You want the Reality? You can't handle the reality!

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by yin26
Agreed. The immersion factor drops to the floor. And that, IMO, is a kiss of death.

You eagerly jump onto the weak rhetoric deployed in this thread. In essence, ALL computer games boil down to dry calculations and can be broken down to binary values. Ergo, ALL computer games are stale?



(gotta love that smilie)

[Moraelin]

Grim Legacy, ANYTHING that has to do with a computer has some numbers underneath, but some are better at hiding that. I mean, really, if you have to remind the player at every single turn that it's just a dice game, you might as well animate the dice on the screen too. Would that be more immersive? Personally I'd say definitely not.

The whole idea of an immersive game is that I can think I'm Napoleon conquering Russia, and that those are my trusty cavalry and cannons against the Russians' cossacs and peasants with pichforks. Not that I'm playing dice with the Russians, and that's my generic 4/2/1 card against their generic 1/4/1 card. Let's roll the dice and see who won. Darn. Want to go for double or nothing, Catherine?

Some games also offer a lot more than dice rolling. (Again, even though we all know that deep under there must be some 2D10 rolls.) E.g., stepping outside the empire building, the Fallout series sure had some dice rolls there, but it also had more opportunities to actually role-play than any other computer game.

So no, I wouldn't say that simply having numbers underneath makes a game "stale" or "non-immersive". But if ALL you do in the game is number accountancy, well, it's a different story.

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by Moraelin
Grim Legacy, ANYTHING that has to do with a computer has some numbers underneath, but some are better at hiding that. I mean, really, if you have to remind the player at every single turn that it's just a dice game, you might as well animate the dice on the screen too. Would that be more immersive? Personally I'd say definitely not.

The whole idea of an immersive game is that I can think I'm Napoleon conquering Russia, and that those are my trusty cavalry and cannons against the Russians' cossacs and peasants with pichforks. Not that I'm playing dice with the Russians, and that's my generic 4/2/1 card against their generic 1/4/1 card. Let's roll the dice and see who won. Darn. Want to go for double or nothing, Catherine?

Some games also offer a lot more than dice rolling. (Again, even though we all know that deep under there must be some 2D10 rolls.) E.g., stepping outside the empire building, the Fallout series sure had some dice rolls there, but it also had more opportunities to actually role-play than any other computer game.

So no, I wouldn't say that simply having numbers underneath makes a game "stale" or "non-immersive". But if ALL you do in the game is number accountancy, well, it's a different story.

You talk about dice rolling. How would you then propose to model the combat system? To my knowledge, even the best combat games basically use a complex unit strength model (front armour, gunsize, terrain, weather, supply, movement, surpression etc etc) and use this against the similarly calculated opponent. The result is a gamble, with pre-determined odds. That's how it is.

Now, in Civ3, the system is more or less the same, except for the low number of combat rounds, making the sample of the battle very small and thus more prone to fluctuation.

Thus, this can yield weird results that may upset the player, but which also might add to the challenge.

[yin26]

Then why not just stare at number on a screen? I'll tell you why: Because you want to be immersed, to suspend your disbelief. A game that fails to realize that fundamental factor to any good computer game doesn't deserve to be published.

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by yin26
Then why not just stare at number on a screen? I'll tell you why: Because you want to be immersed, to suspend your disbelief. A game that fails to realize that fundamental factor to any good computer game doesn't deserve to be published.

You seem to contradict yourself. Now you don't want pre-determined combat? If we had pre-determined combat, we could indeed be looking at numbers on the screen. Civ2 came pretty close (still I liked it but that's beside the point).

Or perhaps you want randomness in combat? Civ3 is doing nicely there.

Hm maybe the best alternative would be some randomness, but with a 'suspension of disbelief-friendly' chance calculation. Is Civ3 doing so bad in this light? I think not.

Since the main gripe seems to be about the unbelievable combat events I might add here that preventing these flukes from occuring would require rewiring the whole system to the extent that not only these flukes have become impossible, but also so that the normal combat results get flattened (i.e. the tank always wins over the musketeer). Like in Civ2.

