Unrealistic Combat: What side are you on?

[Dead Sage]

As I recall, despite their spirited, heroic defense, the all of the Spartans at Thermopylae fell along with the king commanding them.

Civ IV is a game of strategy, which involves planning--not hanging on to minute thread of a hint of possibility. Civ is about using you disadvantaged spearmen to weaken the tank until it is finished, not hoping you will roll quintuple boxcars.
Limiting the bounds of possibilities-while taking away from the theortical reality of the game--I humbly assert would add to its practical realness.

--D.S.

[Kiltdown]

Planning includes planning for the unexpected; no one should relying on that spearman defeating a tank, BUT there should still be more than one tank at the battlefield. And yes, the 300 died eventually, but only after holding out far longer than anyone would have dreamt was possible.

To decry the possibility of unlikely events as unrealistic is to refute the inherent and historically documented unpredictability of military conflict.

The magical (almost apocryphal) CIV spearman will certainly meet his end against that next tank. (Although some lucky player will no doubt win that lottery too).

So where does the line get drawn if the tank becomes undefeatable against the spearman? At 0% damage? At 99.99% damage? What if the tank is already slightly damaged? And what about pikemen or later troops? When does such a unit begin to get a chance? Are there to be special thresholds for all conflict possibilities, just so that a 1 in 1000 outcome becomes a certainty? How do all these special rules get disseminated? There is a virtue in a conceptually simple system.

This combat system does not seem to contain discontinuities. Introducing them seems at best inelegant.

[Gray_Lensman]

Here's my perspective for what its worth...

The purported purpose to the game is to advance your civilization so that is is superior to all the other civilizations and then when you do so, you are capable of building more advanced units. At some point, you would think that the difference in advancement between your civ and the other civ and the resulting unit capabilities if it became great enough would result in total domination of the military units. So the fact of a Spearman for example still being able to cause loss of tanks is in direct contradiction to the game's main goal... "to advance". This is one of the reasons I have yet to be convinced that this game is anything but an enhanced version of Civ III.

[Zebitty]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
So you guys believe, that if you have a huge lead in technology it is enough to come with ONE tank to beat any adversary with certainty? It can't lose under no circumstances, right? How boring would that be? The day this will happen, I will leave the franchise and never look back.

Well, just imagine what would have happened if someone turned up in pre-colonization USA or Australia with an M1A1 Abrams Tank. I think it wouldn't require more than one or two to take over the country.......as long as one had units to defend the captured ground and plenty of time.

[Addled Platypus]

Originally posted by Stuie


Looks more like a camp, a city, and a banana plantation, judging by the current results.

[Targonis]

What I am seeing are a lot of people who feel that every fight is a head to head fight, which isn't how things work in a city.

Think about it, the tank vs. spearman example that everyone complains about NEVER is an issue when the spearman is fighting on level ground. When you have trees on a hilltop, and a tank rolls in, foot units WOULD have plenty of room to hide and attack the weak spots on a tank. The tech available doesn't need to be high, sneak up and get some rocks into the wheels, and the tank is dead in the water. Cities are the same way.

One thing that I feel would be nice is if city walls DID provide some defense against gun powder units, or at least a higher end version. A 20 foot thick wall will keep gunpowder units out, even a 10 foot thick wall will do it. Over time a gunpowder unit should be able to do damage to the walls if that's what they want to do though.

So, make a new type of city wall at a later tech level that is designed to keep the newer units out or something...but that's good stuff for a mod I suppose.

[vulture]

Originally posted by Dead Sage
Gunships fly, while spearman march on the ground. The primary weapon of the spearman is a spear, which he uses to, essentially, impale his opponent. How does a spear impale a chopper? Granted, if the chopper gets too low, they may get a shot, or the pilot could error and strike a tree while maneuvering…but such occurrences would be extremely rare. Likewise, in the now infamous Tank v. Spearman case, similar issues apply. I have never seen, heard or read of anything that would lead me to believe that a bronze spear is capable of penetrating more than an inch of steel. Bullets won’t even do that. The only way that it would be possible for a spearman to “destroy” a tank would be to actually destroy the men or equipment inside. To do that, they would essentially have to mob it and attack through the hatch. While difficult, it is certainly possible; especially on certain types of terrain.

A spear works pretty well against a helicopter when you stick it through the pilot while he is outside the helicopter and on the ground. Likewise for tanks. Spearmen could also be capable of lighting fires to destroy fuel or ammo supplies.

Civ combat is highly abstracted. What appears to be 'unit A attacks unit B on terrain X' is necessarily a vast simplification of all sorts of factors. It's fair to say that the spearmans 0.0000001% of victories against a tank come under extremely unusual circumstances. The ones where they conveniently form up as a phalanx and charge the massed tanks are the ones where the tank doesn't lose a single hp while wiping out the spearmen.

Ultimately, everyone probably has a slightly different mental picture of what a civ combat entails. To some people, all fights are 'everyone lines up on the plains, and charges at each other'. To others, like me, it covers just about every conceivable way two units could meet under any number of normal and wildly abnormal circumstances.

In which case, complaints about probabilities have a certain resemblance to arguments about whose home-made interpretation is the 'right' one. But there is no official 'right' answer. Just a whole load of opinions.

