Opinions: Should the big siege units attack on non native tiles?

Post by **wieder** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 7:13 pm

In the past games some people were commenting how the artillery and howizer units can't attack non native tiles even while in real life those units can reach far away targets.

We could enable that for the siege units but is there a downside to that? With the ability to attack non native tiles it would be possible to attack on mountains without roads and also ships that come next to the coast. Would it be too powerful or is there some other issue if this is enabled?

Drew · Post by **Drew** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 8:03 pm

I think this would make things more interesting. Would this be a applied to all siege units, even down to the catapult? In LT35, during the gunpowder age it was nearly impossible to remove musketeers on a mountain with a fortress but no road, but being able to attack with cannons be a nice option to have. I'm fine either way though.

cgalik · Post by **cgalik** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 9:49 pm

I too think this would be fun to have enabled. Siege units can attack any tile, but not move on any tile (unless roads).

Post by **wieder** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 9:54 pm

I have now enabled this (not yet tested) but another change 2.5 has is how rivers are handles. The RiverNative setting is missing meaning that the siege units can' move on rivers. Even more strange is that they can't move on roads. This needs to be fixed. Really strange.

Post by **wieder** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 10:36 pm

I figured out out. That's now defined on the terrain.ruleset like this:

[road_river]
native_to = "Land", "Small Land", "Big Land", "Merchant", "Big Siege", "Trireme"

That also gave me an idea. In the past games rivers have been fun but also kind of unfiar for those who are defending. What if we cange the river settings like this:

native_to = "Land", "Small Land", "Merchant", "Trireme"

That way you could still use riflemen, musketeers, horses etc to moving the same way on rivers wouldn't apply to howizers, cannons, chariots, tanks etc..

What do you think?

Post by **Corbeau** » Wed Dec 23, 2015 12:51 am

How about making siege units "bombarders"? Meaning, they only weaken the defender and don't kill it, but don't die in the process.

Firerate to be discussed.

Post by **wieder** » Wed Dec 23, 2015 3:11 pm

Very interesting. We could use that.

One issue I can think about is defending cities becoming really hard since you can seriously would all the units inside any city with about 6-12 siege units and this starts from the catapults. It's kind of the same effect we had with bombers in LT34 when we softened the heavily defended capital cities by surrounding them with bombers.

What do people think, would this change the game too much?

Post by **Corbeau** » Fri Dec 25, 2015 5:30 pm

Hm, to counter this, make siege units much slower and able to move only on roads and flat terrain. Catapults move one tile, cannons 2, artillery 3. You can still do blitzkrieg, but not with those units. As in RL, those are used to break the hard points.

Additionally, an idea of mine that has been brewing for a while: In realistic warfare, you can't break a city with artilllery. Artillery is ineffective between buildings, you can destroy city infrastructure (is it possible to kill city improvements by attacking units?), but military units inside will still be covered by the rubble. To reflect that, siege units should have decreased power when attacking cities.

Post by **wieder** » Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:16 pm

Artillery already has 3 moves but it's true that catapults and cannons have more (3 moves). Then again with restrictinfra it doesn't matter if the unit shave 3 or 1 move since the defender can build some protective forest next to the cities, eating all the moves from those units anyway.

Currently all the siege units have the feature that will give them double firepower against the cities. This is not a standard feature for Freeciv. The standard is that you get double firepower only for howizers and artilleries. To compensate this catapults and cannons now have less attack power.

The problem we actually have is that the units should be great for some particular task and not great for everything. I'm shy to make changes I have trouble understanding. With that kind of units the tc attacks might become too popular. It would work like this: You take an elephant, move and fortify it just before the tc and also move a catapult at the same time. With maybe 6 units like this it would become almost impossible to defend any city since all the defenders would lose some HP once the catapults would reach the city. This could be done with all units with more than 4 moves and with good defensive values.

Maybe we could experiment with this idea with cannons and catapults. We could add similar units, with same graphics but with different attributes. After that we could see if those units become popular or if they are too powerful or too weak. Probably too risky to change all the siege units at once. We have done some similar experiments in the past to find out if the ideas work in the real games or not.

cgalik · Post by **cgalik** » Thu Dec 31, 2015 10:22 pm

It would be cool if catapults and the like could do both (bombard or attack). Is this possible?

Also, In LT35 a bomber could not bombard a ship on the water, only attack. Is that correct?

Post by **wieder** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 5:27 pm

A bomber will attack if bombing is not possible and when it attacks a ship it's not able to bomb. I can't remember the exact way of how it is but in general it works like in the real life. If a fighter fights with a bomber both canb only fire with guns but if a bomber attacks a city only bombs are a real option.

We could add two bomber units. One able to bombard and one only attack but I don't think it would be possible to allow the player to choose what to do.