[madmario]

Originally posted by Moraelin
It's also a problem that the attack and defense values are totally uninspired.

Maybe it's a matter of game balance? Combine a bit of imagination (there arn't really spearmen in today's world! only poorly armed troops) and consideration in terms of balance.

-mario

[Segal]

renfro

Actually I would love to see all these things added.

Agincourt is a great example. How did an army of 4,500 men, mostly light infantry and longbowmen, defeat a army of 25,000 including some of the French's best knights?

Weather - A rainy night caused the battlefield to become a large mud pit. Heavily armored men could barely move in the muck and once they engaged were so exhausted that they could hardly defend themselves.

Terrain - The battlefield as set in a muddy plowed field with woodlands to either side. The narrow field virtually eliminated most of the advantage of superior numbers. The lightly armored Bowmen were able to move about the battlefield in response to threats while the heavily armored French were forced to move either forward or backward.

Morale - King Henry has the loyalty and confidence of his men, Morale was high. French nobles were trying to place themselves in the best position to gain glory in what was assumed to be a easy fight. The French bowman were moved to the back of the formation since such 'low-births' had no place at the front with the nobility. Morale dropped even more once the horsed knights were butchered as they slogged through the mud and had to retreat the field.

Leadership - King Henry had control of his small army while the French had no central command.

Though the Longbowmen won the day due to numerous factors as illustrated above. Without these factors, they would have been easily slaughtered in a straight up battle. It was the circumstances of the day that made all the difference.

I would love to see all this stuff in the game but I do see one point that others might be missing. Realism, to some degree, makes the battle less predictible, not more.

[Moraelin]

Segal, a longbowman was trained to shoot one arrow every five seconds, for pretty long periods of time. That's why they were more expensive than crossbowmen.

If you do the maths, the French faced a hail of almost 1000 arrows per second. If you're telling me that it counts as the archers being defenseless, then we have very different ideas of what defenseless means.

We're also talking Bodkin tip, which can not only go straight through a manequin in chain armor, it can also go straight through one dressed in a modern heavy kevlar vest.

Also take a look at those numbers you posted. Over 5 times the number of attackers as of defenders. So, yes, in THOSE conditions, yep, they probably needed all the circumstances they could get. Now think equal numbers. One unit against one unit, which is what's wrong in Civ 3. I do believe that if it were 4500 English against 4500 french, they probably wouldn't have needed any help from the weather.

BUT more importantly, exactly how would if have been differently if the archers were in attack, instead of defense? Even if we were to aggree that archers are supposed to be defenseless to knights, what difference does being on the attack make? What would keep those knights from slaughtering the archers in defense, just as well as in offense?

Either way you want to look at it, ranging from "archers are defenseless" to "archers kick righteous donkey", the current situation makes no sense.

THAT kind of illogical discrepancies is why I think the attack and defense numbers are one royal screw up.

[Venger]

Agincourt wasn't simply longbowmen against Knights - English knights dismounted and used their lances as pikes to defend the field. No matter how many times this has been stated, it wasn't a battle between of English archers vs. French combined arms.

Archers not supported will be ridden down every time.

Venger

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Grim Legacy
You talk about dice rolling. How would you then propose to model the combat system? To my knowledge, even the best combat games basically use a complex unit strength model (front armour, gunsize, terrain, weather, supply, movement, surpression etc etc) and use this against the similarly calculated opponent. The result is a gamble, with pre-determined odds. That's how it is.

Could you please actually read (and maybe even try to understand) what's written before launching into that kind of pointless rhetoric?

Yes, I know there are some dice involved, and you may notice that I've already said I know that. Virtually all games have some dice rolling underneath. Yes. That I do know. But not all force me to remember the numbers involved.

Basically some models are better than others. Ssome actually attempt to model some realistic odds in that situation. Things CAN go pear shape, and often do, but at least the odds of that happening are within believable margins. And others, like Civ 3 just have some profoundly wrong numbers, pulled out of someone's rear end. Which make no sense, so you have to just memorize them as they are and simply play a game of numbers.

