2 questions

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Generaldoktor
Well, I'm a little confused whether you're saying Guardian is wrong, or you're saying he's right and the designers got it wrong.

Generally, land units have ZoC in most wargames and strategy games while naval units don't.

Also, ZoC is usually implemented as the ability to stop enemy units from moving. Thus, an enemy unit moving into your ZoC must stop, and an enemy unit cannot move from a hex in your ZoC directly into another hex in your ZoC.

If supply rules are in effect a ZoC also cuts a supply route.

[Generaldoktor]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Generally, land units have ZoC in most wargames and strategy games while naval units don't.

Also, ZoC is usually implemented as the ability to stop enemy units from moving. Thus, an enemy unit moving into your ZoC must stop, and an enemy unit cannot move from a hex in your ZoC directly into another hex in your ZoC.

If supply rules are in effect a ZoC also cuts a supply route.

Yeah, I know, I've played a few (hundred.) I was talking about Civ4. Have we verified that there are no land ZOC, but there is a form of naval ZOC for blockades?

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Generaldoktor


Yeah, I know, I've played a few (hundred.) I was talking about Civ4. Have we verified that there are no land ZOC, but there is a form of naval ZOC for blockades?

Yeah. AFAIK, there are no land units that have a ZOC anymore, but it does work for navel blockades. Naval ZOC can both prevent water squares from being worked and can block trade routes (unless there's also a land route, of course).

[zabrak]

I know the AI will try to stay under the happiness cap by arresting its growth. But will it go over the healthiness cap, if it has the food and happy points to support the growth?

For anyone who cares, I've found that the AI doesn't seem to care about sudden decreases in its happy or healthy points. I was playing around with spies in the current spaceship comparison game over in one of the AI's continents (normally, I would have just rent their lands and dressed their children in sackcloth and ashes, but I was prohibited from domination by the rules of the experiment), and I'd blow up this civ's luxury and grain resources, then check within the cities to see the effect. It turns out the AI keeps exactly the same citizen allocation, and allows the unhappy citizens to simply starve. This means the AI takes no penalty once the resource has been taken away, since an extra unhappy citizen being starved to death has no downside in comparison to her never being born.

Now, I still stand by the strategy of donating a happiness resource in advance of a war in certain circumstances. I'm fairly certain that the AI stops its growth at the happiness cap generated by its native resources, meaning that in most cases giving foreign resources that allow it to grow will cause a suboptimal reallocation of citizens during that growth phase.

The other thing is that AI cities are remarkably easy to starve down with spies/pillaging. A city which is at both the happiness and healthiness caps, averaging 2 food per worked tile, and suddenly deprived of a +2 happy and a +2 healthy resource, will lose 6 food per turn.

Finally, this discovery doesn't answer my original question, which is: if native food and happiness resources allow growing past the healthiness cap, will the AI do so?

[Hermann the Lombard]

In my Devel's Workshop Ia game I noticed the naval phenomena when French Frigates showed up offshore. All of a sudden a city was starving because all those sea tiles were interdicted.

The area that a division could be expected to defend in depth had a width of 12 miles in that example. It would still be difficult to quietly sneak past the flanks of such a division, or to filter through the equivalent of a "corner to corner" line on the tile grid.

As for the expansion, well, the wargamers are a noisy and demanding lot and have amply squeaked the wheel for attention. It usually seems to be the wargame elements that get the most criticism in the Civ/CTP lines. My personal biggest gripe is the lack of reasonable stacked combat where combined arms are effective in defense and ineffective in attack. I really liked the CTP2 approach to stacked combat (which admittedly created a 12-unit limit).

[Generaldoktor]

Yeah, so did I; and am playing AOM II (the unofficial CTP III) quite a bit as a result, even though it is a rather violent game with an AI who has been tweaked to the point that the pendulum has swung too far from its former, passive behavior in CTP, IMHO. (It is hard to be a "builder" or "merchant" in AOM.)

The question here is, are we going to get our way and get some serious tweaking of Civ4 combat, including along the lines you mention regarding offense??

[Blaupanzer]

The new extension is called "Warlords." Does lead one to believe the wargaming aspects will be tweaked.