Okay - I'm really enjoying the game but I'm having trouble working around this concept so far.
I'm a "realist"-type player. I like to role play, I don't necessarily play to win, I like to maintain relationships and all that. So it's important to me to visualize battles and things as they happen and I'm having trouble reconciling the concept of a cannon/catapult/artillery barrage causing collateral damage to to a stack or a bunch of units in a city.
To me a seige unit is a seige unit. You don't take a group of catapults and send them into a city with the hopes of causing a small amount of damage to every unit in the city. While they took great care to include (and I love) the realistic detail of certain units being better at certain tasks or against other types of units (pikes vs. mounted, etc), this kamikaze katapult mechanic doesn't ring true for me.
I don't understand why they didn't just make seige units like the air units - allow bombard (lower defenses) or strike (attack units) capabilities. Of course this may have made them a bit too strong since you could cause lots of collateral damage with just one seige unit. But then why not simply make the effect of the strike much much lower? Then instead of rushing multiple catapults only to sacrifice them for collateral damage purposes, make it necessary to rush multiple cats in order to get the collateral damage effects necessary to successfully attack?
I wonder if it would possible to mod this revision in.
Give seige units both bombard and strike capability. Strike effect would be lowered quite a bit, either by number of units in the stack affected by the strike, or by the damage done. Seige units would then have a dramatic defensive penalty against all units, effectively making them an offensive weapon only in open terrain (which seems appropriate). They would be used for city defense to damage SODs but of course would require multiple seige units to really have an effect.
My only question is, would the AI recognize that seige unit sacrifice is no longer the best way to utilize these units and that using the strike capability is the way to go?
ETA: Check that. That's not my only question. The other question is, if one were to try this mod, what files would need to be messed with in order to acheive it? Any ideas?
I'm a "realist"-type player. I like to role play, I don't necessarily play to win, I like to maintain relationships and all that. So it's important to me to visualize battles and things as they happen and I'm having trouble reconciling the concept of a cannon/catapult/artillery barrage causing collateral damage to to a stack or a bunch of units in a city.
To me a seige unit is a seige unit. You don't take a group of catapults and send them into a city with the hopes of causing a small amount of damage to every unit in the city. While they took great care to include (and I love) the realistic detail of certain units being better at certain tasks or against other types of units (pikes vs. mounted, etc), this kamikaze katapult mechanic doesn't ring true for me.
I don't understand why they didn't just make seige units like the air units - allow bombard (lower defenses) or strike (attack units) capabilities. Of course this may have made them a bit too strong since you could cause lots of collateral damage with just one seige unit. But then why not simply make the effect of the strike much much lower? Then instead of rushing multiple catapults only to sacrifice them for collateral damage purposes, make it necessary to rush multiple cats in order to get the collateral damage effects necessary to successfully attack?
I wonder if it would possible to mod this revision in.
Give seige units both bombard and strike capability. Strike effect would be lowered quite a bit, either by number of units in the stack affected by the strike, or by the damage done. Seige units would then have a dramatic defensive penalty against all units, effectively making them an offensive weapon only in open terrain (which seems appropriate). They would be used for city defense to damage SODs but of course would require multiple seige units to really have an effect.
My only question is, would the AI recognize that seige unit sacrifice is no longer the best way to utilize these units and that using the strike capability is the way to go?
ETA: Check that. That's not my only question. The other question is, if one were to try this mod, what files would need to be messed with in order to acheive it? Any ideas?