Also I've already stated that I have no problem with statistical flukes. If something incredible happens once in a while, sure, it's ok. But when it's no fluke, and it happens like that 9 times out of 10... then I do say there's a problem. No fluke happens THAT often. (Again, the Longbowmen vs Longbowmen situation is no fluke, is just use of wrong numbers in the first place.)

And again, the whole point of immersion is that I shouldn't have to remember the exact numbers on any unit. Dunno, maybe you're an accountant by trade, and think that numbers are the apex of quality entertainment. I'm not. When I'm playing "Steel Panthers" I don't even try to remember the exact numbers the game gave each tank. I can just think in terms of the real tanks, and apply some common sense. (Such as that it SHOULD have weaker armour on the sides, so maybe I can flank it.) I can think they ARE tanks, not sets of numbers. That's what immersion is all about. And that's why a good model is important.

[Ozymandous]

You're forgetting something...

Originally posted by Seeker
Actually, in Civ 2 the calculation involved Attack, Defense, Firepower, and Hit Points.

Firepower was removed in Civ 2, and Hit Points were simplified. This was a mistake. There was only a snow balls chance in hell that a Phalanx could stop a tank in the open in Civ 2.

Examples of other strategy games:

In Panzer General, units have soft, hard, air, torpedo, and close att/defense values, modified by terrain.

I actually think that a Panzer General -like system would've been very good for Civ.

In the Operational Art of War, units have base combat stats like in Pz Gen, but modified by more than terrain.

Values were modified by supply route, force supply, morale, air interdiction value, etc. Too complex for Civ, but it is possible to approach realism.

one of your ideas was good, the ability to flag ancient, medieval, renaissance, and modern units. Civil War riflemen should be able to deal handily with medieval knights.

Umm, 'cuse but you're forgetting that BOTH of the games you mentioned were WAR GAMES and NOT EMPIRE BUILDING GAMES.

See the difference? In PG, PG2, Steel Panthers, OAW, etc, these figures HAD to be absolute because they were all you had. You didn't manage cities, or an economy (other than points to upgrade your units), or have to worry about culture, science, etc. So, OF COURSE, these games had all those details.

If you want to play a WAR SIMULATOR then go play one of the games mentioned above, if you want an some-what abstracted EMPIRE BUILDING GAME, then play Civ3. That's a simple concept to grasp, why do so many people have so much trouble with it?

[Ozymandous]

Were we playing the same game?

Originally posted by jadlakha
The solution for Civ III in solving all combat woes would have been to just copy verbatim the exact combat system of the Call To Power series. Combat was the best part of the series. Call To Power had quite the realistic combat system. To bad its not possible to implement the combat system of Call To Power into Civ III anymore now that its been released. With the new Air combat stuff and bombardment, it would have been interesting to see how combat played out combined with the Call to Power system. But to late for that..............

You are kidding right? When you say that the combat system in CTP was "realistic"?

Did you ever take 5 tanks in CTP and fight 10 knights backed by archers and samauri? Your tanks would lose, guarenteed.

CTP had good ideas about how to combine units into effective armies, with ranged units in back, flanking units on the sides, etc, but when you have PIKEMEN and archers beat TANKS in the CTP series you can NOT say that system is better than the one we have in Civ3 now.

At least in Civ3 you may lose a tank to a spearman occasionally but you won't have a large group of them lose to a group of less effective units SIMPLY because the lower powered units have twice the numbers. At least in my games.

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Venger
Agincourt wasn't simply longbowmen against Knights - English knights dismounted and used their lances as pikes to defend the field. No matter how many times this has been stated, it wasn't a battle between of English archers vs. French combined arms.

1) And again, even assuming that archers are defenseless to knights, it's still wrong. OK, I believe you. Archers alone don't survive. Fine. But what difference does it make if they're on attack or defense? Are you telling me that archers vs knights aren't exactly as defenseless when they attack?

Let's take Agincourt again. If it was the French defending, and the English archers attacking... what difference would it have made? What would have kept the French knights from charging the Longbowmen in THAT situation? Wouldn't have those archers STILL needed some pikemen as defense?

