Terrain movement cost and defence bonus

[Sandro]

This is not an issue that is specific to FFH, but rather an inherited flaw (imho) from standard Civ, that I would love to see adressed in this great mod.

I am talking about how a movement 1 (m1) unit, such as the warrior, and a m2 unit, such as the scout, move at same speed through forests and hills or combinations thereof. That, combined with the ludicrously high forest defence bonus leads to the very unrealistic march technique for m1 units, through the toughest terrain possible, since they gain high defence bonus and pay no extra movement.

So, there are two issues here, that I would like to see changed. One is the defence bonus for forest (I think it is ok for hills), which is just out of proportions (it is better to defend units by placing them in a forest tile than in a city with stone walls or a fort). The other is the way movement works. I think it should take dist(A,B)* terrainMoveCost(A,B) / unitMoveSpeed to go from A to B, regardless of unit and terrain types. This is only the case for units with very high movement at the moment.

Movement change idea illustrated by a simple example: Warrior wants to move to a forest square. It will take 2 turns since its speed is only 1. After giving the order and ending turn the unit will be unselectable the next turn and ready for new orders the turn after. The actual movement from tile A to B should take place in turn one or two with fifty-fifty chance.

Another way around this would be to increase the move speed of all units, but I don't like that idea. I would also like to add, that I'm not suggesting this in order to make things as "realistic" as possible, but because I think it would improve the game significantly.

Thanks for reading this rather longwinded post

-Sandro

 

[eerr]

the biggest problem is that 1 move units would become unreliable-moving a stack would entitle multiple problems and it would really mess with cued up moves.
and who would want a unit that can't move at least 1 tile per turn? they would become useless explorers in rough terrain while it would only be possible to reasonably use a scout. and what happens when you have a scout with three moves trying to move through a second forest tile?

the current system retains simplicity without being over balancing. as such, i just don't think such a change is in order... unless units could get a base move of 2 to start...
and what happens when a unit tries to move to a forested hilltop? these currently take 3 mp to enter so a warrior might end up waiting 3 turns just to move to a good defensive position...

 

[Sandro]

I don't see why it should mess up queued moves for stacks, since they would still travel together. Just at more appropriate speed. The die that is rolled to decide when the move is happening should be the same for all the units in the stack (since they form an army marching together).

If you want to climb the forested hills more quickly take the mobility promotion. The +75% strength should require some effort imho. I can see how you think waiting 3 turns is steep, but I still think it would be for the best. You can just go around it to see what is on the other side if you don't care about the defensive bonus (or want to risk it to explore more quickly). A m2 unit should have a fifty-fifty chance of either spending one turn climbing the hill or spending two turns.

 

[DMN]

That change would be great for realism, but it might hurt gameplay.

I think it might be confusing, especially for new players. Which stacks can move this turn? Which stacks will not move for the next two turns (because they moved on a hills/forest square)?

Right now you can just look at stack A and see how fast it will arrive and whether it will be able to intercept stack B in time. It might be frustrating if you cannot see this any more except if you keep in mind all stack movements and therefore know how long every stack has been on its specific tile.

 

[Sandro]

Well... I thought there would probably be some objections, but more because it could be difficult to implement. I think it could work without being confusing, even to new players. The current system is so simple that it makes no sense (m1 units with woodsmanII overtaking m2 units in forests etc.).

What about the +50% defence for forest - any comments on that? That would be easy to change (my idea for initial test would be to 25% like for a hill, meaning a max terrain def. bonus of 50%). Again I'm not only trying to make things more realistic, but I think it is boring that it is always best to end your move in a forest or jungle (even when defending against bears and tigers ).

 

[QES]

I have also thought about the natural disparity of movement in CIV games. The problem comes in that if we want to make the game far more tactical, and less strategic, game play issues arrive.

For example, In the ancient mediterranian, have you noticed how long it would take to move an army from Gaul to Palastine? Even WITH roads, it'd take several "years" if not Decades. In the RL ancient era, a Roman Legion could move the length of the empire in MONTHS. This is not represented, but really how could it be, unless either A) it was Real-time game. or B) all units got obscenely high movement modifiers (detracted by movement penalties of terrain). At that point, an army could move from city to city and attack without warning. If the turns were turned into MONTHS however, this would solve itself. But, then youd be playing games on a larger scale than Epic, Marathon or even something beyond that like "Eternal".
-Qes

 

[Grillick]

I think this problem could be solved if only we could figure out a way to make "Double movement in x" actually mean double movement in x, rather than meaning that for 1 movement folk, and not in 2 or 3 movement folk. As it is, if you've lots of woods around, it's simply wiser to get Woodsman II than to get mobility, because your mobility wouldn't work in forests.

 

[vorshlumpf]

Sandro, I agree with your idea, overall. I, too, feel that it is unrealistic for a unit to move through forested hill tiles at the same rate as grasslands tiles.

Even without the responses to your idea, I would have guessed that the general public would not want it. However, I noticed a Vanilla mod targetting this very subject - perhaps we can use that with FfH (as a mod) in the future.

