Unit changes disscusion

[1SDANi]

I REALLY don't like spearmen being heavily advantaged against horsemen if they're also to take the mainline infantry niche away from swordsmen. If horsemen aren't good at attacking cities, and aren't good at fighting spearmen, and there's no more swordsmen for them to maul, they're really only good for what, killing archers who happen to be outside of cities? At that point the only units worth building are spearmen and siege engines, maybe an archer here and there. I'd rather have an ahistorical rock/paper/scissors than just seeing who has more rocks.

I think the easy fix to allow both a balanced rock paper scissors and a historical combat setup would be to make horsemen good at attacking cities. Would that be ahistorical? I don't know, I'm not a historical warfare expert. But if we want to remove the role of swordsman in warfare, then the role of a city attacker would have to go to someone else, and the best unit for that would be horsemen.

This would make the best city defense archers for their high defense, spearmen to divert enemy horsemen away from your archers or just straight out attack them, and horsemen to attack into enemy tiles with spearmen.

In short archers are pure defense, spearmen are defense and offense, and horsemen are pure offense. Though even while defending a city, you need pure offense for attacking the enemy stack before your walls fall.

So the best I can come up with is limiting their collateral damage in sieges where it seems to be the most significant problem. So either:
a) units in cities are immune to collateral damage
b) units in cities are immune to collateral damage as long as city defenses are still intact

This way, you can still use collateral damage to punish stacks that are out on the map, but concentrating your army in a defensive position (as the AI likes to do) is not punished anymore. Siege units with city attack bonuses, possible city raider promotions and high retreat chances are still a valuable in sieges to weaken strong defenders but will not weaken the entire defensive stack in the process. I might combine this with rebalancing siege unit strengths and their city attack bonuses if necessary.

Thoughts?

The problem that I see is that siege units can be easily stacked and thus allows you to easily tear down an enemy's defenses in a single turn. While brainstorming my own game based on Civ 4 I thought of a pretty strange solution. I'd say, with the obvious hesitation due to the AI concerns this would cause, that it may be good to look into enforcing a rule where siege units can only attack if they're the only siege unit in the stack. This would put a hard cap on the number of siege units that can attack per turn to 8 in most instances and make even these 8 siege unit onslaughts more costly as you would have to train enough units to defend each individual siege unit.

I know this is awfully close to the clustertruck that is 1UPT, which is why I specifically said cannot attack unless their the only siege unit, not 1 siege unit per tile. Even with that stipulation though I'd imagine it would still be a good bit of AI coding to get anywhere near usable, but it's something to consider I guess.

 

[Leoreth]

Or just reduce the ability of siege units to damage city defenses.

 

[Caesar Augustus]

If we're ok with horses being ahistorically good at dealing with city defenses, why aren't we ok with militaries containing ahistorical amounts of swordsmen or spearmen NOT having their historical bonuses against horses?

Or just reduce the ability of siege units to damage city defenses.

I'd go the other way and reduce their collateral damage and shift it over to light horse and/or skirmishers. Assaulting cities and punishing stacks are distinct enough niches to have separate unit types filling them.

 

[1SDANi]

If we're ok with horses being ahistorically good at dealing with city defenses, why aren't we ok with militaries containing ahistorical amounts of swordsmen or spearmen NOT having their historical bonuses against horses?

No idea. I'd rather things be historical in general.

 

[Leoreth]

But if given the choice, I think having Swordsmen in the game is more acceptable than Cavalry being good at assaulting cities. I am not considering removing Swordsmen in the short to mid term, anyway.

I really like the suggestion that it should not be siege units that deal collateral damage. At least before say, Cannons. Historically this kind of harassment and weakening fits more closely for light cavalry, which is lacking a distinct role right now anyway.

