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Exile
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of the Benighted Realms
Sep 2000
time: 23:14
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but practical?
Field Marshall Klesh offhandedly mentioned what I think is the best idea ever for improving a civ2 scenario. Someone some time ago mentioned that, in order to circumvent the "stacking problem," a scenario designer could place fortresses on every square on the map, then make them invisible. IMO, the "stacking problem" is one of the worst inconsistencies of the civ2 game. For example, you have 6 units in the same square. A bomber comes out of nowhere, bombs, and every one of those units is wiped out by the attack. Not very realistic. Additionally, this characteristic of the game tends to "funnel" campaigns along railroads and through towns and fortresses, simply to keep from incurring these kinds of losses. Putting an army "in the field" is just too dangerous because "stacking" them all in the same square will just get them all killed by a lucky attack. 10 tanks in the same square will all die if they are hit by a single successful artillery attack. How realistic is that?
One wonders if the designers of civ2 ever heard of the idea of "Concentration of Force?"
But implementing this, invisible-fortresses-in-every-square, would create other problems. All units would be doubled. But Klesh solved that with one neat statement. With adjustments of the terrain, so that the effective terrain defense is half of what it would be normally, you solve this problem. By placing invisible fortresses in every square, then adjusting terrain effects to compensate, you can effectively re-make the game so that concentration of force is now an operative concept in military affairs on the civ2 map. If an artillery unit attacked a square with 10 tanks in it, 1 would die, and the others would then be able to pounce. I don't know about you, but I REALLY like this outcome.
It would also have the pleasing effect of eliminating those geometrically-perfect arrangements of fortresses put down by the AIs around every bunch of cities that invariably get infested by their partisans when you finally take a city.
If you wanted an actual "fortress" of some sort in a scenario, you could then always use a unit, suitably defined, as such, and with a lot more graphic variation.
The one remaining problem that I can see with this is human stamina. A big map would require an awful lot a clicking to get something like this implemented. Is there any way to short-cut this? Is there some way to set up the scenario so that every square is created already having a fortress in it? That way all one has to do is blank out the graphic.
Also, how would these invisible fortresses affect air units in the air? In Nemo's recent release, The Blitz, I noticed that several times when, as the British, I attacked flights of AI German bombers, that 4 or 5 units in the same square would be killed. Would a fortress in every square have prevented this kind of thing happening?
Intriqued mightily,
Exile
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techumseh
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of the frozen North.
Apr 1999
time: 22:14
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As Henrik says, it was John Ellis who pioneered this concept. If you're making a scenario without air units, you can use airfields in the same way. You don't need to fiddle with the defensive values of terrain, and you can still build fortresses for defense.
As for covering a large map with these, maybe one of Mercators' or Gothmogs' excellent programs could do it. They're available on http://civ.cx/
Last edited by techumseh on 01-07-2001 at 21:18
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Kull
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El Paso, TX USA
Mar 1999
time: 22:14
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This could be made "workable", with a little thought.
1) Don't fortify everything: One way in which Civ is totally different from real life, is the way in which defense bonuses encourage you to place armies on mountains, hills, and forests. If you only placed the fortresses on grassland and plains (where historically the big battles have always been fought), it would encourage the player to keep his troops where they belong. This could be tweaked, of course. You may want to put fortresses on all (or most) river terrain, and perhaps also at chokepoints or in conjunction with all roads or railroads. This technique would not only add realism, it would reduce the amount of editing.
2) Oceans: The negative here is the possibility of stranded land units sitting in the ocean after their troopship gets killed. The human player could adjust, and rationalize this as a "sea rescue opportunity", but the AI would be ignorant of that benefit. On the other hand, naval combat becomes much more realistic when you get the chance to use naval stacks. Again, the human player would probably benefit much more by thoroughly protecting his troopships, subs, and carriers. I highly doubt the AI would make similar adjustments. The same is probably true on land, but no single land units are quite as valuable as transports and carriers since they can't "carry" multiple other units. Keeping with our "theme" of reducing the edit workload, perhaps naval fortresses could be placed only along the shoreline and in shipping lanes. This would encourage naval units to travel along the "traditional" routes, and would allow for easy "rescue" of troops whose ships are sunk close to shore. If you don't plan to use air units or airbases, perhaps these could be used at sea in place of fortresses (I assume this would work), and could be colored to make the shipping lanes easily visible. On balance, if the scenario has a heavy reliance on naval activity, fortresses are good....otherwise, it's another piece of terrain that doesn't have to be edited.
3) Barbarians: Traditional barbarians will never work on this kind of map. They'll just metastasize across the landscape occupying fortresses one unit at a time (if you are using ToT, this is where fortresses are superior to airbases since Barbs will never pillage the former but will ALWAYS destroy the latter). On the other hand, it suggests the possibility for a whole new use for Barbs. You could add them to the game as some kind of disease or crop blight...even a locust swarm! And Barb Leaders could be transformed into some kind of reward for cleaning up the mess: Kill the leader and get this message: "Local peasants present you with 100 Gold in thanks for ending the locust infestation".
4) What will the AI do? The $64 question. Having never played Bonaparte I have no first hand knowledge, but the odds are there's going to be SOME effect. Maybe their Defensive type units will start randomly fortifying all over the map. The best way to figure out the difference would be to make this your LAST change to a completed scenario. Then playtest both versions and see what happens. To really minimize the workload, you could edit only a small section of the map and see how the action differs. Worst case, you've wasted a couple days testing a scenario idea that didn't pan out. Well, duh, we do that already! 
This discussion has been valuable, since I was on the fence about adding this capability to "Guns of August". Now it's seems like it would be dumb NOT to test this out!
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master on high
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San Francisco
Apr 1999
time: 05:14
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in Bonaparte the AI fortified just about all of it's units and never moved them...at least that's how I remember it.
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01-07-2001 16:18
At sea this feature wont work well since a killed transport will leave all its units out there in the middle of the ocean, the AI is rather capable of fighting whit fortresses all around the place in Bonaparte, except for the barbarians, who allthough they never pillage anything fortify themselves in every square on the map.
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