WTF: no firepower?

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Knigget
If there's no firepower the roman legions and musketmen are equally good...

Say it ain't so

If its raining they'll be vastly superior....

[Jason Beaudoin]

Ya... there you go... that needs some clarification on how that works.

[KrazyHorse]

Hex, what was the improbable result? Rorke's Drift or Isandlwana?

[hexagonian]

Actually, I do not think either is improbable, since they both happened...

It could be argued that superior weaponry always should win the battle, and it is the basis for the argument that phalanxes should never beat a tank - and this was the main argument in the ctp1 thread when this issue came up. When playing that game though, it really did not happen to me because the whole basis of combat was to build up a balanced force with ranged and unranged units - using the bombard capability to seriously weaken the target before going in for the kill, which I normally did.

I do think that many of those unusual results that were reported were partially due to a players lack of understanding of the combat system. To be fair though, their viewpoint was a valid one - as planes could actually be shot down by spearman, which was totally unrealistic. This was due to the fact that there were also a lot of defensive modifiers available - (city walls/terrain/fortify) that would bring up the numbers of the weaker unit too.

I am not totally familiar with the combat system of civ3, having not followed it extensively (too many ongoing threads in this forum to cover), but I'm assuming that with air units, for example (as this was the case with SMAC) certain ground units cannot counter against air units, especially pre-modern units. If this is the case for civ3, this will very good and should go a long way towards making sure that unrealistic attacks do not occur.

After all, from a truly realistic standpoint, a phalanx should not even be allowed to fire back at a battleship, and if there is the ability of a phalanx being able to do so, then combat is not going to be well-thought out. (and yes, I realize that a phalanx could sneak aboard a battleship and subdue the crew too, but that actually is quite a stretch for me)

As for the combat results from different land units from differenty ages, this issue is a little harder to clearly define, because incidents such as what occured in the Anglo-Zulu war show that there are times that superior weaponry does not always carry the day. My hope is that from a probability standpoint, there should always be a slight uncertainty in any battle, but this needs to be slight, at most.

Your battleship/phalanx example was based on no terrrain/fortify/walls issues too, which means that if the battleship (or tank) were to attack the phalanx who was well fortified with these bonuses, then the numbers end up getting skewed more in favor of the phalanx to inflict and possibly destroy the battleship. This may not be good, IMO.

And with the removal of firepower as a means to counter that effect, then the whole system is based on the combat numbers, (and HP, if those are different from unit to unit). CTP1 tried to use this system, and they had the same results that were in civ1.

A question...Is there different HP for each unit, because if this is the case, then civ3's system might work as advertised. But there will be times that a weakened superior unit will be defeated by a healthier inferior unit - which may then give an accurate reflection of what does happen in a battle.

And since combat will be different from the past, with troops rotating in and out of battle, then this may also give more conventional results. I am glad to see the whole idea of the winner take all approach gone, when one superior unit wipes out an entire stack of inferior units.

[Dutch]

The answer to your question is:

Yes, there are hitpower differences between units, which is necessary for realism. The only thing firepower did was to take away enemy hitpoints at a quicker rate. But this would probably be dealt with using a greater range of hitpoints and/or attack/defence values.

Let us hope it works out well that way.

But the battleship should still be able to bombard and destroy a phalanx without taking any damage in return ...

[korn469]

who cares about realism!
just think about this bad outcome of the battle changes

after a war

regular units will be either

100%
67%
34%
-dead-

vet units

100%
75%
50%
25%
-dead-

elite

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
-dead-

that sucks to me

[Kaznix]

I'd be surprised if a battleship could do a standard "assault" attack on a land square at all. I reckon it'll only be able to bombard a land square, hence making most ground units unable to respond. In which case, as you'd expect, the battleship wont get a scratch from the phalanx.

Just a forum noobs few cents.

[Grunthex]

Korn, I agree with your point that it doesn't leave enough... damage states I guess you'd call it, for the units. But even if it's not possible to modify hp by age, which I really hope for, you could still, I'm fairly certain, multiply the hp by say, a factor of 4, couldn't you?

Assuming the editor supports this of course, you could change the hp from 3/4/5 for reg/vet/elite units to 12/16/20 without really changing the delicate balance Firaxis has surely worked really really hard on. You'd not change the combats, but you'd have much more variation in the damage level afterwards.

[korn469]

Grunthex

well it might be that each hit point has 10 subhitpoints, so a 3 hp regular unit really has 30 hitpoints, i really hope that the damage states (good term btw! ) aren't so limited

[Grunthex]

Originally posted by korn469
Grunthex

well it might be that each hit point has 10 subhitpoints, so a 3 hp regular unit really has 30 hitpoints, i really hope that the damage states (good term btw! ) aren't so limited

Woo, I figured out how to quote!

