Originally posted by Bismarck
The point made in this thread, and it is a legitimate one, is that Civ3 doesn't sufficiently differentiate between the gradients of ships in the game. However, this is a deliberate simplifying assumption. For example, there is a vast difference between the infantry of the 1890's which was armed with Maxim guns (at best), and today's infantry, which is armed with anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft missiles, medium mortars, heavy machine guns, etc. Yet both these units would be classified in Civ3 as "infantry," with the same combat stats (6/10/1).
I'd probably say that today's troops would fall into Mech Inf rather than Infantry.
But overall I agree that land warfare is also grossly simplified. That is not, however, to say that Firaxis' over-simplifications are something we need to put up with.
The naval side in vanilla Civ3 is far more neglected than the land side, and thus more deserving of some decent modding (I would go so far as to say that Firaxis either haven't much of a clue about naval history, or couldn't give a stuff about it).
But the land side also would benefit from improvements - if nothing else, we can prevent yet more of the "spearman kills tank" complaints. Quite a few people have made some very creditable attempts to deal with this, and quite a few more (your humble servant included) are still working on the problem.
All of course highly optional - if you're happy with Firaxis' simplified version of warfare, that's fine.
As I see it, part of the problem is that Firaxis chose to make a game that uses real-life nations and units as its playing-pieces. If they'd used abstractions - eg Red nation, Blue nation, Defensive foot unit (primitive), Offensive foot unit (industrial) etc - there would be less incentive to mod the game the way we do. Of course, that would also make the game far less marketable, so Firaxis was almost certainly right to use non-generic, more familiar, terms.
As a result of this, however, many of us tend to be slightly intolerant of the over-simplifications: if they're going to be called "Romans", let's ensure they behave like Romans. Equally, if there are two ship units called "galleon" and "destroyer", we rather want the two of them to behave appropriately. And jumping straight from matchlock arquebuses to rifles is hard to swallow.... the list is a long one.
This is why some good people have created unit animations for some sorely-needed land units to fill the gaps and smooth out the historical progression - the 18th century and Napoleonic infantry, the motorised infantry in lorries, the early tanks etc....
To come back to your post, Bismarck - I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
If you're saying that one shouldn't bother modding naval units because the "broad-brush" simplifications used by Firaxis are the true way, then my answer (as stated above) is: OK, your choice; I prefer to mod and (to my mind) improve.
If, on the other hand, you're saying we should also be modding the land units, my answer is: darn right we should, and a lot of people are. But that's a different thread.
