Walls

[Che Guava]

Walls were used in the real world effectively for thousands of years, why not in Civ?

Were they really? Large walls (ones over ~10km long), like the great wall, never really kept anyone out, they just slowed nomads from escaping quickly. Plenty of people got in!

 

[apatheist]

Walls shouldn't block invaders (or retreating forces), just slow them down. Maybe a wall could be the equivalent of a hill or mountain in terms of moves and defensive bonus. The difference between a wall and a fort/barricade is that a fort/barricade must be occupied to have any effect. A wall would slow invaders down even if there was no defender there. Of course, it should be possible to destroy walls like any other improvement. And walls shouldn't allow roads through. If you want a road to pass through a barrier line, you build a fort and send the road through there.

 

[hamtrigger]

Maybe walls should have hit points, and must be attacked 2 or 3 times to be broken down.

 

[apatheist]

hamtrigger, I'd be a little wary of that because it introduces a new thing to civ. Building a terrain improvement that does stuff and then destroying it applies to irrigation, roads, outposts, mines, etc. There are no terrain improvements in civ right now that have HP. Walls would be the only one, making them a thing unlike any other. It may be more realistic to have that, but at the cost of introducing a special thing with its own rules that otherwise looks like other things that go by different rules.

 

[frankthe butler]

Walls shouldn't block invaders (or retreating forces), just slow them down. Maybe a wall could be the equivalent of a hill or mountain in terms of moves and defensive bonus.

yes. walls should slow enemy units down to double the time it would take them to cross the tile. if it's on a hill or mountain, that means it will take them two turns just to move one square: one just to scale the wall, placing them in between tiles-- i hope this isn't unthinkable to civfanatics. perhaps they would be succeptible to bombard but not attack when in the in-between move. anyway, it would give the player longer to respond. On terrain where the enemy units have more than one move, such as horses on grassland, a wall would double the time to move in the same fashion: they would take one turn to scale the wall and end up on the other side if they started with full movement on the outside of the wall. if the enemy had a mixed force of slow and fast units, then the horses (if it was on grassland) would make it over, and the other units would still be in the process of climbing. And if you place units where the opposing forces are scaling the wall, when they're half way over, you're just asking to be attacked by them-- it will be inevitable. this would create interesting tile strategy since you might not want to attack that last horseman since winding up in that tile means you're unit is going to get it from the invading force.

i think the discussion of settlers is mute since the AI must respect the borders. walls only would come into play in terms of war strategy.

also, i think building a road through a wall should be a rather time intensive project, as gates are. in order to build a wall in a non-exorbitant amount of time, any road that goes through where the wall is to be built should be destroyed by the player, unless they want the wall to be a gate which should, ahem, take considerably longer.

 

[RickiusMaximus]

all they need is the same system as call to power (at least i think they had it...)- when you attack a non-combat unit in your territory you 'eject' them from the country

 

[apatheist]

yes. walls should slow enemy units down to double the time it would take them to cross the tile. if it's on a hill or mountain, that means it will take them two turns just to move one square: one just to scale the wall, placing them in between tiles-- i hope this isn't unthinkable to civfanatics. perhaps they would be succeptible to bombard but not attack when in the in-between move.

Make them vulnerable the whole time. That's the idea behind walls, to slow your enemies and make them vulnerable to your counter-attack as they scale the wall. I'm not sure how the 2 turn thing would work, though.

The wall should only hurt invaders and help attackers. That should be keyed based on whose territory the wall is in. If it's in German territory and the French attack, the French should have to slow down in both directions and the Germans should have a defensive bonus in both directions, but the French should never have a defensive bonus and the Germans should never have a movement penalty. If it's in nobody's territory, then everyone gets the defense bonus and everyone pays the move cost. Or nobody does.

also, i think building a road through a wall should be a rather time intensive project, as gates are. in order to build a wall in a non-exorbitant amount of time, any road that goes through where the wall is to be built should be destroyed by the player, unless they want the wall to be a gate which should, ahem, take considerably longer.

If you're a fan of the realism, though, that might not work. Gates are only hard if you put them in after the fact. So maybe it should be that building a wall over a road is not harder, but building a road through a wall is.

