New Version - 2.6 (August 16, 2022)

[Zuizgond]

Wars are usually a carpet of units running into each other, especially in the mid-late game. And the main problem is units can usually be recreated faster than they can be killed, so AI cannot focus on attacking cities as they are too busy killing units.

I think the main issue comes from buying units, which is too easy to do. Maybe units should be more expensive or there should be a cooldown before buying another unit in the same city.

 

[nekokon]

Siege units are the only realistic way to take cities after walls for the most part. You have to plan and line up 2 or 3 at once because the AI is smart enough to target them over your melee walls.
Siege units really shine when they get the level 3 volley promotion that adds in an extra +50% to attacks on cities. You will eat away 15% to 20% of the cities health each hit. You will usually be attacking cities close to your boarder, make sure you have your roads going right up to the boarder of the enemy territory. If you have them to spare using a great general to expand your territory makes this even easier. If you can snipe the capital, you won. The AI will always vassal once you take their capital. This of course can become an issue if your aren't attacking a civ that shares boarders with yourself, but that's the game and reflects real life.

Skirmishers only scratch cities, and if you are using them to take cities it will take forever. Skirmishers are amazing defensive units because you can use your roads to hit and run units. They are alright on the offensive, but it depends heavily on terrain. If you have lots of open terrain you can pick off whole armies. Because ranged mounted units are so good, melee mounted are kind of garbage.

Ranged units draw back is they do crap damage towards cities. You can use them to get your melee close to cities because they are alright support units, but after than they are just in the way. Your main goal should be attacking enemies that share your boarder, I find if I try to use ranged units they end up having to pull back to make room for my siege units before they really do much. Due to ranged mounted units are so much better you should focus on using them in place. Ranged units also tend to get worse and worse as the game progresses while siege units just get better and better.

Building road right outside enemy border doesn't help much unless it's against small new city (which doesn't even need siege to take). Your siege units will still have to crawl for a few turns to get in/out of enemy border.
I'm already doing what you're suggesting, having multiple siege units in position at the same time, and it's still nowhere as effective as you're saying. Without range promotion they're almost single-use in a sense that once they get targeted for 1 turn and have to retreat, they will never comeback in time to contribute (get all the way out of border, heal up, get back in, very slowly at every steps). Also taking volley instead of siege III is inefficient, because you only have +25% extra dmg (on top of current extra bonus dmg and not total dmg, so more like an extra 10-15%) and you delay range/indirect fire which would allow siege units to attack a lot more often and be much more useful.

Skirmishers indeed can only scratch cities, but it's a constant stream of small scratches which would actually contribute more the longer it goes. It doesn't mean I would just replace all siege units with skirmishers for the purpose of taking down cities since it's a huge waste of time, but a buff to siege unit would help their contribution a lot more. Right now it's a waste of time to not use them against cities after wall, but at the same time it's horrible to field them because of how inefficient they are before range/indirect fire, so the more logical conclusion would be just pillage/kill units without taking city at all unless you can easily do so.

Also this might be from when I was playing a long time ago, but who would take away indirect fire from siege units ? Doesn't make sense both historically and gameplay-wise. If you're too scared on siege units breaking balance by rushing city, there're other ways to nerf them, and not their main/only characteristic of able to fire over obstacle.

 

[CppMaster]

You could use medics, so you don't have to retreat wounded units to your border for healing.

 

[Tekamthi]

To soften up seige of cities, imo should have Assyria seige towers available to all civs... Unit line of battering ram > seige tower > sapper, or something similar

 

[nekokon]

You could use medics, so you don't have to retreat wounded units to your border for healing.

Speaking of medic, would be great if we can have a medic as a separated civilian unit to stacks on combat unit, even if they're nerfed to medic 1 max. As of right now dedicated medic is kind of inefficient as they're only good when you're regrouping after a fight and not during the fight (they have to stay close thus get in the way of other units, and most of the time they can only heal 2 fighting units at once).

 

[SpecifiedUsername]

New civilian unit, medic, available at education, and new military unit, battering ram, fragile, non-upgradable, but nearly immune to ranged attacks and having like three or four times CS against cities, available at military theory, both available for all factions, would be incredibly refreshing and wouldn't require new drastic balance changes and coming up with something new like with taking siege tower from Assyria.

