Swords destroying tanks in civilization

[Nephtys]

It distinctly reminds me of Rise of Nations. It actually takes a battleship several shots to sink a small wooden fishing boat.

You mean the RTS where every land soldier, vehicle or horseguy lines up Napoleon-style into a giant line and fires at each other, from archers to Navy SEALs? And that cities are only mildly irritated at being hit by nuclear weapos?

Yes. How did you know?

It's just like Civ. Oh dear, look out! Horatio Nelson is sinking your WW1 Battleships.

It just seems rather hard for these 'different era' games such as Empire Earth, Civ, Rise of Nations to balance units without giving a new generation complete and utter dominance. What are muskets ever going to do to machine guns? If it's realistic, everyone's only hope is to tech up like mad, all the time.

[Vendetta]

Well, yeah, that's rather supposed to be the point. Balancing the need to tech up with the drive to industrialise, make money, wage war, and all the rest of the other things you need to do to be effective.

[Stark]

Vendetta's got it. I think these developments should be a bit more incremental than they are (for instance, GalCiv1 sucked since it had predefined 'unit types' that you 'unlocked' by getting the right techs, just like Civ) but the demands on infrastructure and economy should make the decisions more difficult than 'zomg I unlocked tanks I build 1000 tanks'. Whoops, it turns out Civ is just too simplistic to handle that - we just compared it to an RTS!

As an example, in GalCiv2 (where the tech changes are far more narrow than 'what's iron' or 'what's a boat' like in Civ), upgrading your entire fleet to use a slightly better missile defence system is often simply not worth it. It costs too much, it takes too long, and the ships out in the field are too busy. You incorporate it into the new designs that need it and it slowly becomes standard, by which time you've got more tech. If Civ didn't jump from 'dudes with sticks' to 'dudes with iron armour 500 years later', you'd need to weigh these decisions and their pros and cons too. If Civ could actually handle the difference between Rome Total War and GalCiv, it'd be an achievement in game design. I still think Colonisation was better, dammit, and having to manufacture and supply 1,000,000 rifles of ever-increasing complexity would make the game more interesting/complex.

[brianeyci]

People are going to kill me for saying this, but fuck realistic. Go for balance. The only time realism should matter is if it strains credibility, which is why tank versus sword gets people pissed off. Well, I can imagine the worst possible tank ever, that breaks down and everybody inside dies of wasp bites, while the greatest swordsmen ever rush up in the dead of night and kill the guys inside. If that isn't good enough for you then don't play these kinds of games in my opinion. If a battleship costs 100 minerals and a man-o-war costs 50 minerals, two man-o-wars should put up a good fight to a battleship.

Credibility problems exist in all kinds of games. I will look at balance first, credibility close second. It's not that it doesn't matter, but "hit points" are not credible either and everybody accepts them. Maybe people think that because civilization is such an epic game on an epic scale it has to be more credible than other kinds of games, or that 4x games have to be more credible than other kinds of games. That's only because of preconceived notions of what the game should be, and unless they went out of their way to advertise realism, I'm not going to slam them for it.

[Stark]

PROTIP: balance also sucks in Civilization. At least you admit Civ is a kiddies game, too many people do as you say and decide 'large in scope' = 'super important serious game'.

Ironically, you even mention how broken Civ is: Triremes are made of wood at short notice, and BBs take huge amounts of industrial resources for years. The mechanisms for 'balancing' (ps it's not called balancing if reality is already balanced ) it already exist. The design is just too simplistic and stupid to use it. Of course, there will be six sources of 'wood' and 'iron' in the whole world, because Civ is so 'balanced'.

This is why I mentioned Colonisation. It had more steps than 'hurr hurr shieldz', so things that required rarer or more expensive or more difficult to process materials automatically took longer and were more valuable. Honestly, the 1 grain, 1 shield, 1 dollar thing is another example of why Civ hasn't gone anywhere but backwards in almost 20 years.

Of course, we were just talking about strategic-level decisions, which is EXACTLY what Civ should be about, NOT realism. Nobody has advocated Civ become a walking spreadsheet (any more than it already is). PS, I know 'what Civ is' and if you take away the shieldz you'll ruin it rar!

[chitoryu12]

It just seems rather hard for these 'different era' games such as Empire Earth, Civ, Rise of Nations to balance units without giving a new generation complete and utter dominance. What are muskets ever going to do to machine guns? If it's realistic, everyone's only hope is to tech up like mad, all the time.

