Modern versus Ancient Garbage

[simwiz2]

Originally posted by zeeter


So then basically.......you cheat?

Congratualtions! You have posted the single most stupid thing I have seen on these forums in a long time. You are saying that anyone who mods the game is a cheater. In case you weren't aware, Firaxis INTENTIONALLY made their game moddable. Let me guess, you are one of those who feel the need to post in any thread wanting a change in the game "you all suck at civ3, you need to learn strategy, you just want to cheat and roll over the AI" Modding is NOT cheating, unless you open up the editor and give one civ a super-unit and then play that civ, or something like that. Most mods simply change certain concepts to improve the game's historical accuracy, replay value, fun, predictability, etc.

And the second most stupid thing... the comparisons of spear vs tank to Vietnam. The vietnamese did NOT destroy entire tank divisions with spears!!! Sure it is possible for them to dig a pit and have a tank fall in, but I HIGHLY doubt that they would be able to do that to an entire "unit".

 

[Trinity]

Against Cavalry possible. Spearmen could set up a spear/shield wall. Against modern armor, on plains or desert, the programmers didn't include overrun attacks. Unrealistic? Yes.

Mountain terrain or jungle is different. That's where infantry should be superior. Saying that older units would have no defense there is unrealistic. Building to building fighting in cities might be a reason where modern armies might take losses. We don't see that.

But then this isn't exactly a division level game. If it were division level the map would be huge and we would see some of what is involved in taking a city. If any of you have played Game Designers Workshop's "Unetschieden" (Russian Front WWII - division level circa 1974) you would have seen primitive units. They included "volunteer" units for the Russians which appear in November 1941. They are nothing more than schlock units made up of Russian peasants wielding pitchforks, shovels, and a few rifles that the Russians threw out to slow the German advance on Moscow. Put them in decent defensive positions and they can actually do the job as they did in real life. Hence, how you should be able to use spearmen and swordsmen to slow an armor advance.

I'm running patch 1.21, and it seems like India has disbanded their spearmen, upgraded all of their musketmen/riflemen to infantry. As have the Greeks. That I can understand. The Aztecs are still running around with Jaguar warriors, knights, and haven't upgraded a single unit, even though they have more modern units. Why? I don't have a clue.

Also I can't figure out why I still get the spearman, swordsman, horseman choices in my build menu in the Industrial Age when I set up a new settlement on one of the islands. Why on earth would I want to build them? I use my transports to ferry over infantry for garrison.

 

[Catt]

Originally posted by simwiz2


Modding is NOT cheating, unless you open up the editor and give one civ a super-unit and then play that civ, or something like that. Most mods simply change certain concepts to improve the game's historical accuracy, replay value, fun, predictability, etc.

I agree, modding is not cheating (provided you're not playing GOTM or submitting games for HOF, etc.)

However, I believe that many of the mods out there are unbalancing (notice I did not say cheating ), and almost always tend to favor the human player. After all, the human knows how to take advantage of the mods and/or knows that the mods inherently necessitate a change in strategy. For example, zeeter's earlier post pointed out that substantially increasing modern unit values over ancient unit values may very well be more realistic, BUT, since we're playing against a hard-coded AI, and many seem to think that the AI is not very smart about upgrading its units (though seems to be some improvement in v1.21f?), the "modern warfare fixes" mods can be unbalancing -- the human will realize that ancient, but upgradeable, units are substantially devalued in the modded game, sometimes to the point of worthlessness -- does the AI recognize this and upgrade these units at any cost and/or disband them? I don't know

(btw, I have not played your mod, simwiz2, and am absolutely not criticizing your mod -- I appreciate all the work of all modders).

 

[newfangle]

I just doubled the stats of modern and industrial units in my mod to alleviate the killer spearman problem.

 

[Trinity]

The only way to find out if the AI accounts for costs of upgrading units is to do saves and spy and watch treasuries.

How India managed to upgrade all those musketmen/riflemen to infantry and still manage to have a positive balance in their budget is beyond me. With the RoP, I knew where those units were and how many of them there were.

I also can't figure out why at the stage where I'm starting to build a modern fleet my governors still select "Privateer".

Caravels and Galleons upgrade to Transports, but Frigates don't upgrade? Oh well, decommission time.

