[GS] Punch List for Civ VI

[acluewithout]

Added this:

• One more dedication per Era (ie 5 instead of 4). The current 4 per Era are very repetitive. [NEW] Also, add the Era Overflow Mechanic from Dramatic Ages Mode into the base game.

 

[Moginheden]

Recruit partisans works great for AI players and doesn't need a nerf when they use it. The problem with this mission, is it is useless to human players. The barbarians spawed ignore the AI city my spy spawned them in, and beeline to my cities and units to screw me over. The partisans should have a priority to mess with the city they were spawned in.

 

[Moginheden]

The debate about air being too powerful is related to the point about the tech tree not being connected enough. Let's presume player A takes the bottom half of the tech tree and player B takes the top half.

In the early game player A has a big advantage, but it's mitigated by player B getting more science and walls are generally stong enough for player B to survive. (presuming they use naval units to upgrade their city strength or dip slightly into the bottom of the tree.)

On the other hand late game player A is completely screwed. Once player B has flight, they can delete player A's units at will with no consequences and flatten their cities WAY easier than player A's rocket artillery.

Flight comes quite a bit earlier in the tech tree than anti-air. Even with anti-air, the ability to attack with whatever units have enough health to survive, from halfway around the world, means player A loses any units that leave his cities while they are running to the fight... While player B just cycles his planes to heal them up and attacks wherever he will win.

The problem here I think is more a matter of the modern and later ground units sucking. You can be an era ahead of the player with flight and still lose. Ground units, (even ranged ones) can be hit on the enemies turn and take damage. Planes only engage when they are safe, usually take no damage when attacking, and retreat to a safe city before the enemy can fight back. Ground units have to take multiple turns sitting in the open getting hit before they can take a city, then only 1 of them is safe.

Naval units in the end game have enough anti air power and enough movement they can still be relevant, (but they are in the same side of the tech tree as planes anyway.) ground units are too slow, and should be able to shoot back vs planes.

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

has anyone ever had enough oil? I feel really unlucky lately in that regard...

 

[Moginheden]

has anyone ever had enough oil? I feel really unlucky lately in that regard...

I often have to settle in a tundra area for no other reason than to get oil, but that's not a problem.

 

[Sostratus]

The problem here I think is more a matter of the modern and later ground units sucking. You can be an era ahead of the player with flight and still lose. Ground units, (even ranged ones) can be hit on the enemies turn and take damage. Planes only engage when they are safe, usually take no damage when attacking, and retreat to a safe city before the enemy can fight back. Ground units have to take multiple turns sitting in the open getting hit before they can take a city, then only 1 of them is safe.

Firstly: before getting into the abhorrent modern+ era tech tree, air units are intentionally very strong because aluminum is so rare. Now, we can debate how much aluminum there should be etc, and we can recognize that unequal access to aluminum absolutely screws over players, but the first counter to air units is fighter aircraft. I know everyone spams bombers all the time but the devs intention was for bombers to get brutally countered by having fighters (which they do.)
The second counter is SAM systems. These are less flashy than fighters but they are resourceless and they should be thought of as "A2AD" weapons: Anti-Access/Area Denial. This is how they are used in reality. A bomber cannot do anything about a mobile SAM as it is a support unit. They are not really there to kill bombers, they are there to deny bombers from being useful.
Secondly: Not having an air force is a huge disadvantage.
There is no way to sugarcoat this fact - air units are balanced around being faced with other air units. An enemy with air dominance is going to steamroll most opponents. If you could easily counter an air force using no resources yourself, well, that would be a useless air force.

Now I recognize that SAMs hit bombers at +10, which is very close to a 2 hit KO iirc. It's not perfect. And they hit fighters at -10. OOF. Perhaps the Mobile Sam & Missile Cruiser should have a 2 tile coverage range instead of 1. I also wouldn't be against encampment defenses at some point getting an inherent anti air upgrade.

 

[Moginheden]

My bombers are stationed in cities, half the world away and hit wherever they can do so without dying, (almost anywhere.) If anti-air units and fighters are supposed to be a hard counter to them, then the bombers should not be able to out-range them, and should not be invulnerable when landed in a city.

In real life bombers can be intercepted reactively depending on where they are spotted. In Civ you need to defend everywere at once or the bombers just hit where you arn't.

 

[Sostratus]

If anti-air units and fighters are supposed to be a hard counter to them, then the bombers should not be able to out-range them, and should not be invulnerable when landed in a city.

Fighters only stop bombers when they are used to patrol an area. I don't remember the radius of that patrolling, though.
A bomber that tries to bomb into a fighter protected area will barely survive. It takes several turns to heal that bomber while the fighter can keep "almost" downing them turn after turn. The problem isn't that fighters won't stop bombers, it's that fighters and bombers both cost 1 aluminum, so why not just keeping making bombers? Fighters can never get enough patrol coverage to defend an large area from bombers because of how absurdly rare aluminum is.

