Why are cities so squishy?

[Question]

Im confused, how is it not intended that ranged units defend with their combat strength? They are supposed to take less hits than melee.

Also it seems that you can hit strength 30+ cities without any defensive upgrades. That easily one/two shots marines/gunners in the early game. How do you take cities then? Against the AI i still find it really easy to defend with just the city + 2 ranged units.

 

[Gamewizard]

In my recent apollo game, around turn 230, I got distracted trying to take down African supremacy cities of strength 125. My fully upgraded purity units were getting picked apart, especially the siege units. During all of this, PAC on the other side of the world won a contact victory on turn 242.

I should have focused on completing the warp gate instead of picking on Africa, but I couldn't possibly let something so evil looking live on my planet. Those beady yellow eyes, oh my!

 

[aguliondew]

When close to the end of a Apollo game you can only take those heavily fortified cities with your affinities super unit. Those tend to have +100 strength. The AI tend to avoid attacking them because it is not safe for none range unit to attack them.

 

[bruntfca]

I don't think the info in this thread is consistant. I just finished an Apollo game where my high end ranger could blast the hell out of cities from maybe 4 tiles away. Each shot seemed to take almost 1/3 of health 75 city. If anything taking cities seems too easy.

I almost lost a city to the same strat by the "Russian" faction, he made maybe 10 rangers and just shot the crap out of my 35 city right at the start of the game.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Because in civ5 you could turtle with 2 or 3 contemporary ranged units in and behind a city and be invulnerable. The pendulum and swung.

 

[Gort]

Im confused, how is it not intended that ranged units defend with their combat strength? They are supposed to take less hits than melee.

Ranged units have very low melee strength. This means that if they all defended with melee strength, ranged versus ranged fights would all be one-shot-kill affairs where the first unit to shoot wins.

To solve this, Firaxis made ranged units defend against ranged attacks using their ranged strength. The result is that using melee on a ranged unit will often one-shot-kill it, but a ranged unit versus a ranged unit will take a few shots to kill.

This is all fine and works. The problem is that they forgot to implement the same system for ships, so ships get one-shotted by basically all units in the game since they use their very bad melee defense to defend against all attacks.

It's clearly unintentional and will probably get fixed in the first patch.

 

[InfinityV]

Because this way, players in multiplayer who rush cities and econ and get easily punished by someone who builds some military.

Honestly, a lot of the complaints I've seen so far regarding single player actually turn out to be a great improvement for multiplayer gameplay. I haven't had this much fun playing Civ multi in a long time (ever since FFH2 multiplayer)