Scaredy-Cat Barb Galleys

[EmperorFool]

I started playing this mod with v129 and have found that barbarian Galleys never fire on my sea-faring units. Is this intended or a bug? In Vanilla I had to be much more careful about trolling the waters for Honor bait, but now only the Archers fire back which with v130 are nothing more than a nuisance.

 

[Txurce]

If by "sea faring units" you include embarked ones, then barb galleys definitely fire on them.

If you mean ships, then barb ships definitely fire on notably weakened ones.

However, they don't fire nearly as much as they should.

 

[EmperorFool]

Yes, I specifically meant combat ships. It just seems like easy fodder.

 

[Thalassicus]

We cannot alter the tactical combat AI without the game core only Firaxis has access to. If I could, I'd make barb galleys pillage more as well.

 

[EmperorFool]

Oh God, please no! I really, really hated having to deal with pillaged sea resources in Civ4. However, Civ5 and VEM specifically seems to provide more incentive to build Triremes anyways, so maybe it's not such a big deal. Won't matter until the game core is released in 2018, anyway, so I won't get too worked up over it yet.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'd also change naval unit zone of control to 2 tiles. While that mostly helps the AI deal with fleet engagements, it would make it easier to protect resources with a screen of destroyers. A zoc range of 1 tile just doesn't feel right for units with 5-10 movement speeds and wide open battlefields.

 

[EmperorFool]

I whole-heartedly concur. I had assumed that a larger ZoC would be more difficult for the AI to handle, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

 

[Thalassicus]

When inside a zone of control the ship has 1, so the AI only needs to consider 7 possible tile destinations. With an 8 ship they can move anywhere within an 8-tile radius, which is 217 destinations.

 

[EmperorFool]

Not harder on the CPU but harder on making effective tactical decisions.

 

[SlightlyMad]

Of course, the upcoming addition of melee ships will mean a 2-zoc ship is immune to attack from them, so that wouldn't work.

 

[Thalassicus]

The movement penalty could be 3 cost per ZoC tile instead of infinite. Most land units have much lower movement speeds than sea units, so this would mostly affect ships. Moving completely through a ship's ZoC would cost 9-12, so it would still effectively stop ships, but take more tiles to do so.

 

[SlightlyMad]

That would be very cool, actually.