I wish civ had a slightly more flexible resource system in place so that we could model something like "actually a fighter consumes 1, but a bomber takes 2" type stuff. In reality, compared to the cost of a large scale bombing campaign that aerial pillaging a district represents, operating interceptors is practically free. I fully recognize the deficiencies of SAM and Fighters vs Bombers as the game currently plays, I am only saying that the intention is that those counter them.

 

[Chekko]

What if you could group up Bombers with fighters as escort? Or do friendly Anti-Air help the Bombers from patrolling enemy Fighters? Don't know much about Aerial combat in this game.

 

[Sostratus]

What if you could group up Bombers with fighters as escort? Or do friendly Anti-Air help the Bombers from patrolling enemy Fighters? Don't know much about Aerial combat in this game.

Anything that can intercept an air unit (AA guns, fighters on patrol) can only intercept once per turn. I can’t recall if fighters can use their air strike on patrolling enemy fighters or not, but basically you just fly your fighters in to “air sweep” the defenses, then launch the bombers. In past games fighters had an air sweep action that explicitly tried to find and soak up enemy intercept chances.

 

[Moginheden]

What if you could group up Bombers with fighters as escort? Or do friendly Anti-Air help the Bombers from patrolling enemy Fighters? Don't know much about Aerial combat in this game.

I'm not sure where Sostratus is coming from, (he seems to think it's perfectly balanced?) but the current state of Aerial combat is:
Step 1: move bombers and fighters into cities instead of airstrips
Step 2: choose to attack with them in places where they won't be destroyed in a single hit, (pretty much anywhere)
Step 3: wait till they are healed with absolutely no chance of losing them
Step 4: repeat from step 2.

There is no way to actually stop a smart airplane user right now. Not even other planes from the same era. Only 1 deployed fighter seems to attack incoming aircraft, (even if you have a swarm deployed together.) Being hit by a fighter plus it's deployed buddy doesn't quite kill the attacker, (so it can heal up till full and do it again.) Most units have to leave their defenses in order to attack and stay vulnerable during the opponent's turn. Airplanes don't.

To make this worse, with the range bombers can attack from, you can wipe out a city's entire urban defenses and health from full in a single turn while hiding in multiple cities 15 hexes away, and then use a horseman corps to take over the city after it's flattened. (Yes horsemen, the first light cavalry unit in the tree... at least you need to corps them to make them strong enough when the enemy has tanks... but still this shows a massive bias towards the top half of the tech tree and to ignore the bottom half.)

 

[Sostratus]

I'm not sure where Sostratus is coming from, (he seems to think it's perfectly balanced?) but the current state of Aerial combat is:

I don't think air units are balanced- in one of my messages here I even mentioned how dominant bombers are over other air units- but I think the way aluminum is handled is a bigger specter over aerial combat than the unit stats themselves.
If we just pretend for a second that air units are not constrained by resources, how damaging should air defenses be to bombers? A one hit KO on a SAM battery or an unpromoted fighter might be too much. The problem currently, as I see interception, is that intercepting a bomber doesn't stop it AFAIK. I would rather see this logic tree:

• Aircraft is intercepted
  • If Aircraft is intercepted more than X tiles from target, Aircraft is shot down or returns home damaged, in neither case having completed the mission
  • If Aircraft is within X tiles of target, Aircraft is shot down (mission failed) or returns home damaged (mission success, but using post-interception-strength.)
• Aircraft is not intercepted but is attacking a target with an AA strength
  • AA unit has the first strike
• Aircraft is not intercepted and not subject to above
  
  • Mission proceeds normally

In the rules of the fighter patrol mechanic, you can get intercepted along a path to a target, but AA support units can only defend if the hex next to them is targeted. Problematic. Personally, i would up fighter range, and have SAMs give more coverage area. Allowing SAMs to intercept along a path would mean that you could make an AA wall to prevent bomber penetration into your empire.

But strategically, if the number of aircraft is heavily limited by aluminum, then players have a choice:
Build all bombers, giving 1 Attack per aluminum income
Build some nonzero number of fighters, with each fighter providing 1 interception per aluminum income
The problem is that 1 interception is more like 0.5 attacks mitigated, so in terms of the relative DPS done by each side (how much more one side is doing than the other,) you are spending 2 aluminum on fighters to prevent 1 aluminum of damage from bombers, when you could have just made bombers and had twice the relative DPS contribution.
The only way out of this is to make fighters OHKO bombers, but that just inverts the problem. You really need to make aluminum more available, likely by upping the amount from mines.

