RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans

[Guardian_PL]

Oh I'm not talking just about insta_heal promotion. I removed that without thinking. I'm talking about the fact that you can have a unit which represents say 40 cavalry, have all but 4 die, and then have it "fortify to full health" its 36 dead cavalry back to life over a few turns. THAT MAKES NO SENSE! Sure maybe you should be allowed to heal 15% of its health for free, representing non- combat worthy units being patched up, but having those 36 cavalry get killed and revived again and again and again in the same unit with no cost breaks immersion, gameplay, and a sense that war has any costs whatsoever to a very high extent.

Yeah, well, it would be nice to be able to full heal only at cities/your own territory (possibly with loss of xp - hey, if we're going for the Panzer/Fantasy General design...), but that would be probably dismissed with the whole "one turn lasts 20 years, so by that time full healing is a must" idea, loosely translating to "please don't make me code that "

But I think I'd like that stuff, would make conquest more challenging. And I agree with alpaca that instaheal was fun only at the beginning, later the novelty is wearing off and it feels cheesy.

 

[alpaca]

Removing healing is straightforward (game defines) so if you like give it a try. It could indeed be interesting to remove healing and lower unit costs so you have to produce reinforcements and keep them coming. Would wreak havoc with the whole promotion system, though. Not that that would be bad, maybe I'd start building a few more XP buildings then.

Instant Heal was never fun for me, but it's sometimes necessary. It creates too much tension to be fun in my opinion. Also contributes to cities (and city states) being so weak

 

[Slowpoke]

What I've done for now is remove all healing except for a city healing, which is reduced to one. I think if you have some hardened veterans, there should be some way to keep them alive. Don't want something like X-com where you work hard to get a group of veterans and every single one gets blaster bombed in one turn XD

 

[alpaca]

What I've done for now is remove all healing except for a city healing, which is reduced to one. I think if you have some hardened veterans, there should be some way to keep them alive. Don't want something like X-com where you work hard to get a group of veterans and every single one gets blaster bombed in one turn XD

Yes, after thinking about this a bit I actually would set city healing to 2 and remove all other healing, including the medic promotion, of course. If possible, it would also be interesting to create a civilian medic unit you can build with biology, that heals units on its tile one per turn. Keep in mind that this is another advantage for city spam, though.

Units should also be a lot cheaper to build if you can't heal them because you'll have to keep those reinforcements coming.

 

[Guardian_PL]

(...)
Units should also be a lot cheaper to build if you can't heal them because you'll have to keep those reinforcements coming.

That bit would come along nicely with increased tile yields - non-healable, lower-cost units (and no instaheal either), at the same time higher yields would be an incentive to grow cities instead of founding new ones. With higher tile yield perhaps even those poor sheep would be useful!

 

[atteSmythe]

Oh I'm not talking just about insta_heal promotion. I removed that without thinking. I'm talking about the fact that you can have a unit which represents say 40 cavalry, have all but 4 die, and then have it "fortify to full health" its 36 dead cavalry back to life over a few turns. THAT MAKES NO SENSE! Sure maybe you should be allowed to heal 15% of its health for free, representing non- combat worthy units being patched up, but having those 36 cavalry get killed and revived again and again and again in the same unit with no cost breaks immersion, gameplay, and a sense that war has any costs whatsoever to a very high extent.

I think you're looking at it too literally. To heal, the unit must stay in place. Couldn't this represent reinforcements arriving? Couldn't the 'dying' animation just mean 'removed from battle,' and be something as simple as being separated from the unit until they stop moving and can catch back up?

The abstraction can be explained away easily, almost no matter what you do. What's the best gameplay choice?

 

[alpaca]

I think you're looking at it too literally. To heal, the unit must stay in place. Couldn't this represent reinforcements arriving? Couldn't the 'dying' animation just mean 'removed from battle,' and be something as simple as being separated from the unit until they stop moving and can catch back up?

The abstraction can be explained away easily, almost no matter what you do. What's the best gameplay choice?