Medic could for example double the healing rate of stacked and all adjacent units, regardless of terrain (hostile, neutral, friendly). You could have multiple but they should be exorbitantly expensive in production, unable to be bought by gold, and doesn't stack with their effect like generals.

 

[Tekamthi]

Maybe don't need to take seige tower from Assyria but implementing same effect of buffing nearby attackers when adjacent to city, using distinct unit line from ranged seige units, might improve the seige log jams. And this uses a feature AI already understands. Would also make sieges more dynamic and tactical vs other changes proposed here of just flat increases/decreases in combat strength etc.

I like the medic idea, and such a unit itself would be trivial to add, but getting AI to use it effectively is another matter. I'm sure there are a number of creative solutions, but AI limitations probably rule many out.

 

[nekokon]

I'm not sure about turning siege units into buffing role, there's nothing tactical about just put them near your units, having specific niche would make it retain identity among other unit types.

Realistically all siege units outside of battery ram would have absolutely 0 defense as there're almost non combatant among the operators, and can get take down very easily from just a light attack. I would say give them back their indirect fire and range 3 while zero out their defense, so that enemy can counter with their own siege units or bring fast unit to snipe (which happened historically, and not this free cover promotion thing) and you also have to leave some units nearby to defend them, thus spread out the clustered frontline. Can also give them a promotion that doesn't allow siege unit to attack while inside jungle/forest (again, accurate historically and also prevent cheesing by putting them inside forest to avoid horsemen flank). Then we can nerf their dmg to balance it out however needed.

Regarding the medic civilian, just slap great general AI on it. Khan has the same ability.

 

[stii]

Ranged units do fine damage to cities. They do something like half what siege units do but they also attack twice as much because they can move and shoot. Siege units pull up get shot and pull back after a few hits. Once you level your siege units up to do more damage to cities ranged units literally shoot twice. Does feel a bit like we have got off the point though.

On the higher levels there are a lot of units you need to clear first. But it is certainly possible to do so. Then you can take cities with ranged units or with melee+siege. With AI vs AI fights they can struggle to get anywhere but not always and not later on. Plus that happens to the human is far more important.

 

[Zuizgond]

I'm not sure about turning siege units into buffing role, there's nothing tactical about just put them near your units, having specific niche would make it retain identity among other unit types.

Realistically all siege units outside of battery ram would have absolutely 0 defense as there're almost non combatant among the operators, and can get take down very easily from just a light attack. I would say give them back their indirect fire and range 3 while zero out their defense, so that enemy can counter with their own siege units or bring fast unit to snipe (which happened historically, and not this free cover promotion thing) and you also have to leave some units nearby to defend them, thus spread out the clustered frontline. Can also give them a promotion that doesn't allow siege unit to attack while inside jungle/forest (again, accurate historically and also prevent cheesing by putting them inside forest to avoid horsemen flank). Then we can nerf their dmg to balance it out however needed.

Regarding the medic civilian, just slap great general AI on it. Khan has the same ability.

Interesting idea. I always found it a bit unrealistic to have siege units having the same range as archers. We could also increase siege inaccuracy to -50%, at least for catapult/trebuchet so that they are not OP against other units.

Ranged units do fine damage to cities. They do something like half what siege units do but they also attack twice as much because they can move and shoot. Siege units pull up get shot and pull back after a few hits. Once you level your siege units up to do more damage to cities ranged units literally shoot twice.

If we buff siege units, maybe we should add a penalty for ranged units against cities with walls, making siege units almost mandatory to capture walled cities.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

I can't run the auto-installer for 2.6. Running as administrator makes no difference; Windows Defender stops it from running saying it's unrecognized.

 

[pineappledan]

Select the More Info button and press Run Anyways

 

[boho]

I agree that taking cities really saps the fun out of VP. Is it more "balanced?" Maybe, but aside from the "who cares if it's not fun" argument, there's also the problem that excessively chasing "balance" only changes the ideal strategy and never actually eliminates it. It's the fate of every game to have the fun optimized out of it.

Speaking of medic, would be great if we can have a medic as a separated civilian unit to stacks on combat unit, even if they're nerfed to medic 1 max. As of right now dedicated medic is kind of inefficient as they're only good when you're regrouping after a fight and not during the fight (they have to stay close thus get in the way of other units, and most of the time they can only heal 2 fighting units at once).

