Mounted units

[Kosez]

I don`t know if this subject ever appeared, but i have been bothering myself with ability of mounted units (horseman, knights,...) to attack units behind city walls and fortresses. We all know horses can`t climb the walls and in reality mounted units were only useful on flat terrains without any major obstacles, like dense forrest or bushes and steep hills.
Mounted units shuldn`t be able to attack units in cities with city walls and units in fortresses, maybe even in all other tiles accept grassland, plains and desert.

 

[sengfossil]

well on the other hand mounted units are used inside the cities too. How will you do that in a civ style fighting system? perhaps the so called walls are not so strong as a stone wall?

 

[dh_epic]

Maybe there should be a "city door" improvement, otherwise nobody can enter or leave the city.

Edit:

 

[mitsho]

@dh_epic Put a smilie behind the post when you are sarcastic. Otherwise, on the internet or any other written text, some people won't understand.

mfG mitsho

 

[Commander Bello]

Maybe there should be a "city door" improvement, otherwise nobody can enter or leave the city.

Edit:

And to be able to build the "city door" you would have to invent the advance of hinges and to build the great wonder of Door Hinges (1350 shields).

Back to the original topic: I think, it is a valid point that mounted - better: riding units - should at least have severe problems in taking a city. On the one hand, as long as they are riding there is almost no chance in getting the city, on the other hand they may dismount their animals, which would lead to reduced "stats" (in real life, that is).
So, riding units should suffer a malus if a city would be protected by walls. This would be another - and understandable - means to break the predominance of the Knight and the Cavalry.
With some adjustments to the AI (which are needed anyway) it would use "core troops" to go after the cities, while the cavalry type units would sweep the lands to kill of approaching reinforcements of the defender.
Hey, that even could give some realistic feeling.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

That is probably the best example I can see of different 'tactics' that should be included in the game

 

[Kosez]

Well, i think it would be much more simple to just prevent riding units to attack units behind city walls and in fortresses. Riding units could be used only as flank units, primary offensive units would be foot soldiers. That solution could benefit greatly to the number of different tactics used, as flank units could be used only on specific terrain, but would be more powerfull.

 

[Aegis]

This would change the dynamic of the entire game. I like the idea. =o)

 

[dasei]

Good point. I guess the mounted unit have to reduce their attack and defend points in mountains, behind the wall, etc.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Perhaps this goes to the heart of the question of: 'should the majority of battles be fought "within" cities-or outside of them?'
After all, it would seem that in many battles-at least until the late industrial age-both sides seemed to avoid city combat except in extreme circumstances. Perhaps a change to the combat system could make it more apropriate to fight out on the open field if at all possible, with retreat to a city being an option only as a last resort. Under such situations, the attacker is left with the option of assaulting the city-at great loss of life to the citizens AND at a significant disadvantage to the AS/DS of certain units (whether there are city walls or not)-or beseiging the city (where a seige would be resolved in almost the exact same way as normal combat-with the objective being to force the surrender of the city or the destruction of all its defending troops).
Of course, the defender faces pretty much the same dilemma.
Also, the possiblity could exist that, if an enemy control ALL of the squares of a city radius of a city, particularly if no defending troops are anywhere nearby, then said enemy can seek the surrender of the city. If they don't, or if the city refuses, then the enemy can seek to enter the city, but may well take a slight pounding as it does so-if that makes sense?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[rhialto]

If we use my suggestion where each unit has a chassis class, this would be very easy to implement. We could just say that any unit with teh "cavalry" chassi has a -25% attack factor vs units in city.

To force battles outside a city, pre-modern style, we need to change two things. We need to give the attacker a reason not to directly assault the city, and instead camp outside, and we need to give the defender a reason to quickly force attacking units off the city radius tiles and bring teh fight to the strategic attacker.

I've just been drinking heavily to celebrate a new job, so I won't try to write up any seige rules

 

[Commander Bello]

[..]
I've just been drinking heavily to celebrate a new job, so I won't try to write up any seige rules

Congratulations for your new job

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Yeah, I absolutely concur with Cmdr Bello, congrats on the new job Rhialto. Shame you didn't try and write up the siege rules with a 'head full-o' alcohol', I reckon the results might have been quite funny !!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[rhialto]

ok, seige rules...

First, regarding scaling...

In realistic terms, seiges tended to last anything up to 7 months or so. Pragmatic concerns regarding how early armies were raised meant that you couldn't keep a beseiging army together much longer than that. In civ terms, this is less than a turn.

However, what is necessary for gameplay isn't strict accuracy to real world models, but the impression of that accuracy. So even though a seige may take 6 months in real world terms, it is quite acceptable for it to take 8 turns in the game, even though those 8 turns may 'represent' 400 years. The key issue is that the turn length gives the feel of a seige.

