Originally posted by Pembroke
If you want to get really realistic then mounted troops shouldn't travel faster than foot units. It's actually the other way round. A man on foot will travel faster than a horse over a long period. In the actual battle the horses are faster and more mobile,yes, but not when it comes to the movement over long distances, and as we know in civ even one tile on a world map means "long distance".
You are quite right. If you're seeking to model long-distance movement, a man on foot can travel further and faster than a man on a horse.
Of course, it depends on what you're modelling. We all know that a Civ3 tile covers many miles, so in a straight slog cross-country, infantry shouldn't be slower than cavalry.
BUT, it's also true that in Civ3 a turn is at least a year (at the time when the cavalry/infantry distinction matters, far longer than a year). So you aren't simply modelling a straight cross-country slog (given a minimum of a year to cross a 20-mile square, even a tortoise might manage a movement rate of 1...).
In the context of the Civ3 combat system, the thing being modelled is tactical mobility[*], so it makes sense to give a higher movement rate to cavalry.
[*] It's one of those sim things - the system is representing short-range tactical activity (units/movement/combat) and strategic macro-activity (cities/terrain development) at the same time and on the same map, which happens to be drawn at the strategic scale.
This gives rise to some necessary oddities - think about the "stacking" rule that says units of two enemies cannot be in the same tile at the same time, and that to move into an enemy-occupied tile is to launch an attack: if the tile is around 20 miles square, there would be ample room for them to mill around without even
seeing one another.
To make the combat system work at all, though, the game has to pretend that an area (which
strategically represents perhaps 400 square miles)
tactically represents about 1 square mile.
It's not dissimilar from the old "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon" system, when one turn represented
simultaneously both 24 hours and 1 year.