I've been thinking a bit more about it, and I'm not so sure my idea is actually as simple as it first looks on the face of it. Probably why I'm not a game designer.

Firstly, I'm not willing to wrack my brains for the math, but I'm no longer certain multiplying the hp equally actually leaves the combat odds unchanged. Obviously it would if Attack=Defense, but outside of that, it SEEMS to me, that the more imbalanced the numbers, the more we'd be tilting the odds in the large numbers favour. You'd see a small difference with say, a 3 on 2, a larger with an 8 on 3. Someone with more math than I can conjure up just after midnight might want to see if the odds of overall victory change if the units both have 3 hp, compared to say, 9.

Secondly, with combat being subdivided into rounds, what if a combat can only run X rounds, and then it's a draw? I seem to recall artillery vs. artillery battles in SMAC worked that way, and if all combat here does, we'd be leaving a LOT of draws out there.

Thirdly, artillery itself. Bombarding HAS to be a limited number of rounds, almost certainly, (talking straight bombardment, with no counter-attack). This would make bombardment near useless unless you could also modify the number of rounds bombardment continued for.

The ideal case would be your last one, where each hp was already subdivided by Firaxis. Otherwise, I guess we'll just have to wait until we see the game to see. I'm perfectly willing to play a game (or 12) to see how the out-of-the-box balance/damage runs. Firaxis has done pretty good so far, maybe I'm speculating for nothing.

[korn469]

Grunthex

well if the hit points aren't subdivided, and a regular unit only has three damage states (besides dead) then a single successful bombard would do 1/3 damage to the unit, and it also means that unlike in SMAC, the most damage you could do to a regular unit would to 2/3 so it would have about 34 of its health left...it also means that elite units could have a smaller percentage of their health left after numerous bombards

[Grunthex]

I never even thought of that. That's a bit too obvious for Firaxis to miss. Therefore, hp must be subdivided. Right. I'm convinced now.

[Sarxis]

But percentage of health doesn't matter since the HPs are counted as whole numbers.

I would rather look at it like this:

Regular unit- I I I
Veteran- I I I I
Elite- I I I I I

Where a regular unit would be Dead, a veteran or elite unit might survive with one or two more hits.

Saying that a regular unit with one HP left is at 34% strength, but an elite unit with one HP left is only at 20% strength is very misleading, as both units still attack and defend with the same attributes. The only difference, of course, is that the elite unit has that extra 'chance' to make/take a hit that the regular and vet doesn't get.


But really, I know what the whole argument is: we really don't want Panzers taking ANY damage from Warriors, etc., since this seems unrealistic. Well, even a guy with just a rock could probably do some damage to a Panzer, if he dropped that rock in the gas tank. But I for one like to see impossible odds beaten, at least every so often, and I doubt that many Warriors will be putting up successful offensives against Germany's armored elite.

[korn469]

Anunikoba

the big advantage of vet and elite units is the fact that they have more hitpoints than normal units...if you have an elite rifleman and a regular rifleman in a stack, and a stealth bomber bombards them four times, then the elite rifleman and the regular rifleman will have the same amount of hitpoints (assuming all four bombards were successful) because the regular rifleman could only lose two hit points in a bombard

don't you consider that a problem?

[Bleyn]

Originally posted by Grunthex


Woo, I figured out how to quote!

I've been thinking a bit more about it, and I'm not so sure my idea is actually as simple as it first looks on the face of it. Probably why I'm not a game designer.

Firstly, I'm not willing to wrack my brains for the math, but I'm no longer certain multiplying the hp equally actually leaves the combat odds unchanged. Obviously it would if Attack=Defense, but outside of that, it SEEMS to me, that the more imbalanced the numbers, the more we'd be tilting the odds in the large numbers favour. You'd see a small difference with say, a 3 on 2, a larger with an 8 on 3. Someone with more math than I can conjure up just after midnight might want to see if the odds of overall victory change if the units both have 3 hp, compared to say, 9.

Grunthrex, I was working on a reply on exactly these same lines to point out that exact problem. Increasing the hitpoints of units does significantly swing the balance in favor of the stronger unit.

The reason is the more hits a unit can take, the more rounds it will take for that unit to be killed. The more rounds, the more likely it is for the strong unit to win.

In fact, you can already see this in the game. For example, in a combat between say, a standard cavalry and a standard spearman, the spearman has a better chance of survival if both are regular than if both are veteran or elite, simply because the longer the combat is stretched out the more the advantage of the cavalry becomes magified. Of course, the best chance of the spearman is if they are elite, and the cavalry is regular, but that is sort of obvious compared to the relationship between the other situations.

I could try showing some math to back it up, but it becomes very long rather quickly.