Should walls be nerfed?

Haig

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I feel walls make cities too strong to conquer without proper siege engines or artillery, which makes it hard for AI empires to do.

Granted I've seen some improvement in GS but still I would love to tone down the walls or give AI city attack bonuses from Emperor onwards.
 
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If anything walls should be even stronger, so the AI would be able to defend themselves.
The problem is, by this you are further aggravating AI’s inability to properly conquer walled cities...

I know buffing city defense is much easier than making AI tactically smarter, but I don’t find the former a sound long-term fix.
 
How about....extending the AI difficulty level based combat strength boost to city defence - so the AI will have stronger walls on higher levels?
 
This is crazy, walls are not too strong at all, you just need the right equipment and strength. It is not like the game is too hard. The AI still runs away but granted they cannot siege but that is partly down to catapults not rams.
 
"I feel walls make cities too strong to conquer without proper siege engines"

Yeah yeah, this is good thing, when a human attacks AI empire or another human, but it seems too much for the AI to overcome.
 
The problem is, by this you are further aggravating AI’s inability to properly conquer walled cities...

Well, if we design the game around the AI's lack of ability, we might as well just have the game be 2 eras.

It's not like the AI can take the player's cities to begin with, aside from the start where we can't build walls anyways. The problem is the player easily takes the AI's cities, even if they build walls. Buffing walls would slow down the player so they can't just conquer 30 cities so fast.

And AI vs AI combat or AI vs CS, they do perfectly fine.

Besides, does anyone actually build medieval walls? I acutally think that's a clearer sign that walls are actually underpowered. Ancient walls go down in a few hits, and yes the AI can actually take those down with catas. They actually deal with walls pretty good. It's actually surrounding the city and using a melee to conquer it that they struggle with.
 
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If anything walls should be even stronger, so the AI would be able to defend themselves.
Eh, have you actually tried to lay siege to a city with Renaissance walls?

I'm not saying I agree with OP, I overall think walls are fairly good as they are now, but I sometimes get the feeling people underestimate their strength because they rarely face a fully walled city (which is probably a combination of poor AI coding and walls being well expensive to build). However, a city with Renaissance walls is BRUTAL in contemporary times. We're talking Bombard armies only taking out a small chip of wall health with each attack, a bit more when they get promoted, but still less than a 10th of overall health. Forget about pitching melee or cavalry units against them, even with battering rams, they'll do practically zero damage.

I think that is probably good as it is, but at the same time I have to repeat that I feel that people claiming walls are useless and should be buffed haven't really experienced their full might.
 
Eh, have you actually tried to lay siege to a city with Renaissance walls?

Why yes. I've even taken cities with defenses stronger than that. Look at where Siege Tactics is on the tree and where steel is. Not only could you have better defenses in a few techs, you can also get balloons or artillery soon enough. I mean it's gotten a bit worse since artillery takes oil mind you. But who really cares? You don't even need to take the city. Pillage a campus for like 300 science or something.

I'm not saying I agree with OP, I overall think walls are fairly good as they are now, but I sometimes get the feeling people underestimate their strength because they rarely face a fully walled city (which is probably a combination of poor AI coding and walls being well expensive to build). However, a city with Renaissance walls is BRUTAL in contemporary times. We're talking Bombard armies only taking out a small chip of wall health with each attack, a bit more when they get promoted, but still less than a 10th of overall health. Forget about pitching melee or cavalry units against them, even with battering rams, they'll do practically zero damage.

I think that is probably good as it is, but at the same time I have to repeat that I feel that people claiming walls are useless and should be buffed haven't really experienced their full might.

That seems to be more of a testament to how awful bombards are, then anything else in particular.

See the secret to making your cities impregnable is actually to maximize melee/ranged unit strength. This is because your cities take on the stats of your strongest unit. So getting a caravel early for example, will boost all your cities to 40 str, and your enemies will have a hard time taking your cities, walls or not. Walls of course help, but I'm saying they're not really a big deal, at least considering AI incompetence. This is why AI civs like China/Brazil are harder to invade if they get their UU. Once they get their UU up, their cities start decimating invaders like nothing.

I mean, we have a mountain of evidence through people finishing the game really fast with like 40 cities or whatnot when the ADs roll along to show that the AI does not fail because the human turtles in their cities but rather that they are utterly incapable of stopping the human player's offense despite their massive advantages at high difficulties. And also the AI seems pretty adept at fighting itself and making headway in those wars, so to me at least, I really don't see how the AI would be more challenging if cities are weaker. That's also why I believe cities should be stronger, so war is much more costly and the human player needs to find other methods to catch up.

