Units that I miss

[Yosho]

By the way, artilery isn't so bad. If you're being a warmonger at that point in the game, try getting it earlier. I've had "rifle, cavelry, artilery" armies before, and they're amazingly effective. If you can get to artilary while the AI still has rifles, or even when they get infantry, it's just brutal how effective they can be even on their own with no support. I just recently invaded another continent (on monarch) with a force of 6 artilery and nothing else in the initial landing, and the amount of damage they did was just amazing. They can level the defenses and then take a city on their own, and then hold it on their own; between the collateral damage, the 18 strength, and the chance of retreat, they can be quite effective, unless you wait until very late to pick up the tech for them.

[Generaldoktor]

Originally posted by Six Thousand Year Old Man


Thanks for the historical illustrations - but from what you're saying, tanks-as-artillery were more of a stopgap measure than a mainstream use of the vehicle. And it could be argued that if you put a howitzer barrel on a tank, it stops being a tank and starts being self-propelled artillery. So I think my original point still stands.

To employ a somewhat extreme analogy: I recall that tanks were modified to be used as bulldozers at times - but it isn't reasonable that a Civ4 tank could be used to improve terrain or build fortifications. (At least, it isn't reasonable to me. The game stops being interesting if you can build one unit that does everything.)

Yeah, we do have Fighting Seabees, with their armored bulldozers, (driven by John Wayne.) But, I now see your point; however, I bet the promotion system for armor does stand anyway, when "Warlords" comes out, its just too big a revision to fix.

Autotrop: Look on the "Warlords" thread and you can see me arguing vehemently against trebuchet much as you are doing. Then see the big picture of the trebuchet somebody downloaded from a "Warlords" preview. The treb is in, man; no further arguments. (Well, I've since revised my view anyway, figuring its hypocritical to argue for intermediate gunpowder units and more naval units and not let the Renaissance Fair crowd have their trebs. )

Yosho: In some cases, historically, the bombardments were ineffective; I won't bore with further examples from my History Channel repertoire, but, defying history, the Civ3 bombardments were generally successful, (more often than not,) and very total in their results. This was particularly not understandable from frigates, the earliest unit allowed such options. Maybe a percentage could be used as with catapault vs. walls.

Oh, and thanks for agreeing with me about artillery.

[Quillan]

Originally posted by Yosho


Navel bombardment to destroy mines or farms in civ III was not a problem, but considering how long it takes to grow a town in civ IV, it's probably best that you can't destry tile improvements with battleships anymore; having costal towns flattened by ships every time you go to war would be INCREDIBLY frustrating and annoying.

Yes, it would, wouldn't it? That would sort of require you to build a navy to defend your coastal waters, and if you don't, you're only getting what you deserve.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Quillan


Yes, it would, wouldn't it? That would sort of require you to build a navy to defend your coastal waters, and if you don't, you're only getting what you deserve.

It takes a much larger navy to defend against a costal attack then to launch one; if your only goal is to get a battleship or two close enough to fire a few shells at the ground, then all you need is a few ships; if you want to stop and intercept those few ships before they get to do that, you would need a huge fleet.

And there would certanly be no way to defend any square near your border against civIII style artilery combined with railroads. The AI in civ III was too stupid to know how to use it properly, but if they included it in the game in civ IV and had an AI who knew how to use it, it would be incredibly frustrating.

I do miss the ability to economically hurt someone using navel bombardments and artilary fire and such, but my point was simply that improvments in Civ IV don't work like CIV III improvements, and the ability to destroy them from the sea or using artilary would be much more unbalancing. Considering how long it takes to grow a town, they're already fairly easy to destroy (bombers, any ground forces, ect); making it even easier to destroy improvements at long range would be incredibly frustrating, if the AI's could use the ability properly anyway.

Besides, as it is, navys can be economically destructive in this game. Along with getting rid of seafood resources, a navy blockade can be very effective. Using nothing but a couple of ships, I've taken size 12 costal AI cities and starved them down to size 3 or 4; ships have a zone of control, and usually with 2 ships you can prevent a city from working any water squares at all.

[dolf]

Subs will always defeat battleships, battleships did have no anti sub equiptment (destroyers and frigates did that job).

so I always find it very anoying if a battleship defeats a sub.

