Siege: the community drawing board

[A+ombomb]

I would like to dedicate a thread solely towards the generation of ideas for catapult (and all siege) changes, as they are sorely in need of it. I'll kick things off with my change to siege, in hopes that others will contribute some ideas and perhaps some really great changes can be made for the second expansion pack (maybe not, but we could get lucky).

1. Siege units now receive an attack modification based on how many units are on the tile it is attacking. If there are 4 units, no change. If there are less than 4 or greater than 4, the siege unit loses/gains 25% attack respectively per unit on the stack. So attacking 1 unit with a catapult results in -75% attack damage. Attacking 10 is +150% and 20 is +400%, etc.

2. Catapults and all other siege now only deal a maximum of 80% max life collateral damage to 5 units (80% of life is left over). Upgrades to collateral only increase how many units are hit by the collateral in the stack.

3. Catapults reduced to 3 str, trebuchets lose their city attack bonus but move to 5 str. Cannons/artillery also reduced in str proportionately to 8/14 respectively.

4. Castles can't be reduced to lower than 40% defense bonus, and walls can't be reduced to lower than 20% defense bonus.

5. If a unit with first strike is in a stack attacked by a siege unit, the bonus to attack is reduced by 25% per first strike promotion. This effect does not stack by having more than 1 first strike unit on the tile.

Result: Splitting up units is actually extremely effective when attacking. Attacking turtle cities is easier, as many units are stacked up in a city. Catapults are not as massable because they receive no defensive benefits. To counteract the severe penalty of stacking mass units in a city, walls and castles are stronger to help less units defend better. One first strike unit becomes essential to any stack as support against siege.

 

[Suspiria]

How about this? Siege or bombardment units should only be effective at destroying/harming defenses (forts, walls, castles, breaking up enemy lines of fortified units to exploit weakness, etc) and should only have a small direct effect on enemy units (say 1-3% damage per unit per turn at most.) When bombarding a city it should also kill small amounts of populace and destroy city infrastructure.

The way I see it siege units should be an effective unit tool used only to weaken the defenses and fortifications of your enemy, they should not be used as a unit killing device. At best with direct attacks on enemy units they should have a small softening up damage that is 1-2% effective at best with catapult, and only 4-5% better with modern artillery.

Please no more kamikaze units and no more 6 unit collateral damage.

 

[Yakk]

Seige units are the counter to the stack-of-doom tactic.

If you remove the ability for seige engines to damage stacks-of-doom, you make that tactic even more optimal.

So, before removing the seige counter, design another counter to the stack-of-doom.

...

I sort of like:
Catapult: 2 strength
Trech: 3 strength
Cannon: 5 strength
Artillery: 8 strength
Rocket Artillery: 10 strength

All offensive siege have the following properties:
+100% city attack
+75% city defence
+50% hills defence
+200% defending against seige
Collateral damage up to their base attack on 3/4/5/6 units.
25%/30%/35%/40%/40% retreat chance
10%/15%/20%/25%/30% defence damage
1/1/1-2/2/3 first strikes

They have a unique sequence of 3 level promotions:
Barrage (+100% city attack, +5% anti-defence, +100% collateral damage)
Range (+35% retreat, +3 first strikes)
Accuracy (+50% strength, +10% anti-defence, +50% city attack, +0-3 first strikes)
Emplacement (+100% city defence, +25% hills defence, +3 first strikes, +50% collateral damage)

So an Emplacement3 catepult in a hill city:
2
+75% from hills
+25% from terrain
+175% from city
----
7.5 defence, plus 2*culture defence, and 4 first strikes

In comparison, a city garrison 3 archer on hills:
+150% from hills/city
+25% from terrain
----
8.25 defence + 3*culture defence, and 1 first strike

In a higher-culture city the archer wins, in a lower-culture the catapult wins. Plus the catapult defends nicely against attacking catapults.

We should also cap the collateral damage from a seige to 20% of max damage (ie, min health from collateral is 80%). Enough to soften you up, but not to cripple you.

 

[Wodan]

Siege units should be in three classes:
1) units capable of reducing defenses
2) units capable of inflicting collateral damage
3) units capable of fighting in a siege (whether attacking, defending, or both)

The main problem with Civ4 siege units as they are now, is that most of them can do all 3. In ANY game, anytime you have a dynamic that both increases your odds of winning and also enables you to win, that's called a "broken" mechanic. You can invest almost the majority of your resources into that one mechanic. To have a well-rounded game with lots of flexibility (and enjoyability), we want each mechanic to be separate and have its own use.

