than a platoon could effectively operate using the small trails that lead you from one point of solid ground to another -- I base that assertion on the experiences of my Scout troop. If you consider the issue of supply, marsh operations become even goofier -- you can no more drive a wagon through a marsh than you could a car. Boat based supply options are a possibility, but the majority of channels are narrow and shallow, leaving it generally not viable.

Putting this in concise terms: an army would no more operate in a marsh than it would operate in a river or underneath the ocean. Marshes and swamps should be inaccessible. They can be crossed, certainly, but they're no more fit for military operation than a mountain height is, and for similar reasons.

 

[Tasunke]

nah, I like the Strength Decrease ... prolly around -10% str while in marsh. That way, attackers (kindof) have a bonus, but it also sucks to attack from a marsh

 

[Neomega]

Marshes and swamps are two very different locations. For instance, coastal Carolina has marshes, while the Everglades is a swamp. There are also moors, which are again very different and generally found in Europe and Africa. It just sounds ignorant when people use the terms interchangeably. Feel free to examine the wikipedia articles on all three to familiarize yourselves with the differences!

they are pretty much the same To say "very different" is actually nitpicking.

 

[Tasunke]

marsh = -10% strength???

 

[Darksaber1]

they are pretty much the same To say "very different" is actually nitpicking.

Not really. A marsh is pretty much a shallow lake full of low-plants, like rushes and reeds, whill a swamp if more of a flooded forest, to first appeareance. A march raley has trees, while a swamp almost allways does.

The big diffence: A marsh has much more open water then a swamp. However, the two terms have become more or less interchangable in North America

 

[Tasunke]

I like swamps better than marshes, although either way marshes should only hurt units in them.

 

[JFSebastian]

So a marsh tile with a forest/jungle feature should work out to something similar to a swamp then?

 

[Tasunke]

ah ... probably yes.

 

[iffi]

Marshes and swamps are two very different locations. For instance, coastal Carolina has marshes, while the Everglades is a swamp. There are also moors, which are again very different and generally found in Europe and Africa. It just sounds ignorant when people use the terms interchangeably. Feel free to examine the wikipedia articles on all three to familiarize yourselves with the differences!

Thank you for this. For years and years I've been telling people Finland has lots of swamps. But what we actually have are bogs! Sphagnum bogs to be more precise.

Assuming the wiki entries are correct, marsh and swamp really should be a no-no for most units. Which would be fine with me, because they would make great natural borders to civs. But not impassable like mountains, rather with some heavy restrictions to passage. I liked the way some maps have marsh in the heart jungles. Would be great to also have largish 'tundra marshes'.

And if marshes are made upgradable, it should take several turns each tile.

 

[dot]

I hate marshes for yield reasons.
I agree they could be nice for style and flavour.
I quite like the idea of having marshes (no trees) and swamps (with trees).
I have subscribed to this thread.

 

[Dean_the_Young]

Breunor brings up the most valid points here. The difficulty of a marsh is as much the problem of maintaining organization and cohesion (and logistics) as anything else. Cehesion and control are far more important for an aggressive attacker than a prepared defender, who can set up at the best positions beforehand.

Imagine it the other way around.

Your troops, bogged down in marsh. How exactly do you setup fortifications on non-solid ground?

A marsh is a mixture of solid and non-solid terrain. The defenders have the choice of picking their terrain to stand or hide in, and time allows them to shape the terrain to their advantage: cut down trees for a barricade, rig traps, etc. They can also arrange their primary, alternate, secondary, and fall back positions as well, always choosing the best terrain for each while the attackers don't know the advance terrain and don't have the choice.

Enemy, standing outside marsh, just launches a hail of arrows on your vulnerable troops.

Why would they sit in range? And what happened to the cover and concealment of all the trees and military terrain in the marsh?

Each tile in civ is large enough to have a sprawling city. They are more than large enough to force the enemy to come to you in the tile than force you to meet them at the edge. If that were the case, then there would be virtually no terrain defenses at all: why not apply the same logic to forests, or hills, or even cities?

In any military campaign, the last thing a general wants is to be in a marsh. Its a terrible place to be caught. If your army was caught in a marsh, you have been caught with your pants down. IIRC, there was a famous roman battle where the Romans were completely destroyed because they got hamstrung in a marsh.

