Thoughts on if there will be an Artillery Fix?

[stealth_nsk]

Perhaps flaw is the wrong word. But may not be the best for balance. Admittedly lousy AI was a major part of this in Civ5, but it was an issue that generally unit production took so many turns that once you started loosing, it was virtually impossible to prevent complete eradication (should the offender want that). I did miss some sort of mechanism from the old games where you could draft units from population in cities in an emergency situation to withstand an assault.

Feature to conscript units from population made sense in context of defenseless cities. It's not needed for Civ5-6 cities which could defend themselves to an extend and I doubt it will fit the new population mechanic of Civ6. We don't know yet about it, but we know districts require population to be housed in them, so probably it's not that easy to loose.

I found the biggest problem with Civ5 strong cities is how easy is to play defensively. So once peaceful gameplay features were introduced in BNW, the peacefull tall civilization became much better than wide or aggressive. That's wrong and I hope Civ6 fix this. With info about cities not having ranged attack without walls, I'm quite optimistic about it.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Perhaps flaw is the wrong word. But may not be the best for balance. Admittedly lousy AI was a major part of this in Civ5, but it was an issue that generally unit production took so many turns that once you started loosing, it was virtually impossible to prevent complete eradication (should the offender want that). I did miss some sort of mechanism from the old games where you could draft units from population in cities in an emergency situation to withstand an assault.

Drafting was offset by the potential for collateral damage (an often overlooked component of stack warfare that marks inexperienced Civ IV players who claim it was all about SoD). However, keep in mind that in those days cities were utterly defenseless without units; a warrior could walk into a city in 2000 AD and burn it instantly.

From a "balance" perspective, if you invest no resources or have lost all resources invested into defending yourself, what is the justification for being able to resist? If you lost your army and can't produce a new one fast enough, you SHOULD die.

Historical armies rarely got slaughtered to a man, but any time you saw someone get their territory completely overrun for most of our history you'd start to expect some..."going concerns"...

 

[Lexicus]

errr... what? Can you share a link to some backup of that, because it sounds pretty inaccurate to me.

Every source I can find corroborates it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_during_World_War_I

The majority of casualties inflicted during the war were the result of artillery fire.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12olci/ww1_what_was_the_distribution_of_casualties/

David Holmes' 1985 analysis Firing Line concluded that British casualties (deaths and injuries) in World War I broke down to 58.5 percent from artillery (including gas), 39 percent from bullets, 2.2 percent from bombs and grenades, and 0.3 percent from bayonets.

http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_germany

Artillery was by far the greatest killer in the war; about 58.3 percent of German deaths were caused by artillery and about 41.7 percent by small arms.

Not exactly two thirds, probably, but close enough.

 

[dexters]

Conscription was a terrible idea and caused AI to self-destruct in Civ3 a lot of times as they started losing units, they started losing pop and it was just a downward spiral.

Keep in mind Civ AI has always been terrible at tactical play. And short of quantum computing, we'll have to either accept there will be some features the AI won't be great at, or craft the game around AI weaknesses.

I generally tend to the latter. But sometimes a feature is kept in to satisfy human players for immersion or just because there is too much inertia in the community.

Ranged I think fits into this latter category. The Dev knows AI isn't great at it, but has kept it in because fans love it.

To circle back to the earlier discussion, removing the set-up penalty and giving AI ranged units a free promotion might be the way to go in terms of getting the 'feel' right. It won't be a perfect solution, but Civ systems individually are rarely perfect.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

No, ranged can be and needs to be toned down. 80% of the battles in the game should not amount to "focus fire them with ranged units", with half of the game being some form of archery.

That's now how historical wars worked, and it's not making for deep tactical combat in Civ V. If it's not giving good gameplay and has negative basis in history, it should really be altered.

Super horseman from vanilla was bad too. Archers need to be supplemental units, useful for a little softening damage because they can attack from locations other units can't, but completely helpless if you have 6 xbows vs 6 pikes straight up.

I hear how V offers tactical play due to 1 UPT but in practice it's mostly ranged spam, especially against the "can't move and shoot" AI.

 

[theis81]

I think they should make all ranged units support units with a range of one.

So for instance a swordman could choose between a spearman (vs. cavalry), archer (with a ranged attack) or a catapult (for attacking a city/district).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I think they should make all ranged units support units with a range of one.

