Casualties of War

[Demerzel]

yes I know it's a game but as I plainly said the whole point of CivX is that its an abstraction of reality. the fun is in the abstraction not in the ruthless implemention of reality.

For example, I do not want to have to have feelings of guilt for being forced to "ethnically cleanse" opponent civs because the game is so limited as to force me to do that. Why in hell would I want to see a list of civilian casualties I enforced on the enemy?

with regards to your use of stats to determine if an enemy uses artillery extensively, surely using a spy to determine that s/he has say 50+ of the things pretty much guarantees that they will use them in some capacity.

btw, even if we consider infantry/rifleman/etc.. to regiment in size that is still ~3,000 men and half casualties amount to 1,500 men a pop. in a very large battle with armour scything through enemy defences, that would be say 10-15 modern armour/tanks taking on 30-40 infantry. if all infantry killed thats say 35 * 3,000 men killed. 105,000 dead in one titantic battle and i've had that happen more frequent in game than I'd care to admit yet that pales between the two to three million I've killed in a siege of a size 20+ city.

ONCE AGAIN.

Yes it's a game but let's keep it abstract eh? I sometimes have to reduce a size 20+ city to a size 6 city in order to capture it but I do not want to reflect on the realities of the millions of deaths that really entails. similarly if the enemy attacks with a 30+ stack and I eliminate it, should i glory in the hundred thousand deaths I've inflicted?

I've won, the enemy lost. that's good enough for me. not who can ethnically cleanse the best...

[Patroklos]

You are right, it is just a game.

That bieng said, I look at it as a simulation also. I like playing on real world maps to see "how things might have been different," and make senarios to replay historical events. The degree of accuracy is suspect because of the engine, but I can think of no other game that can come close to this and still be interesting and fun.

If you need to bombard a city to size six to take it then yes, you are inteed bing ruthless and killing millions of people. If you want to be true to ethics, then try to take it without the bombardment. Yeah, your casualties would be high, but that is the price of ethics. Real western nations struggle with this problem today, where their ethics require to go to extreme methods to acheive victory without civilian casualties. Play like them then. Perhaps for players such as yourself, one of the challenges could be to see if you can win without bieng a murderer.

And I must say, when you bomb a city in real life you don't normally kill millions, you kill thousands and make millions refugees (yeah in WWII we did kill millions in bombing, but that took 6 years of war to do). I have mentioned including refugees in the game, perhaps as population in cities during wartime that produce nothing but cost money? Whatever it is, it would be easier to just call them "casualties." Or reduce the number of people each pop point represents to reflect that not all of them were killied.

Once again, I view the game as a simulation, and I enjoy realism, or at least as close to it as I can get. In real war civilians die, deal with it. So in my simulations I want to know how many of my and their people were killed. Call me a nazi if you will, but I will call you a hippy (that is only if you call me a nazi of course ).

Note: I already do my best to calculate these numbers on paper when I play (not the shield idea, that would just take too much time). It is tedious but rewarding work, as it once again adds more realism to the game.

And I have to say this, who is the biggest monster (as far as a computer gamer killing nonexistant people goes), those who put a face to those they kill with a quantitative analysis, or those who call them "pop points" and leave them at that?

[JohnM2433]

Maybe bombarding cities should negatively effect your reputation. Then it would make sense to keep track of civilian casualties, and try to minimize them. Having access to the AI's casualty histories would be nice too. If you knew that an AI caused a high number of civilian casualties, you could lower your opinion of them, just as they do to you.

[Demerzel]

darn nazi

not bombarding that size 21 city with 30 or 40 bombers before attacking it would have meant I'd have lost nearly half my tank strength trying to winkle out the 10 or so infantry defence. ouch. i don't normally use any kind of bombardment until the very end game but then a well defended AI size 12+ city is too hard to take otherwise.

[Cidifer]

If you really don't want to feel "guilty" then there's no need that your wars carry you all the way to an enemies size 20 cities. Most boarders cities are smaller then that and who the heck is going to make you look at the casuality report? We're not talking about a talking report that says "hey you just killed a million people."
Also I don't know about you but genreally I don't build 50+ of one thing unless I have some where around that many in a complementing unit (for example Cavalry\riflemen). Also just becuase I see someone has a whole lot of bombers or artilary doesn't mean they are more likely to go on a bombing spree then someone with half as many who has been doing it all game. For example if I have 2 countries boardering me and I see that one has killed say 3 million enemy soldiers and 500,000 civilians and the other has only killed a 500,000 soldiers and no civilians I'd be more afriad of the 1st one invading me even if the other had a much larger military. The reasoning is, if he's got a smaller military and has been in a bunch or wars it's probably because he's been using his more and has been going after cities more often then the other guy.