There could be a nicer nuke option with sub based nukes and a way to have a tactical anti nuke strike, this would also clear the way for the hunter/killer sub vs the strike platform ( LA vs. Ohio class)

for nuke subs it could have the advantage:

less visibility and more movement points.
then you can use anti-sub planes to detect and kill those.



sidenote on Market Garden: The attack on Arnhem failed because Monty was to arogant to listen to the Dutch resitance who told him there was a German SS group in Arnhem.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Dolf,

Being another fan of the History Channel, I can tell you that battleships were pretty hard to knock out with torpedoes: the waterline armour (aka torpedo belt) was up to 12" thick on some designs and used multiple hulls to soak up the blast. Torpedoes of the day were hard pressed to do more than put dents in the battleships if they were at battle stations.

And yes the Bismark was damaged: they took one in the rudders, which are not armoured to the same degree. If the Germans had been thinking about attacks by torpedo planes, they would have better protected the rudders and screws.

Not to mention have included manual gunnery back up systems on their AAA batteries. Hard to score tellin hits on an old biplane when your gunnery system is leading the target too much because it doesn't do calculations below the stall speed for all other aircraft.

Pearl Harbour, too many of the ships were totally unprepared and so much of their defenses like water tight bulkheads were left open when they were hit.

------------------

Now getting back to the topic of the thread.

Soren and the game designers gave up the complexity of the logistics and a more realistic set of unit abilities to make it more about the relationships between the AI personalities and the player. Promising for multiplayer too, but so far, all I have ever gotten from an AI was some attitude from them and their undying hatred after leaving them with only one or two cities after my mid-game manueovres.

I would dearly love to see some more complicated logistics such as supply lines for individual units, maintenance costs for keeping units in the field vs in garrison, etc... Professional soldiers know the devil is always in the logistics details.

[Gen.Dragolen]

Con't

The modern US Army Armoured Divisions do not cover many more miles in a day than the WWII German Panzer Division, which is about 250 miles at best. CCC, fuel requirements and the ability of the logistic tail to keep up are still the biggest millstone to warfare.

The other problem is the limited number of individual units the game could handle. In CivIII there was a limit of 379 (?) units the game engine could handle. That made for maybe 6 unique units to replace all the default units for 6-8 civs. Kinda limiting when you realize how many units there are in each age.

I would love to see more civ specific units such as carrier based units from Japan and the US, WWII and Modern era, the different riflemen from the different countries of the 19th century, etc... probably looking at a couple of thousand units all told to make a good show of it.

The other thing that I miss is the mountainous terrain type. Could also use some real dessert terrain too. Places like the Quattra Depression, the Dune Seas in Arabia, the Mojave... The currently impassible mountain ranges are a bit of a disappointment. I'm hoping that we will see some different mountain graphics added with Warlords. I miss being able to mod it so that wheel and tracked vehicles could not go into virgin jungle and mountains while light infantry could.

[dolf]

The Japs did sink the Repulse and the Prince of Wales with the torperdo planes (at battle stations).

But the battleships were not designed for anti sub warfare, the were designed to bring and endure firepower.

[Generaldoktor]

Originally posted by Gen.Dragolen
Dolf,

Being another fan of the History Channel, I can tell you that battleships were pretty hard to knock out with torpedoes: the waterline armour (aka torpedo belt) was up to 12" thick on some designs and used multiple hulls to soak up the blast. Torpedoes of the day were hard pressed to do more than put dents in the battleships if they were at battle stations.

And yes the Bismark was damaged: they took one in the rudders, which are not armoured to the same degree. If the Germans had been thinking about attacks by torpedo planes, they would have better protected the rudders and screws.

Not to mention have included manual gunnery back up systems on their AAA batteries. Hard to score tellin hits on an old biplane when your gunnery system is leading the target too much because it doesn't do calculations below the stall speed for all other aircraft.

Pearl Harbour, too many of the ships were totally unprepared and so much of their defenses like water tight bulkheads were left open when they were hit.

------------------

Now getting back to the topic of the thread.

Soren and the game designers gave up the complexity of the logistics and a more realistic set of unit abilities to make it more about the relationships between the AI personalities and the player. Promising for multiplayer too, but so far, all I have ever gotten from an AI was some attitude from them and their undying hatred after leaving them with only one or two cities after my mid-game manueovres.