 

[d3dash]

in my game, I have changed a few things, one of them being the HP bonus, I gave medevil plus 1, industrial plus 2, modern plus 3. this helps with the killer spearmen while still giving them a chance. the chance decreaces with each passing era as it should. Another thing I changed it the movement of modern (metal) ships, I trippled it and left the woden ships and ironclads as their normal moves. The reasoning for this is I play huge maps, and this way the navy can be used. I also think that the new ships should be a whole heluva lot faster than the old ones.

 

[d3dash]

Originally posted by Trinity
Also I can't figure out why I still get the spearman, swordsman, horseman choices in my build menu in the Industrial Age when I set up a new settlement on one of the islands. Why on earth would I want to build them? I use my transports to ferry over infantry for garrison.

with those new settlements, are they connected to the resources needed to build the newer units???

 

[Trinity]

Sometimes yes. Its that there is still the option of building one of them the bugs me. Swordsman still appears.

I just built a city on an island where my privateer scout discovered a source of rubber. I can understand not being able to build anything of siginificance without the requisite resources. This one I fortified with an infantry unit, cavalry, and worker. So the first task is to build a harbor, while the worker is irrigating, mining, and planting and harvesting forests for those extra shields. I've got 18 turns left on my trade agreement with Greece for rubber, and 28 on the harbor, so it's build new units, and upgrade everything else for the remaining 18 turns.

 

[zeeter]

simwiz2,

Read what I was responding to:

"Anyone playing with Firaxis' values is as goofy as they are. "

So, basically if I am not playing with a modded game, I am goofy. And since most people who play this game do NOT mod their games, most people are goofy.

Sure, maybe to say that he is cheating is a bit harsh, but look what I was up against. And, if you read my elaborative post, I have reasons to back up my position. But obviously, you didn't because other than saying that my post was stupid and saying that modding is not cheating, you didn't really say too much to back up your position. Firaxis blah blah.

Since you didn't read my post, (yet felt the need to call me stupid) I'll go over it again. To significantly modify the game without modifying the source code behind it is to create an unfair advantage over the AI. In a modded game, the player knows exactly what he has to shoot for. The AI knows exactly what it was programmed to shoot for. A player going for cultural victory under these conditions will know enough to keep the military updated so that they don't get run over by modern units. The AI knows that defense is important, but doesn't necessarily know that unless they are modern, they are doomed. Out of the box, a fortified veteran spearman in a walled city stands some sort of chance aganst a tank. Under the modded conditions, it has no chance. Does the AI know this? I think not.

And to be fair, how often does it really happen that a tank gets beat by a spearman? From my experience, there isn't a problem with Tanks beating Spearmen, however once in a while there is a rogue Elite spearman unit that takes out three tanks and some mech infantry. This is uncommon, but does it really warrant changing the game and complaining about it all the time?

 

[simwiz2]

You were not just calling zouave a cheater - you were calling anyone who dares to mod their game a cheater. the AI being rendered ineffective by modding is a possible, unfortunate side-effect, not the goal of the modder "haha, now I can steamroll them easier with my mod" as you seem to imply. and yes, i did read your posts, though there was little in them worth reading anyway.

 

[zeeter]

roadwarrior,

Ok, I was off by a few years. Although since we're nit-picking, the actual first settlement on the continental new world was St Augustine in 1565.

One thing that sticks out to me is that you suggested that "the massacres of european armies are very much the exception rather than the rule." I think its fair to say the the massacres of Tank units to Spearman is very much the exception as well. Its not like these units are on level ground with a tank.

I think that we get caught up with looking at pikemen as pikemen and tanks as tanks. These units are numeric values. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but lets say that a pikeman is a three defensively, and a tank is a 12. Well, fortified within a city with walls and the pikeman goes up to what, nine? So now its twelve against nine. These odds are not quite as daunting. However, we get all hung up in thinking of tanks and pikeman that we forget that the source code doesn't really know that its a tank, it knows its a twelve.

 

[zeeter]

simwiz2,

Ok, let me get this straight. You feel that I was calling anyone who mods a cheater. I can live with that. It was not my intent, but I don't think I can sway you in that argument so I won't bother trying.

You agree that the AI may be renered ineffective by modding. It is, according to you, an "unfortunate side-effect." So an inneffective AI is only a side effect so that modders may have more reallistic values?

This is a strategy game! Not a war-game. If we mod the game so that there are more "realistic" values, should we also point out that it takes far less than six years to walk from NY to Washington? And Galleys often went out into the open ocean way-way back. Some sank, but many didn't. And did the Great Lighthouse really make ships faster even when they were on the other side of the world and couldn't see the lighthouse? Plus, last I saw, there was no Cure for Cancer. And is Caesar really six thousand years old?