So I guess the important question is: is it fun? Which is going to be subjective, and no system is going to suit everyone. Some people genuinely thrive on difficulties, and having everything go wrong and adapting. Others only really enjoy games where everything goes according to their plan and is under their control. It's just different preferences for how to play things. And since game designers can't make all possible games at the same time, they make combinations of ones that they enjoy and what they think will be popular.

Sometimes they compromise in favour of integrity - having 'fair' games (same combat odds for all civs). The cynic in me suspects that what a lot of people really want (whether they can admit it to themselves or not) is to win without too much trouble whilst the AI appears to be good but actually isn't. You could go some way to helping this illusion by changing the combat odds so that humans never lose battles where they are a clear favourite, but the AI does relatively often. I think that most people would find the results intuitively seemed 'fair' to them then, so they could dominate a weakened AI without ever knowing that it was weakened. I reckon it would improve opinions of the game all round, at the expense of upsetting a few hardcore 'challenge'-type players and the integrity of the programmers...

Of course, players of such a game would find it much harder to adapt to MP play without the hidden bonuses

[CrispyCritter]

Originally posted by vulture
Civ combat is highly abstracted. What appears to be 'unit A attacks unit B on terrain X' is necessarily a vast simplification of all sorts of factors. It's fair to say that the spearmans 0.0000001% of victories against a tank come under extremely unusual circumstances. The ones where they conveniently form up as a phalanx and charge the massed tanks are the ones where the tank doesn't lose a single hp while wiping out the spearmen.

Ultimately, everyone probably has a slightly different mental picture of what a civ combat entails. To some people, all fights are 'everyone lines up on the plains, and charges at each other'. To others, like me, it covers just about every conceivable way two units could meet under any number of normal and wildly abnormal circumstances.

I completely agree. Another important factor people haven't mentioned is the time factor. The conflict between the units takes anywhere from a year on up (well, maybe 6 months for the two-attack tank), these are not single day battles.

The designers had to blur the major differences between strategic and tactical level conflicts; it would be an impossible game otherwise. The battle graphics suggest a tactical battle, but the time span says otherwise. Over the course of a year, low-tech would indeed have a chance at winning, assuming they can avoid most of the head-to-head skirmishes.

I've been playing since the original Civ. I think this is definitely their best combat scheme so far.

CrispyCritter

[Stuie]

Originally posted by CrispyCritter Another important factor people haven't mentioned is the time factor. The conflict between the units takes anywhere from a year on up (well, maybe 6 months for the two-attack tank), these are not single day battles.

Now that's a really good point. People complain about how the combat shouldn't be abstracted within a model in which TIME is abstracted by default. Having one without the other wouldn't make much sense.

[amicus curiae]

Originally posted by NanoDingo


It clearly doesn't give one much better odds in combat if Tanks can be beaten by Spear-Men - that's the point. "Giving much better odds in combat," is equivalent to saying that a Tank would, in all statistical significance, always beat a Spear-Man. You're arguing against your own case.

No. That doesn't follow. Much better odds does not necessarily mean allways win. Just check the current odds of tank v. spearman and compare them with spearman v. spearman. I think you will agree that the tank has much better odds.

[LordShiva]

Please, God, let this thread die...

[Aileron]

Originally posted by LordShiva
Please, God, let this thread die...

Aw come on, it was just getting good

I not going to wade into this one, but I just wanted to say I find it really interesting that this debate is still raging after 4 Civs and 10? 15? years. Maybe we need a poll: Spearman vs. Tank debate, will it ever end?

Another sidenote, when I told a friend about Civ 4, one of the first things he asked was "How's the combat? Do Spearmen still defeat Tanks?".

[Zebitty]

Originally posted by Holistic Cookie


1. hmm Look no further then Agincourt, where numerically superior knights lost to archers.

2. Modern weapons and technology does not necessarily mean an ensure victory. Vietnam is a very good example of a gunpowder nation beating, not one, but two modern nations. (France and the Yankees for those who don't know)

People (not just holistic cookie) keep comparing this debate to Vietnam or Afghanistan. The tech/strength level differences aren't that different in these examples. RPGs, antitank weapons and machines guns in the jungle (Vietnam) or mountains (Afghanistan) levels things out considerably. The tech/strength difference between longbowmen on a hillock in a swamp and knights is also not that great (Agincourt).

The debate is more a case of a case of turning up with a a unit of Tiger tanks to face William Wallaces' (Braveheart) attack on the English at Bannockburn. A different outcome is almost certainly assured.....

[Dis]

after more playing my answer is pretty much the same. But I have encountered battles where I should have won, but lost. But then later I've won battles I should have lost.

So I still don't have too many arguments about the combat.

[Mylon]

My take on the matter is that the most deadly weapons out there are human beings. What you give them can influence their performance, but ultimately ingenuity and tactics have the ability to overcome any technological advantage.

The game itself is misleading in that it only shows spearmen poking at tanks. If the spearmen, say, jumped out, taunted the tank, and lured it into a pit, upon which they poked the driver of the tank with their spears, I think people might regard it with amazement, but they wouldn't be quite so annoyed. The animations themselves is what misleads people.