That's why I prefer Company of Heroes. An squad of riflemen stand no chance against a tank. It actually forces people to use a mix of different units in a squad instead of just bum-rushing a superior enemy base with their entire army.

And wouldn't the "tech like mad" approach be solved by making it more difficult to tech up, while at the same time allowing you to build large armies with realistic-ish AI to keep the game from being the same shit over and over?

[RogueIce]

To me the "balance" in the game should be the fact that it takes longer to build an ironclad and it is more expensive than a wooden frigate. So while the first player to get ironclads has an advantage, he would have a relative few while the enemy would have fleets of wooden ships wandering around doing damage. And enough swarms of the wooden ships could probably destroy one, if nothing else than ramming the bugger.

Obviously no amounts of wooden-hulled frigates would ever survive against a battleship or even an industrial era destroyer. But quite frankly if you're that far behind in the tech tree compared to your opponent, you deserve to lose.

IMO, the upgrade thing in Civ3, while nice, does take away from that "balance" a bit. The main drawback to it was of course needing to pull them back to your cities that had the required resource. Still, I think it'd be better, balance-wise, to simply require construction of the new units on their own. That way you're paying for that, then the upkeep of the new unit as well as your existing ones, forcing you to either live with that or simply start scrapping your older units (and having fewer numbers). The one exception I can see to that is maybe for the more purely defensive units that don't tend to leave your cities anyway.

EDIT: Plus, constructing the new units will take all the time that entails, whereas upgrades were pretty much an instant transformation. I haven't played Civ4 so I don't know how it's handled there.

[Stark]

Yeah, and in a game more complex than one-step resourcing you'd need a whole industrial apparatus to build ironclads in any number, and experience to learn how to employ them successfully. By that time, you'd have heaps of experience in building and using wooden warships, whole resourcing systems in place, existing doctrine, etc. Arms races should actually tax the economies of those involved.

You either treat triremes to ironclads as sensible (ie, triremes have no chance whatsoever, ironclads change the face of naval combat forever) or as an RTS-style '+25% armour to ships'.

[Ritterin Sophia]

-Snip-

I think Stark needs his own Game Reviews Thread, where he tells us what he does or does not like in games for our own amusement. First up is that new Bibleman game.

[Stark]

I could terrify people by posting reviews of games I actually like, and paying special attention to the things I think could be better but are servicable. FS2 and GalCiv2 are both good games, but neither of them are perfect. Things like Majesty are a good idea, but there's not much depth.

Man, I might just do that.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

"Sword beats tank" has been a problem since the very first Civ game, and I don't see that it's any worse in 4 than in any of the others. The main problem is the huge leaps between certain units. For instance, the destroyer is a strength 30 unit capable of sweeping the seas clean of all opposing ships pretty much instantly, so whoever researches combustion has instant naval superiority. Well, if you're being realistic, this should happen with a lot of different units, but why should only one unit be treated realistically? Also, an 1890's destroyer should be wiped off the map by a 1960's ship just as easily as the former mops the floor with an ironclad, but in the game they're the same unit, so you go from 1860's ironclads to 1960's destroyers in a single tech. A similar problem exists between muskets (str 9) -> rifles (str 14) with nothing in between, and colonial riflemen (str 14) -> WW2 infantry (str 20) also with nothing in between.

Civ 4 is a great game, but certain units need to be spread out and multi-century gaps between some units should be filled in.

[Vendetta]

Many of these problems arise from Civ's timescale. Covering 6000 years in 400 turns is never going to let you put much granularity in the unit tree.

It's never going to be Hearts of Iron 2, but there are many games out there that run on the same global scale, if rarely the same timescale, that do the job better.

Hell, I went back through a MoO2 phase not long ago, and even slight increments in beam and missile tech there can give you a serious leg up in battle.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

A problem I've had with Civilization 3 AND 4 is the speed of research and the speed of building units. This is particularly true in the ancient and late-industrial eras. By the time I've built an army of WW2-era tanks, they're already entirely obsolete! Rocketry and modern armor come way too quickly. Even in the ancient era, everyone's trying to desperately expand so much, by the time the real fighting starts, you're already going Medieval.