We can accept all of the above historical inaccuracies as part of the game, but cannot accept that a spearman has an off-chance to beat a tank?

I dont' think that modders are cheaters. Many fine scenarios have been built. And in CivII even I, sick of my battleships being sunk by cruise missiles from the other side of the planet, modded the range of the missile to three to prevent this.

If we look at this, one of the strategies of the AI was to fire these cruise missiles from so far away. I took this strategy away from them. And since I didn't use them it didn't effect me. So, in effect I modified the game to my advantage.

Aren't we doing this by significantly modding CivIII?

 

[Trinity]

Yes there are a lot of very unrealistic things in the game. And like Zeeter pointed out, this is not a war game.

Unit movements are unrealistically slow until one gets rail. In some cases it takes way too long to build an improvement. But those are things we need to work around. Cultural flips are very unlikely in the real world, but nations usually are made up of several ethnic groups. Some ethnic groups are always struggling to form their own nation, and usually fail, or succeed only to find they don't have the resources and end up getting annexed to another by default.

Large empires are unwieldy to manage in real life, as they are in the game. There is way too much territory to defend. Costs of maintaining a balance between a strong military and maintaining happiness in all your cities are very high. The game doesn't take into account outer edge cities fighting to form their own civilization (like the United States did with England).

Creating mods are fun, and so are creating scenarios. The thing about making things historically accurate is that in this game we are creating a new history of the world based upon our actions, starting positions, map. A lot can be altered. Conditions for certain changes in governments, like the rise of fascism, may not be met during the course of a game.

Nazism rose because of the crushing defeat in WWI followed by huge war reparations, global economic depression. Germany was desparate and turned to a desparate form of government and ultimately imploded at the expense of millions of lives. If those conditions fail to appear in a game, why would any nation turn to this? Also would any player force those conditions on a nation for peace terms?

Another thing that is unrealistic about the game is that most civilizations go to democracy as quickly as possible. And the democracy in the game is based upon the US model which is actually a republic. Smaller nations with fledgling democracies still deal with rampant corruption, military coups, etc., which do not get taken into account. Once the AI chooses democracy, they rarely will change to another form of government. That is my observaton.

Bottom line is that this is a game unto itself.

 

[jerosen]

Originally posted by Trinity

I also can't figure out why at the stage where I'm starting to build a modern fleet my governors still select "Privateer".

Caravels and Galleons upgrade to Transports, but Frigates don't upgrade? Oh well, decommission time.

The privateer unit has a unique property because it can attack anonymously. For this reason alone, I can understand why there would be circumstances when a player would want to create them during modern times. Granted they won't be too effective if your enemy has many modern naval units. But there are possible strategies for their use even in modern times. You can create naval blockades of ports, bombard improvements on the shore or use several units to attack undefended transport units. All of this can be done without reprisal from the other side or any declaration of war.

But then I wouldn't expect the governor to know or understand such strategies. So I don't know why they would be trying to build them. Sometimes I think the governor will pick a cheaper unit in a city that does not have much production. They seem to want to build swordsmen or longbowmen in low production cities that have few military items even when there are cavalry available. This may be a need to fortify the city asap. The governor may have some desire to build up your naval fleet asap and decide to pick the cheapest naval unit available in the city in question. We can only speculate.

Jim

 

[Zouave]

Originally posted by DaSilva
He isnt cheating cause all the other civs get to use the same modified units as well. (I dont know if your post was tounge in cheek but there didnt appear to be any smilies )

He has just modded the game mechanics so it plays better in the modern era when up against backward civilisations.

Let me keep this as simple as possible for those people (unlike DaSilva) who are as braindead as the Civ 3 AI.

Editing the values of anything or everything WHEN IT APPLIES TO BOTH THE HUMAN AND AI CIVS is not "cheating" as the AI civs have exactly the same capabilities as I do. If I gave my knights a rating of 6.2.2 and the AI's knights 5.2.2 (if that would be possible) THAT would be "cheating". That is not the case.

Furthermore, the values that came with the game are non-historical, idiotic, difficult to enjoy playing with, and generally slapped together by people who neither playtested the game nor understand military history.

