Please Fix The Combat

[Saber_Cherry]

Great idea for Civ 3 - let's reduce hitpoints to unbalance everything!!!

A better choice would have been to give the player an unpleasant but usable work-around for lacking a strategic resource, like making units that require it cost 3 times as much if you don't have it or something.

I completely agree with this... being forced to make cavalry in modern times because you don't have oil is crazy... lots of modern countries don't have oil, not to mention rubber trees...

Ancient/Medieval units should just die without causing any damage if attacking or defending against modern units, though.

I disagree with this, though. The problem (and thus solution) is extremely simple. Civ1 was unbalanced because units had 1 hitpoint. Civ2 was more balanced because units had 10 hitpoints (they also had firepower, etc, which were kind of silly). Civ 3 is unbalanced because, for some logic that is above mere gamers, the designers made the executive decision to give units 3 hitpoints. I'm all for executive desicions, just not ones that take something that is fixed, and break it, for no logical reason except maybe to partially solve their broken resource system.

(Note: I like resources! I think the idea is cool! But right now EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD USES COAL, IRON, ALUMINUM, AND RUBBER. Almost no countries have local sources of all these...)

[Stuie]

Originally posted by FrantzX
Am I the only who hasn't seen this? I just finished killing the English and Indians. I was in the modern age and they were both in Industrial. With a force of 25 armor, 12 bombers and battleships, I lost 2 armor and a battleship in capturing 20 20 cities. The defenders were mostly riflemen and infantry. I have found that using artilery makes conquest SO much easier.

This has been my experience as well. If you prepare for combat and then execute your attacks properly and with forethought, you will not experience the problems people are complaining about.

Seems like a lot of people are ignoring any sort of tactical thinking (attacking with musketmen??? Why? They are a defensive unit.... same goes for mech infantry....) and just throwing units hap-hazzardly at the enemy. You deserve to lose if that's what you're doing. The combat system rewards planning and use of combined arms. If punishes blind assualts.

[AHO]

Let me throw another monkeywrench into this discussion. After many, many, many...many...good lord how much do i play this thing!...hours of play, it is my observation that results in general, not just in combat, are based on other EVENTS in the game rather than on probabilities alone. For example, in combat early in a game, I was attacking a spearman escorting a settler as well as an enemy city during the same turn. No matter how many times I tried, if I killed the spearman and captured the settler during that turn, I could not defeat the city, defended by a spearman, even though I was attacking with a knight. However, if I saved-tried it-failed-reloaded at the same spot- then chose NOT to kill the spearman and capture the settler during that turn, my knight mopped the floor with spearman in the city, as he should have done all along.
I've also noticed this when entering huts/villages to gain random stuff. It's not random at all. I was entering a village with one unit and attacking an enemy with a different unit in the same turn in completely different areas of the map. I lost the battle but gained a valuable science advancement from the hut, supposedly two random, unrelated events. However, if I saved the game and tried this again, this time choosing not to attack because I was going to lose the battle no matter how many times I saved and tried again (which I think is weird because it's supposed to work on percentages and probabilities which should give you slightly different results each time you attack, however, he lost EVERY stinking time and the defender lost the EXACT same number of hit points EVERY time...but I digress) and JUST entered the hut that turn, saving the unit I was apparently predestined to lose in the battle, but when I entered the hut THIS time, I found barbarians. If I saved-tried it-relaoded-tried again this pattern held true EVERY time. If I lost a battle, the hut on the other side of the world gave me an advance (the same advance every time) but if I didn't fight the losing battle and saved the unit, the hut on the other side of the world gave me barbarians (every time).
What gives?

[Zizka]

In general the resource / luxuries system isn't bad at all the only problem I see is that the presence of oil is bit low given the relatively high number of modern units that need it to be built (which is a bit silly as you don't need oil to build a tank just to drive it .. but you can lose the oil and run all your tanks ..)

Its far too easy to get behind the 8-bal in late game if there's only 2 oil patches in the world and the 2 civ's that hold them are using it up.

My potentail fixes suggestion (one of)
1) Random resources fine. But make it possible to "dig" or explore (via workers) to perhaps find a resource that lasts only 20 turns. Yes in the modern world only few countries have VAST oil resources but most have had some exploitable deposits.
2) City upgrade in modern era "Synthethic Fuel Depot" small wonder basically allows a civ to gain access to one oil source. (Say needs 5 labs to build- research)
3) Make later oil based units not require oil (sorta like rifleman no longer needing saltpeter)

I personally kinda like #2

MY .02

[skink]

Example: An army of 15 attack strength (three elite swordsmen) was utterly destroyed by a pikeman (4.5 defense strength - he was on a hill). The sad part was, that pikeman was still in the green!

I think you're misinterpreting some of the numbers here. Your army had 15 hit points, but an attack factor of only 3. Each member of the army attacks alone until out of hit points. So an attack of 3 vs. defense of 4.5 could conceivably result in a complete loss three times in a row, destroying your army.

