Archer Killed Modern Armor!!!?!?!

[Zinegata]

Originally posted by Mao


I still dispute this last fact. While it was a nice little even in Nemo's scenario, I'm sure there was another cavalry charge in subsequent conflicts. I mean, I guess it depends on how you define "cavalry charge" but just look at the Chinese Civil War that lasted until '49. Neither side had a particularly great advantage in armor and horses were used a lot, so at some point I'm sure some horses charged some men or some other horses. Might not have been a big engagement, but to me that qualifies as a "cavalry charge."

I define a "cavalry charge" as a battle wherein horses actually participated directly in combat. That era ended in 1943.

Cavalry actually is still in fairly widespread use today. However, horses are now treated as organic transport - like how a truck would be treated in a motorised Division. The horse takes you where the battle is, but you generally don't want to have the horse participate in the battle itself. Modern artillery will simply kill horses or make them run away in fright. Modern cavalry thus dismount first and fight like infantry when they reach the battlezone. They're thus not really capable of "cutting swathes" of the enemy - that is the role of armor now.

The main reason the Italians were able to charge like they did was because they had caught the Russians by surprise, and the latter had no artillery. I will note though that all historians have called this the last recorded cavalry charge, so some unrecorded cavalry charges may have happened afterwards.

Anyway, I'll stop with the trivia now and just continue and watch this thread spiral in all sorts of directions =).

[Traelin]

Originally posted by KoBushi
No, I didn't loko at those #s... but they shouldn't matter.

I don't are how well entrenched or motivated the longbowman is... taking out an attacking modern armor is just silly.

As for a screenshot I don't have one; I just kept playing.

Though I haven't had it happen again, so I guess it is rare; but such outcomes of very un-evenly stacked battles shouldn't happen.

I don't know how you had that happen, cuz it seems to me to be very improbable. With that being said, I've had an awful lot of problems with combat, in that it seems to me you MUST be pretty technologically superior to the AI in order to conduct any kind of meaningful warfare. Combat favors the defender by far in this version of Civ, what with all the culture bonuses and defender promotions. It's not just about combined arms folks.

[Bhruic]

The odds favour the defender, but the numbers favour the attacker.

Let's say I'm going to attack you with 10 men. You have 4 cities, and 20 men. You outnumber me 2:1. But you want to defend all your cities, so you put 5 men in each. So although you outnumber me in general, when I attack you, I will outnumber you 2:1 at whatever city I attack.

What this means is that the game is set up to allow you to take a city or two without too much difficulty, but not be able to simply steamroll over an Empire.

Bh

[Traelin]

Originally posted by Bhruic
The odds favour the defender, but the numbers favour the attacker.

Let's say I'm going to attack you with 10 men. You have 4 cities, and 20 men. You outnumber me 2:1. But you want to defend all your cities, so you put 5 men in each. So although you outnumber me in general, when I attack you, I will outnumber you 2:1 at whatever city I attack.

If the numbers favor the attacker that much, then I'd have to assume that one is spending a lot of time building up a military. And I, as a previous warmonger in all other versions of Civ, can tell you that if you are too one-dimensional in Civ4, you're screwed. You have to balance your military, culture/Wonders, tech, and REX carefully. I win every time on Noble, but I still am nowhere near close to having the formula perfected yet, and I am a far cry from the highest diff. level as of now. Civ3 was a joke for me on all diff. levels, but Civ4 is posing a problem on the level above Noble (I forget what it is).

Additionally, a 2:1 advantage is not by any means guaranteed, unless someone really had poor REX planning and too many fronts. Quite frankly, if the attacker consistently has a 2:1 advantage, then the defender deserves to lose multiple cities.

This is all assuming, of course, that you are not including your bombarding units in your 2:1 ratio, because even with the city bonuses gone, you're going to have difficulties taking on units with 45% city defense promotions, medic promotions, sitting on a hill, bunkers, blah blah blah.

Originally posted by Bhruic
What this means is that the game is set up to allow you to take a city or two without too much difficulty, but not be able to simply steamroll over an Empire.

Bh

I agree on this, at least at the current time and with my current skill level. I'm hoping that once I've played enough games, I'll tweak my skillset enough to be a warmonger again. As of right now, I'm frustrated that I can't even bulldoze a Civ that's blatently technically inferior to me.

