Walls still work in cities

[DaveMcW]

Tacit_Exit of CFC ran some tests on city walls. It seems that walls still give their defense bonus in cities even though you can't build them anymore!

Test: 5000 Warriors vs. 5000 Warriors

Defense           Attacker Wins
Town/None/None    0.4616 
Town/Wall/None    0.2816
Town/None/GWall   0.4532
Town/Wall/GWall   0.1868
City/None/None    0.2870
City/Wall/None    0.1852
City/None/GWall   0.2822
City/Wall/GWall   0.1360


Combat Calc: Warrior vs. Warrior

Defense   Attacker Wins
10%       0.456
60%       0.291
110%      0.194
160%      0.134

[Konquest02]

Interresting result... I might build the GW once in a while after all!

Is it a bug or a feature?

--Kon--

[Theseus]

I build a lot of walls.

This is good.

[Dis]

hmm

I once tried building walls. But my vet spearman were still defeated by archers.

[alexman]

Woa! Thanks for the heads up!

This is definitely a bug, probably introduced when they added the civil defense for PTW.

[Brizey]

Hmmm. I've wondered about this. I can recall a few cities that just seemed unnaturally tough to take.

[Catt]

Originally posted by alexman
This is definitely a bug, probably introduced when they added the civil defense for PTW.

I agree - definitely a bug. I have no quarrel with the concept, but, unless I am hopelessly mistaken, the game materials (manual and civilopedia) and a Firaxian quite clearly stated that walls meant nothing to a City.

Firaxis should either fix the bug or clarify when Walls are effective.

Catt

[vmxa1]

Get the testers to run the test with 1.29f no PTW and see if it still behaves the same way (I suspect not).

[Ribannah]

We'll have to redo all the Tank v Spearman calculations ....

While it is probably a bug, the walls of the city of Paris protected them well in the Middle Ages.

[Hurricane]

City/None/None    0.2870
City/Wall/None    0.1852
City/None/GWall   0.2822
City/Wall/GWall   0.1360

Now this is strange. Look at the effect of the Great Wall in cities. A city without walls but with the GW gets no bonus, but a city with both walls and GW get a higher bonus than a city with walls only. In other words, the GW works in cities only if they also have city walls.

[theNiceOne]

Originally posted by Hurricane
Now this is strange. Look at the effect of the Great Wall in cities. A city without walls but with the GW gets no bonus, but a city with both walls and GW get a higher bonus than a city with walls only. In other words, the GW works in cities only if they also have city walls.

But this is as expected. The Great Wall has two effects. One is to increase your effectiveness against barbarians, and the other is to increase the effectiveness of walls. If you don't have any walls in a city, then there's nothing to improve either.

[Arrian]

Interesting.

It should be fixed. Either that, or one should be able to build walls at any time, instead of only before the city hits size 7.

-Arrian

[CerberusIV]

What prevents a player from building walls in a size 7 city? The reason I ask is that I once tried to add bombardment defence to the civil defence improvement and found I could not build it in cities above size 6. If bombardment defence is removed from walls does this allow them to be built in size 7 and above cities?

I actually changed the Great Wall to give walls in all cities on the same continent. I am now beginning to question if this was as good an idea as it first looked, as those walls disappear with metallurgy. I thought they would be obsolete by that time but it seems not.

[Hurricane]

Ok, I did a small test scenario. 4 cities (size 9)

Antium: no walls, no GW
Cumae: walls, no GW
Memphis: no walls, GW
Heliopolis: walls, GW

Each city was defended by 2 units. I attacked the first city with 2 swordsmen (all regs), noted the exact combat (for example hit, hit, wound, hit and wound, hit, wound, hit, wound). I then reloaded and did the same for the next city. With random seed on, the combat outcomes should be EXACTLY the same, no matter which city you attack, IF the walls and GW work like inteded. BTW, this is in 4000bc, so the GW is not obsolete.

I did the test 5 times (each with 4 reloads), and each and every reload had identical results. The effect of the GW should definitely appear. I don't know what Tacit_Exit did, but my game sure as hell works like it should.

My test is attached. Play as Greeks.

EDIT. This is on v1.29. Maybe it's a PTW bug?

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by vmxa1
Get the testers to run the test with 1.29f no PTW and see if it still behaves the same way (I suspect not).