Cultural Conversion - yeah right

[Dauphin]

I hate flipping. I detest the formula used for it. The only possibly good thing about it is it makes you garrison units to put down a rebellion if you don't want to starve or raze it.

The number of times I've lost about 7 or 8 units in a garrisoned city with large enemy populations makes even garrisoning, not only frustrating, but extremely unit intensive.

[Atahualpa]

Thx for the calc Tiberius. The chance for a flip is roughly ~0.05-0.1% per turn

Besides to end speculation, I play my mod, which uses HPs: 2/4/6/8
Now that I think of it I should up conscript a bit, because they are quite useless 3/4/6/8 would be better. Still conscripts should hardly have a chance against elite units. Only if they have much better technology.

The unit values are all modified. Cavalry has 16/10, tanks have 36/24, infantry 24/24, riflemen 16/16,... to better reflect technological advantage.
The later units were made much more expensive to obtain as well (e.g. tanks 150 vs 100 shields, modern armor 220 vs 120 shields, modern armor has 64/48 btw )

Oh btw, Cavalry is not so easy to achieve. Chemistry requires education so one has to invest a bit more into the middle ages before he can go to cavalry, which is a good attacking unit until infantry. But infantry has the disadvantage of only 1 movement so Cavalry is still some cheap and formidable unit (especially with its 3 movepoints).

And yes of course the city did belong to me right after the flip again. I moved a tank in

[Atahualpa]

Now that I think of it, I probably should raise maintenance for barracks as well since they have become a lot more powerful.

[Atahualpa]

I have documented all changes in this excel file

[Theseus]

As a further thought:

I've been replaying Minitourney 1, and ran into a similar situation, where I wanted to take out the Vikings, but they had one city far off that I couldn't easily get to... like you, I was also in democracy, so I wanted a quick in-and-out war.

Ata, why not have engaged the pink (Chinese?), green (Celts?), and blue (Germany?) AI civs in mil alliances, so that the Japanese would have been utterly destroyed? One of them would surely have done the dirty deed. Especially when you are dominating a game the way that you are (and that I am in my replay of MT1), old throw-away techs are a cheap and easy way to gain such alliances.

"Oh, and btw, would you kindly eradicate the Japanese for, say, Free Artistry?" "Oh, yes, thank you very much, happy to oblige... strangely, I feel very gracious towards you."

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
Thx for the calc Tiberius. The chance for a flip is roughly ~0.05-0.1% per turn

Besides to end speculation, I play my mod, which uses HPs: 2/4/6/8
Now that I think of it I should up conscript a bit, because they are quite useless 3/4/6/8 would be better. Still conscripts should hardly have a chance against elite units. Only if they have much better technology.

I essentially use the same HP scheme it makes for much more reliable results only change to mine is in the Unit trainings:

Conscript -1 (1/3/5/7)
Regular 0 (2/4/6/8)
Vets +1 (3/5/7/9)
Elite +3 (5/7/9/11)

Oh btw, Cavalry is not so easy to achieve. Chemistry requires education so one has to invest a bit more into the middle ages before he can go to cavalry, which is a good attacking unit until infantry. But infantry has the disadvantage of only 1 movement so Cavalry is still some cheap and formidable unit (especially with its 3 movepoints).

I like this mod, it forces you to research at least half of the top tree and education, a bee-line to cav wouldn't be practical.....

I disagree with you on infantry, once infantry comes on the scene my cavalry are toast (unless you have cav armies)

[Atahualpa]

Ata, why not have engaged the pink (Chinese?), green (Celts?), and blue (Germany?) AI civs in mil alliances, so that the Japanese would have been utterly destroyed? One of them would surely have done the dirty deed.

Believe me, I couldn't have managed him alone. It was at the time of Samurai. The samurai is a very tough unit in my mod. It's 6/5/2 (Knight is 6/4/2). I also had some Musket Infantry (10/8/1), but it performed worse than I expected and 1 MP is a big bummer.
I tried to hit him with Cavalry then (16/10/3) but his Rifleman (16/16/1) often enough beat the **** out of me.

