I can't believe this..

[HappySunShine]

I played civ3 today for 3 hours. That's more playing time in 1 day than the past 9 months since its release. I decided to try out the patch and I was really impressed with some of the new features. However for all the fixes one of the biggest problems still exists...the battle model. Is it that difficult to fix? How can you call a game strategy when the greatest strategy feature is based, as far as I can tell, on random numbers. For three hours I played and everything was going great and then I declared war on the Russians. All they had was regular archers and spearmen, nothing special. Yet my veteran and alot of times elite knights would seemingly randomly die to them. Even attacking an archer with a defense of 1 would sometimes kill my knights. I attacked a warrior, just a regular warrior, with my elite knight and it DIED! But that's not even the worst case. The final stunt was when I attacked just a regular old spearman on a size 3 city and it took my army of 3 elite knights down to red without losing a single hitpoint. How ridiculous is that? And is the defense of 3 for knights correct or is that a typo? Every time an archer with an attack of 2 attacks a veteran knight, the knight loses majority of the time. Civilization 3 isn't a difficult game, the AI isn't any harder than it was in civ2. The simple fact is that the biggest part of the game has a major flaw in it. No game can survive in MP if it doesn't have some sort of consistency to its play, nor can it be called strategy when the outcome of battles are random. Is this going to be fixed in PTW?

[Lord Merciless]

Well, I say that's purely bad luck. We warmongers usually overcome this kind of bad luck by using overwhelming forces. The more battles you fight, the more reasonable the random number generator. But I haven't seen anything like you described.

[HappySunShine]

Winning fights through sheer numbers is not a strategy game. When you're dealing with a small number of units early on it takes real planning to win...at least it did in civ2. I'm not really concerned about single player, I'm concerned about MP. In MP games aren't decided by mass wars with massive amounts of units. They're decided early by fewer amounts of units. If the early game is going to be determined randomly then in a higher skill level MP game the games will come down to who has the best early battle outcomes. Trust me, I know. I was a very skilled player in the MP world for civ2. Civ3 has come a long long way since it was released, and aside from my numerous complaints against the game it has a few really glaring flaws that have to fixed in order for MP to be successful. I'm not the only one that has these off the wall results with the combat system.

[Jaybe]

1. This is NOT Civ2.
2. Just imagine how it might have been in MP and YOU were the Russians against those mighty Knights. What a relief it would have been. OTOH, in the end, you still 'won' your war against the Russians, didn't you?

[HappySunShine]

1. This is NOT Civ2.

Thankyou for pointing that out. I think it's pretty obvious that civ3 is not civ2 just by comparing the amount of units sold.

2. Just imagine how it might have been in MP and YOU were the Russians against those mighty Knights. What a relief it would have been. OTOH, in the end, you still 'won' your war against the Russians, didn't you?

That has got to be the most ridiculous argument I have ever heard. Obviously you have never played MP before. Saying that the flaw works both ways does not change the fact that it is a flaw. If there existed a bug that randomly gave someone 9999 gold you would still call it a bug and ask for it to be fixed even though the bug works for both players.

[asleepathewheel]

Why play the game if you know the outcome of every battle before you engage? Why not just have a game where numerical/strength superiority would cause the enemy to capitulate?

So you have some bad luck. Tell that to the Spanish Armada.
sh*t happens in real life, as in the game. Why should there be consistency in a game when in real life dumb luck plays such a major role in every aspect of existence?

[Bleyn]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel
Why play the game if you know the outcome of every battle before you engage? Why not just have a game where numerical/strength superiority would cause the enemy to capitulate?

So you have some bad luck. Tell that to the Spanish Armada.
sh*t happens in real life, as in the game. Why should there be consistency in a game when in real life dumb luck plays such a major role in every aspect of existence?

Don't forget that a LOT of people around here seem to forget that numerical and/or technological superiority do not always mean winning the battle or the war.

