Totally Random Idea to balance Artillery...

[RobC]

I was just sending my trebuchet stack of doom around to visit all of my neighbors on this continent and it occured to me one way to limit the power of these beasts would be to make more terrain impassable to wheeled units without roads. I'm thinking of adding forest and hills to the currently impassable-by-wheeled jungles, marshes, mountains, and volcanoes. It would also be cool if you could prevent wheeled units from crossing rivers if there are not bridges (i.e roads on both sides of the river) -- this could allow you to set up interesting tactics where the defender could pillage or bomb a bunch of roads around a river to delay an invasion: the enemy would have to fight his way across the river with foot units -- giving the defenders a defensive river bonus, then being workers/engineers over to rebuild the roads on both sides before you could bring the artillery. I think this would be good for gameplay as well as more realistic (after all, it shouldn't be very easy to transport large numbers of artillery across enemy territory...it should slow down your troops advance.), plus it increases the tactical importance of terrain.

What do people think?

[RobC]

And yes, this would suck for chariots, but it's still realistic and who uses the standard chariot much anyway? You could always add defensive bombard and ZoC to the War Chariot and 3-man-chariot if you want to give them something to compensate...

[Stuie]

You should add deserts to the list of impassable-by-wheeled terrain, too.

I like your river crossing idea. Too bad that can't be modded; it would need an "official" fix.

[muxec]

Artillery should damage all units in the square. Just like in real life. When artillery bombards owercrowded land it causes more damage.

And MilitariZm(R) is an excelent example of advantages of this concept.

But units must be better protected against artillery. Also artillery should be very vulunerable to aircraft (aircraft should have special order to destroy escorted artillery)

[Arrian]

Re: Totally Random Idea to balance Artillery...

Originally posted by RobC
I was just sending my trebuchet stack of doom around to visit all of my neighbors on this continent and it occured to me one way to limit the power of these beasts would be to make more terrain impassable to wheeled units without roads. I'm thinking of adding forest and hills to the currently impassable-by-wheeled jungles, marshes, mountains, and volcanoes. It would also be cool if you could prevent wheeled units from crossing rivers if there are not bridges (i.e roads on both sides of the river) -- this could allow you to set up interesting tactics where the defender could pillage or bomb a bunch of roads around a river to delay an invasion: the enemy would have to fight his way across the river with foot units -- giving the defenders a defensive river bonus, then being workers/engineers over to rebuild the roads on both sides before you could bring the artillery. I think this would be good for gameplay as well as more realistic (after all, it shouldn't be very easy to transport large numbers of artillery across enemy territory...it should slow down your troops advance.), plus it increases the tactical importance of terrain.

What do people think?

Hmm. I think I like it. I never really understood how "wheeled" units were supposed to deal with forests and hills.

-Arrian

[alexman]

Good suggestion, except that by the time the really powerful bombard units arrive (artillery), most of the world is roaded anyway...

[RobC]

Originally posted by alexman
Good suggestion, except that by the time the really powerful bombard units arrive (artillery), most of the world is roaded anyway...

But you can still pillage/bomb lots of roads across rivers and through terrain unfriendly to wheeled units, even your own tiles, to slow down an enemy advance.

[RobC]

Another cool thing about this that I realized after I started playing with this mod is that you can 'strand' artillery that's already in the field...forces you to more carefully plan and protect your attack routes, as well as bringing some protected workers just in case.

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by muxec
Artillery should damage all units in the square. Just like in real life. When artillery bombards owercrowded land it causes more damage.

No, this is what I hated about SMAC combat.

It seems very unrealistic to me. Why should one artillery unit be able to cause damage to all the units in an area of many square miles?

[Thoth]

Warpstorm: Agreed, but I do miss the artillery duels.

[RobC]

Originally posted by muxec
Artillery should damage all units in the square. Just like in real life. When artillery bombards owercrowded land it causes more damage.

What's overcrowded? On a standard 100x100 map, each tile is 1/10,000th of the surface area of the earth, which is approximately 5x10^14 square meters. So each tile is 5x10^10 square meters in area. I don't care if each unit represents a company, a division, or a batallion, there's no way even 4000 of those units (max. # of units allowed in the game) is going to 'overcrowd' any of those tiles.

[Kuciwalker]

I don't like the river idea, because it seems like it would just get in the way.

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by skywalker
I don't like the river idea, because it seems like it would just get in the way.

isn't that the idea/suggestion???

[notyoueither]

Yes. You'd have to destroy hundreds of square miles of farms and villages to deny the enemy the use of a few bridges. Like he said, it would get in the way.

If you really want to balance bombard units, reduce their bombard so that incidence of hits become less frequent. At some point the lack of bombard effectiveness would meet the cost of upkeep and put an end to the arty stack of doom in most cases.

[muxec]

I say make bombard units vulunerable to air units and you'll balance the game.