Air missions, air/naval bombardment

[Biohazard]

I stumbled upon FreeCiv recently and was blown away at how well you've re-captured and improved the Civ2 experience. Kudos to you all for that!

A few things bother me about the Civ combat mechanics, though, and I see FreeCiv has inherited them. I recognize that the goal with FreeCiv is to recapture the Civ2 experience and so maybe these ideas aren't worth considering. But if you're looking to take some of the better aspects of Civ3/4/5 (or from other civ-like games) and incorporate them, then here are two I think would be beneficial.

Late-game air and naval combat was always a weak point in Civ2. Once the game arrives at industrial-era combat with battleships, aircraft carriers, and first-gen fighters/bombers, the combat model fails to utilize handle these units with interesting (and historically accurate) strategic depth. The solution to this problem is, at a minimum, to treat fixed-wing air units differently than land and sea units. Air units should have missions like "intercept", "fighter sweep", "relocate", and "bomb". If I have a fighter stationed in a city with "intercept" as the mission and a bomber attempts to attack, the fighter should have some % chance to intercept the attack. It then has some % chance to do damage to the bomber. Likewise, bombers have some defenses and may damage the fighter. This mimics the way fighters/bombers already work in the Civ2 model at a high level, but abstracts away the mostly-pointless "move air units around the map to get to the target, avoid enemy land units in the process". I'm also advocating for outcomes where both fighter and bomber can walk away from the air battle without being completely destroyed. I think that's okay, given the historical record with air battles, and also that we're not trying to treat them like land units anymore. I believe this is largely how air power is handled in Civ3/4/5.

For air-to-surface attacks I'd prefer to see damage inflicted rather than complete destruction. Air power, even with high-tech advances that have been made in the modern era, can't win wars by itself. Ground forces are still needed to both defend and attack territory. To accurately capture the role of air power at the strategic level, air power should cause damage to land units. (Some arguments can be made that you should eventually be able to destroy a land unit, or only destroy unfortified land units, or only destroy land units outside of cities/forts, etc. I think some of the more advanced bombers in later Civ games could destroy land and sea units after enough attacks. I don't pretend to know what the best gameplay route is at that level.) Air power then acts as a strategic force multiplier - if you have air power, you can weaken and soften up enemy land units and cities, making them easier to destroy with your armies. But if you multiply against zero - the zero in this case being the size of your army - you still get a zero overall. That means bombing advancing enemy units does little or nothing if you don't have ground forces there to stop those enemy units. The big change here is that Civ2-style bombers can destroy land units, meaning enough bombers can actually wipe out an enemy's land force completely. And they may even do so before protecting fighters can respond. Granted that air power can't take cities in the Civ2-model, but still, if you have enough air power you can destroy their entire army and walk into the capital with nothing more than a warrior. That seems odd and historically inaccurate.

I would also imagine that abstracting away the need to move air units around the map would help the AI handle air power better. The AI can then avoid trying to figure out a path to getting to its target, both for bombers making attacks and fighters trying to intercept.

On the other hand, I'm having trouble of thinking of reasons to keep the existing Civ2-style model. I'm interested to hear what those reasons are if anyone has them.

Adding naval bombardment for the industrial-era (and later) is less of a priority, but I think doing so would add another layer of strategy to naval warfare.

But overall, I like the Civ2-style combat model, and don't want to detract too much away from that. I'm hoping these ideas would take the game to a better place while still preserving the Civ2 style that we've all come to enjoy.

Thanks for making FreeCiv. Seeing what you've done has made me wish I had kept up with C programming.

[RSSwizard]

My Wishlist for air power is to make it more realistic, which None of the Civ games have done.
This being an extended option for Air Units that can make them operate in this fashion rather than normal units.

Unit Behavior:
Air Units can only Fight other Air Units (or those in the same movement class, or those with anti-air defense power).
Against any other unit the air unit can only Bombard, though it is a heavy bombardment (twice as many hits as usual).
It can only attack/bombard once per turn, after that its movement for that fuel cycle is ended.

Additionally, for a unit like a Bomber it should not have the ability to fight any other units, it can only be attacked. This is because its only job is to bombard, and for that its bombardment attack power should be very high. Likewise it can only bombard ground/sea targets, it cannot bombard air targets and if air targets are in the same square as other eligible units being bombarded the air targets are unaffected. And it cant "counter bombard" air targets.

This also allows their defense/attack power to be jacked up really high to reflect their effectiveness, since they are not able to be "defeated" except by something in the same class as itself.

The reasons are because:
If you dont have anti-air defense power and you're not on an even-keel with air units, then there is Nothing you can do to fight back against them. You cannot inflict damage on them.

However they dont just kill whatever they attack that cant defend against them either, they run out of missiles/bombs and have to re-arm. So the onslaught does come to an end at some point.

So this suggests Bombardment behavior, except the damage is more reminiscent of a major attack (normal combat) rather than standard bombardment which may only inflict a few hit points of damage. So that should do twice as many bombardment rounds as normal.

[The Square Cow]

I, for one, enjoy the concreteness of the Civ2 air combat model. If we wanted to enable more complex air engagements, then we could give bombers a fuel of 4 (So they can end 3 turns outside of a city) and fighters a fuel of 2 (ending one turn outside of a city). We would also halve the movement of bombers and fighters so their total range would still be the same.

This would mean that we could intercept bombers attacking (distant) cities as they flew to the target, and fighters would be able to defend bombers from other fighters for short distances.

A disadvantage would be that fast units like horsemen on road would be able to out run the bombers.

Also, this could be implemented within the mod system. If the AI could handle it is another issue...

[GriffonSpade]

My Wishlist for air power is to make it more realistic, which None of the Civ games have done.
This being an extended option for Air Units that can make them operate in this fashion rather than normal units.

Unit Behavior:
Air Units can only Fight other Air Units (or those in the same movement class, or those with anti-air defense power).
Against any other unit the air unit can only Bombard, though it is a heavy bombardment (twice as many hits as usual).
It can only attack/bombard once per turn, after that its movement for that fuel cycle is ended.

Additionally, for a unit like a Bomber it should not have the ability to fight any other units, it can only be attacked. This is because its only job is to bombard, and for that its bombardment attack power should be very high. Likewise it can only bombard ground/sea targets, it cannot bombard air targets and if air targets are in the same square as other eligible units being bombarded the air targets are unaffected. And it cant "counter bombard" air targets.

This also allows their defense/attack power to be jacked up really high to reflect their effectiveness, since they are not able to be "defeated" except by something in the same class as itself.

The reasons are because:
If you dont have anti-air defense power and you're not on an even-keel with air units, then there is Nothing you can do to fight back against them. You cannot inflict damage on them.

However they dont just kill whatever they attack that cant defend against them either, they run out of missiles/bombs and have to re-arm. So the onslaught does come to an end at some point.

So this suggests Bombardment behavior, except the damage is more reminiscent of a major attack (normal combat) rather than standard bombardment which may only inflict a few hit points of damage. So that should do twice as many bombardment rounds as normal.

This can all be somewhat mimicked with the existing framework. You can set a unit to bombard, and it will deal set amount of damage. However, NOTHING can defend against bombard, and bombard can NEVER kill a unit. Likewise you can use the unit flags framework in 2.5 to add bonuses to defense or attack, to make it so that certain classes are severely disadvantaged against others.