You're right. Things happen. That is why SNAFU and FUBAR are now long standing military axioms. And it didn't just happen to the Spanish Armada. There are numerous examples from history of the "wrong" side winning battles and wars.

In fact, as Sun Tzu pointed out thousands of years ago, and people are still ignoring today, the real victory most of the time is not to win the physical battle, its to win the information battle that preceeds the physical battle. Win that, and often the physical battle will follow. Lose the information battle and you are in real trouble.

And the only way to simulate that is random numbers.

[DrFell]

Freak results happened in civ2 you know. Just at a more predictable frequency.

Anyway, there is a simple option which could be added which would satisfy everyone. Like accelerted production, adding an option to double units hitpoints at the start would pretty much solve the problem. I think it's time the MP community started pressing this issue, we want this in the expansion pack (it's so simple to add).

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by HappySunShine


Thankyou for pointing that out. I think it's pretty obvious that civ3 is not civ2 just by comparing the amount of units sold.

Yes. And if you do compare you may find that 3 is ahead of 2 by a long way in the same time frame. Thanks for bringing that up.

[Coracle]

No, Civ 3 is not Civ 2. That is pretty obvious by comparing the FUN factor of each, and how much LEGS each will have. Civ 2 wins hands down. Save the references to sales for a stockholders' meeting; I could care less.

As for combat. . .

We needed STACK combat with Realtime tactics. This was discussed online years ago after Civ 2 came out. But we still get this individual vs individual unit stuff.

The combat values in the game make very little sense, are highly unrealistic, and cause very weird things to happen. Knights should be 5.2.2.

That would force an attacker to bring up pikemen to hold ground, as would have been the case in reality, rather than just have a giant stack of 4.3. knights.

Yes, the '3' defense factor is RIDICULOUS. It is the same defense factor as rifle-armed Cavalry!! The defense factor in the game of Longbowmen (a '1') is even more absurd.

So, if you don't mod it you will have very strange and frustrating results that are antithetical to history and kill a lot of the fun of game-playing.

[Robert]

- stack comabat sucks. Look at CtP. It's just big armies vs big armies. It adds nothing.

- of course your units die now and then. There's no perfect war in which none of your units die. Most of the time, and for sure in ancient wars, there were MUUUCH death people.

[HappySunShine]

The spanish armada lost to the English fleet in the same way that the Persians lost to the greeks. Smaller ships in a small channel beat larger slower ships. Is this some freak stroke of luck that will randomly change if we were to recreate it? No, it's strategy. Military genius. There is no such thing in real life as a lucky war.

Freak results happened in civ2 you know. Just at a more predictable frequency.

Freak results were just that, freak results. In civ3 they aren't freak results, they're a common event.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by HappySunShine
Freak results were just that, freak results. In civ3 they aren't freak results, they're a common event.

I find combat in Civ3 to be reasonable and predictable. The outcome of any single combat may be uncertain, but the outcome of a coordinated campaign does not have to be. I find the combat system comprehensible and very fun to play. If I can do it, you can too.

Soldiers die in war, and even the victor must pay a price in blood.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by HappySunShine There is no such thing in real life as a lucky war.

"Luck" refers to those factors beyond our control. How did John Paul Jones beat and capture the British frigate Serapis with a refitted merchant vessel, the Bonhomme Richard? Pluck. But from the strategic planner's point of view, it was simply "luck."



From Navy.Mil

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/traditions/html/jpjones.html

[HappySunShine]

Obviously luck plays a small part, but strategic planning is what is the main factor. In civ3 luck of the roll is what determines the battles. And you really shouldn't be comparing civ3 to real life nor any computer game for that matter. If computer games were like real life then they wouldn't be very fun. This has nothing to do with realism, and even if you wanted to get started on realism the idea of ancient archers beating knights 50% of the time is pretty ludicrous. The fact is the combat model is flawed and I don't see any arguments other than simply luck is a part of life to refute that.