So for instance a swordman could choose between a spearman (vs. cavalry), archer (with a ranged attack) or a catapult (for attacking a city/district).

Spears, not swords, were core/primary weapons for many historical armies.

If you make every unit melee or support for melee, the game's tactics devolve into "surround and pound", instead of having difficulty spacing units and having to protect ranged.

Admittedly, that's not actually worse than what it is right now in most cases (ranged + block focus fire), but I don't see how it improves much either.

 

[Nick31]

Historical armies rarely got slaughtered to a man, but any time you saw someone get their territory completely overrun for most of our history you'd start to expect some..."going concerns"...

So, I'm more interested in the gameplay mechanic, but as a historian of sorts, you're quite wrong in that there are many, many examples of cities or fortified areas being able to outlast invading armies and thereby stopping a superior military from taking land and resulting in a new "owner" of a country rather than just a temporary invasion.

Hannibal invaded Rome, won Cannae where nearly all 70,000 Romans died in battle... but he didn't have the manpower to take Rome, itself, even though it was mostly defenseless apart from walls and militia. He'd spend years in Roman Italy killing soliders but never got land as Romans wouldn't offer a peace deal, and Hannibal couldn't take big cities via siege. Conversely, the Roman engineering Corps made Roman invasions extremely successful against fortified cities or river networks of defense.

The Danish invasions of England over a century failed precisely because of a) city walls, and b) Alfred the Great eventually making as many cities as possible into Burghs, i.e. fortified walls. Danes and then other Norsemen would frequently plunder the countrysides but struggle against a Burgh system where the harvest could be protected and relatively untrained soldiers could withstand a siege against elite infantry.

The Byzantines held onto to Byzantium so long (even as the Byzantine 'empire' shrunk over centuries) precisely because its walls were so difficult to take, and its geographical location in the Bosphorous. Byzantium resisted all comers, even if armies routinely rolled into what is now Turkey and won battles.

Anyway, the impetus for a Capital city, or even a few "major" cities being untakeable unless the invading army learned siege techniques (Genghis and Alexander were famous precisely because of this ability to learn and adapt after a setback taking a city) is vast and I could give example after example.

As a CiV mechanic, it does make Tall and Turtling until Artillery (a ruthless siege-breaking device) entirely too comfortable a strategy. Hence my original query to open this thread: if Beach/Shrik want to reduce comfort zones, the artillery tech path/mechanic needs to be altered to make a player play differently than core-4 into Ideologies into Aborb nearest neighbor with Artillery. So long as you can pre-build cannon, artillery is vastly superior to an Air Force you need to hard build and came later in the path.

 

[dexters]

As a CiV mechanic, it does make Tall and Turtling until Artillery (a ruthless siege-breaking device) entirely too comfortable a strategy. Hence my original query to open this thread: if Beach/Shrik want to reduce comfort zones, the artillery tech path/mechanic needs to be altered to make a player play differently than core-4 into Ideologies into Aborb nearest neighbor with Artillery. So long as you can pre-build cannon, artillery is vastly superior to an Air Force you need to hard build and came later in the path.

Presumably district system will solve some of the artillery rush strategy. If you have a military district in close proximity to the city centre each providing cover fire for the other, it's much harder to do the artilerry zerg.

I've experienced this before in a vanilla Civ game when the AI basically had artillery fortified between each of their cities, making my infantry + artillery advance extremely costly

And with both military district/city itself having HP bars much larger than your traditional unit, it will be a slog just to close in on a city to pursue a siege.

There could also be other mechanics we're not aware of as well. Such as the cities/military districts getting a bonus range which makes approaching artillery even more vulnerable.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Hannibal invaded Rome, won Cannae where nearly all 70,000 Romans died in battle... but he didn't have the manpower to take Rome, itself, even though it was mostly defenseless apart from walls and militia.

"Lacking manpower to secure a major city" doesn't mesh well with my statement "entire country overrun" . Historical examples of the latter are rare, but not good for the defending nation...

You're giving me examples where they still have military after all, not to mention significant portions of their spending power invested into defensive fortifications. It's hard to modify the difference between English and BYZ systems and just a simple wall here or there in the game, but at the same time, we're still talking about a scenario where literally all of the military investment is gone and it's still hard to get into the cities, and said cities are still a legitimate threat to pre-artillery siege weapons (...). That's overtuned.