[Saber_Cherry]

I suspect that the random number seed is stored in the save file, so all "random" numbers will be the same no matter how many times you reload. The only way to affect outcomes is to vary the order that you use random numbers. So, if fighting the battle is the first action, then the next action (goody hut) will use the next random number... and since that number is bad, you should wait until the next turn to take the hut - all the computer moves inbetween will re-seed your random number.

Personally, though, I will only play on "Ironman" mode, with no save/load. I say "will" because even though I have the game, through a supreme force of will I will NOT play it until it has been patched. If this doesn't occur within 30 days (21 now, I guess) month I'll have to return it... I only own it because I had it pre-ordered due to my previous trust in Firaxis.

[Pembleton]

EDIT: This post has been clarfied later in this thread.

[Saber_Cherry]

2) City upgrade in modern era "Synthethic Fuel Depot" small wonder basically allows a civ to gain access to one oil source. (Say needs 5 labs to build- research)

Hmmm... I like that idea, kind of... I still prefer making a resource lack triple the price of units... but the small wonder would work too. I mean, that's kinda what the Germans had to do in WW2, developing synthetic petroleum, and what the Americans did, developing synthetic rubber. Nowadays, nobody even thinks about natural rubber (except in condoms. Ironically, modern rubber is made of oil, just like synthetic silk (rayon, developed in WW2), nylon, plastics, roads (asphalt), lubricants, printed circuit boards, high explosives (carbon-containing ones), rocket fuel (nitromethane, etc), and so forth. If the US supply of oil was cut off, and we decided not to nuke the Middle East and take it anyway, we would probably just develop ways to synthesize all these things from corn oil, ethanol, wood, or coal. Which would be kind of like a small wonder liberating us from oil dependance.

[zapperio]

One problem with TBS I've played is that you can save before battle and reload, if you don't like the outcome, until the dice come up all sixes, so to speak.

I suspect that in Civ3 every civ, unit, or unit type has a collection of random numbers that are rolled at the beginning of your turn and those numbers are used to resolve combat. It makes sense and is not hard to implement and it deals effectively with the re-load cheat.

Zap

[Pembleton]

Originally posted by Saber_Cherry
If the US supply of oil was cut off, and we decided not to nuke the Middle East and take it anyway, we would probably just develop ways to synthesize all these things from corn oil, ethanol, wood, or coal. Which would be kind of like a small wonder liberating us from oil dependance.

Uh oh, this is getting way off topic but we *are* going to run out of oil in about 30 years or less. And we *will* come up with alternative energy sources.

We can do it now. We have the GNP that would allow us to invest in this research and do it within 5-10 years. But not as long as Bush and his buddies get their money from oil. They'll wait the 20-30 years to profit from this before they start investing more money in alternative energy sources.

[zapperio]

Originally posted by Pembleton


Actually, according to Soren, the human has been given a slight *advantage* in combat because of too many complaints that it was unfair although the combat has always been balanced.

Actually, according to what I understand from the transcript, he said that testers complained and he found it amusing that when he tweaked the humans they thought it was fair. That does not negate his previous comment:

"I am glad you brought this up. The AI get NO combat bonuses of any kind at any difficulty level. I understand that many people have a hard time believe this but let me give an anecdote..."
Soren Johnson

Zap

[Saber_Cherry]

Conclusion: Addressed to Firaxis

Uh oh, this is getting way off topic

True. Ok, let's save the fact that resource system is good but flawed for another thread. My conclusion is this:

Firaxis, what the hell were you thinking by moving hitpoints down to 3??? Set them back at 10!

Then the randomness will be fixed... and if you want modern units to be more powerful, just edit their stats - but they shouldn't lose to ancient peons anymore anyway.

[Pembleton]

Originally posted by zapperio
Actually, according to what I understand from the transcript, he said that testers complained and he found it amusing that when he tweaked the humans they thought it was fair. That does not negate his previous comment:

Thanks for pointing this out, because I actually had doubts about what I said but I decided to go ahead and post it anway because I really find it amusing that unless the human wins 90% of its battles, it isn't "fair".

[zapperio]

Originally posted by Pembleton


I really find it amusing that unless the human wins 90% of its battles, it isn't "fair".

True

In my experience, 4 games on regent, I've seen no head-scratching results from battles. I found that if I sauntered into enemy territory with a single unit or unit type I got slaughtered pretty easily. And when the enemy AI lost its way into my territory I could return the favor.

On the other hand, when I put defensive and offensive units, with artillery and elite unit support into a stack, then that stack became an effective war machine.

Kind of like real life.

Zap

[RichM]

I used to think the same things as most of you, but after playing more and more, I realized that I just had too many preconceptions from civ2. One thing about this game is that quantity matters just as much as quality. I was holding the notion that my veteran, fortified, in a hill city pikemen should be able to hold off any number of archers, but this is not the case in civ3. Any unit can be overwhelmed by the weakest units if the numbers are enough to wear them down. I think I like it that way. In civ2 they wanted to have less randomness than civ1. In civ3 it's back to more randomness again but now you can compensate by stacking many, many units together. Also, the units are much cheaper to support than in previous civs.