Costal Defense

[Nordicus]

Hey, Timothy. I just finished a Coastal Fortress improvement last week, but I've yet to see any difference between defense from any unit and defense from naval units. I have not seen a flag indicating that there is a difference--and if so, then what you want to do (and I agree, BTW) would not be difficult at all.

Can anyone confirm this? Is defense defense, or is there a distinction between land and sea defense?

[Pintello]

Costal Defense

Hi All,

I have been looking over the history of naval warfare and I noticed that there exist a axiom in naval warfare that says "Ships do not attack fortresses." This started me thinking that possibly the bombard capability of Ships of the Line are too powerful when employed against cities. Would it be possible using Slic or some other method to create a city improvement called Costal Defense a la Civ 2 that reduces the affect of Naval Bombardment on cities that contain this improvement? This would allow Ships of the Line to keep their effectiveness against land units, but make their effect against "fortified cities" much more in line with real life.

Any thoughts?

Timothy Pintello

[Pintello]

Hi Nordicus,

I seem to remember early on that someone from Activision said this could be done, but only with Slic. I don't know anything about the subject beyond that. Perhaps it was somewhere on Activision's FAQs about Slic. I will take a look and see.

Timothy Pintello

[Pintello]

Hi All,

Yep, I was right, here is Activision's answer to a similar question. I don't know where they currently stand on it though.

How can I made an improvement that is only buildable in
coastal cities such as a Harbor? Or only buildable on a
river like a Dam? Would a Coastal Fortress (City Walls
against naval units) be possible?

No. But SLIC is really close to allowing a pretty cheesy way of doing it, all it's missing is a function to check and see if a city is next to water or on a river. We'll look into adding that for the patch, it would be a good thing and not hard. Thanks for the idea.

- Joe Rumsey, CTP programmer

Hope this can get someone looking in the right direction to come up with a solution to my lead off question.

Timothy Pintello

[Nordicus]

Hey, cool, Timothy! I hope someone can as well. I made a Bridge Building icon and designed the advance only to find later that it's pointless: there are no bridges. D'oh!
So, I was thinking of trying to find a way that could make Bridge Building mean something--allow roads only to be built on river-ed terrain when one has the Bridge Building advance....
Doesn't seem that hard, but I don't know Slic too well.

Even so, about Coastal Fortresses, doesn't a unit need a ignore_city_walls flag or something (haven't checked), I mean a naval unit? I think that, IMO, only certain vessels would be able to attack cities--ships of the line could, and anything up from that.
Anyway...

[Terrator]

Pintello,

I don't know what axiom you refer to but throughout history, naval forces have attacked fortresses which whole purpose was to defend ports.

Read the naval battles during the US Civil war, the English-Spanish war, the US-Spanish war where Cuba obtained its independence as well as the Hellenistic war where Athen's armada dominated the seas.

Thansk,

Terrator

[WesW]

From what I can tell, artillery behind city walls get the walls bonus when bombarding or counter-bombarding ships. Also, when ships bombard cities, they hurt a random unit, while a counter-bombarding art. unit always hits the attacker. Because of these facts, I don't bombard cities that might have comparable art. units to my ships in them. I also avoid ending turns for my ships by such cities.

[Mark H]

Since I always use a stack of naval units to bombard, the most I've ever lost is 1 ship before killing everything in the ai coastal city (AAIP's hasn't effected this). Since replacing the ship is always quicker than waiting for one to "repair" at sea, I just have a steady stream of them heading to the "front".

All things considered I'd say bombardment as a whole is over powerful in ctp, but especially naval bombardment. My two cents...
Mark