[Bhruic]

Get some help?

I don't mean professional.

One thing I noticed is that, after I got attacked by Catherine in my latest game, I was able to fight off her attackers, but I couldn't make any headway attacking. So I called in the reinforcements. Both the English and Japanese responded. At that point, we did steam roll her (and boy was that fun ). That's another of the things I like about Civ IV, they've made co-ordinated attacking much more effective and valuable.

Bh

[Kataphraktoi]

Nope, the French had better tanks. Tanks that were so good, in fact, that they were impervious to German tank guns.

The Germans, however, had more tanks and better control and coordination over their tanks. The latter is the decisive difference.

that is only true at the begining of the war with the char b-1 bis which i believe you refer to. the tiger, and some other less armoured vehicles,were significantly better. you are absolutely correct on control and coordination being important

Yes, there were large Russian cavalry units. But they fought on foot. They didn't do cavalry charges anymore because it's suicide. "Cutting down" enemy soldiers is the wrong term to use.

whichever way it happaned, a well trained and equiped german army often ran up against ,and defeated soundly, relativly obsolete militray units

[Arrian]

I find that having 2-3 bombard units (cats, cannon, arty) with an attack stack is generally sufficient to eat up the city's defensive bonus within 2 turns, maybe 3, and start hitting with my city raiders. I don't find this to be unfun, although YMMV, of course. For those who don't want to wait for slow 1-move arty, there are (eventually) bombers. For coastal cities, frigates (and destroyers and battleships) work very well.

Just building a couple of powerful units and hitting cities w/o softening them at all will result in some painful results. Is this good? I dunno, I've never been fanatical either way on this issue, and I had very limited input during testing.

The first thing that comes to mind, however, is that if you can build a Modern Armor, you can certainly build a bomber too, can't you? Personally, I find it more fun to use more than 1 unit type anyway (full spectrum dominance, baby - air, land and sea!!).

-Arrian

[Mao]

Originally posted by Zinegata


I define a "cavalry charge" as a battle wherein horses actually participated directly in combat. That era ended in 1943.

Cavalry actually is still in fairly widespread use today. However, horses are now treated as organic transport - like how a truck would be treated in a motorised Division. The horse takes you where the battle is, but you generally don't want to have the horse participate in the battle itself. Modern artillery will simply kill horses or make them run away in fright. Modern cavalry thus dismount first and fight like infantry when they reach the battlezone. They're thus not really capable of "cutting swathes" of the enemy - that is the role of armor now.

The main reason the Italians were able to charge like they did was because they had caught the Russians by surprise, and the latter had no artillery. I will note though that all historians have called this the last recorded cavalry charge, so some unrecorded cavalry charges may have happened afterwards.

Anyway, I'll stop with the trivia now and just continue and watch this thread spiral in all sorts of directions =).

OK, then this is why I seriously doubt that the Italian charge of '43 was the last one. I'm sure in some engagement that someone (maybe something as small as a platoon or company) of horsemen charged positions of infantry who were caught off-guard. Just because it's not as well-known or as large as the Italian charge doesn't make the "last cavalry charge" in history. It is still, however, an engagement nonetheless. It doesn't really matter at all, but I that title always bothered me a little, especially considering how there were probably many other charges.

And what's wrong with "maniacal courage"? The Russians suffered more casualties than anyone else combined in World War 2.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Firstly, many counts of Red Army casualties also count casualties not due to the enemy but due to Stalin. And there's also essentially no possible way that that's true because, well, look to the East.

EDIT: Actually, I stand corrected. Stats are very hard to find to be anywhere close to accurate on this apparently. Most military casualty lists only list Chinese "regular" forces while a good bulk of the army was local forces (that weren't as well-trained and would've suffered more casualties). But the stats are pretty gray here it seems.

Also, you all do realize that there's an off-topic here, no?

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by Bhruic
"It's just a game."

