Corbeau wrote:I don't know if there ever was a battle in pre-1000AD history where naval bombardment contributed in taking a city.
I may have been misunderstood. I was not suggesting that catapults should have the marine attribute. I understood that the wikipedia entry was talking about trireme attacks onto other ships (which were not so effective either). The point I was making was that galleys could carry equipment as well as personnel.
One strategy was crucial, and nothing ever came close to it: holding a line. After you hold a line, you can consider what to do with taht line, move forward, back, left or right, but unless you hold a line very firmly, you are about to be slaughtered.
Units landing from ships are not doing so in a line. They are doing it in disarray which lasts quite enough for any defences present to kill them off.
The issue I was talking about was that of occupying the city. In this situation there are NO defenses left in the city. It is true that marines can also attack defenders but that could be made expensive, as you please. Vodot may have been thinking along these lines.
I can think of three reasons why marines were introduced:
a) (cynically) capricious creep of complexity,
b) Corbeau's issue,
c) an attempt to make city capture a little more difficult in the earlier parts of the game by forcing players to use the barb strategy of landing on your doorstep one turn, and then attacking the next.
I believe I have answered Corbeau.
As for the third, I have an alternative suggestion:
From the very beginning Civ I had the concept of 'not moved this turn'. This was (and still is) implicit in creating the fortified state. Civ II introduced the EXPLICIT use in HP recovery. My suggestion is to make this a reqs vector predicate. This would have a variety of uses but I will only talk about two here.
First, one could specify that a sea borne land unit could only occupy a city if the transporter was 'not moved'. This means that the transporter would have to finish its turn next to the city, in order for the attack to occur the next turn giving the defender one turn to arrange a defense. Not exactly Civ II compliant but I would say small beer - there are bigger fish to fry.
Second, this predicate could be used as an additional option to stop the exploit of running a unit along a river with a sequence of triremes. This also applies to the open sea with any transporter - an exploit much abused in Civ II (and could therefore justify the non compliance of my little feature.)
Wahazar wrote:River battle ships, such monitor, should be slightly worse than their naval counterparts,
wikipedia:"After the first clashes of ironclads (both with wooden ships and with one another) took place in 1862 during the American Civil War, it became clear that the ironclad had replaced the unarmored ship of the line as the most powerful warship afloat. This type of ship would come to be very successful in the American Civil War.[3]
Ironclads were designed for several roles, including as high seas battleships, coastal defense ships, and long-range cruisers."
It is my understanding that battle between CSS Virginia and USS Monitor was entirely within the rivers' estuaries at Hampton Roads. While the USS Monitor itself was not seaworthy (it sank in a storm - anyone remember triremes?), the naval arms race lead to (armored) dreadnoughts and then to (unarmored) battleships. I might point out that the name 'battleship' came from the precursor to the ironclad - SHIP of the line (of BATTLE) - there is thus an unbroken sequence of obsolescence of flagships [There is in fact a fifth and current - the carrier]. Note that destroyers were NEVER flagships!!!
Wahazar wrote:Corbeau wrote:
A second best solution would be that a river takes a lot of MPs cross (increasnig the cost instead of reducing it), but you can still have boats that are able to carry units along.
It is exactly a reason, why I started this thread and proposed some river boat/ships tiers.
I should apologize to Wahazar for drifting off topic but I do think there was a natural progression. As for that initial topic I am not really sure what the issue is. The fact is that before bridge building rivers ARE an obstacle. And this continues - many a battle was fought over the control/destruction of bridges.
As for travelling ALONG rivers there is ambiguity/conflation: do we consider the unit's movement, or do we consider the unit's ability to co-opt some unspecified transport. I am not sure I know the general answer to this. This issues extends to roads and RAILROADS also. I note that tilesets have had, and still have, an unused unit - the train!