This needs to be added yesterday. Medic as-is makes managing unit carpets even more tedious and for my sanity I eventually just stop caring.

 

[CppMaster]

excessively chasing "balance" only changes the ideal strategy and never actually eliminates it.

The point is, so that the optimal strategy is less dominant, so there is more variety to play

 

[nekokon]

Tbh I think VP's balance has always been about AI's performance foremost (to keep all civ's performance around the same level) and player's experience later, due to gazebo mainly use AI only game to measure performance.

It's quite impossible to balance those 2 aspects due to various limitations (mostly AI and late game performance) based on the fact all those talks and changes have been going for years, so personally I think it should be ok to have some minor unbalances here and there for individual civ in player's hand. Yes they can be op playing a specific kind of strategy with a specific civ, but it doesn't mean they would forever stick to that civ and strat and never touch anything else, or at least raise the difficulty to enjoy a more even/prolonged game on their own.

This design philosophy would help eliminate a lot of extra work balance and rebalance, thus those effort can be spent on better stuffs like improving player's experience with new tactic/possible strat or mechanic to immerse in.
In fact a lot of modern games also adapted this method, abet encouraged some bad practices like almost forgoing AI because they can't follow up with all the great gameplay mechanic (thus focusing more on multiplayer advertisement) but since we already have a good base for AI it is ok to lean more on this instead of going back to the same cycle.

 

[Gazebo]

Tbh I think VP's balance has always been about AI's performance foremost (to keep all civ's performance around the same level) and player's experience later, due to gazebo mainly use AI only game to measure performance.

May have been the case when we first started, but bulk of relevant balance changes have been player-led for years.

 

[XSamatan]

As of right now dedicated medic is kind of inefficient

A MedicIII Scout located besides your siege units means you can have the one siege unit targeted by the city staying for multiple rounds taking damage instead of having to get out of range of the city immediately out of fear of it being destroyed.

Regards
XSamatan

 

[nekokon]

May have been the case when we first started, but bulk of relevant balance changes have been player-led for years.

It's because most suggestions for new gameplay change/mechanic were turned down due to AI technical limitation (which was set with the expectation that AI is to be able to keep up with human players using new mechanic, means favoring balance over player experience).
Thus the only feedback that passed through were balance and rebalance, going back and forth trying to find a perfect pixel (just to redo the whole process again when finally some new idea/mechanic is implemented, then repeat over and over until it got scraped because there's just no way to balance it or AIs have to work extra heavy calculation to keep up with human player).
It's not about who makes the suggestion (you, based on AI games, or other real human players based on their games), it's about what the suggestions tend to (the game's balance or player's experience). And the filter was on the former.

A MedicIII Scout located besides your siege units means you can have the one siege unit targeted by the city staying for multiple rounds taking damage instead of having to get out of range of the city immediately out of fear of it being destroyed.

Regards
XSamatan

I don't remember we have medic III. And 15hp per turn probably just gonna help you last 1 extra turn before fully pulling out, not multiple round (unless you get cover 2, which delays all other important promotions)

 

[andersw]

It's because most suggestions for new gameplay change/mechanic were turned down due to AI technical limitation (which was set in the expectation that AI is to be able to keep up with human players using new mechanic, means favoring balance over player experience).
Thus the only feedback that passed through were balance and rebalance, going back and forth trying to find a perfect pixel (just to redo the whole process again when finally some new idea/mechanic is implemented, then repeat over and over until it got scraped because there's just no way to balance it).
It's not about who makes the suggestion (you, based on AI games, or other real human players based on their games), it's about what the suggestions tend to (the game's balance or player's experience). And the filter was on the former.


I don't remember we have medic III. And 15hp per turn probably just gonna help you last 1 extra turn before fully pulling out, not multiple round (unless you get cover 2, which delays all other important promotions)

Regular units and medics .... can maybe help a bit later on when you have a LOT of upgrades, before industrial considering how much damage the AI can do to a unit "out of the blue" it feels like nothing.

Testing a game atm as Persia and Immortals+ several medic archers behind, now we're talking this is good.
Working to get march on the immortals (now pikemen) but this will take time.

 

[Stalker0]

I can't quite put my finder on it, but there seems to be something wrong with Germany's unit gifting ability. Either I'm not getting credit for some of my unit gifts or the bonus is kicking in much later than the 3 turns the UI says it should take, I'm not sure yet.