Are your units getting blasted?

[Sava]

I've been playing on Regent and have not noticed any of these things you guys are *****ing about. Maybe you all just suck. Try taking out their resources so that they don't have better units, then concentrate your attacks with mobile units. Then, if your knight is getting whooped, he will retreat. By focusing your attack, it might take 4 knights to kill one warrior, but he's dead and you can heal your units. Even if your mobile units get attacked in the open, as long as they have more than one hit point, they will retreat. Unless the computer is attacking with a mobile unit.

Warfare in this game is easy. You need to mass your forces and do two things before taking cities.

1. Position guys by their resources and pillage them so they can't make more guys. Since the computer usually only has one or two of each strategic resource in their possession, this is not hard.

2. Blitzkrieg the majority of their offensive units, primarily their mobile ones. It usually doesn't take me longer than two turns to completely wipe out their non-garrisoned forces. It's like chess, you move your pieces, then strike at once when you have a strategic advantage.

Once this is done, the computer only has about 2-3 defensive units in each city, and since you took out their resources, they can't build more modern units. It doesn't even matter what era you are in, although, I haven't even been to the modern era yet because I kill the comps too fast. Focus on one city at a time. And don't attack until you have 4-5 mobile units in attack position per city per turn. Don't be scared of fortifying outside the city. If they attack you, their unit moves out of the city and into the open, then they only have 1 unit in the city. Even on deity, the comp won't attack using garrisoned forces.

[morb]

just so you know, the difficulty level DOES NOT affect combat. so for those of you trying to come out and suggest ever so indirectly that the rest are somehow inadiquite by assuming that they play at lower difficulty levels (and that that must be the problem), don't.

IF YOU'RE NOT HAVING A PROBLEM WITH THE WAY THE COMBAT SYSTEM WORKS IN CIV3, YOU HAVEN'T BEEN IN COMBAT LONG ENOUGH. simple.

In truth, it is not entirely a step back to Civ1, but its pretty effen close when you stack it up against SMAC.

[morb]

Originally posted by Plutarck
A decade of civilization games and we still don't have Armor or Firepower to go with Attack and Defense.

Wouldn't it be cool if the creators of Civ-style games maybe played an RPG and realized that Attack, Defense, and Movement shouldn't be the only stats units have? Wouldn't that just blow your mind?

But that would add complexity! Firaxis don't want to deal with complexity of any kind in the combat system (gleaned form the chat log). That also explains why units from civs with right of passage or "allies" can't share the same square. They didn't want to mess with which unit to attack if there was an allie and and enimy in the same square. There are at least a half dozen ways to deal with this, but that would require some forethought, when the original combat system was being designed, so no luck.

[Sentinali]

I've got to agree with SA

Combat in Civ 3 is great. I had three armies with 3 Elite Calvarys (9 total units) take a Roman city. They sent about 30 legions and took the city in 3 turns, I killed most of the units but they kept coming. This was perfectly reasonable. For those of you who need numbers think of these when attacking a well fortified defender.

City bonus: +50%
Metropolis bonus: +100%
Mountain bonus: +100%
Fortress Bonus +25%
Hills Bonus: +50%
Fortified Bonus: +50%

So if you attack a musketman (2/4/1) with a calvary (6/3/2)

in the open - musket 4 v calvary 6 (calvary has a 66% chance of sucess.

in a city, on a hill, fortified - musket 10 (4+150%) v calvary 6, musketman should win about 75% of the time.

[dexters]

Childish whining aside, lets say Firaxis implement armor and or firepower in combat. Would we be hearing from the same handful of whiners again about AI cheating because somehow they didn't get oil and rubber in their part of the map and their crappy units were mowed down by the enemy.

Give me a break. It's all relative. When you have the power, you want to mow down the AI, but when you don't have the power, i'm sure you'd all want that longbowman defending your capital to kill the tank that's advancing on the city. And then either way, you whine about the combat being unbalanced or the AI getting combat bonuses.

Firaxis' Soren Johnson said in the Apolyton chat that it was a design decision to make obsolete units more competitive vs. advanced unit so at to give players who didn't happen to have oil or one of those strategic resources stay alive.

If you play stupidly, like marching a tank against a longbowman on a mountain, then no one can help you either. Don't forget the defensive bonsues incurred by being on special terrain, in forts and in towns/cities. towns below pop 6 get no defensive bonus, unless they have walls, in which case, they have 50% bonus.

As for realism, Civilization isn't about realism. It is about simulating an experience and that may include some realistic elements. Besides, the Russians have had entire tank columns destrouyed by nothing more than militia during their invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. I don't see Russia whining to GOD about a broken combat system.

Get a life folks.

[morb]

Re: I've got to agree with SA

Originally posted by Sentinali
Combat in Civ 3 is great. I had three armies with 3 Elite Calvarys (9 total units) take a Roman city. They sent about 30 legions and took the city in 3 turns, I killed most of the units but they kept coming. This was perfectly reasonable. For those of you who need numbers think of these when attacking a well fortified defender.

