Question on pillaging...

[Tattila the Hun]

Let's say, we have a road, and a town. Enemy enters the square. They burn the village, rape the females, and take all citizens to slavery.

Then they dig up the paved road, fill the gap with dirt and grass, and plant trees and bushes.

I mean, by the time railroads were in widespread use, there were also means to destroy tracks, explosives and such. But how on earth do you destroy an unpaved, basic gravel road?

[Zan]

You steal the gravel.

[petermarkab]

blow it up. can't drive trucks through a 10 ft deep crater.

regards,

Peter

[Tattila the Hun]

But even something like that can be fixed in few hours, and go around the hole...

And how about before high explosives?

[petermarkab]

i suppose roads weren't made as well as they are now - romans excepted - and you could probably wash away or block a road with a landslide or even a large number of substantial trees!

i take you point though - it probably shouldn't be pillaged automatically. fifty pc chance perhaps?

regards,

Peter

[Boris Godunov]

Re: Question on pillaging...

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun
Let's say, we have a road, and a town. Enemy enters the square. They burn the village, rape the females, and take all citizens to slavery.

Okay.

"We have a road, and a town. Enemy enters the square. They burn the village, rape the females, and take all citizens to slavery."

[Shogun Gunner]

[Blake]

Yes, I've also mused on this. The barbarian warrior pillages the road. HOW??? Wouldn't it take as long or longer as building the road? What is possibly in it for them?

THe best logic I can come up with (btw, logic is overrated when dealing with AI's with a pillage-fetish), is that since in ancient times roads were largely for finding one ways around, the pillagers destroy all the sign-posts, or make them point in the wrong directions. Little brats.

[Addled Platypus]

maybe it's the head on the poles

[Son of David]

Yes, they probably repaint all the road markings and screw around with the traffic lights - causes absoulte chaos! It's AS IF the road was actually destroyed.

Remarkable.

[Wittlich]

But the results are just the same.

[DRoseDARs]

This can only end in Wiley E. Coyote failing off a cliff...

[Blake]

Something else that both irks and amuses me is when you capture a barb city, then the barbs come back and pillage "their" hamlets. It's like "how dare you get captured by a technologically superier civilisation! We'll kill you all!".

When forces pillage roads, I think of things like the axemen using their weapons as plowshares to carve up the roads, dragging the weapon through the dirt for hundred of miles! For years!
Any unit that pillages a road should be completely demoralized and lose at least half their strength due to blunted weapons.

[Last Conformist]

Roads need maintenance. I suppose the pillagers tear down the guesthouses and eat the farmers responsible for maintaining the roads.

[Shogun Gunner]

I tend think of road pillaging in a similar way to forest defense bonuses. It isn't each individual tree that provides some protection (i.e. hiding behind a tree as arrows go whizzing by).

For the road pillage, chokepoints are destroyed, so small bridges are destroyed, roads are blocked with trees/rocks at key junctures, signposts switched. If there are any carts or non-combat forces going along with the actual combat troops, this could slow up those units.

The connection to forest defense is similiar (in my mind), where you defend the entire forest, but the defense is able to pick out key junctures in the forest and defend those in mass, with reduced risk of flanking and encirclement. By holding up those key bottleneck points, the entire area (tile) can be defended.

The pillaging question, along with many other issues, will always have some "realism" problems. Your view of how the micro level operates depends on a lot of things -- most importantly the perception of the player. I'm willing to not get too hung up on some of the minute details.

However, I would agree that it's silly thinking of a swordsman dragging his sword along a road to seperate the clumps of gravel from each other