I would dearly love to see some more complicated logistics such as supply lines for individual units, maintenance costs for keeping units in the field vs in garrison, etc... Professional soldiers know the devil is always in the logistics details.

Well, I came in this aspect of the discussion late. For the guy that mentioned the Prince of Wales and the Repulse; yeah I think both Yamato class ended up eating it from a combination of bombs and torpedos. The British lost more to torps, including one battle cruiser sunk in or near home harbor at the beginning of the war and several vessels in Alexandria harbor to midget submarines. The French, while Vichy, lost a couple in Oran too and I believe torps had something to do with that. Japanese capital ship, whether battleship or carrier, losses late in the war, some sunk in harbor after being surrounded by American island air bases, were also in many cases partially and maybe totally due to torps; I don't have specific instances handy, but know Avenger torpedo planes were among those commonly running the missions and submarines bagged some too after we (U.S.) ringed them with those.

But whatever. The interesting aspects of the discussion is that a true military man concedes he would enjoy this more as a true "wargame." I agree, in principle. I never served, but got interested in military technology after seeing several buddies off to the Vietnam Era military; (they actually ended up facing off the Russians in Europe) and with the complexity and interest of the old, cardboard board military strategy games, which were prevalent from the late Sixties to the mid-Nineties. Largely replaced for most by computer games, their hardcore enthusiasts will still run their annual Baltimore convention this summer, I just heard.

But...time marches on, though maybe not enough for the true wargamer. One of Gen. Dragolen's most interesting observations is that a game engine in a computer game can only handle a certain number of "units." I don't think any of us who have been idly for months suggesting this unit and that and then some more, have ever realistically considered what the system can handle. Sid and his wizards at Firaxis are just automatically assumed to be able to cater to whatever we demand. This even though there have been a lot of criticisms, including some from me; that the system as is comes close to overloading an awful lot of existing home computers.

The "Warlords" expansion is a move in the direction Gen. D. speaks of, to enhance combat as a viable role in the game and make it more interesting. I'm sure we'll get some additional good units and some good options. For true "wargames," I think we'll still have to go somewhere else.

One additional point, Gen. D.: Everybody was anticipating rich interrelationships to come out of human multi-player play, but the reports I'm getting out of the forums is that these games are pretty brutal and full of war activity, motivated in part by the fears and egos of the human participants. So multi-player actually moved us in the direction of more war in Civ. Go Figure.

[dolf]

the Yamato was send out on a suicide mission.
The US navy was prob. glad they didn't end up in a ship vs ship fight with it.

[Generaldoktor]

Musashi, the sister ship, about the same. The point was they used torpedos as well as bombs to sink them.

A lot of the German capital ships in WWI and WWII were sent out individually; occasionally also the British, as with Hood or Prince of Wales/Repulse. This appears to be desparation based on lack of combined fleet resources by the various participants at various times; the fact that the United States was able to establish this by mid-1943 is a significant factor in its rise as a dominant world power, though heavy land and air force development was key also. Prior to that, the U.S. was considered (post-Spanish-American War) only one of several major Western powers and something of a "sleeping giant." Britain was able to build up to fleet operations by the end of the war too, but was often unable in the war's context to complete heavy units to replace those lost, often on individual missions, in the desparate early days; this prophesied their decline on the world stage.

The Yamato was definitely on a suicide mission by April, 1945 and that's what it got. Sister Musashi's loss the year earlier didn't make much more sense, but the whole point was that they were done in, in part, by torpedoes; and I believe this was more common, at least in WWII, than what the other gentleman (Gen. Dragolen) asserted.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Barham?

[Generaldoktor]

Yeah, HMS Barham was the one that got torpedoed early in the war, I guess she didn't sink then; but unlucky crew, she gets torpedoed later and sinks, (still only 1941.) I guess the point being that capital ships still had to worry about torps, even with the thick armor belts.

When I studied this as a miniatures-wargame-oriented teenager, I recall the armor belts were mostly there to deflect shellfire aimed at the waterline. Torpedo hits, like one I just read that hit the Yamato at mid-war, can go above or below that belt. I think its safe to assume a lot of capital ships did go that way, in some of the examples, (Alexandria harbor and the Japanese harbors, Battle of Marianas, Force Z, etc.)

This is kind of secondary to the subject of "What units I miss." Battleships, I'm sure, are not going anywhere, as regards the game.