City bonus: +50%
Metropolis bonus: +100%
Mountain bonus: +100%
Fortress Bonus +25%
Hills Bonus: +50%
Fortified Bonus: +50%

So if you attack a musketman (2/4/1) with a calvary (6/3/2)

in the open - musket 4 v calvary 6 (calvary has a 66% chance of sucess.

in a city, on a hill, fortified - musket 10 (4+150%) v calvary 6, musketman should win about 75% of the time.

I always take defence bonuses into account. That's why it was puzzling to me when my knight 4/3/2 which was parked and fortified in the mountains got killed by an enimy bowman, while my bowmen got slaughtered while attacking the enimy pikemen fortified in the city. They get 50% less to their defence bonus, but are hardly even damaged.

plus nobody has discounted my point about 'haste' or movement penalties yet (which are preasen for defenders in both civ2 and SMAC). If a defender is under a constant berage of fire, it should be expected that the defender would get the same or at least similar haste penalties as a unit attacking with less than a full movement point. AND/OR at the very least, the defenders should not be allowed to heal back to full strength even if the city has a berracks when they have spent the entire turn defending the city. The way the system is set up now, defenders are treated as inanimate energy fields which recharge after bombardment, rather than somewhat belivable and tiring/combat weary soldiers.

[morb]

Originally posted by dexters
Firaxis' Soren Johnson said in the Apolyton chat that it was a design decision to make obsolete units more competitive vs. advanced unit so at to give players who didn't happen to have oil or one of those strategic resources stay alive.

it was a poor design decision.

If you play stupidly, like marching a tank against a longbowman on a mountain, then no one can help you either. Don't forget the defensive bonsues incurred by being on special terrain, in forts and in towns/cities. towns below pop 6 get no defensive bonus, unless they have walls, in which case, they have 50% bonus.

you're not saying anything which hasn't already been said or counterd...

Get a life folks.

if we all had lives we wouldn't be posting on this board or playing civ3, would we?

[Andy]

Outside of the complaints already registered in this forum, my largest is that there doesn't seem to be any actual randomness in the combat system of the game. In a recent game, I attacked a English city being defended with 2 warriors with my six 6 warriors. After being defeated the first time, I decided to load a recent auto-save to try my luck again. To my suprise, I lost WITH THE EXACT SAME RESULT. The first few warriors were killed outright, and then the fourth beat his opponent down to one hit point before dying. The fifth warrior caused his opponant to lose one hit point initially and then lost the remaining rounds. The sixth warrior died with out causing a scratch.

Perplexed by this odd repetition, I reloaded the autosave game again and repeated about 6 or seven times. EVERY GAME HAD THE EXACT SAME RESULT. Exactly. Down to the amount of damage that each warrior inflicted before he died, in the same exact order.

I am not exactly a statistician, but to get the same results time after time is extremely unlikely. I realize that the odds may have been stacked against me in the whole overall battle, but there should have been some variation in the amount of damage inflicted by a particular warrior and each warrior should have performed randomly. I find this lack of randomness troubling.

[dexters]

Originally posted by morb


it was a poor design decision.



you're not saying anything which hasn't already been said or counterd...



if we all had lives we wouldn't be posting on this board or playing civ3, would we?

The point of the new battle system is to sustain what a lot of people think is one of the better changes to Civ 3, that is, the introduction of resources as tradable, valuable and limited goods and not just a terrain modifier.

Now, for any trading to occur, you are going to have resources that others don't have access to, and you're going to not have resources that others will have access to.

These resources give one strategic advantage, but not an absolute advantage. This is clearly reflected in the combat system. A tank has a higher attack and defense rating that a rifleman, but that is not to say a rifleman can't take down a tank. But if you happen to have oil to build tanks, you know you have an advantage. But that is not to say your opponent can't array an army of riflemen to beat back your tank rush.

In war, advantages big and small have been squandered. People who complain about their units getting slaughted likely felt they had an absolute advantage with their advanced units, marched into to teach those "backwards barbarians" a lesson, ignored the defense bonuses of certain city sizes and terrain tiles, and attacked. In that case, they deserve to get their ass whooped. We may have been able to get away with sloppy wars in Civ 2, where we simply line up a few tanks and warships and destroyed a city's defenses in a few turns. That is clearly not the case in Civ 3, and it is for the better.

The methodical player who advances on the enemy with caution, especially those who understand and know how to use bombardment to their advantage, will find thise apparent "broken" combat system to be utterly superior to the boring point, click, and I know i will win, battles of the past.

Don't protect your flank, you're enemy will exploit it. Get too cocky, the combat system will tell you otherwise.

Again, absolute advantage is not the same as strategic advantage. The United States thought it had absolute advantage in the backwards country we call vietnam, and how wrong it was.

[Jokka das Trevas]

Frankly?

I think this is because Sid Meier's wanted to "go pop".

You know that heavy-metal bands begin to smell little greenies (I'm talking money here hehe) and so they start singing more "pop" songs?

I think it's the same with Sid's.

You may see at Firaxis' page: SMACX is out of press, and conventional SMAC isn't sold by EA anymore. Many fans of Civ and Civ2 that I knew of didn't ever heard of SMAC until I told them. And, lets face it, despite civ/smac kicks ass, many people don't like because it's "too much mind-intensive" for a game that "should be relaxing".

