EC3 Fix #21 - Implement Ranged Attack

[raingoon]

by Field Marshal Klesh

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</font>This is an idea I've been pondering. I originally posted this thought in the Civ2Gen/Com, before I realized what this one was all about.

I find it a bit unrealistic that Field artillery, tanks, and ships must be adjacent to the enemy in order to execute an attack. In real life these weapons have the abbility to attack from very long ranges. Is it possible for Civ3to change the attributes of these units? Imagine an attack system for these units(perhaps others) that would be simmilar to the "Paradrop" command. You press perhaps the "a"(for attack) button, then you get a crosshairs pointer(like the parachute icon) that allows for an attack from a few squares away. Battleships maybe three squares, field artillary from two and tanks from one. It seems to me that only infantry should have to risk themselves by getting up close, and personal with the enemy.

This has major implications toward strategy. Imagine parking a battleship within a city and taking out oncoming units which are three squares away!

The argument against this that developed in the other thread is that the atk/def/mov points already take into account the units real life ability. But the 'Move' catagory should be seen that way. Would a battleship go full speed ahead at a cruiser before it attacked it? No, it would fire upon it, and then move into the area. See what I mean? Costal bombardment can now stretch a little inland too.

The crosshairs idea can be put on anything with large missiles or cannons.(not medievil cannons, tank cannons of course)
Mainly I see only the modern units using this new idea.
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[Ekmek]

I'm for this. I've heard that CTP has a bombard function close to this. I support this for the same reasons stated above. But also because its unrealistic and annoying for my battleship to bombard the coastline and get damaged by infantry units.

Similarily the case is with artillery, it never engages an enemy in a close fight. Infantry may attack it(the solution in the Korean War was to fire a charge with no round creating a huge fireball), but thats only after the infantry surprised an engaged the unit. This usually happened on the infantry's own acccord and not as a counterattack to an artillery barrage. I tried to find a way that ground units can carry air units (thereby make artilly round units) but no luck (maybein TOT). Either way I'm for some ranged attack, it changes and better reflects warfare.
However, as a negative there has to be ways where the ranged unit has problems detecting other units (since it is not close) and also needs some logistical applications. Civ2's big combat weakness was that once you got Armor you just had to build an Armor heavy Army and you can roll all over the world. It totally ignored combined arms and weakened the role of infantry. I don't want to see this with ranged weapons.

[korn469]

getting some discussion going...

first can you define what the problem is? is it a significant problem? how does your ideas fix that problem specifically? does your fix effect any other areas of the game? if it does effect another area does it upset game balance in those other areas? is there a simpler way to fix the problem? does your idea hurt gameplay? why out of all of the ideas does your fix belong on this list?

Ranged attack requires range at least 1½ times the tile size. The only "ranged weapons" on the scale represented in Civ (~100+ miles per tile) are aircraft (including guided and ballistic missiles). But that should be handled under strategic generalization of air movement and attack.