 

[frankthe butler]

If it's in German territory and the French attack, the French should have to slow down in both directions and the Germans should have a defensive bonus in both directions,

Forts are for defensive bonus. walls should only be for slowing. and being made vulnerable.
I imagine walls could be placed in between tiles in the way that rivers are, and when a worker is told to build a wall on a tile, there be some simple mechanism to designate which two tiles to build between. i imagine an attacking force being committed to traversing the wall after they begin to do so, so that taking two turns before they're over, one entire turn is out of their control while they are in between tiles, scaling the wall. This creates an interesting tile strategy because the player can know where they are scaling and where they will be landing, so that they can bring catapults or whatever bombard they have right next to the invaders and fire with impunity since the invaders cannot come after the catapult in the next turn.
if the player had enough workers, they could even build a fort in one turn where the forces will land, and stock it with the toughest defenders.

Also, i think it would be good if it were not possible for a player who is attacking a force that is climbing their wall to be able to retreat, or climb back up the wall after fighting their way down the wall (that is, fighting an invading ememy who is in the inbetween tiles, scaling it). if a player chooses to send a unit at the attacking enemy, whether the unit wins or loses is irrelevant to that unit's continuation: he'll die either way, unless he kills the last guy in the stack of course.

 

[Kurioku]

Couple pikemen and forts will ultimately do the same thing too. After all an unguarded wall is just a great big pile of ruble.

.....yes, however a focus factor in strategy while it is being turned into rubble, the deffending civ is busy building up counter forces and mobilizing accurate defenses.

 

[rhialto]

A wall by itself doesn't stop any invader at all. A garrisonned wall might, but that effectively requires building a unit anyway, and so is functuionally no different from the existing methods people use to block settler units.

historically, walls (beyond city walls) stopped nothing - at best they acted as an alarm system and to help block a retreat.

 

[wolf_brother]

I imagine walls could be placed in between tiles in the way that rivers are, and when a worker is told to build a wall on a tile, there be some simple mechanism to designate which two tiles to build between.

This same mechanism could be used for artillery units trying to knock out a wall, and then the unit has a certain percentage of a chance to actually do it; the chances increasing the better the unit is. Of course then you could could research tech to make your walls better.

 

[apatheist]

I imagine walls could be placed in between tiles in the way that rivers are, and when a worker is told to build a wall on a tile, there be some simple mechanism to designate which two tiles to build between.

I don't like the idea of building between tiles, because no other improvement works that way. I'm ambivalent about even rivers being between tiles. I don't see there being a big enough advantage of walls between tiles rather than on them to justify that special behavior.

 

[Dudedudeyo]

A wall by itself doesn't stop any invader at all. A garrisonned wall might, but that effectively requires building a unit anyway, and so is functuionally no different from the existing methods people use to block settler units.

historically, walls (beyond city walls) stopped nothing - at best they acted as an alarm system and to help block a retreat.

what about the Great Wall of China that kept out the mongals for a few years.
Oh on the matter of garrionsing walls they would have to be somthing with bombard even range 0 so they if a unit trys to climb over the the archer can bombard but the bombard would act as regular attacking exept the enemy couldn't attack till it climbed the wall.

 

[apatheist]

what about the Great Wall of China that kept out the mongals for a few years.

Was it the wall that kept them out or the many soldiers patrolling it and stationed nearby? A wall by itself is not a defense. You can get by any passive defense given sufficient time. A passive defense only slows down attackers; to stop them or repel them, you need an active response. I'm not advocating walls as something you can construct so you can ignore your borders; I'm advocating them as a force multiplier, something that allows you to maintain your borders with fewer troops, something that buys you time to build more or to move your army in from elsewhere, if necessary.

 

[frankthe butler]

how about this strange diddy: the question of how much artillery should take out a wall is a tough one, so what say there was a rule that artillery that shot at a wall wouldn't be able to destroy the wall if there was someone on/behind it, and that no unit on/behind a wall could be lethally bombed--only bombed to red, or the equivalent.

i also think that the tiles and things would be harder to deal with if a wall took up an entire square. loss of valuable tiles would become a huge issue. enemies standing on wall squares would be confusing to deal with, and if walls took up an entire square, and the enemy could only go one square at a time, then it didn't slow down the enemy at all. the only way to get around that is to mire the enemy at the top of the wall for two turns, but that seems much weirder than having walls in between squares.