Similar ideas I had based on fractional movement use have to do with healing and creating improvements. For instance, a worker that moves 5 spaces along a road and begins to make a mine is on track with a worker that starts at that space and begins making the mine. As for healing, I feel a unit >1 mvmnt should be able to make a partial move and still heal an appropriate fraction of its healing rate.

These two ideas came about not so much for the realism, but to cut down on micromanagement (us micromanagers have a sickness, and we cannot keep ourselves from micromanaging anything we can even if it detracts from the overall enjoyment of the game ).

- Niilo

 

[Sureshot]

the simplest fix would be to make "Woodsman II" turn forests into 0.5 movement cost tiles, and "Guerilla II" turn hills into 0.5 movement cost.

oh, and the movement plan you speak of was done in one of the civ 2 games (forget which one). that one was quite interesting, with 3 layers (land, underwater, air), fishing farms, slavers, propaganda, explored futured techs like Hive mind type stuff. overall though im not certain it was better, it was different, interesting, but not necessarily more fun.

 

[eerr]

yea... it's not always best to fix what aint broke even if it does work a lil "faunkeh!"
espeically
-we don't want to add realism that isn't going to make the game more fun no matter how more real it becomes

 

[Frozen-Vomit]

the simplest fix would be to make "Woodsman II" turn forests into 0.5 movement cost tiles, and "Guerilla II" turn hills into 0.5 movement cost.

oh, and the movement plan you speak of was done in one of the civ 2 games (forget which one). that one was quite interesting, with 3 layers (land, underwater, air), fishing farms, slavers, propaganda, explored futured techs like Hive mind type stuff. overall though im not certain it was better, it was different, interesting, but not necessarily more fun.

I think that was call to power. Had to many things that detracted from the civ experiance in my opinion - it failed to get me addicted completly

 

[Sureshot]

ya, it was still neat tho, like id prolly play it over test of time if i was gonna play one of them

 

[eerr]

if you do really want to change woodsman and guerrilla
you could alternativelymake it cost .9 to enter the space, so 1 move units could still move twice and 2 move units could move 3, 3 move units could move 4...
unit mp is at 6 or so max movement right? so woodsman and/or guerrilla would give an extra move for going through them once compared to normally moving across grassland.
this would avoid giving units huge bonuses for moving across a rough terrain but allow slightly faster passage than grassland.

 

[Maian]

Well one way to approach this problem is to change the scale of terrain so that it represents smaller areas and thus lead to more plots/squares per map. Then increase the number of MPs each unit has, so that it's guaranteed to be able to move at least once in the terrain with the highest MP cost.

However that approach has some problems:
- Requires a lot more memory.
- Players have to spend more time to gauge where enemies might go (which may be a good thing depending on your point of view).
- If players will have more trouble figuring out where to move units, consider how much worse it will be for the AI, which don't benefit from the massively parallel processor that is our brain.
- Forts become even more useless and would have to be rebalanced.
- City distances and the number of workable plots need to be adjusted, and therefore also rebalanced.
- Would perhaps require implementing zones of control to handle the above combat problems.
- All unit MPs would have to be rebalanced.

 

[Unser Giftzwerg]

Would it be possible to fiddle with the movement point costs to achieve the desired result? Make Plains 2 MP but give infantry 2MP. Make Woods 3 MP, round-up when halving move effects?

Was going to post a chart, formatting is funky though. And as I think of it, roads start to throw in a monkey wrench. Do you make Roads 1MP to enter? Then how to implement the 3:1 movement advantage under Engineering? Gonna ponder some more, but there might be a way to adjust the numbers to get the units moving as desired.

As for the +50% defense bonus in forests, I think your comment has a lot of merit. It does seem a bit strong. It's not quite as bad as in vanilla civ, because FfH units earn a lot more +STR promotions and each is +20% instead of +10%. FfH city defenses also skew higher than in vanilla. But yeah, I tend to sympathize with your point.

 

[BeefontheBone]

Well, if you want to keep the movement rate as it is on flat things with roads you'd need to multiply the costs (and units' MPs) by 6 (so you can both halve and divide it by 3 easily), then tweak forests etc. as much as you liked.

At least we're away from the Civ I days where 1-move units were guaranteed to be able to enter a 2-move cost tile but 2-move units with 1 move left failed half the time...

 

[eerr]

if you raised the lowest unit movement to 2 then you could raise the movement on roads to 66% of an mp instead of 33%

 

[QES]

The major issue with movement is movement vs. time. Forests, hills, and the like are meant to slow down very fast moving units. In honesty, "RL" representation of movement is not possible unless during a "year" any one unit could literally cross to any general one location on the map. Even in the ancient era, units (MILITARY UNITS) could travel hundres upon hundreds of miles, farther with roads. I think there are alot of good ideas here to "tweak" the system, but i think that we must remember that "tweaking" is the best were going to be able to do.
-Qes