Walls, WTF?

[Fan2]

Originally posted by CerberusIV
The bit I have never been clear about with walls is what exactly counts as a gunpowder unit. The game has different categories of units which show up as such in the military advisor and the gunpowder ones are clear. In that screen cannon are listed as siege units, not gunpowder. So do they ignore walls or not? Same question for armour and helicopter units later in the game. They should surely ignore walls but do they as they aren't listed as gunpowder units?

EDIT: I went into the Worldbuilder to try and answer my own question and ended up more confused. I picked a walled city on a hill and checked the combat odds with a variety of attacking units. Once I had bombarded the cultural defence down to zero the walls didn't show up at all on the combat odds. All the factors that showed were the same for gunpowder and non-gumpowder units.

This is explicitly listed in the civipedia - however you spell that.

[Yosho]

There have been games where I've built walls in border cities to defend against barbarians, or if there was a city I knew the AI was going to attack, and they helped a great deal. It's not an automatic build even then, it's sometimes better to just build another millitary unit instead, but there are times when walls are worthwhile.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Generaldoktor
Comparatively speaking cheap, compared to a whole bunch of cultural improvements, but you were going to build those anyway, right?

Usually I run of structures for my cities to build at some point in a game. That's when I build them walls.

[fani]

Me too and it's a shame that their value is such that leads to them being built last or not at all...

[MasterDave]

Originally posted by fani
Me too and it's a shame that their value is such that leads to them being built last or not at all...

I am sort of torn on the walls issue. Walls could be more useful if they give a defense bonus not tied to the culture bonus(perhaps +25% defense) since they are useless in all but the newest cities (or conquered cities) now. On the other hand, from a logical standpoint, it makes more sense for catapults and cannons and such being able to destroy walls then it does for having them be able to destroy cultural resistance.

Perhaps the answer is to make walls cheaper, give them a 25% defense bonus independant of cultural defense, and have them get knocked down permanently after the first few bombardments (more modern units would knock them down with less shots). After the walls are down, then the bombarders would start reducing any of the city's inherent culture bonus. I wonder if someone smarter than me could do this in a mod? It sounds like it would be fun, and would make walls more desirable on the building list.

[Yosho]

I don't know..you would still probably only build walls in border cities, (unless you're in REAL trouble) and there you'd usually rather have the +50% right away

[zeace]

Almost every city was a border city at some point
(unless you're letting people settle cities in between yours (?))

My problem with walls is that their usable life is too short. I could build a wall, or I could build a theater. The first gives me +50% as soon as it's done.

The theater takes only a little longer to build, and immediately starts increasing my cultural defense. It takes quite a few turns to get to 50%, but eventually it'll be huge. And in the mean time that theater helps assimilate the new citizens and keeps the previous owners culture at bay. And every other cultural building I build accumulates with this effect.

So if I can keep a city defended long enough to get a theater, library, and temple created, the walls would be wasted.

That said, if you're on a war-path and intend to deal with the previous culture by eliminting all traces of it from the earth... That's different.

[Yosho]

Well, very early in the game when you only have 2-3 cities, there's no point to building walls; you're better off just building a few millitary units. If you actually have a real "border", though, as in a couple of marginal cities on the side of your empire that you expect to be attacked in the near future (by either barbarians or an unplesent civ), a couple of walls can be worthwhile.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by zeace
Almost every city was a border city at some point
(unless you're letting people settle cities in between yours (?))

Don't you backfill?

[Azuarc]

Originally posted by nugog
If going for a cultural victory I will also build them in my 3 culture city, to get the +1 from castles. Every bit helps.

I disagree with this. Usually in a cultural victory strategy, you're hard-pressed for production in those three cities, cranking out wonders and religious stuff and other cultural developments to worry about the +1 from wall+castle. Typically you are better off when you have nothing else left to simply build culture.

[Generaldoktor]

Maybe I'm playing too low a difficulty level, but I've built a few lately in the mid-game, where I've cowed the neighbor who has the intrusive cultural border with me to where I can avoid true attack, but need culture to keep resources and transportation routes from being infringed. Then I'm like the guy who said "every little bit helps," and I'll build the walls to get the castle to get the extra cultural point. Production is up a good bit by then and it doesn't take as long as when the city is truly small. That crenalated boundary is also a good reminder that my cities are a tough nut to crack.

My suspicion is that walls are okay in mid-game too because AI at least do not always upgrade and their sleaze, outdated units that they might likely throw at you might actually find the d-mn things to be quite a "stumbling block," (pardon pun . ) Indeed this may even be true of live players, ala MP, as upgrades in general are kind of tough in Civ4, unless you have a lot of GM going around on money-making sojourns; this of course the topic of another thread earlier this year.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147189&highlight=Upgrade

I'm not real "militant" about any such view about walls, though, which is why I threw this out to get other opinions. Most seem to be muddling through as I do, sometimes building them and sometimes not. Lately, I find I'm building them less, to explore what "cultural defense" can and cannot do alone and to streamline production to prepare for higher competition at higher difficulty or if I try MP, where I understand you only build what you know you need.

[1889]

Walls also increase your demographic power without costing unit upkeep, so I may build them to cut down on AI demands when pursuing more peacful strategies.

[Generaldoktor]

Duh, I never thought of that!

[dolf]

They should have made some kind of defence structure that would have been used in the later part of the game.

there were enough stuctures made by men after gunpowder

[Indon]

Originally posted by 1889
Walls also increase your demographic power without costing unit upkeep, so I may build them to cut down on AI demands when pursuing more peacful strategies.

Hmm, so walls could help to keep enemy AI's from attacking you even when you don't have so many units?

I wonder if that tactic keeps working after gunpowder...

Hmm...