 

[Leon Michiel]

I see civilization units as large formations at a strategic level. From a strategic perspective, collateral damage then becomes attrition to me. Think of:
- Raiding of supply lines. Of course the bigger an army, the more vulnerable they are to this.
- Sniping during sieges. Sieges were relatively 'safe' in that the attackers could disengage, so attacking besiegers have high withdrawal chance.
- Skirmishing in the lead up to large engagements. Again, larger formations are richer in targets and harder to manouver, so more vulnerable to ambushing tactics.
- Indirect fire and bombardments for the howitzer era.

Comment 1

From that perspective I'd say I agree both skirmishers and light cavalry could both be candidates for collateral damage as anti-stack, as they both can represent raiding and warfare through attrition.

There should also be a balance between withdrawal chance and the max for collateral damage for balancing purposes. I would suggest cavalry to have higher withdrawal chance with lower max damage, and for skirmishers it would be vice versa?

Comment 2

Removing grenadiers is ok by me, but how to bridge the gap between the longbow era and the rifle era? This is the appropriate era for grenadiers, hence my earlier comment. I agree it doesn't make sense as they were not a unit at the strategic level, but still carries the image of being anti-mass unit (even if its not in a stategic sense).

I guess in the pike-and-shot era, it were the arquebusiers that were actually doing the skirmishing from the safety of pike formations. This changed with the 80 Years War in which line tactics were used for fire-arms, which then led to large formations of musketmen.

In that that case the longbowmen turn into arquebusier as skirmishing unit, and can then upgrade to both musketmen or later light riflemen? Intuitively,, from a gaming sense, this doesn't seem right though!

So I guess the choice is - ahistorical grenadiers, or arquabusiers as skirmishers with pikemen as the bread & butter unit for the renaissance era?

Comment 3

Historically, warfare revolved around sieges and attrition. Straight up battles were a relative rarity, since they were too risky.

So I would really dislike to see reduce city defensive removed from siege units. That was exactly what I understand catapults, trebuchets, bombards were used for; to reduce defensive structures.

 

[Caesar Augustus]

But if given the choice, I think having Swordsmen in the game is more acceptable than Cavalry being good at assaulting cities. I am not considering removing Swordsmen in the short to mid term, anyway.

I really like the suggestion that it should not be siege units that deal collateral damage. At least before say, Cannons. Historically this kind of harassment and weakening fits more closely for light cavalry, which is lacking a distinct role right now anyway.

I don't really know offhand but would replacing swordsmen with Axemen or macemen be more accurate historically?

 

[Ogi123]

Historically speaking main difference between infantry and cavalry was price. Heavy cavalry was battle winning weapon, but it was enormously expensive and rare, since it usually recruited from highest echelons of society. Only way to model this is vastly change difference in and maintenance. For example this could look something like this: spearman 4/30/1 -> heavy spear 6/60/1 vs horseman 6/60/3 -> lancer 10/120/3.
Or even taking page from master of mana and bringing into game concept of military support limit, with units costing various amount of it. Infantry 1, light cav 2, heavy cav 3 etc.

 

[Leoreth]

Increasing relative costs of cavalry is also something I wanted to look into before the 1.15 release.

Upkeep is more complex, I probably won't touch it in the mid term. Preferably I would like to have a system where upkeep is split between the resources required to build units. So instead of just having one pool for unit upkeep (or two, military and civilian), you would have base maintenance for all military units, but extra maintenance for units consuming iron, copper, horses etc. The amount of free units for each resource is determined by the number of resources you control. This would actually reward having multiple strategic resources and as a side effect, make city defenders cheaper than base infantry (iron/copper) and that again cheaper than cavalry (horse + iron).

 

[Ogi123]

Not bad idea, but how it's gonna work with gunpowder units who are resourceless? In longer way perhaps military unit limit could work better... Still from what I understood this is for 1.16 or even later.

 

[ozqar]

I like the idea of higher maintenance costs for some units, and I get why it's more costly to keep a horse than a foot soldier - but not really why that would happen for a guy with sword vs guy with no sword. Once you have it, you have it! If anything, it's either units continually consuming resources (feed for horses, gunpowder) or promoted/advanced units (higher salaries, continued training costs).

