r_rolo1:
r_rolo1 said:
You misunderstood me ... again. My point is that you don't need to be tactical inept to be caught off guard or with your army in a delicate tactical position .. you might have just been caught in a unfortunate and hard to predict chain of events. You can only predict everything when your adversaries are predictable enough.
That is untrue. You have control of the terrain within your border, and you can therefore plan your defenses ahead of time. Active defense means that you have a plan for transporting your forces to where they're needed when they're needed there. If you are caught unawares, then you are not tactically inept. You are strategically inept. Every time you move your troops, you can estimate how much time it would take for them to move back.
Once you know the disposition of your forces, planning the terrain to have a defensive line and several fallbacks is a matter of foresight. Use hills to block line of sight against ranged units. Force the melee units to go through open terrain so your guys can slaughter them. Clear forests, even, to generate this fallback point.
r_rolo1 said:
I am really not sold to the idea of giving land to gain time. In civ V , probably more than in civ IV by a order of magnitude, land is power and losing land is a sure sign that you will lose your army if your opponent is as smart as you are. But i digress ... Anyway giving land by time was more powerful in civ IV due to the way you continued to have control of a lot of tiles where you had more speed than the offender even if you lost the city ... and the fact that cities in there have literally no defense after being taken in most of the times. You could make your city into a empty fort and siege your enemy inside or to force him into a long march inside enemy terrain until the next city. Neither of this is possible in civ V
Land is not power in Civ IV, and neither is it in Civ V. True power comes from having people, and the more population you have, the more powerful you are. Having land to work is just an initial requirement that becomes more optional as the game progresses. A Civ with more land isn't necessarily more powerful.
Losing cities and land isn't that big of a deal in Civ IV if that city is just a puppet or a non-core city. Sure, you might lose some gold or science, but isn't anything that isn't repairable once you win.
Ceding land to set up your opponent for brutal bombing and shelling is murderously effective in Civ V. You may not even have to lose the city. You just need his units in open terrain around it.
r_rolo1 said:
Now on your last point, it is clear to me that you had little times where you had to pull out your defensive gallons in civ IV against a inteligent foe. The name of the game in civ IV defense is to counter attack the enemy using the superior velocity you have against your enemy inside your land and if you add that to the static defenses, while doing the same math to civ V, civ IV wins hands down ( it is extremely hard to take a enemy of a similar military strength in civ IV if he is as smart as you ... you have to stick to defensive terrain, be very careful on your moves and pray for a miscalculation of his. Otherwise you will be surely defeated ). OFC that neither civ Iv or civ V AI do active defense, but that is a Ai shortcoming , not a inherent feature of the combat system ...
I take it that you haven't played with Civ V's battle system much. Probably win all the time through Horsemen or some such.
Defenders have monstrous advantages in Civ V. Quite apart from City Walls, Castles, and the like, you have the Great Wall, Himeji Castle, and preset terrain. You can win in Civ IV with a fraction of the strength of the army that is attacking you, if your dispositions are correct. Given unfavorable terrain, it can be not only difficult, but impossible to unseat a like-strength defender.
r_rolo1 said:
The only real diference between very fast conquers in civ IV and V is what you said: less means of making the cities defenseless fast, less range of those that exist in general and increased dificulty to concentrate those at will. This makes things diferent in degree at best, not diferent in kind. Anyway, the 1 upt also makes harder for the defender to regroup in the targeted areas to defend them, so I would probably call that even ground , not a civ V advantage.
Eh. Defense is defense. The differences are there, you concede, and it makes taking cities harder, allowing the defender to get reinforcements and choose his terrain. 1UPT making it harder for the defender to regroup also makes it hard for the attacker to maintain attack cohesion. The best attack is only
just enough and rather fragile - very much like Panzer General, actually. The right strike at the right time brings it all down. Anything less than that isn't a well-enough planned attack.