Stacks being damaged or destroyed when near enemy cities

[delijoe]

I'm sorry for starting a new thread for this but I didn't see this mentioned anywhere else.

I'm using the latest version (18) of C2C and I notice that every time I bring a stack of units near an enemy city, they get either damaged or destroyed by "city defenses". It makes capturing cities impossible even with adequete seige weapons. I had a stack of 20+ riflemen completely destroyed just from moving next to an enemy city.

Is there any way I can turn off this "feature" thanks...

 

[JosEPh_II]

The modders tell us to have several Healers with your stack. And Siege weapons too. It's getting complicated.

JosEPh.

 

[delijoe]

Um... I did and I got killed immediately...

The city in question did have a defense of 235% or something....

Is there a way to turn this thing off?

 

[Hankc]

The damage comes from two lines of buildings: Mines/Traps and Towers/Batteries. If I remember correctly it should max out at around 75%/turn with Antimatter battery and Robotic traps. I'm guessing this is not what you are up against since you have riflemen. It shouldn't kill your troops in one turn.

I don't think there is an in-game way of disabling it. You mighy be able to edit it out in the .xml, however. No idea how.

 

[JosEPh_II]

You didn't perhaps go into the Bug menu and reset City defense to 100 did you? The default is 75%.

You can lower it to less there also.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

I've brought this up and we're working on some solutions now. At the era of riflemen it is at its worst I think. There are a few strategic ways to address this and they pretty much involve SPEED... get in and through the city defenses in one round and you'll be right as rain. Mind... future alternative ways of arranging city defenses will take speed as a strategy down a notch but will also allow for the slower troops to be a bit stronger and less likely destroyed outright by city defenses. For now... in that era, the golden troop seems to be the balloons and blimps, cavalry, and anything that can get in there quickly and still be strong enough to be effective. Mind, you have at least the first round to step in, suffer damage, then blast the city defenses with bombard units but if the city is on the ocean, ships can be fast enough to get in and wipe defenses out before the city can damage you.

 

[Necratoid]

It also helps to have units with enough move to approach, attack and step back from the city in one turn. Which may mean sending in a warlord with a move plus promotion, bombarding and running away for a while.

If it is a city you can get boats to, bombard and move away then use attackers from boats... though taking the amphibious promotion won't hurt in the least. Gunpower units should ignore the brunt of the defense plus by their nature anyway, so its not a combat direct threat to have a number that big. On its own anyway.

Haven't switched from v17 to v18 yet, but it sounds like the game needs a unit that builds tunnels from 2 squares away from the city.

 

[delijoe]

The other issue to is that it seems like this is making to hard for the AI to capture cities as well...

Do think this needs to be toned down...

Stacks of riflemen and cannon shouldn't have a problem capturing a city full of swordsmen and pikemen...

 

[Koshling]

The other issue to is that it seems like this is making to hard for the AI to capture cities as well...

Do think this needs to be toned down...

Stacks of riflemen and cannon shouldn't have a problem capturing a city full of swordsmen and pikemen...

Agreed. There has been discussion on how to tone it down (the simplest being to change the defenses from damage-of-x-per-turn to chance-of-up-x-damage-per-turn, where the chance would be another settting on the defense building concerned).

As far as I know the dsicussion didn't conclude with a definate this-is-what-we-are-going-to-do however. The simple option above would be easy, but for it to be amenable to just a DLL update in the patch thread (i.e. - useful before V19) there would have to be an across-the-board default value for the 'chance' element since otherwise we'd have to patch lots of XML files too. If people agree I can make this change urgently today and just set the chance-if-unspecified to (say) 30%. That way each unit each turn has a 30% chance of being hit with a random amount of damage between 0 and the max damage the defense building does (so half on average), which makes it much more of an attrition factor rather than an immediate decisive factor, which was really the original intention.

Let me know opinions (especially the mod team please)

 

[EldrinFal]

Agreed. There has been discussion on how to tone it down (the simplest being to change the defenses from damage-of-x-per-turn to chance-of-up-x-damage-per-turn, where the chance would be another settting on the defense building concerned).

As far as I know the dsicussion didn't conclude with a definate this-is-what-we-are-going-to-do however. The simple option above would be easy, but for it to be amenable to just a DLL update in the patch thread (i.e. - useful before V19) there would have to be an across-the-board default value for the 'chance' element since otherwise we'd have to patch lots of XML files too. If people agree I can make this change urgently today and just set the chance-if-unspecified to (say) 30%. That way each unit each turn has a 30% chance of being hit with a random amount of damage between 0 and the max damage the defense building does (so half on average), which makes it much more of an attrition factor rather than an immediate decisive factor, which was really the original intention.

Let me know opinions (especially the mod team please)

That sounds good to me. I'd actually tone it down to 20 - 25% with a maximum number of enemies hit per turn or per stack (if that's relatively easy to implement). Bombard attacks from catapults works similarly-- it won't damage ALL units in a stack.