But I'd really like to see a something where the number of resources determines how many strategic units you can build. For example, 1 iron mine = 1 swordsman under training. When the swordsman is finished, you can build a second one, etc.

And that's off topic from this thread on units, but I'd like to have the same thing for resources used for constructing buildings and wonders (ie, marble, gold). Ideally during the time when they're used for construction, they wouldn't provide their happiness bonuses.

 

[Leoreth]

Usually units with metal requirements have more extensive equipment overall, weapons, armour etc. The cost also reflects the need to replace and repair this equipment. For most of the game a turn is many years, after all.

 

[ozqar]

Yeah, I get that too, and I considered it before writing my comment. I was going to dwell on this point too, but thought it would be too much detail. As I understand, the relative cost of replacing and maintaining a sword is considerably lower than the cost of maintaining a horse. Of course, if you're talking about armor, that's probably somewhere in between. And if you're talking about vehicles, that's going to be more than the horse. I guess it boils down to having not two black and white tiers, but gradual increases in their maintenance costs (assuming you want to go into the trouble of defining those). With all the military history experts in the forum, probably someone can provide some sources on the relative production and maintenance of costs of different types of units, historically.

 

[Leoreth]

From a game design perspective it is better to keep things simple and intuitive within the rules of the game. It is always easier to understand that you have to pay for the resources required by a unit and that those are the same as the resources required to train the unit. It's a system that flows directly from the concepts that already exist and everyone is aware of. Defining another upkeep cost property that varies from unit to unit isn't.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Have you looked into Civ4Reimagined's resource system yet?

 

[Leoreth]

Yes, I have written a more in depth post what my thoughts on resources are ... the essence of it was that I think they should only be changed as part of an effort that also involves trade, corporations and diplomacy. It's another thing I'd really like to take a stab at but there's like a dozen things that take priority.

 

[1SDANi]

Yes, I have written a more in depth post what my thoughts on resources are ... the essence of it was that I think they should only be changed as part of an effort that also involves trade, corporations and diplomacy. It's another thing I'd really like to take a stab at but there's like a dozen things that take priority.

Wasn't that around the time I talked about Trade Route Economies and Cultural Economies?

 

[Leoreth]

Possibly, I really cannot remember the context of the post, but feel free to try and dig it up.

 

[1SDANi]

Possibly, I really cannot remember the context of the post, but feel free to try and dig it up.

I was basically saying that certain resources if not all resources should influence the output of trade routes and that there should be buildings that increase the yield from trade routes to cities with a source of a certain resource.

Building on that, I was thinking that we could combine that concept with the Hollywood wonder to allow Hit Works, resources that can be obtained by some culture related source, either great people or being rewarded every x culture or something else. The idea is that these Hit Works would increase commerce when connected to another city via trade route.

This would create an economy based on culture that could replace the colonial economy born from the effects of my first. suggestion when colonialism becomes untenable, at least if colonialism becomes untenable. We still have the whole "Australia" thing.

Late game civs with few turns to play as aside, the idea would primarily be to represent the rise of culture driven consumerist economies.

 

[Ogi123]

Ultimately there are various methods how to construct unit tree, all of them are OK and witch one you use is question what do you want from units. More granularity where each unit type has narrow focus? Or something more universal? All units are with similar price range or some are much more expensive elite?

For example:

Heavy infantry - +25% city, average, average , universal unit with emphasis of city fighting, can siege cities.
Light infantry - +25% to 50% difficult terrain , low , low , specialist unit good for forest, hills and jungles.
Heavy cavalry/Armoured units - -25% to 50% city , high , high , elite mobile shock unit but poor at city combat.
Light cavalry - +25% to 50% open terrain and vs siege , low , average , flank attack all types of units, immune to flanking, has withdrawal and first strikes.
In such setup you could go away with siege and archery units. This is very universal unit setup with no collateral damage unit, making conquest difficult.

Or something else I guess, there is as much ideas as players.