Anyway all the time I was allied with the Chinese and the Cartagians against them, but for some time it looked like he could push all of us back, he could even advance into our territory. I then went in with some 10-15 cavalries into his mainland and that was the spearhead. Even though he recaptured the city I took, it was enough for the chinese and cartagians to get in. The small land bridge between those continents was blocked often enough (either by stupid allied AI units, or by me trying to get my units through), but more and more units flowed in. Still however we didn't feel we could get through. I once was soooo close to capture his damn capital, but failed on the last unit. My whole cavalry stack was damaged, had to retreat and was easily eaten by chasing Japanese forces.

I noticed we wouldn't be able to come by if we don't cut his resources so I heavily concentrated on his western side where I landed ship after ship and tried to cut saltpeter (cavalry requires saltpeter) and horses. It got a little better after I got Sharpshooters (24/12/1), at least I finally had some power to get at his Riflemen.

In the end, after a casaulty heavy war he lost and the mainland was divided by cartagians, chinese and me. The underdeveloped western region I conquered for myself as a whole.
After some time Cartagians declared war against me and I took almost all of their cities (together with the Chinese again).
Nobody however has killed Jap's last city and I don't like to do it, because then all AI will be mad against me (not that they aren't anyway). Seems like I have no other choice though.

The blue are Mayans and already conquered (one city remains on an island not too far away )
They declared war on me. Don't ask me for this reason or what they'd expect out of that. Getting their cities was a no brainer. I could have let them alone if they would have proven to be more cooperative.

I essentially use the same HP scheme it makes for much more reliable results only change to mine is in the Unit trainings:

Conscript -1 (1/3/5/7)
Regular 0 (2/4/6/8)
Vets +1 (3/5/7/9)
Elite +3 (5/7/9/11)

So you mean you have age dependant HPs?
My HP doesn't depend upon age, I rather try to balance them out with greater attack/defense values.
I think age dependant health such as yours have one problem:
in ancient times an elite is 5 times better than a conscript. In modern times it's not even twice as good.
Maybe this was intended (there is no way to implement this in civ3 anyway), but I don't feel that this is right.

I like this mod, it forces you to research at least half of the top tree and education, a bee-line to cav wouldn't be practical.....

thx, I think this is a bit of a flaw in the original civ3 as well. Now that Cavalry is soo much better than everything and the Invention (Longbowmen)->Gunpowder (Musketmen)->Chemistry (Musket Infantry)->Metallurgy (Cannon)->Military Tradition (Cavalry) chain is pretty much the only thing you'll need for military units, except for Knights of course, which you can throw in if you are in urgent need for military power. Therefor the dependency of chemistry on education (which I think is justified from a historical point as well).

I disagree with you on infantry, once infantry comes on the scene my cavalry are toast (unless you have cav armies)

Yes, true you don't really build new cavalry. Still you can use the old ones for cannon fodder (or softening, since they can retreat). And it doesn't do so bad strangely. I always have that feeling that somehow this extra movement also influences their chance to win.

Wars slow down a lot with only infantry units. Thats why infantry armies (24/24/2 - blitz) become very good!
For some quick raids you still need cavalry.


Also an important thing I found out about Civ3 is to disable all those combat animations and such. You care much less if you lose a unit or not. Combat is resovled much quicker, the unit is lost, life goes on.
If you'd watch it all, you'll reload much faster and try something else.

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Atahualpa


.........
So you mean you have age dependant HPs?
My HP doesn't depend upon age, I rather try to balance them out with greater attack/defense values.
I think age dependant health such as yours have one problem:
in ancient times an elite is 5 times better than a conscript. In modern times it's not even twice as good.
Maybe this was intended (there is no way to implement this in civ3 anyway), but I don't feel that this is right.

I do have age dependent Hp (2 per age, roughly) as a way to give modern units an edge over ancient units without modifying the A/D/M valuse to far from the stock rules.

Even with modern units an Elite will have an 11 to 7 advantage in HP which in ratio is only 1.57 to 1 but to look at it as a ratio is misleading; the elite still has 5 more Hp to lose than the conscript. This allows a conscript the ability to defeat units from lesser ages with some regularity while retaining the superiority of unit training between units of comparable ages.

Remember that in ancient ages unit training was far more important than it is today. Most warriors trained and fought their entire lives and a few hundred trained warriors could defeat thousands of conscripted, poorly trained soldiers. This is not to say that today unit traning isn't important on the battlefield--it is, but it is of lesser importance than it was during the ancient ages.