Suicide Artillery = broken concept

[Inflammatory]

Make artillery a promotion. This way they function as an attachment to a unit, much like in real life, and will not be harmed unless the unit it is associated with is eliminated. This would give the unit a first-strike chance with collateral damage, much like Aussie Lurker suggested. If you attach artillery to a fast unit it's slowed down, and if you research better forms of artillery the bonus of the promotion is increased.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Sounds good, Guagle !

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[lordrichter]

Ever heard or read of the town of Verdun?

Yeah. 1400 German artillery units against the entrenched French army during WWI. Big blunder on the part of the Germans. The Germans dropped 100,000 shells per hour on the French during the preliminary bombardment and in the end didn't even get the city, and lost a half million infantry to the French.

I don't think that the artillery SoD was ever used again as the focal point of an attack.

If anything that single battle does more to show that the CivIII artillery SoD was way out of line than anything else said in this thread.

YOMV.

 

[Inflammatory]

Well, artillery was a useful part of a broken strategy. The problem is countering that in Civ, since artillery itself isn't supposed to be weak, but basing your whole doctrine on artillery isn't supposed to work. I don't think they chose the right way of going about it by making artillery a shock unit.

 

[lordrichter]

And how many did the french loose? as many if not more. And artillery was very usefull in ww1 about 80% of casualties were caused by it.

The French casualties were also about a half million, about 100,000 more than the German losses, AND they managed to keep the town. That is a definite victory for the French. Plus, the French captured 10,000 German troops and some of those nice artillery units.

And, I might add, the French did not have a SoD in Verdan when the Germans attacked. There were 200,000 French troops against 1 million German troops, plus 1400 artillery. The Germans had a very impressive SoD, and lost.

SoD RIP.

 

[Harrier]

The solution, IMO, is to give siege weapons these abilities:

1) Reduce defenses-as currently exists.

2) 'Stack Defense'/'Stack Attack'. If you have a siege weapon in a stack-and that stack attacks or is attacked-then the siege weapons get ONE free attack EACH before the main combat begins-with collateral damage too.

The seige weapons should only have Stack Defense if they have been fortified for one turn. To simulate them being placed facing the enemy and prepared for firing. If they are not fortified they are considered to be moving and not in any position to fire.

The bombardment attack by the seige weapon should also weaken that unit (say by 40/100 health points). This means they can only be used to bombard units twice, as a third use would destroy it. - until they regain their health. (Consider this to be them running out of missiles.) This would go some way to reducing the overpowerfull effect they had in Civ3.

 

[Commander Bello]

Yeah. 1400 German artillery units against the entrenched French army during WWI. Big blunder on the part of the Germans. The Germans dropped 100,000 shells per hour on the French during the preliminary bombardment and in the end didn't even get the city, and lost a half million infantry to the French.

I don't think that the artillery SoD was ever used again as the focal point of an attack.

If anything that single battle does more to show that the CivIII artillery SoD was way out of line than anything else said in this thread.

YOMV.

But the French lost at least the same number of casualties, although they were sitting in a fortress.
At the bottom line, after the war had turned into trenchline warfare (latest by mid 1915), both sides considered it impossible to launch offensives without proper artillery support.
Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_1#Trench_warfare_begins
(Sections: German spring offensive, Technology)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
(Section: Battle)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlacht_um_Verdun
(German)

 

[sturmtrupp]

Ever heard or read of the town of Verdun?

Yeah, and how many german machine gunners were taken down as planned? Artillary was way overestimated and the allies were getting slaughtered in there advance, for very marginal gains, which were mainly by the french. And how many tons of shelling were used? Too many to remember... and for how many days, fore crissakes you proved my point.

It was a bloody genocide of soldiers

 

[damxam]

During WW1, arty was both overestimated and essential. It was essential because a creeping barrage could stop the enemy from mowing down advancing infantry (in game terms, it took down many defensive advantages) but it was overestimated; the most amazing artillery bombardments preceeded most of the great offensives during the war, but simple dirt trenches protected the troops so well that the vast majority was still alive after days of artillery fire. Troops would march through the moonscape of no-mans-land confident that nobody could survive that kind of bombardment, just to be mowed down by an almost undiminished force of defenders. Once troops were dug in deep nothing but a direct hit on their section of trench could hurt them.

 

[TerraHero]

Yeah. 1400 German artillery units against the entrenched French army during WWI. Big blunder on the part of the Germans. The Germans dropped 100,000 shells per hour on the French during the preliminary bombardment and in the end didn't even get the city, and lost a half million infantry to the French.

I don't think that the artillery SoD was ever used again as the focal point of an attack.

If anything that single battle does more to show that the CivIII artillery SoD was way out of line than anything else said in this thread.

YOMV.

That was because they used the wrong ammo for there artillery. A mistake the English made at the battle of the Somme. They used sharpnel granates to destroy the personal blockign stuff like barbed wire, wich was pretty much useless.

Back to topic. An artillery as an offence unit is nonsense, i like aussie_lurkers idea more. Something that was already applied to curtain units in civ3. The artillery and curtaina rcher would fire a free crack when they where being attacked.

 

[Inflammatory]

The main (even though perhaps not intended) use of WW1 artillery wasn't reducing numbers, but morale. The soldiers in a trench subject to two days' worth of artillery fire would be numb both in body and spirit. Furthermore, artillery was responsible for breaking communication with staff positions behind the lines. They'd dig wires two metres into the ground that still would break by an impact above.