Building defenses should cause a bit of injury and force attackers to consider healing and withdrawing some units occasionally to heal, but never completely wipe out attackers.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I'm just waiting for the tags to go into effect. The following tags should be considered:

• Defense Damage Range (up to x distance from city - could be a # or could just be a few possible settings such as adjacent vs full city radius)
  
• Defense Damage Probability(if possible, some units should also have an ability to avoid this damage and thus reduce this likelihood when checked against them.)
  
• Defense Damage Max Amount (again, another # that some units should be able to reduce for themselves when being struck)
  
• If counts for land only, water only, or both - some traps can't be placed in the water and vice versa while bombard towers are capable of damaging either way equally.
  

I've been anxiously awaiting such tags and would be very happy to go through and manipulate the #s in the xmls so that we have ever increasingly dangerous defensive buildings but never too overwhelming. I'd also be happy to post what amounts I come up with initially so that we can debate it out or suggest changes based on playtested results. Provided the tags are in place and the programming of the effects is completed, THIS is something I could have done on my end rather quickly.

 

[Koshling]

I'm just waiting for the tags to go into effect. The following tags should be considered:

• Defense Damage Range (up to x distance from city - could be a # or could just be a few possible settings such as adjacent vs full city radius)
  
• Defense Damage Probability(if possible, some units should also have an ability to avoid this damage and thus reduce this likelihood when checked against them.)
  
• Defense Damage Max Amount (again, another # that some units should be able to reduce for themselves when being struck)
  
• If counts for land only, water only, or both - some traps can't be placed in the water and vice versa while bombard towers are capable of damaging either way equally.
  

I've been anxiously awaiting such tags and would be very happy to go through and manipulate the #s in the xmls so that we have ever increasingly dangerous defensive buildings but never too overwhelming. I'd also be happy to post what amounts I come up with initially so that we can debate it out or suggest changes based on playtested results. Provided the tags are in place and the programming of the effects is completed, THIS is something I could have done on my end rather quickly.

Doing the general tags is a fair amount of work since it means changing the underlying representation (currently cities just aggregate a damage potential and that's the only number held for the city). So for now all I can fidn the time to do is chnage the interpretatio of that ONE number from 'this is the amount of damage each uni will suffer' to 'this is the maximum amount of damage each unit might suffer' where the 'might' element is a fixed probability (25% say), and the range etc. is all as before (adjacent to the city). THAT I can do today and post to the patch thread.

Reworking the entire system (including migration for existing games which will have to somehow upgrade their current saved data) will have to wait until after I have my higher priority V19 work done - several weeks at least unless someone else can take this one on...

Edit - just pushed to SVN - changed damage to adjacent units from city defenses to have a 1-in-4 chnace of hitting each such unit each turn, instead of it being a certainty

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Personally I think that the damage from the city should be handled in a similar way to "Ranged Bombardment". This would at least make consistent with what the siege units out side the city do to troops inside the city. "Ranged Bombardment" does colateral damage and we already have defensive promotions and stuff against that.

 

[Koshling]

Personally I think that the damage from the city should be handled in a similar way to "Ranged Bombardment". This would at least make consistent with what the siege units out side the city do to troops inside the city. "Ranged Bombardment" does colateral damage and we already have defensive promotions and stuff against that.

Reasonable, but this is just a stop-gap. I won't have time for any serious changes in this area for a few weeks at least, so I wanted to do SOMETHING to allow the rifleman type era to actually allow cities to be attacked in a practical sense

 

[Hydromancerx]

Is there a way to do ranged bombardment where say a trebuchet or cannon can attack a city from 1 tiles away while say a ram or catapult have to still be adjacent to the city?

 

[Thunderbrd]

What, like a building that extends the bombardment range of units in the city? It could be done in the dll I'm sure but that'd be some very creative programming.

 

[Hydromancerx]

What, like a building that extends the bombardment range of units in the city? It could be done in the dll I'm sure but that'd be some very creative programming.

No no. I mean Is there a way to extend the range of a unit when attacking a city so it doesn't have to be adjacent to the city to bombard its walls. That way if you have projectile siege weapons they can bombard the city out of the range of the city damaging them.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Reasonable, but this is just a stop-gap. I won't have time for any serious changes in this area for a few weeks at least, so I wanted to do SOMETHING to allow the rifleman type era to actually allow cities to be attacked in a practical sense

In that case it is a good solution.

 

[Necratoid]

I remember the later seige getting mutli square bombard distances already... at least two in the modern era. Snipers also get this kind of range.... however if the range goes up for ancient era seige... then the modern era needs a range boost... which is a slippery slope until your 10 squares way bombarding.

 

[need my speed]

Ok, I have modded your mod so that buildings never go obsolete by technology... I'm in trouble right?

Anyway, what if, there are buildings that increase the city's defense, buildings that add a bombard function to cities like Civilization V (or spawn an immobile bombard-able unit, which is upgradable for free when newer buildings are built), and a tiny few buildings that automatically damage units surrounding the city?