Siege: community drawing board

[Atomation]

I would like to dedicate a thread solely towards the generation of ideas for catapult (and all siege) changes, as they are sorely in need of it. I'll kick things off with my change to siege, in hopes that others will contribute some ideas and perhaps some really great changes can be made for the second expansion pack (maybe not, but we could get lucky).

1. Siege units now receive an attack modification based on how many units are on the tile it is attacking. If there are 4 units, no change. If there are less than 4 or greater than 4, the siege unit loses/gains 25% attack respectively per unit on the stack. So attacking 1 unit with a catapult results in -75% attack damage. Attacking 10 is +150% and 20 is +400%, etc.

2. Catapults and all other siege now only deal a maximum of 80% max life collateral damage to 5 units (80% of life is left over). Upgrades to collateral only increase how many units are hit by the collateral in the stack.

3. Catapults reduced to 3 str, trebuchets lose their city attack bonus but move to 5 str. Cannons/artillery also reduced in str proportionately to 8/14 respectively.

4. Castles can't be reduced to lower than 40% defense bonus, and walls can't be reduced to lower than 20% defense bonus.

5. If a unit with first strike is in a stack attacked by a siege unit, the bonus to attack is reduced by 25% per first strike promotion. This effect does not stack by having more than 1 first strike unit on the tile.

Result: Splitting up units is actually extremely effective when attacking. Attacking turtle cities is easier, as many units are stacked up in a city. Catapults are not as massable because they receive no defensive benefits. To counteract the severe penalty of stacking mass units in a city, walls and castles are stronger to help less units defend better. One first strike unit becomes essential to any stack as support against siege.

[Jaybe]

Here is what I would like.

Siege could be fixed with a rule that they NEVER win while attacking.

• They can reduce city defenses.
• They can cause collateral damage in an attack, but their 25% chance of withdrawl is the only way they can survive.
• The unit they attack suffers collateral along with the other units in the stack, but otherwise takes no damage.

Defensively, they operate normally.

In this way the seige concept of being an expenditure of effort/ammunition is purified.

Perhaps this can be attempted by simply lowering the strength of the various siege units, along with lowering their hammer cost. The only available promotions should be Barrage & Accuracy.

Counter-battery fire could be a chance thing similar to how air-defense is done in Civ4 (perhaps no more than 25% chance of counter-battery (aggregate, regardless of the available counter-battery units)). Success against any adjacent enemy bombarding siege would cancel its bombardment & possibly damage it. Damaged siege units would have their bombardment/collateral effects reduced.

The AI would have to be modified to adjust to all this.

[Dis]

I still liked civ3's system better. Though it was in need of work as well.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Already answered

[Tattila the Hun]

I'd like to see the retreat ods tweaked, based on the unit's health. When unit is in full health, it has 100% chance of retreating, reduced as the unit takes damage. Note, that this is the starting health, not the health it has after attacking/retreating once. In my humble opinion, this would make them more like actual artillery, and take out the silly "suicide" aspect of it. To balance, I'd like to see horse units have the chance to attack siege units in a stack, picking their target, much like subs could in CivIII. Same with other fastmovers, and planes.

[Brutus66]

I suggest eliminating catapults, trebuchets, cannons and artillery.
Instead, create a new promotion for melee and gunpowder units; call it maybe "siege engineer".
When attacking a city, this promotion gives the unit the ability to make a bombardment attack instead of its normal attack.
When attacking enemy units, it would inflict collateral damage (though I think it would need to be watered down some to prevent these units from becoming too powerful).
I would also suggest that the City Raider I promotion be a prerequisite.
The current City Raider promotion seems to indicate that a unit not only has become skilled in the tactics of assaulting cities but has the use of sappers, battering rams, siege ladders and towers.
The Siege Engineer promotion would indicate the presence of a catapult or two among the troops.

[wodan11]

Siege units should be in three classes:
1) units capable of reducing defenses
2) units capable of inflicting collateral damage
3) units capable of fighting in a siege (whether attacking, defending, or both)

The main problem with Civ4 siege units as they are now, is that most of them can do all 3. In ANY game (computer, board, card), anytime you have a dynamic that both increases your odds of winning and also enables you to win, that's called a "broken" mechanic. You can invest almost the majority of your resources into that ONE mechanic. To have a well-rounded game with lots of flexibility (and enjoyability), we want each mechanic to be separate and have its own use.

So, what we should do is remove ability #3 from all current siiege units. This will be like Civ3, except we keep the ability of defending units to sally and counter-attack and possibly destroy the siege engine (the siege engine can only inflict collateral damage; if the sallying unit doesn't "win" then it retreats). Alternately, we allow defending siege units to enter a artillery "duel" (like SMAC).

We can go further. We can allow some special units that can do only #1 (such as a Bombard), units that can do only #2 (such as the hwacha), units that can do only #3 (such as the machine gunner), units that can do #1 or #2 (such as a cannon).

We should have very, very few units that can do #1/#2 or #3 (such as a Battering Ram), because this is the "broken" combination.

Wodan

[sjm]

What I always hated about siege units is the way they deal with city defences. Having a higher city defence is actually no bonus at all at the moment, because it takes just as long to reduce a city with an 80% bonus to 0 as a city with a 20% bonus.

I'd like to see siege units removing a flat value from the city defence, not a percentage of the total defence. This would mean that a city with 20% bonus would require a 1/4 of the bombardment required to reduce a city with an 80% bonus to 0.