That was ambush conceived by surprise and treachery, and the most decisive point of any major ambush is catching the enemy when they are off guard and out of ideal formation. They were traveling in a line formation: pretty much single file. It's the only way to move in a lot of terrain, from mountains to thick woods to crossing rivers. It's the easiest and fastest means of controlling a formation. It's also the most vulnerable. Any unit in a line formation is humstrung if attacked, and this is especially true for a formation-dependent military like the Romans. That sort of ambush would have worked just as well in a dense forest, on a steep mountain/hill, or any other terrain with low visibility.

Marsh totally impedes mobility, making it easy for an attacker to pick and choose their targets, and decimate any kind of defenses. It's not like a hill or pass, where you can guard a choke point, its more like a field, except a field made of thousands of chokepoints, you can't possibly guard them all, but you have no choice but to try. It leaves your defenses spread thin, and unable to cooperate well, whilst all and attacker has to do is pick one point and assault, wipe out with overwhelming numbers, move to the next, in the meantime, your defenses can't scramble through the bog. It is a terrible place for attacker and defender, but defenders have to stay there, which is miserable. Attackers can leave. There is a reason why people drain marshland before trying to inhabit it... and even then, there are a lot of foundation and insect issues.

No. No. No no no no. That's not how it works at all.

First and foremost, terrain with bad movement harms the attacker most. It prevents him from moving towards a position quickly, it prevents flanking maneuvers, and it slows the speed of the assault. These all harm the attacker more than the defender, because defenders don't rely on speed. An attacker can't pick and choose his target in a marsh anymore than he can in a forest or on a mountain: by the time he can marshal the forces to overwhelm a point, the defender can also move to counter as he sees fit, whether by also moving troops there or by falling back and striking somewhere else. Every disadvantage to the defense hinders the offense to a greater degree. Impeding mobility virtually always harms the attacker more, because the defender has the advantage of interior lines of transportation and communication.

Second, a marsh is about as far from a field as you can get. The military conception of a field is that it has great visibility, the easiest availability of movement short of a rode, and little or no terrain defenses. A marsh is the opposite: visibility is exceptionally to highly limited due to vegetation and terrain fluctuations, maneuverability is extremely difficult at best, and terrain defenses (waterways, rises, trees and vegetation) are everywhere.

A marsh is no more a field made of thousands of mission-critical chokepoints than a forest is. There are natural conduits and strategic portions: areas of firmer ground, larger waterways, everything that applies anywhere. It's all local. So what if an enemy passes through one pair of trees here or crosses over an individual waterway there? They just got one step further. But I can attack when it suits me best, which will be when the terrain forces the enemy to loosen their formation. The terrain itself will divide up the formations for me, and all the while I can harass them. I can attack them as their forces are split trying to cross a water channel. I can secure firmer ground and bombard them as they try and attack, and then flee back into the wastes. Each of those thousands of chokepoints only matters so much as I let them, and there's no military reason I have to hold every one of them.

And in the end, if the attackers get sick of it all and leave... I've won. I have successfully defended the area, and the attacker has lost.

I am totally surprised it gives a defense bonus. It just doesn't make any sense at all.

It makes a lot of military sense. You can't move in easily, and I can make it impossible for you to have an effective advance.

Marsh is bad terrain for warfare in general. This is especially true in modern times. Traditionally, military analysis views it as favoring defenders.

No offense to anyone in particular, but from being on these boards for years I've noted that most people here view military operations as battle and sometimes as strategy; however, logistical issues and command, control, and coordination dominate military science.

Marsh type terrain makes it very difficult to remain in formation, especially for an army moving. For modern armies, obviously, the terrain makes it hard to use wheeled or heavily tracked vehicles at all. Therefore, armor based armies cannot operate in marsh; the conclusion here is that defense with automatic weapons is relatively easy. So the swamps around Leningrad, for instance, were traversed in the winter during WWII because the ground was harder and more easily navigated than in the summer.

Even going back to the Revolutionary war, we see the campaign of Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox) in the Carolinas in 1780 and 1781 period. For the British, any type of organized attack is difficult and guerilla warfare practiced by Marion was very effective. The British advantage was their professionalism, but the swamps limited their ability to stay coordinated.