The problem is that, unless units die, waging wars of attrition is impossible. As you can see from this game, the situations where we couldn't avoid losing a unit were few and far between - so the AI couldn't wage wars of attrition against us. This contributes to the bad AI performance.

If reinforcements should be simulated, this would have to be done using production (or drafting like in Civ4 where population can be substituted for production) and since healing doesn't cost production, reinforcements are not simulated by this mechanism. An alternative to producing healing is to force the player to actually produce reinforcement units, which is what's being discussed.

 

[Donaithnen]

I agree about the healing thing. Having a unit regenerate from 10% strength to 100% strength for no cost other than sitting still for a little while is very unrealistic.

I've been working through a set of changes in my head that i think would be interesting to try. The goal of which would be to make the AI more competent on the battlefield, or at least make it a little less easy for humans to take advantage of it.

Reduce both the cost and possibly the strength of all units by a fraction, and make it possible to pump out multiple units a turn at a single city. Then allow units of the same type to be stacked. So instead of producing a single warrior you'd produce 2-10 warriors over the same amount of time and stack them together.

In combat if the attacking stack is larger than the defending stack apply a penalty to the attack. Keep the flanking bonus for attacking units but also add a separate bonus for if the stack you're attacking has an enemy unit on another side, possibly multiple bonuses based on how many enemies it's surrounded by. This means that a stack of ten units fighting two stacks of five units would be at a disadvantage, and it would be at an even worse disadvantage if surrounded by three stacks of 3/3/4 strength.

Grouping units together to move across long distances would be advantageous (less congestion, and if you're unexpectedly attacked you don't suffer any penalty on the defense) but when you reach your destination you would want to split the stack up into multiple groups for flanking bonuses and other tactical considerations.

Ideally damage should be adjusted so that when two stacks fight at least one unit is killed every turn, but usually not the whole stack except for extreme situations. Damage always comes "off the top." The first unit in the stack is damaged and then killed before any other unit in the stack takes any damage. Since each unit is now worth a fraction of what they were under the old system the single unit healing itself is now of much less significance. In fact a lot of the time it wouldn't be worth waiting to heal just one unit in a large stack.

Unfortunately i can't really see any easy way to reconcile this setup with the experience system. Dealing with stacks of tens or possibly hundreds of units would be a chore unless they could all be treated interchangeably. However the experience system is one of the things that humans can take much better advantage of than the AI, so getting rid of it wouldn't be a bad thing in terms of balance.

As a result of all this, it would ideally no longer be possible for humans to sweep in and wipe out enemy units on an individual basis and then retreat to heal up. I expect the human could easily still achieve a better tactical situation, but since combat would continue for several turns the human would also suffer losses which would prevent the extremely skewed kill ratios we saw in this game.

Ideally i'd like to give the player a choice with Horsemen and other such units about whether they wanted to do a "hit and run" attack which would do much less damage but allow them to retreat, or a "full" attack that would do regular damage but negate their remaining movement. Since there's no good way to implement an AI for it that i can think of it might be best to just remove the Horseman's ability to attack and then move.

And given the need to produce a lot more military units it would be ideal to have split civil/military production queues for cities, but that's probably beyond what's possible in a simple mod.

 

[atteSmythe]

The problem is that, unless units die, waging wars of attrition is impossible. As you can see from this game, the situations where we couldn't avoid losing a unit were few and far between - so the AI couldn't wage wars of attrition against us. This contributes to the bad AI performance.

If reinforcements should be simulated, this would have to be done using production (or drafting like in Civ4 where population can be substituted for production) and since healing doesn't cost production, reinforcements are not simulated by this mechanism. An alternative to producing healing is to force the player to actually produce reinforcement units, which is what's being discussed.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that healing shouldn't be toned down. I don't know if it should be or not. I just think 'realism' is a poor justification, considering that in the very early game, it could take your warrior 100 years to heal back to full strength.