This could also add something else to trade, (casualty reports). Whenever a civ goes to war with another one both sides should save a report of their casualties taken and inflicted, that way when you meet new civs you can trade these to get an idea of how they (as well as the other civs around them) have been playing on their continent while you've been on yours.

Basically if you don't like it you don't have to read it, (we'll never get it anyway so it doesn't matter) and if you really felt bad about it you wouldn't do it in the 1st place, you know (or should know) that every time a city drops a size from bombardment that means thousands of people have been killed. Why doesn't that make you feel bad?

[Martinus]

I think we are facing one of those "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody sees it" absurdities.

I mean, come on. If you shoot a man in the street, would you only feel guilty if you read about the murder in a newspaper on the next day? I'd call it psycho

[Martinus]

Besides, I think it is a great idea both ways, actually, adding to a realism. Not only you can avoid mass murder, you could actually make it a point in a MP game with likewise minded players to "punish" genocidal civs (at least it would make a nice, yet another, casus belli to kick someone else's ass).

Die genocidal evildoers

[Apolex]

Originally posted by Demerzel
darn nazi

not bombarding that size 21 city with 30 or 40 bombers before attacking it would have meant I'd have lost nearly half my tank strength trying to winkle out the 10 or so infantry defence. ouch. i don't normally use any kind of bombardment until the very end game but then a well defended AI size 12+ city is too hard to take otherwise.

Yeah, these are the horrors of war, which are simulated in a game like this. If that makes you squeemish, may I suggest The Sims for you? The calculation you just did was the same one the United States did when determining whether or not to use the atomic bomb. An invasion of Japan would have killed millions on both sides. The US decided to drop the bomb and instantly kill thousands (REAL people, not pixels!) It's a terrible thing, but you're doing the same thing in this game even if there aren't stats to show it. Maybe you would want the stats in there to try and minimize how many people you kill. I think the idea of it affecting your reputation is interesting.

[Demerzel]

i'm just saying that keeping it abstract is one of the fun points of the game.

sheesh.

[Lunacy]

Originally posted by JohnM2433
Maybe bombarding cities should negatively effect your reputation. Then it would make sense to keep track of civilian casualties, and try to minimize them.

The game would feel more real if bombarding cities non-stop and the resulting civilian casualties had a REALLY negative impact on the attacking civ - particularly in the modern age. Such a strategy could result in more citizens protesting, a really bad reputation with the other civs, trade embargos and possibly even expulsion from the UN (meaning you would loose control of the UN if you were the one who built it). Also - this might be an incentive to try to get weaponry that allows you to do precision attacks. I've never built any of the stealth units but, aside from the humanitarian aspects, if I knew that killing a ton of civilians was going to create a lot of problems that would definitely cause me to consider building the stealth planes that allow precision bombing.

I think nuking is far too easy also. There should be TREMENDOUS consequences if you nuke another civ - not only political but environmental. If you have troops or cities of your own nearby they should have to contend with the possibility of radiation poisoning. Also, the clean-up of any location that's been nuked should take a LONG time and possibly even cost money.

One final thing about the bombing which I think is somewhat unrealistic is that the planes never accidentally drop those bombs on friendly troops. That's a very real part of war - friendly fire. If you bomb something that's right next to one of your units I think there should be a risk there that you might hurt some of your own units.

Lunacy

[Apolex]

Originally posted by Lunacy

One final thing about the bombing which I think is somewhat unrealistic is that the planes never accidentally drop those bombs on friendly troops. That's a very real part of war - friendly fire. If you bomb something that's right next to one of your units I think there should be a risk there that you might hurt some of your own units.

Lunacy

I agree with your other points, but this last one is silly. If the units in Civ III represent 1000-2000 men each, then the results from friendly fire would be completely insignificant. In the Gulf War, the US lost a total of about 200 troops to friendly fire, out of like 500,000. A friendly fire incident (at it's worst) causes maybe 20 casualities... that's not even NEAR enough to warrant even a hit-point loss in one of your units.

In addition, bombing 'right next' to your units in Civ III is a tile away which probably represents at least 50 miles away in distance... way too far away to cause accidents.

True, friendly fire does occur in real life, but so does influenza, stds, awol, etc., (these probably cause more troop loss than friendly fire), but it's not practical or realistic to put them in the game as far as casualities go.

[Cidifer]

Also in the game you never bomb at the same time your troops are engaged in comat, meaning when they are on a tile with an enemy they are fighting with no air support, that can only come before and after battles in a way it's also unrealistic but I think it works pretty well this way.