Shouldn't units have different potentials for different circumstances?

[morchuflex]

Hello.

Here are some reflections about civ3's combat system. I guess at least some has already been discussed here or there, so don't hesitate to point me to a more suitable thread.

In most advanced wargames (which Civ isn't, I know...), military units have different potentials depending on what they are facing or terrain types.

Cavalry, for instance, is great against light infantry (I'm using cav. and inf. as general terms, not Civ3-specific terms!) on open fields, but should be heavily penalized when attacking pikemen, or charging through a forest, and should not be able to charge through jungles or in mountains.

IMO, archers should be bombardment-only units. At least, they should perform better against cavalry (horses being highly vulnerable) than against heavily shielded troops (phalanx-like units).

Frigates and dromons should have bombardment capacity but only vs other ships. In fact, no ships prior to 20th century should have efficient bombarment capacity against land units (BTW, Ironclads are ridiculously overrated, esp. in C3C, unless you consider the ironclad to be a generic concept ranging from real, American civil war, ironclads to WW1 dreadnoughts).

Battleships have proven to be great against other surface ships but very vulnerable against subs and air attacks (remember the fate of the Prince of Wales?).

BTW, subs, when attacking, should be treated as bombardment units: their torpedoes can hit or miss, but they hardly ever engage their targets in reciprocal fire.

No criticism here, though. I just wish civ was even better!

 

[Theoden]

This could make some good ideas to the civ 4 suggestions.

Regarding units being more specialized it is in fact already in the game to a small degree, like cruisers being able to see subs. But as you say it would be nice with more of this.
As it is now it is relatively easy to conquer the world with one type of unit as long as you have the productive advantage. With these specializations the good general could win an uphill battle by making a varied and balanced force able to handle every type of enemy. OTOH we don't want the game to be too complicated so the amount of this special strategy would be limited by that.
Anyway, Great idea

Theoden

 

[Grav]

Honestly, I've always hated "rock/paper/sciccors" combat. Its incredibly hard to balance without making things all goofy.... take a look at Empire Earth for instance, and Rise of Nation, to a lesser degree. This is one of the few aspects in which I've liked civ's combat perspective, because a tank will beat anything lesser than a tank (well, except spearmen), and a mech infantry will beat anything lesser than a mech infantry. I hate having to rebuild my whole army in EE or RON because some jackass desides to spam all of one unit, which then forces you to spam the counter unit, which completely defeats the intent of the developers of having people create diverse armies.

They shouldn't try to force diversity with a combat model that gives bizzare bonuses, but they should encourage diversity due to cost of production, resources, speed, etc. Yes, you could build all the top of the line units in this model, but could you support them, or even afford them? I'd rather have economic incentive to build a diverse army, rather than some stupid 'rule' that makes unit X do 104290834 extra damage to unit of type Y.

With economic incentive, a simple way of implementing this would be to give deminishing returns of effeciency as the units become stronger. You COULD buy 4 Super Duper Unit X's, ORRRR you could buy 10 medicre unit Y's. This is how it works in real life. Countries weigh the pros and cons based on economics. Just look at the F-22, its the best plane on earth, but for the price of one, the US could buy like a bizzillion F-18's, etc, so that's the reason why the F-22 will never see full deployment. So we'll end up buying a few, but we wont be making entire fighter wings out of them.

In EE and RON, the reason why we'd only buy a few is because as it turns out, they're vulnerable to tank fire or something stupid like that, of which of course is completely rediculous.

 

[Xerol]

It's not as much as "stupid rules" as being more realistic. However, variable unit support and some changes in the default shield costs would be highly beneficial.