[Coyote]

I think all the tech advancement is too fast. I'd love to enjoy a few centuries of medieval warfare and castles, siegecraft, etc, but IMO it's just sticks-spears-swords-guns-nukes in, like, an hour.

A more graded tech advancement would be good, as mentioned-- more interim designs. And if possible, some sort of variety by country. Japan would make crappy little machingun tankettes, the Germans would make powerful but complex and over-engineered behemoths, the Americans would spam out hordes of jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none 'mediums', and so on. But I guess as realisim creeps in, the programs get more complex and it gets sluggish. Sigh.

[montypython]

Paradox seems to be one of the few companies to somewhat successfully incorporate different eras and equipment type in their games plausibly, Victoria and HOI for example, still there's many areas of improvement that can be made for these types of strategy games.

[Sea Skimmer]

The miracle of the naval mine would make it quite possible for a trireme, or a self propelled honey barge for that matter, to defeat a battleship, it should just be an absurdly unlikely occurrence. Anyway those Civ triremes are built of some damn strong wood to be able to keep serving the empire for 2000 years or more.

[Vendetta]

Paradox seems to be one of the few companies to somewhat successfully incorporate different eras and equipment type in their games plausibly, Victoria and HOI for example, still there's many areas of improvement that can be made for these types of strategy games.

They really aren't doing the same spread of time as Civ though. If you tried to make a tech tree with the depth of Hearts of Iron but covering the entire span of 6000 years, rather than, at most, 15, your head would explode.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I do think there's a way to have inbetween techs and still not make it seem so frantic. Ever notice how long it takes to research something in the Ancient / Classical eras, for instance, compared to how quick the techs come in the late game? Each turn in the early game already represents 40+ years compared to the late game's 1, so why the double whammy? By speeding up the early game, you can afford to slow down the late game and add more techs, especially between musket -> rifle and ironclad -> destroyer.

I don't think adding a lot of realistic concepts is the answer. Civ has a good, fun gameplay formula that would be totally ruined by adding a lot of depth. Such a game should be built from the ground up and not kludged into one that was designed to be simple and abstract.

[Stark]

Even something simple like techs adding experience or bonuses to existing unit types would stretch their usefulness and graduate technology a bit more. Shuffling the number of techs/tech speed will simply make the ridiculous 'speeding up time' effect even more obvious and stupid, I think. You'd think at worst it'd be a setting - I actually DON'T want to spend 50% of my turns in the last three centuries.

I also think expecting a game to cover all of human history, be simple and ALSO not be stupid is retarded. Nobody is going to call GalCiv2 complex or realistic, but Civ could really stand to take some ideas from it. Civ is simple and childish, so if you like that, you really can't complain about it not making sense.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I do think there's a way to have inbetween techs and still not make it seem so frantic. Ever notice how long it takes to research something in the Ancient / Classical eras, for instance, compared to how quick the techs come in the late game? Each turn in the early game already represents 40+ years compared to the late game's 1, so why the double whammy? By speeding up the early game, you can afford to slow down the late game and add more techs, especially between musket -> rifle and ironclad -> destroyer.

I don't think adding a lot of realistic concepts is the answer. Civ has a good, fun gameplay formula that would be totally ruined by adding a lot of depth. Such a game should be built from the ground up and not kludged into one that was designed to be simple and abstract.

I think the best way to make things less frantic is to add more turns but allow for upgrading of unit abilities and not upgrade to the next unit type altogether. The sailing ship frigate itself has changed a fair bit in design and armour over the course of a hundred years before they abandoned it all together.

[PeZook]

The miracle of the naval mine would make it quite possible for a trireme, or a self propelled honey barge for that matter, to defeat a battleship, it should just be an absurdly unlikely occurrence. Anyway those Civ triremes are built of some damn strong wood to be able to keep serving the empire for 2000 years or more.

This is how I delude myself while playing Civ (yeah, I like Civ III. I'm stupid like that ) to make things more plausible

Tank-hunting pikemen are somewhat more plausible if they bought some RPGs on the black market, for example.*

*This post should not be considered an excuse for Civilization's flaws.

[The Yosemite Bear]

as the GLA would say...

AK-47s for EVERYBODY

oh wait there was a tech in civ 2 that gave everyone guerilla soldiers once one side had discovered it...