* units with "cavalry" chassis have -25% attack vs cities
* a hostile unit prevents the city from working the tile it is on, and every tile adjacent to that hostile unit.
* Each consecutive turn a city is under seige causes a cumulative -1 happy face in the city. A city is considered under seige if the combat potential (att+def factors) of hostile units in the city radius exceeds that of city defenders.
* A city in civil disorder loses all benefits of defence related city improvements (walls, barracks, etc)
* Cities receive a defence bonus based on the highest population level ever achieved. This is 25% add pop 6+, 50% at 12+. 75% at 18+. This bonus is not lost either if teh population later shrinks or if the city goes into disorder.


On a slightly related topic, I want the way acquducts, hospitals, and walls affect max population to change.
To whit...

(all numbers are example illustrations only)
* Base max population for any city is 8.
* Acqueduct has +4 max pop.
* Sewers has +6 max pop
* Hospital has +20 max pop (ie effectively removes population limits)
* City walls has -4 max pop.

This way, even a modern city can have city walls if you are prepared to pay the penalty in a lower maximum population. It always seemed odd to me that the walls should effectively vanish once your population grew. Those walls were still there; it made no sense for their benefits to vanish.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Actually, Rhialto, if combat (be it seige or standard) were comprised of what I call 'pulses', then you could increase the perception of realism even more.
For instance, at the end of a turn in which you 'besiege' a city, the siege is resolved in a similar fashion to normal combat-with the objective being to force the surrender of a city. Each combat pulse (i.e. attack/defense) might count as a 'fraction' of the time between two turns. For instance, if you had a 20 year turn-and there were 10 combat pulses-you could surmise that each pulse equals 2-3 months, meaning that the entire siege only took 2.5 years of the total 20 years between turns.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[rhialto]

@Aussie Lurker
The key issue for teh feeling of taking time is that a seige must take place over several turns. If it just happens over a single turn in multiple combat pulses, there aren't any other decisions being made while the seige is going on.

It's what I think I will call "experience time". From the player's experience perception, if the seige is 20 pulses happening in one game turn, all seige related decisions are happening at the same time, and so very little experience time is taken up by the seige. But if it is broken up into several turns of game time, the player has to come back to the seige, which will help lengthen the experience time of the seige - it will feel as if it has taken longer, even though exactly teh same number of decisions will have been taken regarding it.

Also, without it taking place over more than one turn, you can't sensibly model morale effects or reduced production on the city.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I disagree Rhialto, I think all of these things could be easily modelled within a better 'overall' combat model. It probably won't suprise you to know that I am a keen supporter of certain elements of both the CtP I and II AND Birth of the Federation combat systems. If such models were adopted to CivIV, you could allocate responsibilities to units involved in a siege PRIOR to the siege occuring-then watch the results pan out in a mini-combat screen. You could even have a pause system where you can 'exit' the combat and reassign tasks according to your wishes, or you can just let your 'Field Officers' take care of things for you.
I guess what I am saying is that normal civ3 combat has NO direct player interaction in the system, and I don't see why sieges should consist of any more. I do support your overall ideas, btw, I just think they can be condensed to within the length of a single 'combat turn'.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

Hey Rhialto, congratulations on the power move

I think the idea of city walls offering a population limit is interesting. But I think it hurts defensive players two-fold. Once simply for being on defence, and once with a population restriction. If anything, it's the expansionist-militarists that need compelling tradeoffs.

 

[Kosez]

It probably won't suprise you to know that I am a keen supporter of certain elements of both the CtP I and II

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Reinventing combat system would be the best solution. But if combat system stays the same, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to simply prevent mounted units to attack units in cities with walls. In all Civ´s mounted units are primary offensive units, so if in CivIV mounted units would not be able to attack cities with walls, some other kind of offensive units has to be invented. In ancient age there is swordsman, but in mediaeval (i apologize if word is not correct, but my dictionary says it is) and industrial age there is no substitute for knights and cavalry. And that has been bothering me. Knights and cavalry were not capable of sieging a city, and because they have no unmounted substitute they are really only offensive units of their time, which makes no contribution to diversity of armies, tactics and strategy.
Offensive wars would be fought in different fashion if everybody would had to bare in his mind, that knights/cavalry are useless at seizing cities/fortresses.
In CTP2 units were divided in offensive, deffensive, flank, and so on, and I think this was not entirely gone astray concept.

 

[sir_schwick]

Oftentimes troops on horseback would, WOW, get off the horse. Foot knights were some of the most dangerous and effective infantry troops man-for-man in medieval Europe. I love using Chivalric Foot Knights dismounted from Chivalric Knights in MTW. Anyway, I would except the idea that they get a A/D penalty for fighitng dismounted(against walls or in bad terrain, although the Swiss even had Knights).

Actually what makes more sense to balancing out troops is fatigue and morale combined. Fatigue means that over 'combat pulses' your troops lose thier A/D/M stats for the purpose of combat(not over the whole game). Heavy Cavalry tends to lose it quicker, as does heavily armed troops in equatorial longitudes, and mechanized troops in rough terrain. It means defensive troops do well if they survive the first couple pulses, and hit and run cavalry tactics would count against morale(possibly breaking huge opponents).