 

[Slowpoke]

Realism is a small part of my belief that healing needs to be nerfed. Mainly it's the obvious conclusion of people being like "Oh We get 50:1 kills verse the A.I.? A.I. fails lol." It does fail, but only from players seriously abusing a feature that just doesn't feel right anyways

 

[atteSmythe]

Heh fair enough - back to the lurk for me

 

[alpaca]

Unfortunately i can't really see any easy way to reconcile this setup with the experience system. Dealing with stacks of tens or possibly hundreds of units would be a chore unless they could all be treated interchangeably. However the experience system is one of the things that humans can take much better advantage of than the AI, so getting rid of it wouldn't be a bad thing in terms of balance.

Experience was in Civ4, it allowed you to get veteran units that were either specialised or quite a bit stronger, both of which works with stacks. You don't have to go as far as that, I actually like a stacking limit. A soft limit using combat penalties might be a better idea, though. Let's say for each unit on the tile all units get -25% or so, then there is an incentive to spread your units out to fight more effectively but it may still make sense to protect archers with other units and you can push through chokepoints if necessary.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that healing shouldn't be toned down. I don't know if it should be or not. I just think 'realism' is a poor justification, considering that in the very early game, it could take your warrior 100 years to heal back to full strength.

Realism is generally a poor justification for anything in a game because you can in most cases find reasons to support either side of the argument with realism in mind. It actually seems to me like most people on this forum are refreshingly little realism-obsessed and typically only throw it in as icing for the cake if they push an idea out there.

You asked whether healing or produced reinforcements is good for gameplay, which is why I tried to argue gameplay-wise: Healing mostly prevents wars of attrition, which are normally a significant part of strategy (in fact, in many games wars of attrition become the primary way of warfare).

 

[bryanw1995]

I really like the idea of nerfing healing. a deity map would be much harder if all you did was remove insta-heal for that matter. maybe as a compromise over creating something else that promotes city spam why don't you just set it so that you can't heal outside friendly territory, but you get no bonus to healing for being in a city?

 

[Donaithnen]

Experience was in Civ4, it allowed you to get veteran units that were either specialised or quite a bit stronger, both of which works with stacks. You don't have to go as far as that, I actually like a stacking limit. A soft limit using combat penalties might be a better idea, though. Let's say for each unit on the tile all units get -25% or so, then there is an incentive to spread your units out to fight more effectively but it may still make sense to protect archers with other units and you can push through chokepoints if necessary.

Well two things. I was trying to come up with an idea that would save the few benefits the current system has (tactics and placement mattering a lot) while negating the big negatives (being able to mangle the AI without taking any permanent damage in return, as long as you're careful with your movements.)

Allowing mixed stacks would just be moving it completely back in the Civ4 direction. Not that Civ4 was bad of course, but it would be better to see if we could salvage something from Civ5's combat system while preserving _something_ unique.

Second, if your suggestion was implemented the first thing i would try would be building archers and a whole ton of scouts. The scouts stack with the archers so if an enemy unit tries to attack one or more of the scouts die but the archers are unharmed. On your turn you move the scouts back a space, let the archers fire without the 25% penalty, then move the scouts back onto the stack. This could of course be combined with normal tactics using regular melee units, but it would effectively make archers immortal as long as you kept enough (cheap to build) scouts on hand.

Actually three things. I'm familiar with experience from Civ4, and i quite like it. However i have to admit that it's a bit overpowered in Civ5, particularly when applied to ranged units. If you can get to the point where you've got Crossbowmen, or better yet, Frigates, with +1 range, +1 attack, you become practically unstoppable. Unfortunately the AI seems even worse at managing veteran units to make sure they survive long enough to accrue those benefits than it is at tactics in general.

 

[ChevalierdeJstn]

Honestly, fast healing is just bad for gameplay: Things that make you feel bad whenever they're used are a bad idea to implement into the game. Instant healing fits that category because when you use it, you feel bad for sacrificing long-term strength of the unit. If it's used against you it's just immensely frustrating. So I think removing instant healing would be a blessing, balance issues not even mentioned.

Funnily enough, the last thing you want to do against the army size imbalance is fast healing because the AI will keep coming, so you need elite units. I've only typically used fast healing in the early game where I had too few units to rotate them or had to take a city fast.