So, what we should have is to remove ability #3 from all current siiege units. This is like Civ3, except we keep the ability of defending units to sally and counter-attack and possibly destroy the siege engine (the siege engine can inflict collateral damage on them only; if the sallying unit doesn't "win" it retreats). Alternately, we allow defending siege units to enter a artillery "duel" (like SMAC).

We can go further. We can allow some special units that can do only #1 (such as a Bombard), units that can do only #2 (such as the hwacha), units that can do only #3 (such as the machine gunner), units that can do #1 or #2 (such as a cannon).

We should have very, very few units that can do #1/#2 or #3 (such as a Battering Ram), because this is the "broken" combination.

Wodan

 

[Yakk]

Break it into 4 parts.

The problem only occurs if the siege unit is good at most of the above.

I'd propose making a siege engine poor at actually killing units on the attack.

What if seige engines had an attack of 1, massive collateral damage stats, and retreat odds of 90% to 95%?

Then the seige engine "attack" would really be a proxy for bombardment -- which is nice, because the AI understands attacking with seige units against stacks.

 

[Naismith]

Break it into 4 parts.

The problem only occurs if the siege unit is good at most of the above.

I'd propose making a siege engine poor at actually killing units on the attack.

What if seige engines had an attack of 1, massive collateral damage stats, and retreat odds of 90% to 95%?

Then the seige engine "attack" would really be a proxy for bombardment -- which is nice, because the AI understands attacking with seige units against stacks.

If there is one uber-defender, say a archer with CG III and first strike, on a hill, then your siege wouldn't be able to do any damage (probably). It would be chosen as the strongest city defender every time you attacked with a cat, and would sustain no damage. The same type of problem exists now, I'm just saying it would be worse if cats only had an attack of 1.

By the way, I'm not trying to discourage you from thinking of ways to change and/or improve siege. I think it's an area that needs some work.

Just curious: Do you think something closer to Civ3 type siege would be better?

 

[Yakk]

If there is one uber-defender, say a archer with CG III and first strike, on a hill, then your siege wouldn't be able to do any damage (probably). It would be chosen as the strongest city defender every time you attacked with a cat, and would sustain no damage. The same type of problem exists now, I'm just saying it would be worse if cats only had an attack of 1.

So using a catapult on a single archer fails: Good for the archer -- catapults have a weakness, which is if you don't pack your defenders together tightly, they do far less damage.

The huge defence against seige engines is actually questionable in it's utility, I'll admit. But I have an adversion to python/dll changes for composite-aimed mods.

Just curious: Do you think something closer to Civ3 type siege would be better?

Civ3 Siege engines where used poorly by the AI and overly well by players.

I do like the idea of an AC-like artillery duel.

We could reduce the collateral damage on catapults to 1 or 2 more units, make them weaker than most other units, give them a bunch of first strikes and give them a really high withdraw chance...

Then catapults would be decent at softening up targets, but not so good at actually killing them. Huge armies of catapults could kill targets, but they wouldn't do it as efficiently as a mixed army could.

A strength 2 catapult with 5 first strikes and 80% withdraw chance and collateral on 1 unit...

Against a strength 8 defender.

Catapult damage: 20*(14/22) = 12
Defender damage: 31

Catapult gets 1 hit in on the first strikes on average.
From then on, the defender hits 4 times for every 1 hit by the catapult.
The defender has to hit 3.23 times to take out the catapult, and does 2.58 times as much damage.

So for every point of damage the defender takes, the catapult takes 8.34.

So that means the catapult does 12 damage on average post-first stike.

So the catapult attack does 24 damage on average, and only 1/5 of catapults die.

Throw 5 catapults at the target, and you lose 1 and kill the defending unit (on average).

A 2 strength collateral hit on a strength 3 unit would do an average of 7 extra damage.

This is an example of catapults that are better than that defender: the goal would be to make the catapults good at softening up, but poor at winning.

Toss in defending catapults: grant catapults +900% defence vs seige engines. Now when you attack, you are fighting a rather beefy defending catapult. You take heavy damage, and you only manage to get your small collateral damage through.

Thus, catapults act as a counter to catapults. Less than ideal...

Maybe cavalry can also act as a counter to catapults?

 

[bardolph]

Siege units should be in three classes:
1) units capable of reducing defenses
2) units capable of inflicting collateral damage
3) units capable of fighting in a siege (whether attacking, defending, or both)

The main problem with Civ4 siege units as they are now, is that most of them can do all 3. In ANY game, anytime you have a dynamic that both increases your odds of winning and also enables you to win, that's called a "broken" mechanic. You can invest almost the majority of your resources into that mechanic. To have a well-rounded game with lots of flexibility (and enjoyability), we want each mechanic to be separate and have its own use.

