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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.

I deny it. What is true is that in wars where the human player is the aggressor, there's often one decisive battle followed up by a slow roll over the now-mostly-defenseless territory. And so the tactical considerations for that battle are going to be minimized, in that they only need to be figured out once. I.e. a well-researched and -implemented invasion can accomplish a lot by choosing a favorable initial battlefield, yes.

Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.

Which is how Civ4 works, yes. Literally with artillery and bombing and the 'collateral damage' mechanic. Your units standing shoulder to shoulder will get absolutely shredded by AOE damage if you're not taking steps to prevent that, and first-line enemy defensive cities usually have multiple artillery units in them for this reason. Even the AI.

Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.

That's true of NuCiv, sure, but it's not true of Civ4.

I'm with you, civ4 has a ton of tactical depth to its combat system, and I get annoyed when people don't see it. I think the main problem is that a lot of new players don't like seeing their catapults die (which they usually do when used for collateral damage), so they never really figure out the 'collateral damage' system. They also seem to feel guilty about using nukes in the late game, for some reason. Notably the AI does not share that guilt, and will freely use catapults or nukes all over the place.

I do think you're not alone in missing 4, I hear that a lot but I always chalked it up to 4 being the most featureful and having insane levels of content in the base game compared to any modern release.

I was too young to dig deep into the combat so my memory of it mostly comes from the later instalments.

What I remember of 4 is that the combat was a slog in the late game because everyone had so many units you couldn't make any progress.

I guess that's actually a pretty decent portrayal of modern warfare, ironically enough.

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