[RogueIce]

So, for me, a "quick fix" of these silly Civ mechanics:

1) Techs that are within one "jump of each other can kill each other, but you'd need more of the lower tech ones to manage it, and definately expect losses. If it's two (or more) techs away, forget it. Instant lose.

2) No upgrades. You want those shiney new ironclads? You gotta build them from scratch, and pay the subsequent support costs (in addition to all the wooden frigates, etc. you have now). The one exception I might see are the purely defensive units that don't tend to leave your cities anyway (unless they're guarding arty or something). Otherwise, new tech = built new.

3) Make it somehow much more difficult to build the things, at least for the beginning. As you get further along they slowly become easier to build. I suppose you could do it by having it take awhile until you build more of those production bonus city improvements (in later advances) or some kind of script that says "x turns = better production" or whatever.

I like this idea, because when you get a new unit, it is more powerful, but you're pretty limited in how many you'd have out there. Sort of like the "5 battleships vs 40 destroyers" argument or whatever. So it keeps that balance. Whereas if you're two or more advanced units away from someone, then the lower tech person is pretty well screwed anyway and there shouldn't be any stupid mechanics that let them win by impossible means. Learn to tech up better.

Thoughts?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

So, for me, a "quick fix" of these silly Civ mechanics:

1) Techs that are within one "jump of each other can kill each other, but you'd need more of the lower tech ones to manage it, and definately expect losses. If it's two (or more) techs away, forget it. Instant lose.

That's already the case, barring the occasional fluke.

2) No upgrades. You want those shiney new ironclads? You gotta build them from scratch, and pay the subsequent support costs (in addition to all the wooden frigates, etc. you have now). The one exception I might see are the purely defensive units that don't tend to leave your cities anyway (unless they're guarding arty or something). Otherwise, new tech = built new.

I wouldn't mind upgrades only being possible in a capital city or something, but I think upgrades are already too expensive. What kind of sense does it make for you to have bronze age archers defending a modern city, anyway?

[3) Make it somehow much more difficult to build the things, at least for the beginning. As you get further along they slowly become easier to build. I suppose you could do it by having it take awhile until you build more of those production bonus city improvements (in later advances) or some kind of script that says "x turns = better production" or whatever.

I like this idea, because when you get a new unit, it is more powerful, but you're pretty limited in how many you'd have out there. Sort of like the "5 battleships vs 40 destroyers" argument or whatever. So it keeps that balance. Whereas if you're two or more advanced units away from someone, then the lower tech person is pretty well screwed anyway and there shouldn't be any stupid mechanics that let them win by impossible means. Learn to tech up better.

Thoughts?

Higher tech stuff should definitely cost a lot more, but your production should also ramp up over time to compensate. Needless to say, they should still be worth the cost so that it's not an incentive to build a swarm of lower tech crap instead.

[brianeyci]

If we are going for "lifelike" rarely do civilizations keep their technological edge from the rest of the world. This will piss off turtle techers, but I remember from Colonization where units automatically upgraded on the Declaration of Independence from weaker to stronger ones.

Imagine teching up to the industrial age, or to the information age, and pulling the rest of the world with you, no matter how backwards. This would be represented by trade and behind the scenes mechanics, no micro. Even Zulu warriors fighting the British had some guns. Only extremely insular societies can keep their technological advantage secret.

So what I propose is once a civilization researches a new technology level, for example gunpowder, the rest of the world follows suit. What's the point of teching then? Well, if the entire world uses guns, that doesn't mean the US military is impotent. If the entire world uses aircraft, that doesn't mean the US airforce isn't the most powerful in the world.

It would take some balance, with "tier zero" units that anybody could make as long as at least one person in the world had the technology. For example if you haven't done the prerequisite research for mechanized infantry, you could only build masses of cheap guncars, which would be no match for someone who actually had mechanized infantry. But two, or three or four depending on terrain or training, of those guncars could beat the technologically superior opponent by sheer weight of numbers. If you're fighting spear wielding barbarian, this system would mean the barbarians could build warriors armed with guns, but inferior to whoever invented the guns at least until they caught up. If you wanted to reward techers, you could have a "time delay" between turns where the techer could have exclusive use of that technology, until the technology propagated to the rest of the world.

But at the same time, people focusing on economy a little more than technology wouldn't be totally fucked, as they would know if their economy was ten times larger, they could crush a weasel ignoring their economy with hordes of units which although weak are in the same technology bracket as the turtletecher.