I actually really, really, really like fast healing. I think it adds an extremely intriguing tactical decision to the game. Unlike some other commenters on these forums, I'm not all that impressed with the wargaming aspect of Civ 5; if you want a real turn-based strategic wargame play Operational Art of War or some other military title. Fast healing is enough of a short-term vs long-term decision (you're giving up a promotion) that it is a big part of what makes war strategy at least interesting to me in this game.

Then again I'm a King level player and I enjoy "challenging myself" on the higher levels; as this was a Deity level game I can certainly see that if you're already winning on Deity, fast healing would be...kinda cheapo...maybe this is more evidence that CiV was targeted towards those of us playing on the lower difficulties.

And I don't care about the "realism" aspect. To me, this is a game. I don't want it to be realistic, I want it to be fun.

 

[Nutteria]

In my mind Fast healing should stay but only within your City(I say City not cultural border!) .This will make keeping some citys while pushing the war effort instead of razing everything but the essential.

Also as I said in the previous pages.If the 1UPT is changed for 1UtypePT this can make the AI way better at warfaring.Hopefully as modder can make this so I can test it out.

 

[alpaca]

I actually really, really, really like fast healing. I think it adds an extremely intriguing tactical decision to the game. Unlike some other commenters on these forums, I'm not all that impressed with the wargaming aspect of Civ 5; if you want a real turn-based strategic wargame play Operational Art of War or some other military title. Fast healing is enough of a short-term vs long-term decision (you're giving up a promotion) that it is a big part of what makes war strategy at least interesting to me in this game.

Then again I'm a King level player and I enjoy "challenging myself" on the higher levels; as this was a Deity level game I can certainly see that if you're already winning on Deity, fast healing would be...kinda cheapo...maybe this is more evidence that CiV was targeted towards those of us playing on the lower difficulties.

And I don't care about the "realism" aspect. To me, this is a game. I don't want it to be realistic, I want it to be fun.

Did the AI ever use it against you? I think it's potentially very frustrating: it sure frustrated me a couple of times because an AI unit survived with a measly 1 hp due to bad combat rolls and then healed up fully to conquer my city. Sure, it creates some decisions but are these decisions actually meaningful enough that you should spend time thinking about them much? A single unit promotion?

Plus, the cases where it actually creates a "real" decision are very rare because mostly you can easily tell in a situation whether it's correct or not to instant heal: If the unit has a high chance of dying, you insta-heal, if it doesn't, you heal normally. It only creates a decision if you have to decide sacrificing promotions for speed of conquest.

 

[Nutteria]

In the end the compromise should be something like - Keep the fast healing but make the penalty bigger.If you heal at max you skip a exp level. so if you use healing on your first promotion you don`t get a second one and can choose an upgrade on your third promotion level.(damn that was a crappy explanation but I hope you get the point)

 

[EasymodeX]

Brief thoughts on healing:

1. Instaheals are lol silly. I think most agree.

2. Medic and the heal during an active turn can be nerfed, don't see a problem with that per se -- the increased tile yields would help support that.

3. I think that healing by sitting still a turn is fine. You only heal 1 per turn by default, and that's slow.

4. I think the real problem is the turtling. When you take most units and set them to heal, they also get a fortification defensive bonus, and you can effectively tank tons of units / damage by heal-turtling on a hill, for example.

If you removed the fortification bonus, then the unit is sacrificing both its mobility and defense in order to heal (and only 1 point of damage!). Effective healing would then require that the unit retreat first to a safe area, then heal, then come back. This soaks up many, many turns and is an equitable tradeoff, IMO.

 

[boehj]

Thanks very much guys for the game and resulting thread. It's one of the best things I've read on the Net in a long time.

I'm in the 'this is fixable' camp. But no patch will fix the game to the extent it needs. This is expansion pack material. I certainly wouldn't write off having a very nice Civ V in about a year's time.

In any case, I'm still enjoying playing it, despite its flaws. You just have to accept that you're now playing a total war game against completely irrational opponents.

Hopefully MP will get some serious spit and polish in the near future too.

Thanks once again for all the effort that went into this. It was classic material.