Ironically, the lack of communication was also one of the main reasons why the role of artillery didn't quite work out in practice on the battlefield in the Great War. An offensive was planned according to a time-table that required everything to go perfectly according to plan. As the offensive moved on, the artillery would move its aim forward ignorant of how successful the infantry advance was, meaning the infantry was completely without artillery support soon enough if they didn't advance according to the time-table. The artillery itself wasn't bad, but other technologies and the lack of a better offensive doctrine made sure that the impact of artillery was heavily reduced.

But you can rest assured that the arty boys were the last to die and not the first.

 

[Gargoyle]

Anybody ever hear of "Design for Effect". This doctrine, initially used by Avalon Hill in its Squad Leader series of board games, is:

The game mechanics do not need to emulate real life mechanics, they just need end with correct results.

I believe that is the purpose behind how artillery works in Civ IV. An artillery base strategy involves huge outlay of supply and logistics. The end effect of Civ IV to using such a strategy is you must stockpile many artillery units, expending them as you use up massive amounts of ammo. This requires additional resources to build up and maintain.

The results are correct.

 

[Inflammatory]

Fair point.

 

[King Jason]

hmm... I might have an idea..

 

[Harry Haller]

The ability of artillery to strike more than 1 square and to damage terrain improvements was one of the few things I liked about Civ 3. I would like to see something more like the system in SMAC: artillery can strike up to 2 squares, can do collateral damage to units, and engages in "artillerly duels" if there is an enemy artillery unit in the attacked square.

 

[Mercade]

Excellent idea! To further ensure that artillery is not overpowered (ie. in your system if one side brings 50 arty with its stack then every one of them gets a free shot right?) there could be a cap to the maximum damage that can be inflicted.

For example: catapults wouldn't bring a unit's hp below 85% of its maximum, no matter how many catapults are firing, while a cannon would top at say 75%, something like that.

That is a good plan, Guagle. Personally I find 85% resp 75% a bit high, but it surely deals with the problem that if you have enough siege weapons, you can pound everybody down to the last hitpoint like in . It surely takes the sting out of SoD with artillery.

 

[Sparrowhawk]

I guess I might as well throw in my 2 cents here. To start I'd like to say that the artillery system in Civ IV is practically the only aspect of the game that I dislike - otherwise I am quite happy. I think it brings us back to the Civ I style that I always hated.

I liked the Civ III style much better, and did not find that it was unbalanced. Sure, a stack of 50+ artillery with defensive units is a powerful force, but so is a stack of 50+ cavalry or armor. The power of such a stack lies in the numbers, and simply requires numbers and strategy to counter. I always had at least 20 artillery as defensive units throughout my empire in the late game, which was usually enough to blast the defending units of a stack of doom down to size. I found the SoD concept was a huge risk on the part of the attacker, because if defeated it could be captured and turned right around.

That said, I have to say that I really like the solution to artillery combat proposed by Aussie_Lurker & Guagle. The 'brigades' approach would work too.

My opinion is that any of these options would be far better than the current design.

 

[Inflammatory]

I also feel that the Civ3 artillery wasn't particularly broken, it's just that the AI didn't know what to do about it. Instead of fine-tuning they revamped into something worse, which is unfortunate.

 

[Blazer6]

Chemical weapons have been used by artillery and yet no mention of its effectiveness.

 

[King Jason]

Okay my idea I had was to simply make the catapults and cannons airplanes.

Sounds stupid? of course it does. But how I mean is using the XML file I was able to have the same interface as a fighter plane (bombard unit, bombard city/tile imp) but still be a catapult.

Unfortunately, the 3D aspect of this game makes it much harder to implement than it would've been had it been civ3... for one reason... depth! there's actual height these days in civ4 so the catapults were flying after my little tweak (it was hilarious). What's funnier, is when I bombarded an enemy tile, the catapult actually went through the fly by animation the fighter plans do.

It's go, Vrrooooooooo, through the air and fir the stone right as it's passing the the enemy - one of the funnier things I've seen.

Another problem that arose was - with the one ability of the plane - all abilities of the plane. Meaning I even got rebase on my catapult, and recon. which isn't good, for many obvious reasons.

and lastly, they can't move. Air units can't move actual tile spaces. However, if the other stuff can get fixed I thought of a FANTASTIC way to fix this. The point of Aircraft carriers is to transport the planes that can't move. There is a directory that indicates that they can transport X unit. X indicating the planes (each type). Well, in all movies and historical referances you always see someone pushing the catapult, a peon if you will, a... worker.

I had the idea to allow Workers the transport ability. Give them a capacity of 1, and only allow them to transport catapults, cannons, and artillery. It makes sense on various different lvls, workers are like the slaves of your empire, so of course they'd be thrown the task of hauling the catapults everywhere. But as you get more modern, the workers look like engineers. Well... you may need someone onhand to repair that artillery incase something goes wrong.

So... workers. What makes that idea even MORE interesting is that you can actually drop artillery places. Since it can't move on its own. You could use a worker to bring it to X location and drop it there, fortify a defensive unit in the same space, and put your worker back to work.

I'd also make artillery able to be captured just like in civ3. So this time around you'd be capturing a worker and an artillery at all times if it's a mobile one. Which would add more risk to the more power that these artillery would have (ranged bombardment of stacks.)

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, as much as I liked this idea I worked on it for an hour or so to no avail. I'm not gonna give it up just yet, but, I've got tons of stuff I'm modding now. I just wanted to throw the idea out there and who knows - maybe someone else can get it to work.