ranged combat would be the number of spaces a unit can fire upon another unit, heres the statistics of how many tiles a unit can shoot:

1. archers: 1/2 tiles. so the farther away the arrows fly, the weeker the damage. same thing with the: Tank, Destroyer, Cruiser, AEGIS cruiser, and battleship, Artillery, and cannon. make an exception for ALL other infantry units, and Howitzer. note: see my thread on sieges for catapults.
2. musketeers: 2 tiles.
3. marines: 2 tiles.
4. riflemen: 2 tiles.
5. alpine troops: 2 tiles.
6. Tank: 1/3 tiles.
7. Cannon: 1/3 tiles.
8. Artillery: 1/3 tiles.
9. Howitzer: 4 tiles.
10. Destroyer: 1/2 tiles.
11. cruiser: 1/3 tiles.
12. AEGIS cruiser: 1/3 tiles.
13. Battleship: 1/4 tiles.

A tile is the size of a city.

see my thread, CITIES, AND YOUR CAPITAL..., on my siege idea.

p.s. I used to be Tim White.

I would also cut down on the range, especially the howitzer. 4 tile is to long.

An arrow won't travel one and neither will a musketters bullet, or much else.

Same with howitzers, etc. I can't see any way to make them fire over a long distance. The only thing this system could work with is cruise missiles and nukes...which I would hope are now "point and click" rather than having to manually move it to the city you wish to attack.

please, if you want this game to be at least a bit realistic, then use your brains.

quote: And I also suppose you guys think its realistic that two battleships right next to each other fire on each other, and hit its target.

quote: p.s. you also think then that a tank against an infantry unit that is right next to each other is going to lose.

Who's going to lose?

quote: and lastly, since when did ANY nations place cannon right next to the target.

as far as Civ's concerned...they would be in the same tile wouldn't they? even if the size of each square was reduced to 5 square miles

I don't understand where your post was going.

Ive played civ2 before where my Armor unit has lost to a marine unit, doesn't that sound a little strange to you??

I'm worried you are talking about the latter. Civ is (usually) depicting an entire world. Taking truly approximate figures, lets say the distance around the earth in a temperate zone (rather than the equator) is 16,000 miles. That means that even if Civ3 came up with maps that could support 1,600 x 1,600 tiles (gasp) a weapon would still need an effective range of 10 miles to fire into an adjacent tile. That still leaves long range bombardment in the province of 20th century artillery. Multiple tile ranges are for rockets and already implemented for cruise and nukes.

I would especially like Ranged combat for historical scenarios, like I was making a 'Normandy Landing' scenario the other day, I had to make my own map, since there wasnt one of specificly 'normany'. Historicaly, before the Allies sent in the Landing Craft, they bombarded the coast with Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, etc., the ships were well over 15 miles off the coast.

quote: Originally posted by Diablo, Bro. of Mephisto on 12-21-2000 02:06 PM I have to ask, dont you hate it when you have to go right up to land when you are controling a battleship to fire on a wimpy infantry unit??

Nope! Thats no problem for me whatsoever.

Besides, the AI cannot "see" and "overview" the map, the same way as the human player can (without unrealisticly long AI-turn calculations, what is). Therefore, the AI unit-shuffle-back-and-forth syndrome. The AI tries to anticipate any "maybe-threaths", without actually having any extensive overview over the map, to go after.

The reality is, Diablo, that good AI is probably the toughest part of this game to program, and every time they impliment a new feature like artillery or pollution or slavery, they have to find a way to make the computer use it.

IIRC, The Operational Art of War, designed for scenario building , has hexes which are considered to range from about 10 miles to about 50 miles.

Here we have people using a game where, at one extreme, you play the entire world on a small map, and a tile is well over 100 miles, to people making Normandy scenarios where the entire map is well under 100 miles across.

With all due respect to the Civ scenario designers, this wasnt designed as a war game like TOAW or Combat MIssion. Its designed to look at the development of civilizations (thus the name) over historical epochs. Its great how creative people are doing WW2 scenarios, but you can hardly fault the game for not being designed to make your lives easier.

OTOH ranged attack for certain 20th century weapons might make sense - what was the range for Big Bertha, 1918 German siege artillery? Also WW2 era Battleship guns, long range sub torpedos, etc?

All we need is an abstraction to show that the artillery is able to attack from range, and that only highly mobile units can hope to counter attack next turn. We do not need to start measuring ranges of weapons throughout the ages and modelling them.

The battle AI can then take over and concentrate purely on achieving the best combat result on the tactical map, perhaps with parameters to give it major goals - like don't lose more than 50% or only use long range bombardment.

You can only keep the two mostly separate if unit ranges are not normally a factor on the main game map. As soon as it becomes more advantageous to have an attack stack with an artillery stack behind it (and a fighter stack nearby for air support etc) then the human players will always find a way to outwit the AI and lure it to destruction.