What?...civ1 combat back?

[Smash]

I know it has been posted but we have a MAJOR problem here.
Mr galley sinks Mr aircraft carrier.Mr pike defeats Mr modern armor.

Oh boy.This is not good.

No such "miracles" with ancient vs ancient or modern vs modern...so far.Zoinks...this is not so easy to fix.It probably would need to be torn right down and rebuilt from scratch.........

[Blaupanzer]

My experience is more like 4th knight kills tank, or 6th frigate sinks battleship. Not inconsequential, but not nonsense either. Think of the units as points (4-2-2 vs 16-12-2 or whatever) rather than as their names, and the results do have some (twisted) logic. In stats, how many '2s' does it take to overwhelm an '18?' That's a 10% chance per shot times 3 or 4 shots per unit to rack up 4 or 5 hits on the big guy, and "blub, blub" goes your battleship. The image of spears or wooden ships versus iron giants stretches credibility, but not the effect of a swarm of lesser units bringing a more powerful one to its knees. Although others say they have, I have not yet seen a one-on-one with the disparities you define.

[rugbyprop3]

Combat

After reading a whole bunch of posts like this, it is getting a little frustrating. The combat system is not broken, you just have to watch what you are doing.

Take the aircraft carrier for example, if you attack another galley, it has a defensive strength of 1 and you have an attack strength of 1, which means if you attack you have only a 50 / 50 chance of winning that attack. Moral of that story is to never attack with an aircraft carrier.

What I have found is that bombardment is key in the current system. Any attack that you make that you don't out point the opponent by at least triple bombard the hex if at all possible. Artillery especially is king.

The only change that I might make is that I would increase the hitpoints as the ages increase. so in the bronze age the starting unit has 3 hitpoints. Midevil units would have 4, Industrial and modern age units would have 5 hitpoints. This would mean that units from a later age with equal attack and defense values would win slightly more often against their early age units, but it wouldn't overwelmingly change the stats.

[Tom DeMille]

Maybe if you try to think of a "galley" as an abstraction of a weak modern day vessel. Say a PT boat, which might just get a lucky shot in on that aircraft carrier. After all, who's to say that the galley's owner hasn't been able to purchase torpedoes to outfit his old run down tubs with...

Smash, i see that you didn't wait for the mac version to come out I think it will be a while before i'm bored enough with the game to try OCCing it.

[Smash]

hey TD.No I could not wait till March or whatever.And I wanted to get Subcommander so....."dude.you're getting a Dell"


Hmmm....no that doesn't help/It was the galley that attacked.I thought :cheeky devils..this should be good......then the arrows start flyin and it is my health bar dropping....yellow....RED...WTF????
It was me attacking with modern armors against the super,elite secret weapon anti tank PIKEMAN.
There was a reason combat was changed in civ2.This is it!

[solo]

Welcome, Smash! I knew you wouldn't wait for the MAC version.

Some astonishing combats for me too. Now I refuse to upgrade my warriors, spearmen, or those bowmen and their armor-piercing arrows!

[The ANZAC]

I've noticed in general the combat seems a little screwy in general. Stuff doesn't seem right like horsemen attacking cities seem to win somewhat easily. Anyone else notice things like this in general, not just ancient vs. modern unit combat?

[War4ever]

the horseman rush is very effective ....those horses look like the knights of civ2 and feel about as powerufll, or as powerfull as the chariot of civ1

combat is weird but there definitely is a process to it. i will be testing my theories tonite and if i come up with similar results i will post them.

[barefootbadass]

If I'm going to pay upkeep costs on a horde of units I'd rather they be the best I have available, or at least something better than a horseman.

Sure bunch of horsemen can take a industrial or modern city, just bombard the city till almost nothing is left to defend and then your sheer numbers and hp advantage will win. This isn't really at all unrealistic. Look what's happening in afghanistan with the northern alliance swarming taliban tanks with horse mounted soldiers since we bombed them so much.

In fact its kind of eerie how spot on the combat is in civ3.

[vmxa1]

I for do not except the postulations that I keep hearing on how some unit got torps on its galley so that is how it beat XYZ. A galley is a galley and if it can be outfitted with machine guns/torps or anything else, that needs to be documented. If not I can not make an assesment of the battle. Under absolutely no conditions would a galley defeat a carrier. It can do no damage. Cannon firing frigates defeating or nearly so battleship (modern ones), is bogus. They can do no damage. Modern armour losing to pikemen, even in the city bites. I would not complain if it was once in a game, but these types of battles are common. In some cases (not these), you may make a case that the stats allow it, others they appear to argue against it. I just want consistency

[Smash]

hear,hear.Me too.

With the civ2 combat system this never happened.Well,once in a blue moon a pike on a mountain fortress would beat a tank.It was intentionally changed to get rid of ridiculous results.

I like to see a Taliban or Alliance mounted charge on some abrahms tanks.That would be fun.
The whole image of pikeman jabbing at my modern armor is just plain silly.AND then to actually win

[Jason]

I defy you to lose modern armour to pikemen. It's hard enough to get both coexisting on some lame difficulty level to start with, and then to have the inestimable bad luck... Perhaps if you carefully positioned yourself to attack a fortified pikemen on a hilltop metropolis with 1 hp left against an elite pikeman you could manage it. It'd still be what, 24-9? It's the spear-down-the-barrel syndrome, the upgrading pikemen syndrome, whatever you want to explain it by.

The only really serious effect of this is its side-effect, the painfully stupid message board arguements. "But dude, it still has a spear in the graphic!"

[DK36]

It seems that Firaxis wanted to fix us getting nukes about 500BC (well, I did) and spanking everyone. But they SERIOUSLY OVERKILLED it. They made science a lot less dependant on what's going on (someone with a huge science % and libraries everywhere etc.. would only save a turn or 3 on someone who'se still not) and they tweaked the combat so that it's a lot more fair. I appreciate their concerns, it was pretty absurd in civ2, but this is really an OVERKILL.

[N. Machiavelli]

Loaded Dice

I think that the actual combat system in Civ3 is fine... the reason why most of us are getting so many 'wacky' results is because of either a loaded or broken random number generator. You can akin this to a loaded dice roll. All combat in Civ3 is done via chance, and percentages...and while I would prefer that FP was reintroduced, I could live without it if the odds were not so much in the AI's favour. The chances of a modern armour at full health losing to a pikeman at full health is indeed possible...somewhere around 11% per hit, 2.78% for total victory if both are veteren.....so why does it happen 1 time out of 5? These random numbers dreamed up for combat results are insane...flip a coin 100 times and see how many times you can get Heads 97 out of those 100 flips...thats the odds (rounded up!) of that attacking tank losing to that pikeman. Now, compare your results to the game...see a discrepancy? I do.