Would it not make some promotions a bit useless though? Like barrage and first strike for example?
Barrage would just do more collateral, I'm not sure why it would need to change at all from its current form, except that it sucks consistently even now. First strikes would mean less damage, and retain their ability to be more meaningful when strength differences are already large.
And getting ahead in the tech race for better units would be even more important, while currently you can get by with obsolete units to a larger extent.
Both tech race AND well-promoted units would have far more impact. Especially in the latter, suddenly aggressive and even protective have more teeth.
I'd hate it - It'd just turn combat into a giant number-crunching exercise. Oh look, Pericles is defending that city with 3 CG Longbows. Right, let me get my excel spreadsheet war calculator out...so if I attack with 5 CR2 Maces I'll win and my last Mace will have 4.3 str left. Select units. Attack. Win. Yawn...
You...do realize people already do this, right? And so what if you know your 5 cr II maces will emerge victories with 1 left? Does that guarantee you hold the city next turn? That you can reach the city with 3 longbows before it reinforces?
But what it does do is greatly increase the strategic depth of the game as it forces you to put contingency plans in place in case the unlikely happens.
The reality is that when you're competing against other players either directly or in XOTM/HoF formats, there is no contingency plan. You either go all-out on war or you keep just enough to survive. If you go all out and fail, you're not coming back. You might be able to still beat the AI on weak difficulties, yes, but the competition is effectively over when that rush fails...which makes RNG based rush outcome "attempt scumming" a serious barrier to skill-based HoF competition by the way.
And when the odds go in your favour and you win an unlikely fight, it can be a game changer.
Yes it can be, and someone...possibly someone who outplayed you...will pay the price for it.
You have your opinion, I have mine.
Nope, what you have is the *fact* that you're wrong. The statement I attacked reads:
For the record all war games need a RNG since war is never that predictable.
Despite the fact that there are quite a few war games out there, including a couple I can think of off hand that are *more* popular than civ (starcraft) that do not rely on RNG whatsoever, and then another subset where you rely on it FAR less (HOMM still has it but not gamebreaking for example).
To put it more mathematically: Your fixed combat resolution has a jump discontinuity at the point where both units strengths are equal and the jump height is huge.
Agreed, but I'm wondering how bad this is. By the way, in current civ the jump point at near-even str is also quite large
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Are you sure you can mod this into the game?
My friend dug up the code and seems to believe it can be worked with. Knowing him, the code will probably wind up cleaner, not that such is much of a challenge.
I was under the impression that the OP is talking about something like that?
Civ V uses the RNG in battles also, and the result can be disastrous placement of units out of position or failures to kill something. However, my beef about civ V is a separate issue, and largely due to the fact that it's still in beta.
There should be some kind of middle ground.
Carry some cheap cleanup units?
BtW how would you deal with withdraws, TMIT ?
Questions like this are why I made this thread. It's a tough question. You'd either have to leave them married to RNG (aka chance of getting away in losing attacks, obviously irrelevant in winning attacks) or rework mounted. The latter is the more consistent approach, but it begs the question of "how".
I don't think the jump points are as large a deal as made out to be, especially if you make expected damage fairly high unless the str differential is huge. Yes, a musket could reliably kill a mace, but what if that leaves it in the position that it can't even survive an archer follow-up? You'd still have to be careful vs dated units because both defensive bonuses and using 2 cheaper units (losing 1 to take a 1-1 trade) would both be serious threats to the more advanced attacker, as would collateral.
I don't see a problem with giving fixed damage to nukes or air power. Espionage still has its costs, but it's a bit of a broken system unto itself (so many MP games ban it) that it could probably use a "rework" look too, but for the purposes of our weekend MP games we'd probably just leave it alone for a while.
How RNG dependent is Civ V combat? Not that it should be used as an example, but it seemed less luck driven than Civ 4's.
It's still there, but definitely less. It's also one of the areas where V is a legit improvement over IV (it's not like the AI is good at fighting in either game). It's such a shame that civ V forces players to spend hours per game doing nothing or I'd even advocate it.
@Noto
It's not like I'm proposing we use this system as a S&T standard or something. I'm using GD as a sounding board to come up with reasons for and against doing this for our weekend co-op MP games where almost always someone gets screwed early game. We're also doing things to reduce griefing like removing sistine chapel that have nothing to do with this thread
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But issues that I wouldn't think of offhand do come up, such as how do deal with withdrawals, flanking damage, and whether collateral damage itself needs a serious look.