2) Almost no combat since Thermopilae had one single kind of unit in either attack or defense, so that's irrelevant. Always the archers had some support, and swordsmen were always backed by some archers. E.g., most actual Roman legions weren't the Civ 3 "bunch of identical guys with swords", they also had integral cohorts of horsemen and archers.

E.g., a real WW2 Panzer division had only ONE regiment of actual tanks, but TWO regiments of infantry. It also had towed artillery, self propelled artillery, towed AT guns, SP AT guns, AA guns, 81mm mortar tubes, howitzers, and so on. Not just a few, but LOTS of them. I can give you the numbers if you want to.

In fact, if you want something more funky to think about dig the following equipment that was an integral part of an 1944 German _paratroopers_ division. You'd think it's just a bunch of guys with rifles jumping from airplanes, right? Actually, wrong:

2x 75mm light gun
8x HMG
8x 81mm mortar tubes
63x 120mm mortar tubes
76x bazookas
24x 105mm howitzers
12x 150mm howitzers
27x 20mm towed AA guns
12x 88mm towed AT guns
12x self-propelled 20mm AA guns
21x 75mm towed AT guns
14x 75mm self-propelled AT guns

(If you have to ask how do you para-drop an 150mm howitzer, you don't. That's what gliders are for.)

Well, that was the ideal organization on paper, so an actual unit may have differed a bit, but still. The whole point is that if we accept that one unit is a division, it already has combined arms IN it. Infantry is not just a bunch of guys with rifles, and armour isn't just the unsupported tanks that anyone can destroy with pot lids.

[Segal]

renfro

Hahaha, Sorry to hijack this thread on to a discussion about Agincourt.

Archers are awesome, but given a fight between 4500 Archers and 4500 Heavy Horse, I'll take the horse.

Agincourt was won by the Archers but they were given that chance by the footmen that defended the burns. The English carried their own fortifications with them and hammered them into the ground as the French Horse charged. Between the sloppy field, the spiked poles sticking out of the ground, and the footmen, the French were stopped cold.

Casualties were heaviest at the back the of French formation. Since the bowmen couldnt fire into the melee, they lofted flights of arrows at the ranks of French waiting to get the front. The English had so few footmen, a large portion of the bowmen dropped their bows and pulled sidearms to defend the lines.

The French had bows too, just didnt have any targets to fire at once the forces were locked together and the enlglish bowman were positioned directly behind the lines.

[Ozymandous]

Originally posted by Moraelin
Grim Legacy, ANYTHING that has to do with a computer has some numbers underneath, but some are better at hiding that. I mean, really, if you have to remind the player at every single turn that it's just a dice game, you might as well animate the dice on the screen too. Would that be more immersive? Personally I'd say definitely not.

The whole idea of an immersive game is that I can think I'm Napoleon conquering Russia, and that those are my trusty cavalry and cannons against the Russians' cossacs and peasants with pichforks. Not that I'm playing dice with the Russians, and that's my generic 4/2/1 card against their generic 1/4/1 card. Let's roll the dice and see who won. Darn. Want to go for double or nothing, Catherine?

Some games also offer a lot more than dice rolling. (Again, even though we all know that deep under there must be some 2D10 rolls.) E.g., stepping outside the empire building, the Fallout series sure had some dice rolls there, but it also had more opportunities to actually role-play than any other computer game.

So no, I wouldn't say that simply having numbers underneath makes a game "stale" or "non-immersive". But if ALL you do in the game is number accountancy, well, it's a different story.

You want to simulate the Napoleanic battles? Fine, then go buy that game. There are (or used to be) several good games that depict the wars during that time period. They have all the DETAILED, exact numbers and unit things you want.

If you want a somewhat realistic look at how you could potentially change REAL history, i.e. the stuff we live through daily, then go buy EU and maybe EU2 (I heard EU2 is more abstract and "main-stream" to be as true of a representaion than EU was).

Civ3 isn't realistic since 99% of the leaders didn't live in the time periods covered and some of the civilizations covered were never more than a very breif footnote in the hostiry of the world, yet people want to complain because the combat engine in Civ3 isn't up to par with other WAR GAMES or REAL history? Come on, sheesh...