Prophetic Fog of War - Read it and Know Ye Outcome of Your Battle

TimeWeaver

Warlord
Joined
May 31, 2011
Messages
210
Location
Chronos
Hi!

I hadn't really noticed this until my last game with RamalamaDingdong. If you see an enemy unit standing at the edge of fog of war and then you have at it with a unit of yours, the fog of war partly surrounding the enemy unit will prophetically reveal if you win the battle or not a second or more (depending on your rig) before the animations play out and you see the true result of your onslaught!

Personally, I think this breaks immersion and should be considered a bug/glitch worth repairing.

I tested over and over again with different units etc, it always does this. Test it yourself, take a healthy unit of yours and watch what happens: As soon as you start the attack, the fog of war dissipates around the enemy unit well before that enemy unit has been killed through animations, sound etc.

I'm no code monkey, but surely, it is possible to improve the sequence there, so this cannot happen. This also shows that the CiV engine already has calculated the outcome as soon as you click to attack. Fast buggers, those computers! :D
 
Same thing goes for if you have the honour (honor) opener and attack a barb out in the open (i.e not inside an encampment). It already adds the culture you'll receive before the animations are finished. I don't really mind, just pointing it out though...
 
Ha ha. I always play with Quick Combat, so it's a non-issue for me. ;)

In fact, I was initially a bit confused by the post until I realized it was referring mainly to the results of the battle before the animation resolved (since I never see the animations).

Based on the thread title, I thought it was some ability to know the actual results of a combat before you initiate the attack (and so you can choose not to if you want). I thought there was some scenario or mod (or maybe for Civ IV or a similar game) where you could get a wonder that would you let you do that.
 
While i can see the point of breaking the immersion a little is is a logical set-up from a programming perspective.
The battle is decided before the animation starts and then the animation side knows how to display the battle.e.g. how many units to destroy.
If you started the animation first it would be hard (to the extent of not worth the effort) to start the animation and then be able to work out the odds and communicate the desired end result to the animation side with appropriate timing to allow it to properly display the right type of animation.
Especially considering that no computer has exactly the same speed as another and a fraction of a second out of sync could mean too many or too little units being eliminated and then you have a much more immersion breaking/buggy glitch where elements of the unit would either be left over when a unit is killed, or too few elements show as the animation destroyed too many, etc.

Having said that though a reasonably easy work around would be to have the fog of war being separate to the combat animations and the fog of war calculation being calculated after the combat had finished.
You could then keep the current system where the combat algorithm is done before the animation begins to allow it to communicate in adequate time for the animation to display properly and then, when the animation is finished does it communicate the units new position and therefore adjust the fog of war.

That would have been a good design from the start but to change it now would again likely be more trouble that it is worth.
 
ALso if you hover over the enemy unit after clicking the attack button, it will give you an estimation on the next attack outcome before the current attack animation has completed.
 
You can also know where units are on your map outside of your vision by playing around with which tiles it will allow you to move units to with the right mouse button.
 
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