The modern armor

[painkiller]

I started a thread in which I wrote that it was wrong for a spearman to beat a tank since the tank has machineguns and a cannon. The spearman has sticks and the best spearmen of the ancient world had sticks with bronze or even iron edges. I don't have to use the spearman as an example. About 450 years ago the conquistadors used cavalry and musketmen. The Inca/Aztec used primitive infantry and maybe they used spearmen as well. The point is that the didn't have a chance against the conquistadors.

During WW2 the Wehrmacht reached the russian village Vyazma. The village was defended by scores of russian infantry. The germans were better equiped and had modern machineguns. In just under two weeks the germans killed 175000 russian. This is actually a record because no other army has managed to kill so many in a single battle. There are more examples like this one from WW2. Now this is a sad moment in history but my point is that even in modern ages armys are not equal and one can destroy another just as the tank should destroy the spearman.

So the spearman should have a 0% chance of winning against a tank in a battle.

P.S. An obsolete unit should never win against a modern unit and it doesn't matter if it's a tank VS spearman or cavalry VS jaguar warrior. It doesn't happen in the real world and it shouldn't happen in the coming civ 4 either.

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

It is Vyazma
see:http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ww2/barbarossa.htm
but I dont really see the argument...
could you elaborate a little bit on the connection between the 2 armies fighting and the specifics ot spearman vs tank
BTW i think this thread should be in the general discussions
thanks

 

[Rammstein]

I got really bothered when my first modern armor lost to a spearman (my MA was severly damaged, so I had it coming) - but I have since come to accept the fact that even if spearmen are very very obsolete, they too could learn the tactics of the modern age. Maybe he learned how to make a sticky bomb?

 

[ThinkerRCB]

A real unlikely victory moment in history is this:

At one point in Africa, the Zulu's equiped with spears totally massacred the English who were equipped with rifles. The Zulus suffered very few casualties and the English were completely annihilated. Why? The english ran out of ammunition. My point? There are situations (albeit unlikely ones) where obsolete units can beat modern ones. This is already factored into Civ3 using the probability system.

Example: A fully healed normal spearman has a (2/18+2)*3 = 3/10 chance of defeating an attacking tank that has only 1HP. You could interpret that 1HP means the tank has no ammo, or only a few shots left.

Maybe the spearman built lots of hidden deep pits that the tanks fell into. Once the tanks fell in, they just set them on fire with some oil or something, igniting their ammo, thus blowing them up. People who are threatened with their lives can think up some pretty ingenious tactics.

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

I agree with your concept in principle but IMHO the exemple is slightly inaccurate
see: http://www.historywiz.com/zuluwars.htm

 

[Philips beard]

Please give me a break from this spearman complaining! The chances for the spearman to win is really small. Think about the balance of the game, and puny civs chanses vs great ones! Look at the spearman as futile, but heroic attemps to delay your army. It takes time to kill people, even if they are spearmen, and its always risky business.....

 

[judgement]

Please give me a break from this spearman complaining!

I agree! There's way too much complaining going on about this topic. It seems like people are forgetting two important things:

(1) The really unrealistic thing isn't that tanks lose to spearmen, its that they are fighting spearmen in the first place. Never in real life has a unit of tanks fought against a infantry unit armed with bronze shields and spears.

(2) Realism is not the end-all-be-all... enjoyable gameplay is more important. Each time you get a certain tech advance, you can build a unit more powerful that what was available before. When deciding how much more powerful, the designers need to think about realism, but more importantly, they need to think about the effect on gameplay. The game isn't as fun if each new unit can easily massacre all older units. So the fact that there is a small chance of a spearman beating a tank is a bizarre but necessary consequence of the facts that (1) spearmen are balanced against horsemen, (2) knights cannot be overwhelmingly better than horsemen, or else the first civ to get knights would be too dominant, (3) cavalry cannot be overwhelmingly better than knights (same reason), and (4) tanks cannot be overwhelmingly better than cavalry (again, same reason).

Real-life examples (in either direction, i.e., either Vyazma or Zulus) are irrelevant. The only important thing is that the game is fun. Thus the only valid argument against tanks losing to spearmen is that it not fun, perhaps because its' counterintuitive and surprising. But as I state in point #1 above, if the game was realistic, then such battles would never happen at all. If the AI were simply programmed to be better about upgrading, or there was some mechanism for units automatically upgrading after a certain amount of time, then the "un-fun" occurrence of tanks losing to spearmen would not half to happen, and there would be no need to monkey around with the relative power of various units and risk unbalancing the game and making the whole thing less fun.

 

[Kiech]

Besides, can't the spearman run AROUND the tank, climb on top open the hatch, and stab the driver inside? Thats how I see it.

 

[Dell19]

Since this is essentially the same as the last thread I will just briefly point ou that I would like to see spearmen upgrade to a new weak modern unit (assuming that the civ has the techs for the modern age) so that spearmen would be replaced by something like a civil defence unit which would have the same stats or perhaps one or two extra if several units such as pikemen also upgraded to this new unit so that there were no longer spearmen fighting tanks when both civs are technologically advanced whilst still keeping a wide range of units on the battlefield.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Just teach the damn AI to upgrade its units. An AI unable to build better defenders when you've got Tanks is very rare.

 

[Dell19]

I have actually noticed in my recent games on C3C that I don't really see spearmen anymore when I attack the computer. The problem is that I still have outdated in my own cities for long periods of the game especially if I am feeling war like so I need unit numbers to maximise happy faces...

 

[Jawz II]

i remember this exact same thread,same subject same complaint was up a month ago or two

can we look forward for this topic in slightly diffrent words,maybe with new examples in the coming months, painkiller?

 

[painkiller]

Sure. Next time I'll write about something more interesting. ICBM VS worker.

 

[painkiller]

Hey where is the moderator? Why doesn't he close this thread... It sucks so please close it NOW!

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

just PM the moderator, painkiller....

 

[Dell19]

just PM the moderator, painkiller....

Yep mods don't read every thread so they rely on people telling them when they feel a thread should be closed.

 

[Chieftess]

Moderator Action: Closed at the request of the thread starter.