It does not help that the game overwhelmingly favors offense to begin with. More cities = better, and pillaging is seriously overtuned atm.
 
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That seems to be more of a testament to how awful bombards are, then anything else in particular.

See the secret to making your cities impregnable is actually to maximize melee/ranged unit strength. This is because your cities take on the stats of your strongest unit. So getting a caravel early for example, will boost all your cities to 40 str, and your enemies will have a hard time taking your cities, walls or not. Walls of course help, but I'm saying they're not really a big deal, at least considering AI incompetence. This is why AI civs like China/Brazil are harder to invade if they get their UU. Once they get their UU up, their cities start decimating invaders like nothing.

I mean, we have a mountain of evidence through people finishing the game really fast with like 40 cities or whatnot when the ADs roll along to show that the AI does not fail because the human turtles in their cities but rather that they are utterly incapable of stopping the human player's offense despite their massive advantages at high difficulties. And also the AI seems pretty adept at fighting itself and making headway in those wars, so to me at least, I really don't see how the AI would be more challenging if cities are weaker. That's also why I believe cities should be stronger, so war is much more costly and the human player needs to find other methods to catch up.

It does not help that the game overwhelmingly favors offense to begin with. More cities = better, and pillaging is seriously overtuned atm.
I kind of agree with everything you say here, yet I don't see these things being directly connected to whether walls are too strong or not.
  • Is it stupid that city strength scales with your military units? Yes, very certainly so.
  • Do Renaissance Walls come too late and/or cost too much and/or does the civil defenses come too early? Yes, one or more of these are probably true, several solutions possible.
  • Are Bombards bad? Actually, I wouldn't say so, Bombards feel pretty ok to me. I do think the gap between Catapults and Bombards really needs to be filled with the Trebuchet (really miss the MOAR units mod, which I haven't seen updated to GS).
  • Is pillaging overpowered? Yes, very much so.
  • Is AI incapable of stopping a human steam-roll? Yes, absolutely so. I really miss the feature of ... was it Civ3? ... where capturing a city would spawn a number of AI partisan units, which I feel is both realistic and would very much help the AI and make it much more challenging to do conquest because currently there's no way to regroup once your defensive forces are knocked down.
But of all these things, only #2 really relates to walls specifically. Sure, you can't evaluate things in a vacuum, but I'd still say, in the current situation of the game, walls (apart from their cost) is not the main problem, it's rather the things surrounding the walls, so to speak.
 
I think walls should not be nerfed.

I THINK MOUNTAINS NEED A NEW MECHANIC

The mechanic would be that units can walk into a mountain tile but cannot pass through unless a tunnel is built.

What this functionally does is allow siege units to take the highground, which is something they have always done for thousands of years. No one ever goes...You know, i am not going to use that massive elevation on that mountain to reign fire and death on my enemy...

But the reason I said can only walk into is because in ancient times, one would only really climb up a part of the way on the mountain and their only means to get down was the way they came up. It would effectively be simply taking the high ground and nothing more.You can't outmaneuver anyone.

They can also make it where you take 20 health damage when idle on a mountain. This means not actively engaging enemies hurts you (unless you are a scout.)
 
I kind of agree with everything you say here, yet I don't see these things being directly connected to whether walls are too strong or not.
  • Is AI incapable of stopping a human steam-roll? Yes, absolutely so. I really miss the feature of ... was it Civ3? ... where capturing a city would spawn a number of AI partisan units, which I feel is both realistic and would very much help the AI and make it much more challenging to do conquest because currently there's no way to regroup once your defensive forces are knocked down.
  • Don't remember if this was in III, but I am sure it was in II.
 
feel walls make cities too strong to conquer without proper siege engines or artillery, which makes it hard for AI empires to do.
they should fix the AI then. "bring a siege unit when attacking a walled city, protect it with melee/cavalry units" bam.
Easily fixable via a mod. City Attack behavior tree is designed in a way as described. The problem early game is that battering ram and siege tower are not siege units technically, but support and these units are optional. So, the op can start without them.
I added some tweaks in Real Strategy and AI attacks with rams which are linked with other units.

I think ancient walls should be nerfed in order to give incentive to building Medieval and Renaissance walls.
I think the rams should only be effective against Ancient Walls and become obsolete once the game progresses into Medieval era, and towers effective against Ancient and Medieval and obsolete with Renaissance. That way a) walls are still strong b) the player is not exploiting those units and is forced to build normal siege units c) the player also has an incentive to built higher-level walls because those would make rams or towers ineffective.
 
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