This, Combined with the proportion issues (one wall square being the size of an entire city) and the loss of extremely valuable workable tiles, i think make it make more sense to have walls go between squares, like rivers.

 

[apatheist]

how about this strange diddy: the question how how much artillery should take out a wall is a tough one, so what say there was a rule that artillery that shot at a wall wouldn't be able to destroy the wall if there was someone on/behind it, and that no unit on/behind a wall could be lethally bombed--only bombed to red, or the equivalent.

That's similar enough to how bombardment of improvements worked in civ3 that you might as well make them the same thing. If you bomb a tile with a unit on it, the unit takes it. If there's no unit, the improvement takes it.

i also think that the tiles and things would be harder to deal with if a wall took up an entire square. loss of valuable tiles would become a huge issue. enemies standing on wall squares would be confusing to deal with, and if walls took up an entire square, and the enemy could only go one square at a time, then it didn't slow down the enemy at all. the only way to get around that is to mire the enemy at the top of the wall for two turns, but that seems much weirder than having walls in between squares.

The wall doesn't take up an entire square; the square has a wall on it. I mean, does a radar tower take up a whole square? Does a fortress?

Making the wall square have a 3 move cost slows them down even if it only takes them two turns to cross it. If you didn't have a wall, they might be able to attack your cities in the first turn of the war. With the wall, though, you have at least one turn to respond before your cities are threatened. And if you want to slow them down more, build another wall behind it (defense in depth). Plus, there are the troops you have embedded in a fortress along or behind the wall, etc.

This, Combined with the proportion issues (one wall square being the size of an entire city) and the loss of extremely valuable workable tiles, i think make it make more sense to have walls go between squares like rivers.

I don't understand why you assume that the tile would not be workable.

 

[Timeeee4]

I think a good way to implement walls would be to have them connect fortresses, with a limit on the distance between the fortresses as only 2-3 squares. When a unit wants to cross inbetween the forts(where the wall is) they are deverted to having to defeat the units in one of the forts. Artillery could be used to breach the wall, and only ZOC injury's would be sustained for the units passing through. This way a smaller number of troops could effectively contoll a wide line, nearly as well as 2-3x as many.

 

[Afgnwrlrd]

I think a good way to implement walls would be to have them connect fortresses, with a limit on the distance between the fortresses as only 2-3 squares. When a unit wants to cross inbetween the forts(where the wall is) they are deverted to having to defeat the units in one of the forts. Artillery could be used to breach the wall, and only ZOC injury's would be sustained for the units passing through. This way a smaller number of troops could effectively contoll a wide line, nearly as well as 2-3x as many.

Damb, I was going to suggest the exact same thing. Except I like the Idea of slowing people down as well. If you put a spearman on a wall he could be able to defend any ajacent square that also has a wall on it.

 

[apatheist]

Impenetrable walls sound dangerously powerful, even if there's a length cap. Also, length caps are kind of arbitrary and inelegant. Then there's realism... all walls can be crossed. It just takes more time than open land.

 

[Akka]

Walls aren't needed. Again, it seems that people think on the tactical scale, when Civilization is all about strategic scale.

Walls, per se, are useless. They are simply an obstacle as easily overcome as a river. Either pile up dirt to make a ramp access, either make a hole in it. All in all, it's not even a single day of work for some dozens of men.
Easier than to build a bridge over a river, in fact.

What makes a wall useful is that there is, usually, some guy on top of it who shoots or throws different things at you to prevent you to dismember the wall or build the said ramp. In other words, a wall is simply a tool for a garrison, putting it in an easily defensible position.

So what people want, is to be able to build a continuous line of defense where they can put troops to block the way.
Hey, isn't it EXACTLY what a serie of contiguous garrisonned fortresses already do ?

Yes.

Wall are already in the game : fortifications can be built, and troops put in it. It's the same, on a strategic scale.

The suggestions I've read here remind me of some action-RTS, but certainly not Civilization.