Also, I see you "mentioned" my name - rather than link my member page, you can put an @ in front of my name, ex @Sostratus , and that will generate a notification for me.

 

[Moginheden]

Ok I didn't know about the @Sostratus that's cool.

The problem I'm seeing though is the fact you can attack with planes where you know you can win, then retreat to safety and heal up to full and do it again.

Anything less than a 1 hit KO effectively does nothing, because the planes can heal up far away from the front lines and be untargetable while they do it.

A simple change that might help would be to only allow planes to land in aerodromes, airstrips, and carriers, (as they can be targeted there) this would be a massive nerf to planes... But it does make sense and military engineers can make airstrips quickly enough to get your planes to the fight. This would clump up landed planes enough that ground troops *might* be able to deal with them occasionally (but not well)

 

[civfan_999]

Thanks @Moginheden for articulating my argument much better than I did. This conversation is very interesting. Thanks to both of you.

I agree that the tech tree may be causing some issues, i.e. I have bombers but my opponent doesn't have anti-air yet.

And part of the issue is certainly that the AI doesn't exactly play smart. They rarely have anti-air or fighters so they don't effectively counter planes until they get death robots.

I agree that it is an issue that planes can always be safe from an offensive attack, hiding in cities while they heal. Though, it is punitive to have to heal for 4+ turns after a single offensive attack (when a plane takes 50%-70% HP damage from a death robot, for example). I think this mechanic, where you have to waste time healing between free attacks, would be a helpful addition. I suggest there is a tech where cities automatically get AA defense, just like how steel provides walls to all cities. The built in AA can be weaker than fighters or mobile SAMs, but would still at least punish planes a little. Alternatively, it could be just as strong as other AA, but would be an adder, like walls, that the player has to choose to build spending production. However, in the second case, the AI would need to focus that building when at war to defend against planes.

 

[Moginheden]

@civfan_999 I disagree that spending 4 turns healing is punitive considering it takes way more than 4 turns to replace the ground units I'm killing 1/plane, (or sometimes 1/two planes) every turn. Also getting the ground units to the front line takes a few turns and planes get there way faster, so other planes can cycle in while you are waiting for the damaged ones to heal.

Adding AA defenses to cities, (either automatically or requiring building them) would definitely help, but maybe planes should also take longer to heal?

I think all late-game ground units should have some anti-air defenses like naval units have, (although not as much as naval units do, planes should still be good, just not an instant I-WIN button.)

I'm also wondering if rainforest and maybe woods tiles should prevent fighters from hitting ground units. Ground-cover makes airstrikes really difficult in real life.

 

[civfan_999]

planes should still be good, just not an instant I-WIN button.

100% agree

I'm also wondering if rainforest and maybe woods tiles should prevent fighters from hitting ground units. Ground-cover makes airstrikes really difficult in real life.

That is an interesting idea. I have never looked at the modifiers when planes are attacking, but ground unit v. ground unit has a nerf for attacking across rivers and into trees.

 

[acluewithout]

Updated Punch List as follows.

• Get Rid of Recruit Partisans Spy Mission. It’s just another reason not to build Neighbourhoods. [Well, this got tweaked, but not in a great way. I guess I’ll just treat this one as closed.]
  
  
• [NEW] Let Spies be placed in Ally Cities. However, if you do, you have an increased chance of your missions failing / Spies being caught, you get huge relationship modifiers and grievances if you’re caught, and you can’t run certain missions (eg sabotage Dam, Sabotage Industrial Zone, Sabotage Spaceport).
  
  
• [NEW] Envoys. Post June 2020 envoy changes were good but hit Mercantile and Faith CS a bit hard. Perhaps they could be buffed back to 2/2/4. [sorted.]

Man. The changes to Recruit Partisan just screams “careful what you wish for”.

 

[greenOak]

Get rid of district scaling cost (or better yet make them free) and move the adjacency bonuses so that they apply to specialists working in those districts. IMO empty districts provide too many yields - especially when paired with the +100% adjacency cards. It would help buff high population cities. It's really silly that a size 10 city will produce the same of the science that a size 20 city will. Hell, even a size 1 city can produce ~80% the science a size 20 city can.

 

[acluewithout]

Updated April 2021.

I’m really happy Anti-Cav and units generally got some reworks, and that the Amenities changes got rolled back.

Biggest things I’m a bit sorry didn’t get addressed are:

• Add back River Adjacencies for Lumbermills.
• Rework the “no spies in Ally Cities”.
• Rework Aircraft Carriers - they really need to be like GDRs, and promote automatically through the tech tree.
• Buff / tweak the Workshop, eg +1 production Strategic Resources.
• Buff Railways, and let MEs place Roads without charges.