 

[Nick31]

"Lacking manpower to secure a major city" doesn't mesh well with my statement "entire country overrun" . Historical examples of the latter are rare, but not good for the defending nation...

So, nearly every military invasion in history is "outmanned." Men in the fields always outnumber invading soldiers. The issue is when can a man with an axe or a spear but little else defeat a professional army or survive a massacre. The answer is behind walls or in urban fighting. There is a reason why throughout History invading armies massacre whole towns or whole populations: no army can fight everyone. And fear is always the strongest weapon when conquering a territory and it's people.

I've seen you engage in many of these historical debates, TMIT, and I don't wish to spend posts on posts going back and forth. But I urge to reconsider how "right" you feel, or at least come across as feeling in these threads. You're very adamant in your opinions and some of us responding have dedicated years of our lives to these questions. I certainly have, at least.

Back to the CVI...

 

[daft]

You want artillery/bombardment unit fix?
GIVE THEM SAME RANGE AS YOU GAVE LONGBOWMEN in CV!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

So, nearly every military invasion in history is "outmanned." Men in the fields always outnumber invading soldiers. The issue is when can a man with an axe or a spear but little else defeat a professional army or survive a massacre. The answer is behind walls or in urban fighting. There is a reason why throughout History invading armies massacre whole towns or whole populations: no army can fight everyone. And fear is always the strongest weapon when conquering a territory and it's people.

I've seen you engage in many of these historical debates, TMIT, and I don't wish to spend posts on posts going back and forth. But I urge to reconsider how "right" you feel, or at least come across as feeling in these threads. You're very adamant in your opinions and some of us responding have dedicated years of our lives to these questions. I certainly have, at least.

Back to the CVI...

Hey, I can't be correct 100% of the time and I don't think anybody suspects otherwise. I have plenty of evidence against such accuracy so I sure as heck don't.

But we don't have good measures for what "12 swordsmen covering 40% of your hexes while you have no units" is supposed to mean in historical terms. Considering the implications of what leads to that in-game (IE it shouldn't happen, but it can) I pictured a total overrun, something like Mongols through Iran under Genghis Khan or worse.

After all, you have enough units to encircle every major metropolitan center as represented on the game board, *simultaneously*, while the opposing nation has no remaining standing army whatsoever, apparently depleted levies or whatever, and no foreign aid in sight...yet that guy with an axe in the city can still put serious hurting on a trebuchet .

That's just conjecture though obviously. None of us knows what 12 swords in your 3 cities actually represents. The game's scale is wonky; a little pillaging or one city down and the swordsmen can outnumber the pop in the target cities. How are we supposed to interpret that? I can't think of many historical examples, it would be like Hannibal completely encircling Rome...and every other metropolitan center in the Roman empire...at the same time, and supplying them indefinitely.

I'm not as "adamant" in my opinions as you seem to think btw. I don't like stating my beliefs with "IMO" or "I think this" or stuff like that all the time. I'm not advertising that I can't possibly be wrong or defining that 1 sword unit = 100000 soldiers or something. Unless I say something is a fact or claim near-certainty, it's more fair to take it as me stating my belief.

I don't have some kind of "forum command magic" where the things I say are meant to be taken as fact while everyone else is opinion. That wouldn't even be fun.

But if you're that knowledgeable, and this goes for everyone, go ahead and out-debate me on the given topic and crush that belief, replacing it with something better.

 

[Nick31]

I started this thread with a question about artillery in CiV and what might be a change in CVI. If you want to pick my brain about military history and city siege lethality, you may private message me. Or come visit to Durham, NC and attend a conference.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I started this thread with a question about artillery in CiV and what might be a change in CVI. If you want to pick my brain about military history and city siege lethality, you may private message me. Or come visit to Durham, NC and attend a conference.

Fair enough.

Back on topic, I don't see the issue with arty in the game sense. If anything, siege is generally on the weak side from gameplay standpoint and arty brings it closer to in line.

Just from a question of "does anybody actually bother with this", the answer pre-cannon is usually "no", and cannons is "sometimes". You'd think, at least in the principle of gameplay, that units specializing in taking cities should be favored units for taking cities somewhere before mid-late game!