I have posted many times why some values have been changed; see the thread I started on the Completed Mods forum for some descriptions of this. But if you want to examine that mod download THIS one below as it is more up to date and tweaked a little more than the other. But read that other thread for ways to assure it never crashes.

BTW, there are times I do cheat by reloading. That happens only when some absurd Culture Flipping crap occurs and I want to thwart it. (When a town flips to me I try to give it back).

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by roadwarrior
The massacres of European armies are very much the exception rather than the rule.

Correct. And in Civ3, tanks losing to spearmen is pretty rare too. It almost never happens in any of my games. Actually, I don't think it has ever happened.

 

[Catt]

Originally posted by Zouave


Let me keep this as simple as possible for those people (unlike DaSilva) who are as braindead as the Civ 3 AI.

Editing the values of anything or everything WHEN IT APPLIES TO BOTH THE HUMAN AND AI CIVS is not "cheating" as the AI civs have exactly the same capabilities as I do. If I gave my knights a rating of 6.2.2 and the AI's knights 5.2.2 (if that would be possible) THAT would be "cheating". That is not the case.

And I'll repeat my point, which I think is roughly the same point zeeter has made. Modding so that it applies to both AI and human may not be "cheating," but it can be so unbalancing as to seem like cheating to some who play the game.

As Zouave has pointed out time and again, the AI does not employ certain tactics as well as the human player (or, in Zouave's words, the AI is "braindead" "idiotic" etc. ). The example I'll use this time is artillery. If we mod artilery to be significantly more powerful than it is out of the box, and of course make sure that the modded artillery is available to all civilizations, is this "cheating?" I won't call it cheating (but maybe I'm being to semantically polite) but I will call it ridiculously unbalancing, and significantly favoring the human player. Why? Because the AI still won't use artillery in great stacks the way human players often do, so the net effect is that the vast bulk of the increased power available through the modded artillery is exploited only by the human player.

Unless you can recode or rescript how the AI thinks of units and warfare tactics / strategies, certain mods, while fairly applied, will significantly favor the human player, and that just doesn't strike me as "fair" (more importantly, it reduces some of the challenge, and therefore fun, of the game for me).

 

[akinkhoo]

Seriously, though, a lot of Americans got hurt by low-tech weapons (traps etc.) in Vietnam. The human body is quite vulnerable..

ya, quie a few were hurt, but NOT ENTIRE DIVISION! I fail to see how a spearmen can fight a mech Infantry with computer controlled automated machine gun!

Here's my best analogy. The Americans vs. the Native Americans. Americans being any european settlement for the purpose of this argument. The Americans were modern, if not enlightened, while the Native Americans were very enlightened, but not modern. Yet it took almost four hundred years before Americans could sleep without fear of attack somewhere in the country or its territories.

According to the rules presented in this thread, the English should have simply landed and whenever they encountered Native Americans, the NA's would simply disapear.

Well, to go along with these rules, the Native Americans would have to know well in advance that they should ignore enlightenment and concentrate on technologies that will keep them in line militarily.

Seriously, the Native were not stupid, they were not facing rilfemen armies and artillery with only horsemen, blowpipe and arrows. Many have GUNS! it was more like rilfemen and artillery vs. cavalry and conscript. THEY DID HAVE MILITARY TECHNOLGY, much purchase from other powers/smuggler or taken from capture US outpost.

The chinese when fighting the british have guns and cannons as well. but cannons were no match for the artillery. so technology IS important. The chinese pay a heavily price for not moderning. The gold robbed from them can produced an army as powerful as the bristish invasion army. again, it show how important technology is.

The buying and selling of military unit is a must. I don't see how worker are traded and units cannot! countries buy weapons from russia and usa ALL THE TIME! this will make resources important but not kill of the weaker countries as they can still buy their way out!

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by akinkhoo


Seriously, the Native were not stupid, they were not facing rilfemen armies and artillery with only horsemen, blowpipe and arrows. Many have GUNS! it was more like rilfemen and artillery vs. cavalry and conscript. THEY DID HAVE MILITARY TECHNOLGY, much purchase from other powers/smuggler or taken from capture US outpost.

The weapons were usually provided by rival European civilizations. The Native Americans could not produce iron, much less guns. They were definitely in the Ancient Age. This diffusion of weapons is not modeled in the game. It's part of the compromise required to make such a sophisticated game available on a standard home computer, and playable by a large number of people. Without mass production, most of the things we take for granted would not be possible.

 

[Zachriel]

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