So, what we <b>should</b> have is to remove ability #3 from all current siiege units. This is like Civ3, except we keep the ability of defending units to sally and counter-attack and possibly destroy the siege engine or(the siege engine can inflict collateral damage on them only; if the sallying unit doesn't "win" it retreats). Alternately, we allow defending siege units to enter a artillery "duel" (like SMAC).

We can go further. We can allow some special units that can do only #1 (such as a Bombard), units that can do only #2 (such as the hwacha), units that can do only #3 (such as the machine gunner), units that can do #1 or #2 (such as a cannon).

We should have very, very few units that can do #1/#2 or #3 (such as a Battering Ram), because this is the "broken" combination.

Wodan

Good analysis overall. With this concept in mind, you can make the following units:

1) Catapult (Construction) - STR 3 - Capable of inflicting Collateral Damage, No defensive bonuses.
2) Battering Ram (Construction) - STR 3 - Can bombard city defenses (-15%)

Then, at Engineering, perhaps Trebuchet/Ballistae, and not until cannons can you have a unit that does both.

Another possibility (perhaps simpler) is to keep it to 1 unit per era, but make collateral damage only available through the promotion tree.

So the Catapult could be STR 4, No defensive bonuses, can bombard city defenses (-10%).

Then you can take barrage, accuracy, OR city raider, but these would be separate trees with no cross-over.

 

[Yakk]

We could take the existing pattern in battle, and design defensive counters for siege engines.

Proposal: mounted units and siege engines defend effectively against siege engines.

Siege engine is a mediocre defender. Poor against horses, good against siege.

...

There is a fundamantal problem with the Civ4 combat engine. Defensive counters are usually only 2 to 4 times better than the attacker.

Defender doesn't know what is going to beattacking him, so they have to build a mix of defending units. Say 2 or 3 kinds.

If you bring a mix of attacking units, you end up spreading your damage over all of the defenders best-against types. On the other hand, if you bring a concentrated force (with just enough defenders to deal with counter-attacks) of attackers, you can overwealm the special-purpose defensive units, and chew away at the juicy weak-to-your-unit other defenders.

I was noticing that my ideas for giving siege engines counters had this problem, but then I realized it was a general problem with the game.

The current problem is, of course, there is no defensive counter for catapults at all.

 

[Neoclast]

I like the Siege units as are. Sorry I know a lot of people don't like them, but they are better the CivIII and I think they are balanced now.

 

[mrt144]

the defensive counter for catapults should be attacking them outright. There should be no defensive bonuses for seige weapons and should be offensive bonuses for attacking them.

this requires just some unit modding and some ai scripting that encourages risk taking and coming out of the city to attack a stack with disprorptional amounts of seige weapons in it. I can think of numerous times where attacking first before they get to the city is more beneficial than sitting bracing for it.

 

[A+ombomb]

The civ3 style of sieging is flawed because it does not stop the "stack of doom" as previously stated. That's why I proposed an idea that killed stacks of doom without being grossly overpowered in all situations - in fact my idea discourages stacks of doom severely, but does not discourage attacking with large numbers of troops. You simply have to swarm!

 

[bardolph]

The civ3 style of sieging is flawed because it does not stop the "stack of doom" as previously stated. That's why I proposed an idea that killed stacks of doom without being grossly overpowered in all situations - in fact my idea discourages stacks of doom severely, but does not discourage attacking with large numbers of troops. You simply have to swarm!

If you really want to discourage the "stack of doom", make siege units vulnerable to collateral damage, and remove the # of victims cap. I don't think the SoD needs to be killed; there just needs to be viable alternatives.

Actually I think a pretty easy solution would be to give "anti-siege" units (Horse Archers, Cavalry, Marines) better anti-siege capabilities. Make them immune to collateral damage, and allow them to keep their bonus even when defending.

 

[Yakk]

Then you will have stacks of horse archers attacking.

I sort of like the idea of flanking (if you have hostile troops on two sides, you take double damage from all attacks) as a way of discouraging stacks of doom: your army will have to be spread out in order to prevent the enemy from flanking your advance.

 

[bardolph]

Then you will have stacks of horse archers attacking.

Sometimes, but HAs would still have problems with spearmen, and HAs couldn't do the collateral damage that catapults could. I think you'd end up with greater variety overall.

I sort of like the idea of flanking (if you have hostile troops on two sides, you take double damage from all attacks) as a way of discouraging stacks of doom: your army will have to be spread out in order to prevent the enemy from flanking your advance.

That's a good idea (though the AI will have serious problems dealing with those kinds of tactics).