The List - Combat

[Mark_Everson]

Well rationalized TAL, but not completely convincing.

FE those excess goods can be tapped during serious wartime (as opposed to those wartimes when tax cuts are absolutely required ).

Cya,

Mark

[bayraven]

Mark,
the excess goods tapped by the vast Military Industrial Complex are still siphoned and not shown as (exponential type) city surplus.
As TAL says, that leads to discontent.
But i've noticed tax cuts make for Happiness.

[Trifna]

Here's what I got in my movement thread:

1- From Hexagonian, see here for the image he attached to illustrate his point.

See the attached image to get a general feel of my ideas for civ4 combat. The numbers and the layout are not particularly important - as they are in a rough form - but are there to give you a visual example.

First off, I see the need to increase the range of attack/defend combat numbers - possibly from 1-50 or 1-100.

Unit selection will allow you to pick multiple units at one time and indicate that you want to send them into combat. The colors are to designate the type of unit (red - flank, blue - range, green - melee) - and units are broken up in the pulldown menu by category - all melees are in one group, and so on.

When you select the units and send them into combat, you will get additional bonuses (possibly (+1) per unit) based on the number of units you bring into battle. If you only bring in one unit, no bonus. Bring in 6, and you may generate a (+1) attack for two units - bring in 12 and you may get a (+1) for four units. Same with the defender - a fully defended city may generate (+1) bonuses for a lot of units. The bonus will increase based on the unit type too. A tank may get (+3) instead of (+1) because it is a more advanced unit and its attack/defend number is higher.

The goal here is to provide the means to manage your forces and eliminate the need to send units into battle one at a time. There is nothing more tedious than having a stack of 80+ units - select stack, search for unit in pulldown menu, send unit, repeat...

It rewards a player that chooses multiple units for attack with a potential bonus for some of those units.

In a nutshell, combat can either be resolved as in civ3 (unit vs unit) or it can be broadened to a combined arms format. (This is up to the designers to determine).

In a combined arms setup, when you select the units and send them into combat, they will show up on the the box on the left of the pulldown menu. You have a number of slots that you can fill - 2 flanks, 6 melees and 4 ranged, plus an additional 12 reinforcements. (this setup can vary, based on what the designers want, but I'm using a total of 24 units as an example)

When combat starts you have the following
melee vs melee
with range firing on melee
with flanker attacking end melee

When melee units are destroyed, then the ranged units come up on the front line - after that, the reinforcements come in play, taking the place of those defeated units. (or ranged units do not come up on the front lines until all reinforcements are destroyed - this is up to the designer)

Range units - both attacker and defenders - inflict damage on frontline melee units without taking hits themselves until they end up on the frontline - but they have very weak attack/defend, so they will get crushed by a conventional melee unit.

Flankers only get their bonus if they are not faced with an opposing flanker. They hit the end melee unit in the row. Flankers also have weak attack/defend numbers, but they generally are not as weak as the ranged attack/defend numbers.

This system - whatever version (civ3 or combined arms) is streamlined, and does not require a unit stack cap. The beauty of this system is that you can select and send up to 24 units into combat at one time, and it allows your forces to stay in a fluid stack.

Taken a step further, you can preset units to stay locked via the checkbox on the left on the pulldown menu. Select multiple units in the right checkbox, select the far left checkbox of one of the units, and it will designate that stack as a sub-army. Select that army via the right checkbox and you will get a pulldown menu that will tell you what is in that sub-army.

This also will allow a player to handle movement in a streamlined manner, and it can be broadened to include the means to effectively group your worker force.

It probably needs finetuning, but this is the gist of it.

2- Opposite point of view here from wrylachlan

Most of what I was talking about was in response to people calling for tactical bonuses in a mini-map. To summarize:

Instead of having tiles cost a certain number of movement points, it should be transitions between tiles. i.e. Plains to Mountains costs X points, Mountains to Mountains costs Y points, etc. This allows things like plateaus, cliffs, impassable mountains, etc.

As for the tactical bonuses, I think that flanking bonuses should be implemented on the main map scale. Simply put a defender can only defend in the direction he was first attacked from or adjacent directions. For example: With 3 Spearmen and a Catapult in a certain tile being attacked by 5 Warriors and 1 Ancient Cav. The first three warriors attack the spearmen, establishing the direction of their front line. If the remaining 2 warriors attack from the same direction, the spearmen defend. If, however, the Ancient Cav uses 1 movement point to get into a flanking tile and then attack, the Catapult defends, and gets killed.

This makes the terrain, play an important role in tactical combat.

[bayraven]

The sub-army concept is a leap forward for utilizing units in combat and movement
I've also thought there should be a flanking advantage, however structured.
How does combined arms (game play) differ from Civ3 ?


Is it possible to have 'simultaneous movement' of forces as in Gettysburg, or does that eat up to much memory from a program perspective? There could be one phase of game play to do city maintenance and direct the extended movement of units, and the second phase everything moves at once. Perhaps you can redirect any units already in motion that have multiple movements (along roads, for example) but with a movement cost penalty.

Is it feasible to have a sub-map for combat that would take, for example, the one block movement progress of a spearman , and when 'magnified' give you three smaller movements that would constitute the one movement seen on the main map. If not to cumbersome, this would increase battlefield detail. Or the player could choose to stay in the big map as Civ is now, if they don't want to micro manage battle.