In earlier times, Marsh still had the same distinguishing characteristic - it was difficult for attackers because staying in formation, keeping command of the troops, and moving supplies is tremendously difficult. Generally, very little defense was ever assigned to marsh. The danger of contracting disease, carrying supplies, and staying in any way to act as an army is so difficult that it rarely ever NEEDED to be defended at all! the Marsh itself is enough of an obstacle.

Being a little more specific, Marsh was anathema to armies relying on either mobility of formation, which was jsut about everyone. The Romans and Greeks avoided it - the Romans heavy infantry legions couldn't stay in formation, which was even more important to the Greek phalanxes.

To be realistic, then, marsh should be terrible for any attacker, but should be absolutely worst for
artillery; artillery probably should be prohibited form moving or attacking into Marsh at all. Next worst would be chariots and then cavalry (cavalry in a marsh!) The horses would all get injured!), and just about as bad for heavy infantry. Lighter troops, like the recon line, would probably though be at a large advantage.

Clearly, defense should have some advantage, they should be able to spot places where staying in formation is more likely. As I said, they don't need to do much in a marsh to stop an army! There should also likely be an advantage to familiarity, that is, troops knowing where the firmer ground in the marsh is would have a tactical advantage.

The one area then where the army should then have a disadvantage defending would be where the units defending the square are the 'strategic' attacker. That is, take an attacking army that moves into a marsh into enemy lands but aren't familiar with it. They could be in bad trouble against an ambush from light troops familiar with the local conditions.

Best wishes,

Breunor

This. So this. So much of this is exactly similar to what I've been taught.

Are you professional, Breunor?

ever needed to be? Or perhaps it's that there are better places to defend at? I mean seriously, only a fool would really try and set up camp in a marsh. Marsh must be traversed.... you want to get out of it, you don't want to be in it, period... but you want your enemy in it. Just them going through it is going to be a hassle for them, and you can watch on the sidelines.

Depending on the size and situation, setting up camp in a marsh can be the best idea. One of the key emphasis of setting up a patrol base in unsecured terrain for a platoon, for example, is to put it in terrain that the enemy (or civilians) are least likely to stumble across it. In the middle of a swamp in a valley with rises on all sides fits that to a T. It's uncomfortable, sure, but it's better than fighting from the camp and hiding out in a marsh is a proven way to minimize detection. If you put your camp in a swamp, it's less likely to be found and attacked.

You might not be able to do that with an large army, but then the logistics of setting up in a marsh are different than on firmer ground. A swamp will see everything far more decentralized and you'll have lots of camplings, terrain dependent of course. Historically, you can even set up cities in marshes (ex: New Orleans). It all depends on whether it needs to be done enough to invest the resources.

I assure you, victories in marshland come not from setting up camp and machine gun bunkers there, but from lying in wait from solid ground for an army to march though it, begin marching through it, or have it's tail end still stuck in there, then picking weak spots as the army is essentially in disarray.

And the reason why many battles have not been fought in marsh is because it is almost impossible to move an army through one. Armies don't even go there unless it is absolutely necessary... and that is because of the huge disadvantage it puts you at. I would be hard pressed for to find any instance in history where some general was like "here, in this mesquito infested bogland, we shall make our last stand" Nobody would ever pick a marsh for it's innate defensive capabilities.

You mean, besides Andrew Jackson and the New Orleans campaign? (More seriously, there was an entire indegenous empire in Brazil that retreated to the Amazon when Spain conquered the coasts. They mostly died out from new world diseases, not Spanish conquest.)

Those are actually the reasons why a marsh is good for defense. You're just mixed up and confusing the attacker for the defender in that last bit: the defender isn't the one trying to move an army through. Armies don't move through because it's all but impossible to do so well, which is pretty much the definition of a defender's advantage.

 

[Tasunke]

In any event, its the people that are the least familiar with the terrain, at the very least, you should only be able to grant a defensive bonus if the marsh is within your culture.

Same for an attacking bonus into marsh within your own culture, as marsh is one of those terrain types where you need the logistic support of the common people around you.

 

[Breunor]

Thanks for the nice words Dean the Young!

I'm not a 'professional' military man but I have had an academic quasi-career in it. I've published a bit in military history and I've taught it.


Best wishes,

Breunor

 

[Darksaber1]

I'm pretty sure that during the 100 years war, the English sought out bogs and marshes, because they could out longbowmen into them, and the French couldn't get to them. (Granted, the French were wek with ranged weapons, but still)