Well, yes, it's a game. But it's a game based on real world information. As a player, game immersion can make the playing experience more fun. Having events that contradict the real world so blatantly tends to ruin that immersion. You could easily play the game with "Unit A", "Unit B", and so forth. But when you call "Unit A" an Archer, and "Unit B" a tank, then you create expectations in the minds of the players (namely that "Unit B" can smear the ground with "Unit A" )

++ That's a great way to say it, and I totally agree. Obviously it is a game, but as with any game immersion is key. And the way I think of it is "Would I believe this in a movie?" If you were watching a movie and someone shot an arrow through a tank you'd think WTF? And probably think the movie sucked. For me an archer defeating a Tank is disconcerting and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And I don't think it would be that difficult to code it out of the game. Simply any unit A enabled by a tech X techs behind the tech enabling unit B cannont harm Unit B. Done. Easy.

And an added element of realism should be that if you attack with your invincible units against a lowly civ that has only longbowmen there should be a rep hit with other civs for treating the natives so terribly.

[Disk Killer]

Why don't you guys (the ones who hate gunpowder units losing at all to medieval units) create a mod that increases gunpowder unit strength by a factor of four or five? That should have the results you're looking for, right?

Isn't that the point of Civ4? That anything you don't like you can change?

Or is it that hard to change the values?

[LordShiva]

That's not the point. His point (whether you agree with it or not) is that in a game that is supposed to represent reality, you shouldn't have to mod stuff like this yourself - it's how the game should be.

[Mayfield]

Re: angry rant:

Originally posted by VJ

Yeah -- because it's FUN when you have to create 10 artillery-based units along with every swordsman to capture jack, and how raiding cities quickly with mounted units is completely impossible. I just LOVE it how it's "a tradeoff" (read: not making any sense at all) to wage war in cIV - well, I would be if I would be having Solver's playing style, that is

THANK YOU Solver, for lobbying a playing style which renders combat useless after ancient age during game's beta stage (let's be honest now -- you wouldn't be such a fanboy if they wouldn't have done like you would've wanted them to do)... Everyone of course has the same inflexible builder playing style as you do.

No need to be disrespectful..

If you are playing against the AI, take 5 artillery units per every city. Thats it. Soften it up then attack with 2-1 numbers. The need for 2-1 numbers is completely reasonable considering they are defending their home turf.

I have been playing on Prince and with an agressive Civ you can take it to the AI easily... no matter what age.

[Disk Killer]

Originally posted by LordShiva
That's not the point. His point (whether you agree with it or not) is that in a game that is supposed to represent reality, you shouldn't have to mod stuff like this yourself - it's how the game should be.

Oh, I understand his point, but you have to admit that there are literally thousands of viewpoints that people may have as to the way the game should be; the fact that the game was created to be modifiable so that people can alter the game rules to their fancy is a bonus not found in most games.

I don't buy the "shouldn't have to mod stuff like this yourself" argument; I would argue that a majority of people (myself included) would be angrier with that type of combat system than the one currently in use as an official rule.

You can't please everybody; the fact that you can please yourself should be good enough.

[Mylon]

I look at it this way: This longbow unit must have been in service for a huge amount of time. Through knowledge of modern chemistry they can mix up some concoctions that can damage a tank. It's a long shot, but this isn't the age of regular arrows anymore. They'll use anything they can to take down that tank, including concentrated chemicals to burn through treads, home made sticky bombs, or flat out digging a ditch for the tank to fall into. Consider the fact that the technology is out there to be a free upgrade for the longbowman. And if you see them after their first strike, the bows aren't their only weapons.

From the game aspect of things, upgrading city garrisons is a pain in the rear. Usually I don't upgrade my garrisons at all: I have an archer or some such unit in my built cities even in the late game, just as something to keep the populace fooled and keep them from rioting. Or I keep garrisoned on them whatever I used to capture the city.

[Traelin]

Originally posted by Bhruic
Get some help?

I don't mean professional.

LOL!

Originally posted by Bhruic
One thing I noticed is that, after I got attacked by Catherine in my latest game, I was able to fight off her attackers, but I couldn't make any headway attacking. So I called in the reinforcements. Both the English and Japanese responded. At that point, we did steam roll her (and boy was that fun ). That's another of the things I like about Civ IV, they've made co-ordinated attacking much more effective and valuable.

Bh

Yeah I think that's part of my problem. I have so much tweaking to do...I almost have to re-think my entire way of playing Civ from Civ3 to Civ4.