Part 20: Mechanics: Benefits of sieges
NewMars posted:
Test of time I don't know about, but fantastic worlds had the Jules Verne scenario, which justifies everything else about it.
Battle the secret society of evil and their devious leader fu manchu across the globe as the anglo alliance or the continental compact, defend against the martians and uncover the secrets of time travel! Pretty much stretched the limit of civ 2's shitty scripting engine to it's breaking point. I really wish someone would do an update of it. Also had a really neat theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFsP9_w1Qww
Huh, I must actually have Fantastic Worlds. My MGE Civ 2 doesn't have any of the old music which I actually like and instead randomly plays music I don't like, such as World of June Verne, or the absolutely awful-sounding Mars one.
nielsm posted:
One thing I've wondered for a long time, is doing a "siege" of a city (i.e. planting units on all its workable tiles, denying it production) useful ever?
Zebrin posted:
If the city has a large defending force, is sitting on a hill, and has walls, and you don't have enough to fully take the city, you can starve them out of the walls maybe? seems like you would be better off just picking a good defensive terrain, fortifying, and using those turns to amass a large enough army to take the city.
In other words... highly situational, to the point of being useless. So no.
Siege has a very powerful niche role. It's basically THE tactic if the enemy gets Democracy (or you just don't want to invite revolts) and the game is in a defensive tech stage. For example, if the Sioux had stolen Alpine Troopers in that last game.
It was taking me something like 15 veteran Cavaliers with 12 Attack each to take down Rivered, City Walled 13.5 Defense Musketeers mixed with 20.25 Defense Veteran musketeers.
Alpine troops on defense would have had 22.5 Defense if they weren't even veterans, 33.75 if they were. It could have taken 50+ Cavaliers per city.
And if the Sioux had actually built cities on real terrain? Like Hills? Or Rivered Forests? Or a Mountain? We're talking quite literally hundreds of veteran Cavaliers to seize a city held by enemies unlocked by the exact same tech.
Now again, inciting revolt completely solves this problem- and every problem. It is the most broken tactic in the game. But if you can't or won't use it, what can you do?
Well there's Nukes/veteran Bombers/various other things that take 50 techs to get to.
Or you siege them.
With 20 troops of any kind and quality, you can occupy every single tile around an enemy city. But you don't actually need to do that. All you need to do is occupy all tiles that give Production. So you can ignore Grasslands without shields, Oceans, Jungles, Swamps, etc. Stand there for a single turn and you reduce the enemy to most likely 1 Production shield per turn for that city. If they are a Democracy (which is the main reason to not be able to use Diplomats), then that means that city can support exactly one military unit. The entire rest of their army will disband that turn and there is nothing they can do about it.
If they're a Monarchy or something, then you still cut them down to 4 units. That's a lot more reasonable than the 10 or so you often fight. The best part is that it's just as likely to disband high tech units as low ones, so possibly you only need to fight a bunch of random 4000-year-old Horsemen instead of Alpine Troops or whatever.
Bam, easy conquest.
I actually did that to the final Sioux city, though it was a rush job that still left them a couple of shields and thus only wiped out about half their troops.
This same principle is also the key to why I love using Global Warming or Nuclear Winter to crush human players. Just by being maximally prosperous and determinedly lazy at home (or by launching nuclear attacks on anyone in reach whenever I feel like it) I can create enough Pollution to ruin everyone's land across the world. This will plunge their economy and Production into ruin, tie their Engineers up trying to fix things, and probably disband a lot of their field units and defenders.
Meanwhile I'm totally unaffected- or even benefiting in Freeciv- because I always rely 90% on Oceans for everything and Oceans are never hurt in any way by Pollution OR Global Warming.
You've probably heard of the "Eternal War" story about CIv 2; it became really famous for a while for some reason. If not, here's the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/com...ivilization_ii/
The TL;DR version is that the guy played badly enough that the AI got Nukes and the entire world became polluted and turned into Swamps by Global Warming. He ended up in a real-life-decade-long stalemate with 2 other civs. A ton of people then gave him lousy advice and a few gave him good but misguided advice.
The trouble is that they all saw the world's land being unusable as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to be exploited. Having the world became an irradiated, uninhabitable hellscape is my desired endgame. It more or less guarantees victory if you just build Harbors and Offshore Platforms, but that's heresy to conventional smallpoxers and bigpoxers alike.