Lets bring back the cavalry defense bonus

[SpencerH]

I'd like to see the defense bonus for pikemen against horse units brought back. Firaxis could re-enable mounted in the editor and add a little check mark that allowed for double defense against mounted units.

Personally, I'd like to see a variety of these but that change would be a good start.

[Coracle]

Knights would have to be increased in strength. I've already Edited them to 5.2.2. A '3' defense factor is absurd, especially as rifle-armed cavalry also is a '3'.

The Pikeman bonus? Fine, but other values might have to be changed. Fortified on hills they could really stop knights, and perhaps make longbowmen (which I have at 4.3.1) much more useful. A Men-at Arms offensive land unit should be added - slower than knights but they would not have the horses vulnerable to pikes.

There could be a lot of effects from such a change.

BTW, pikemen and musketmen were designed to fight together not separately. And the primitive musketmen of 1600 were much less offensive than the faster firing, bayonet-armed musket infantry of 1800.

Ciov 3 needs more units.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by SpencerH
I'd like to see the defense bonus for pikemen against horse units brought back. Firaxis could re-enable mounted in the editor and add a little check mark that allowed for double defense against mounted units.

Personally, I'd like to see a variety of these but that change would be a good start.

Perhaps in the expansion pack, or a mod. The problem is always going to be balance, as Coracle noted. Sometimes simplicity is best. But if you are going to change things then,

Archers better in woods or jungle, especially on defense. archers move after attack, so they stay with their stack or in their city.
Cavalry/tanks worse in poor terrain or against cities, but only 25-50%.

Subs should have bombard, and movement before and after, as allowed by their mp, which remains slow, and should automatically attack the weakest unit or a random unit in a stack.
All modern ships should move faster
Naval units should be subject to lethal bombard, but not land units

Hp should be implemented as standard. one extra hp per epoch of unit, i.e. middle ages units should have one extra hp over ancient units. balance on this may be a problematic, though.

A radical suggestion would be to make infantry even more powerful, but not able to stack effectively. this would encourage the formation of continental sized battle lines, and the necessity of concentrated armor attacks to break through the line. (This would not apply to earlier units such as riflemen.) Because this would result in a huge change in the nature of the game, this is just a fantasy.

These are merely suggestions. The game plays just fine like it is. Being a strategy game, the actual mechanics of combat are somewhat irrelevant. More important would be to reduce the late game tedium. This can be done with more powerful, but more expensive units in the late game, so there are fewer units, as in my "radical suggestion."

[SpencerH]

Pikemen existed long before gunpowder. The phalanx being one example of this. The Swiss pikemen ruled the European battlefield from 1315 to 1513, often annihilating armies of knights ten time there number. Effective cannon eventually broke their dominance.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by SpencerH
Pikemen existed long before gunpowder. The phalanx being one example of this. The Swiss pikemen ruled the European battlefield from 1315 to 1513, often annihilating armies of knights ten time there number. Effective cannon eventually broke their dominance.

Quite right. For a short while, pikemen were combined with harquebus as a primitive bombardment, but this was not decisive. The advent of cannon was decisive and is simulated quite well with Civ3 bombard.

The innovation that made the swiss pikemen decisive against mounted units was their discipline and training. This enabled them to quickly rotate their front, eliminating the standard flanking maneuver which made earlier versions of the spearmen line vulnerable to more mobile mounted units.

[Zachriel]

Interestingly, the development of cannon allowed the return of the mounted unit. Once the pike line was bombarded and weakened, the dragoons were sent in to take advantage of the breaks in the line with cold, hard steel. Pike are not very useful once the line is penetrated.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Zachriel


Quite right. For a short while, pikemen were combined with harquebus as a primitive bombardment, but this was not decisive. The advent of cannon was decisive and is simulated quite well with Civ3 bombard.

The innovation that made the swiss pikemen decisive against mounted units was their discipline and training. This enabled them to quickly rotate their front, eliminating the standard flanking maneuver which made earlier versions of the spearmen line vulnerable to more mobile mounted units.

Quite right. I would add that their ferocity was probably a factor in some victories.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by SpencerH
I'd like to see the defense bonus for pikemen against horse units brought back.

They would have to institute it, take away and THEN they could bring it back.

There never was a bonus for pikemen against horse in Civ III.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Ethelred


They would have to institute it, take away and THEN they could bring it back.

There never was a bonus for pikemen against horse in Civ III.

Bring back (as a concept) from Civ II

[kittenOFchaos]

I've never understood why knights ever charged pikemen...just ride around the pikeman and burn down their farms and cut their supply routes!


Plus: why couldn't archers not annihilate pikemen formations??? Why the need for cannon?

[SpencerH]

Well in the Swiss case, the pikemen charged the Knights! Plus their discipline allowed them the maneuverability to counter threats from the flanks and rear.

As to the archers, its hard to say. I'm not aware of any battle between an english style longbow and the Swiss. For the most part I would guess that part of the Swiss success was due to the stupidity of their opponents and the knights false belief in their inherent superiority (as at Agincourt). At the height of "chivalry", armies were not multi-component combined arms units. Infantry units were looked down upon by the nobility and their use by most armies of the day was limited. It was the Swiss and English who brought back infantry as the "queen of battle" because of their successes against the knights.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by kittenOFchaos
I've never understood why knights ever charged pikemen...just ride around the pikeman and burn down their farms and cut their supply routes!

Most medieval warfare consisted of avoiding combat, so pillaging was indeed a popular form of "combat." Fortification is the counter to this.