Arty itself is risky, because if you don't end the game with it you're going to get shanked by air power in short order, and rushing arty delays late-game research a lot. Less true if you can spam some AA fast enough, but still not ideal, and once we start talking infantry or even just great war infantry it's not as easy to press forward.

 

[sugerdady87]

One way they can do that is to decrease the damage of ranged units the more weakened the target unit is, and set up a threshold where ranged units can no longer deal damage to them .

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. What needs to happen in Civ 6 is for the A.I. to become better at using it, not a nerf to range. All warfare overtime has increasing become longer range because it's more efficient.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. What needs to happen in Civ 6 is for the A.I. to become better at using it, not a nerf to range. All warfare overtime has increasing become longer range because it's more efficient.

Not to mention the maneuvers with ranged units is the core of 1UPT tactics.

 

[sugerdady87]

Every source I can find corroborates it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_during_World_War_I


https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12olci/ww1_what_was_the_distribution_of_casualties/



http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_germany



Not exactly two thirds, probably, but close enough.

Even before the American "Civil War" (which is a misnomer), artillery would kill the vast majority of soldiers in 18th-early 19th century warfare if used. In the second Turko–Egyptian war, for example, maybe over 95% of Egyptians were killed by artillery mortars on British Ships-of-the-lines.

 

[Haig]

sugerdady87: The War of Northern Aggression?

to artillery:
Personally I feel that archers and artillery in the game should be more of a softening tool before a land unit assault, and not the deadliest unit on map. I think the infantry units represent something like full bridgades, and they dont get completely wiped out by an artillery strike.

Few things we need to know about Civ 6 artillery: Can they destroy districts like bombers? Are they separate units like archers or support units like battering ram? I'd be fine if they are less powerful against land units but can be used to smash cities and districts.

Machineguns, on the other hand, should be lethal infantry and cavalry killers...

Anyway, I have faith in my man Ed Beach, they have given him free reign now.

 

[elwin00]

I always thought it was weird how the ranged units would transition after gunpowder. There are two systems: ancient/medieval with smaller units where you need to position your ranged units and protect them.

The second system comes with gunpowder where the units represent larger formations armed with guns where the defender can shoot back .. and so they fight like melee units. Ranged units in this system represent very long range weapons, like artillery or battleships.

I understand that they wanted to make the 1UPT more tactical and more interesting but it has its problems, especially when it comes to sieges and artillery.

I would suggest the following:

TLDR: siege weapons would damage fortifications but not killing units. Artillery would soften but not kill. Regular units would have to do most of the damage.

- ranged attack in general would have diminishing returns based on the health of the receiving unit - they are and always have been used to soften enemies, not to destroy entire armies (even Mongols used lancers to finish off enemies). This way you have to bring regular troops.

- cities can have health like in civ5 (where health represents the defenders drafted from population) but I would make the defence structures to have much greater impact, ie city without walls would fall very easily without siege weapons. City with good defence structures could be taken only with superior force, heavy losses and/or siege equipment.

- siege weapons would degrade the fortifications and have very little effect on city's health. This means with every siege attack, the city's defence value would go down, but impact on city's health would be very small. That's because siege weapons are not good at killing people, although some die. The fortification damage would be repaired slowly over time just as the health does regenerate in civ5.
How fast and how far the city's defences could be destroyed would depend on relative difference of siege equipment used and fortification level of city (eg catapults attacking a castle would not do much).

- after the attacker destroyed the city's defences, they would still have to fight the defenders of the city who would lose part of their defence bonuses due to destroyed fortifications.

- cannons and artillery would have much greater damage vs units and could (and should) be used outside of sieging for softening units, but not killing them.

- back to cities: I like what was mentioned here before about defending units in cities would take part of the damage. Also after city's health would fall to 0, if there is still unit in that city, they should continue defending, having city's defensive bonuses but taking all damage. I never really understood why they get instantly destroyed.
This would make it somewhat possible to rotate the city defender unit and so the attacker would be much better off surrounding the city unless they had superior force.

- city with 0 health would not be able to shoot. City with 0 health and with garrison could shoot with a penalty.

- city's range: not sure. It could depend on the defensive structures in that some defensive structure later in the game would have cannons with increased range.