A question about Civ-3 combat-model

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by korn469


Grim Legacy

what are you talking about exactly? you can still build as many riflemen, armor units, submarines, etc as you can support...and that could be a large number of units, but armies (stacks of units that fight as one entity) are limited by the number of cities and great leaders you have (as far as we know), also there was hints in the pc.ign preview that nationalism was a government (which conflicted with the gamespot uk preview where it was only a tech) and that once you switched to it you could create as many armies as you wanted

so there is no hard limit on the amount of units you can build (which was what i got out of your post) but there is a hard limit to the amount of stacks you can have

i have another question and that is how many units can you have in a stack? has anyone heard anything about that?

Ow sorry I must have confused the stacks with the units themselves. Arg, ok forget what I said.

[TechWins]

i have another question and that is how many units can you have in a stack? has anyone heard anything about that?

No, there hasn't been any word on that. It is a very good question, though.

The problem with war in Civ is that it's too easy and simple. There needs to be more strategy involved in war. Typically you could take over a neighboring civ, in modern times, in a few turns by having a lot of howitzers, for attacking, and mech. infantries, for defending, and using those units in a blitzkreig. You didn't need much of a navy or an airforce at all. Nor did you need a variety of land units. How boring! In order for this not to be so boring combat is going to have to be more tactictal. Not neccesarily all tactics but just enough to make war interesting in Civ. Maybe some type of arttrition system, possibly a model such as Europa Universalis, would help a lot too. Something more than some lame stacking armies tool has to be implemented. I'm sure there are many ideas from other games that could be brought into Civ3,

Only being able to build armies on every four cities just adds to that fact that bab. If Firaxis wants to put some limit on how many armies you can create than they should do it with a city pop size method. Every city over size 8 could create an army, a city over size 16 could create two armies, a city over size 32 could create three armies, and so on. Having a few large, developed cities would put a premium over a lot of underdevloped cites. Now has is this not a better system?

If arttrion were to be implemented, then there shouldn't be a cap size on how large your stacking army can be. The only problem is that arttrion would be further increased with the more units in a stacked army. An example could be, one unit recieves 1% arttrion, two units would recieve 3% arrtrion, four units would receive 5% arttrion, etc... So every unit receives it's base 1% arttrion then every unit added into that stack after the first, original unit would receive an additional 1% arttrion on top of it's base 1% arttrion. The base arttrion of course would change with the city that it's from, the additional arttrion would always stay the same.

Wow some of these ideas took just a few minutes, Firaxis has had a few years. So they better have a damn good combat system.

BtW, sorry but I could find the screenshot I was referring to earlier. Oddly enough I saw it last week, I thought I saw it at gamespot but it's no longer there. I'll check some other places and I'll get back on this one.

[Zanzin]

Originally posted by Grim Legacy


Hm no. The production of units was city-bound and that posed a sort of soft limit on your armies, depending on your type of government.

Sorry, I was sort of reffering to ctp as well

Thanks for the info Korn, I stand corrected on the issue!! Anyway, I think the way Firaxis are implementing it is pretty good. I have faith in civ3 yet.

[Swissy]

I think that armies are not going to be the norm until you get units with ZOC. Firaxis has already said that most ancient units won't have ZOC. So I see long lines of ancient units in my civ3 future, possibly even double lines.

[TechWins]

What does ZOC have anything to do with building armies? It seems as if there isn't any corallation at all between the two of the them, so that would make ZOC irrelevant when building armies.

[CyberbugFredrik]

If the units in a stacked army will fight as individuals replacing eachother after dying, rather than fighting as one big army, I seriously wonder what use ranged units will have.

I mean, if the archers won't use their ranged ability and fight from behind the other troops, what's their real advantage to regular units?!

[korn469]

CyberbugFredrik

i don't think it works exactly like that...here is how it seems to work from what i have read

catapults, cannons, artillary, and howitzers are now bombard units...they can shoot at units on the map and damage but not destroy these units...so if you had an all howitzer force you wouldn't be able to kill anything (although you might be able to almost destroy it)

then when you form a stack on units into an army they fight one at a time, but it goes by rounds, not till the unit dies, so if you have four units in you army, two spear men and two archers (1.2.1 and 2.1.1 respectively) then on attack your strongest archer would attack the first round, if it loses combat and takes damages it then goes to the next strongest archer, if that unit wins then the next round since it is still the strongest unit it will attack again, if it loses then the next strongest unit attack (no matter which unit that is) this continues till the battle is over

[Marcus Agrippa]

I think the strategic choice of units needs to become more advanced. I think units with "bonuses" AOK style would help improve the system... pikemen and AEGIS cruisers already have these bonuses... why not introduce more? Also, I like the idea of having certain units fight well on certain types of terrian. For example, the warriors of Native American tribes fought well against superior European troops when defending their land in dense forests, but certainly would have been crushed by the same Europeans if fighting on a vast open plain.

In this way, the game wouldn't be changed into a tactical wargame... but, at the same time, would require more advanced forethought when it comes to fighting wars. Also, it would force civs to adjust as they move to expand into unfamiliar terrains. e.g. The Roman Empires dominated nearly every aspect of warfare, but was never really able to conquer the art of fighting in the forests of Germany.