Plus: why couldn't archers not annihilate pikemen formations??? Why the need for cannon?

Pike were vulnerable to missile fire (cannons were just better). Pike trumps horse trumps archer trumps pike.

As the middle ages wore on, and organizational capabilities improved, combined arms gained the upper hand. They were, as we would say in Civ3, balanced for gameplay.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Zachriel

Pike trumps horse trumps archer trumps pike.

Exactly, this logic still exists today (to some extent) and I think it would improve the tactical level of combat if we could specify a units vulnerability to another type of unit with the editor.

[Fitz]

I imagine that until English style longbows were introduced to the scene, archer units didn't have any particular dominance over pike. Shorter bows than english longbows didn't have the penetrating power to get through a breastplate (the armor on a late period pikeman IIRC).

(Edit: Specifically, the concept archer beats pikeman is something I think you will find to be completely innaccurate if you do a little research. Feel free to prove me wrong though. )

Crossbows do, and you can train a crossbowman in 1/2 or less the time you can train an archer (even a point up and shoot that way battle archer), but they are so slow that they were pretty much next to useless without cover such as fortifications. Although ship based Italian crossbow mercenaries were unsuprisingly very effective too.

The firearm (even the crappy original ones) were so much more effective than crossbows because they also allowed for easy training & good armor penetration, but they also allowed continued use once wounded. Still suffered from the same time limitations as the crossbow for a long time though.

I always liked the military terms steming from the pike & musket era. Rank & File (rows & columns of pikemen), Loose shot (Shot were the musketeers flanking the pikemen, loose shot was a formation), etc.

[nato]

I really like the setup in Archer Jones Art of War in the Western World. In his setup, there are 4 classes of troops ... heavy infantry (like pikes), light infantry (like archers), heavy cavalry (like knights), and light cavalry (horse archers).

Then all 4 relate like this:

* Heavy infantry can defend successfully against heavy cav, but can be attacked by light infantry and light cav

* Light infantry can defend succesfully against light cav, but can be attacked by heavy cav

* Heavy cav can be attacked by light cav

(basically the rock paper scissors thing, but with the addition of light cav)

Then he goes on and a similar relation arises between modern units.

I'm sure its an oversimplification, but so is Civ ... and it really lends itself towards a game.

I really would love to set up civ like this ... basically what is required is tags for the classes (like mounted) and bonus vs that tag (like pikemen vs mounted). Ah well...

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Fitz
(Edit: Specifically, the concept archer beats pikeman is something I think you will find to be completely innaccurate if you do a little research. Feel free to prove me wrong though. )

Sure! If you insist.

One of many references on this subject:
Pike: The long spear, with a small steel head. Up to 20 feet in length, they were popular with the Scots, Swiss and Flemings during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The use of compacted pikemen was a powerful counter to cavalry, but was usually checked with arrows or missile fire.
http://www.chronique.com/Library/Glo...-AA/arms_p.htm

Generally, mounted units had gained dominance on the battlefield. Pikemen ended this dominance.

http://www.sealedknot.org/gallery.asp?GN=20

[SpencerH]

Yes, it's not so much whether archers could have broken the Swiss pike formations, its why it didnt happen! The Swiss pikemen were not heavily armoured, and attacked in formation at the run! Disciplined archers should have been able to break their formations as cannon eventually did. It took 200 years though for the military attitudes towards infantry to change and for the weapon developments that allowed that to happen.

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by SpencerH
Yes, it's not so much whether archers could have broken the Swiss pike formations, its why it didnt happen! The Swiss pikemen were not heavily armoured, and attacked in formation at the run! Disciplined archers should have been able to break their formations as cannon eventually did. It took 200 years though for the military attitudes towards infantry to change and for the weapon developments that allowed that to happen.

In the era before pikemen, knights (horse-mounted units) were dominating the battlefield. Many armies were composed solely of knights.

Archers are generally very weak against the knights, as they usually cannot get enough rounds off before the quickly moving knights cross the battlefield. (Agincourt is an obvious counterexample, but terrain was a major factor, slowing the French knights. Indeed, we remember Agincourt simply because it was abnormal. The French should have won.) Normally the archers are protected by infantry, but the infantry was being outflanked and subject to shock attack by knights, so the archers were left unprotected and vulnerable. Why even field infantry or archers?

Then the pikemen restored "balance," that and better organization allowing the use of combined arms. That is why pike was considered a decisive change on the battlefield.

[Sprint_ST_NYC]

Originally posted by Coracle


BTW, pikemen and musketmen were designed to fight together not separately. And the primitive musketmen of 1600 were much less offensive than the faster firing, bayonet-armed musket infantry of 1800.

Ciov 3 needs more units.

But that's two hundred years. What is that in Civ terms, like 10 turns? 20? People already complain that units aren't useful for long enough.

It's a complicated enough game already. It doesn't need zillions of sub-units cluttering it up.

[nato]

Why even field infantry or archers?

That is an issue I wish was reflected better.

I think the real reasons were:

1) Mounted units are so much more expensive to make. This can be very well reflected by higher shield costs.

and

2) Mounted units eat so much more than foot units! Those horses gobble it down. I wish this was better reflected, but supply and logistics are totally missing in Civ.

Not that I am complaining ... logistics never has been in Civ, and perhaps is too hard to implement or too small for Civ's big picture view.

But logistics is so important! I wish it was in somehow. Maybe I'll just increase shield costs more for mounted units ...