So Sid saw it and thought: "why I'm gonna be stuck creating complex cult games when I could make a much simpler thing and earn double the money for it?".

The market demands.

I, for myself, will probably only finish Civ3 one more time just for the sake of curiosity (not seem space travel yet) and put it back on a drawer soon after.

SMAC rules all the way.
Players in SMAC are less influenced by their "starting position" on the map.
New technologies, projects and improvements may boast resource production on city squares. Crawlers can support poor cities (how do you keep up with a low-food city on Civ3 - on tundra, for example?).
And that's now that "fresh water" crap that limits agriculture. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but CIV3 DOESN'T HAVE "IMPROVED FARMING" AND "SUPERMARKETS".
Man, is that a downgrade from civ2 or what? IT already came pretty late in the game already, but now is definetely lost!

Complexity of Civ2's city square improvements: farm, road, mine, rail.
In SMAC: mine, farm, condenser, borehole, collector, echelon (and the almighty crawlers, saviors of less-fortunate cities)

MORALE really counts on SMAC. Elite SMAC units ARE valuable in combat, even though they can't turn to heroes.
More complex government system.
More detailed everything.

Heck, even the damn interface they managed to downgrade at Civ3! And that's for what?
For the sake of the "lame", "lightweight", weekend players that don't want a game with too much depth as their school's exercises. Maybe thinking hurts them, I dunno.
And for hardcore gamers? "Oh, let them use poorly-documented shortcuts for half the possibilities that they had before."

Hardcore gamers (at least TBS) don't spill enough money on their game machine. Casual gamers do. So they turn to attend casual gamers instead.

Let's face it: if Civ3 becomes a success greater than Civ2 and SMAC together, we can kiss our good old quality turn-based strategy genre goodbye, just as Sierra made with their adventure series as soon as they discovered the 3D-games market.

[whosurdaddy]

CIV2 HAD AARMOR!!!

Civ 2 had an armor factor which prevented these crazy combat outcomes from occuring, but they removed it from Civ3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[yavoon]

very few places in life is there such a high concentration of whiners than in game forums. surely its understandable, but no less tiring.

ur not playing SMAC, or civ2, or ne other game. you are playing civ3, if you can't adjust to the new mechanics, then go back to ur superior games of before. I surely wouldn't want to stop you. but for the luv of god, enuff of this whining.

[morb]

Originally posted by Andy
Outside of the complaints already registered in this forum, my largest is that there doesn't seem to be any actual randomness in the combat system of the game. In a recent game, I attacked a English city being defended with 2 warriors with my six 6 warriors. After being defeated the first time, I decided to load a recent auto-save to try my luck again. To my suprise, I lost WITH THE EXACT SAME RESULT. The first few warriors were killed outright, and then the fourth beat his opponent down to one hit point before dying. The fifth warrior caused his opponant to lose one hit point initially and then lost the remaining rounds. The sixth warrior died with out causing a scratch.

Perplexed by this odd repetition, I reloaded the autosave game again and repeated about 6 or seven times. EVERY GAME HAD THE EXACT SAME RESULT. Exactly. Down to the amount of damage that each warrior inflicted before he died, in the same exact order.

I am not exactly a statistician, but to get the same results time after time is extremely unlikely. I realize that the odds may have been stacked against me in the whole overall battle, but there should have been some variation in the amount of damage inflicted by a particular warrior and each warrior should have performed randomly. I find this lack of randomness troubling.

exactly, i've had the same experience. seems shady doesn't it?

[morb]

Originally posted by Jokka das Trevas
SMAC rules all the way.
Players in SMAC are less influenced by their "starting position" on the map.
New technologies, projects and improvements may boast resource production on city squares. Crawlers can support poor cities (how do you keep up with a low-food city on Civ3 - on tundra, for example?).
And that's now that "fresh water" crap that limits agriculture.

thank goodness at least now its not nessesary to have squarly adjacent tiles to irigate. You can irigate diagonally.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but CIV3 DOESN'T HAVE "IMPROVED FARMING" AND "SUPERMARKETS".

YES! how terrible!

Originally posted by yavoon
very few places in life is there such a high concentration of whiners than in game forums. surely its understandable, but no less tiring.

ur not playing SMAC, or civ2, or ne other game. you are playing civ3, if you can't adjust to the new mechanics, then go back to ur superior games of before. I surely wouldn't want to stop you. but for the luv of god, enuff of this whining.

heh, I don't see anybody forcing you to read. I usually skip topics which don't concern me. maybe you should do the same. Or were you just trying to make yourself feel better by taking a "holier than thou" stance?

I like what Civ3 could have been, and its hard to detach myself from a game that is otherwise addictive, but COULD have been made so much better and wasn't.

[yavoon]

hehe u save reload newbies crack me up, obviously firaxis has put some kind of protection against save/reload for new battle results. which I think is really nice.

unfortunately I doubt its foolproof. either way, the pure amusement of you running around like ur head is chopped off because you can't seem to save/reload every lost battle nemore is rather hilarious.