Casualties of War

Patroklos · October 30, 2002, 00:29

Hey everyone,

Bieng a history major, I had an idea in class. I was studying WWI and all the statistics associated with it and began to wonder what they would be for my Civ wars.

I don't know about any of you , but I would like to see a casualty list after I declare peace with a particular Civ, maybe including the units lost by both sides during that particular conflict. Not only that, but I think a shield loss comparison would be interesting, where the total shield cost for all the units of both sides are compared (this means that if I am fighting a Tech backwards Civ with cheap units then a better comparison can be made). This would let you see who won economically in a sense.

Why stop there, why not give each unit a number equivalent to the soldiers that would be contained therein (maybe a spearmen unit represents a thousand soldiers, a tank two thousand, a fighter three hundred), so that you can see an abstact number for soldiers lost. A civilian casualty stat would also be useful, counting the population lost to bombing, artillery, and city conquest (of course this would have to be modified for tha ages, a pop point in a medieval city would be 10,000 casualties, while in the modern age would be 1,000,000 maybe). I think that would be fun. I also think that when two civs declare peace it should be sent to all the players.

What do you think?

Muddi · October 30, 2002, 00:37

I think that sounds pretty cool. Maybe you would need a separate program that runs along side civ to keep track. wish i could program ...

vmxa1 · October 30, 2002, 02:04

They had a list of lost units in civ2, but I think it was a running list, I forget.

Demerzel · October 30, 2002, 03:29

in civ2 they did indeed have a running list of units killed & lost by the civs.

having stats of how many civilians I killed off in a war sounds just a bit macabre for my tastes. a list comparison of military casualties for each side I guess would be useful for the player and maybe for the AI too if it could use the information intelligently...

The Pioneer · October 30, 2002, 03:36

I loved that list on Civ 2. I used to look into it all the time. Although it served no practical purpose it was fun to check it out.

So long...

SanPellegrino · October 30, 2002, 03:38

IMHO casualty stats are a very good idea, because the terms of peace with the AI are dependant of your kill ratio. (the more units you kill (and cities you conquer) the more money and tech you can get from peace).

Well, and another point: I just loved it in civ2 to see my 20 lost MAs vs. 600 spearmen and musketeers

Muddi · October 30, 2002, 04:00

oh yaeh you wipe out a civilization then see the stat on all the units you slaughtered.

I can imagine your little civs learning these things at uni history classes...

Adm.Naismith · October 30, 2002, 06:08

Quote:

Originally posted by SanPellegrino
IMHO casualty stats are a very good idea, because the terms of peace with the AI are dependant of your kill ratio. (the more units you kill (and cities you conquer) the more money and tech you can get from peace).

We asked for similar statistics during long years of Civ III brainstorming. Probably Firaxis just chose to cut some numbers to save computing resources.

Just a bit of searching in Apolyton archives, will let you find many interesting suggestion that you can consider worth to read, IMHO.

werdhertz · October 30, 2002, 06:16

I, also, would like to see this. maybe in the 2nd expansion pack..We can hope..

miccofl · October 30, 2002, 09:02

If the game could create and save a text file at the end of every turn - call it "turnsummaryyear.txt" that could be called up with a button or hotkey, it would be a welcome addition, although on huge maps with the resulting epic battle sequences, the calculation and compilation of the file would most likely cause quite a wait between turns.

Cidifer · October 30, 2002, 09:22

Here's something that I've always thought though, when a veteren unit of let's say Infentry (which we'll say has 1,000 units to make it simple) goes into battle and loses 2 health bonuses I don't think of that as all 1,000 people being hurt I think of it as half of them being killed, which means if you wanted actual # of people casualties maybe you could count those as casualties too.
Now there are 2 ways to of upgraded units (elite for this example) you can think of it as them getting an extra 250, or how I think of it, that they have gained experiance and now in battle they tend to lose fewer people at a time, for example instead of 250 people per hit point it's now only 200.

Anyway just letting people know, it's fun to pretend like maybe we'll get it in someday.

Patroklos · October 30, 2002, 15:23

The counting civilian casualty idea wasn't some twisted idea of me liking the idea of slaughtering the inocent, but rather a way fro me to compare my civ wars to real life equivalents.

aahz_capone · October 30, 2002, 16:12

I think this is a great idea. I looked at the military casuality list in civ2 all the time as well, just to see which civ is better at war and such. If it could split that list into sections (The first Sino-Russo war, the Franco-Persian war, the second Sino-Russo war, etc) that would rock!

Showing civilian casualties (from bombing, art, nukes etc) would be mucho mucho cool. Then you could see which civ is the most ruthless.

Demerzel · October 30, 2002, 18:17

if an infantry unis is supposed to represent an infantry division then it comprises ~12,000 men. so using the above system & say it lost "2 health points", that would be 6,000 men cut down in their prime in 2secs of game time. youch. that would be 3,000 men dying per second. not sometime to revel in surely?

"ooh looks boys, according to the stats I got a new high of 34,500 men killed per game minute. I rule!"

sheesh.

however at least this is dealing with soldiers who know what they are letting themselves in for. what worries me is the people who want to know how many civilians they kill as if that makes you a better gamer...

the game is supposed to be fun but surely it is fun in the abstract nature of your command? considering just how much your abhorrent or benevolent rule affects the "common" person could be quite suprising indeed.

to really express this simply, if I attacked a size 20 city then that might be 2 or 3 million citizens. After a considerable bombardment and subsequent capture that city might drop to size 6, which say is ~500k people ( it might be less I forgot exactly). this would mean I've either killed/wounded/or made refugee at least 1.5 to 2.5 million people...

in a hard fought modern war I might expect to do this between 5-10 times to take what I desire, leading to anywhere between a low estimate of 7.5 million to a high of 25 million casualties/refugees.

exactly where is the fun in knowing you've murdered X number of civilians come from? mass genocide isn't fun it's something to fight against. I seriously wonder about certain peeps, me I try to keep the horrific as abstract from the gameplay as possible.

sorry to be a downer on this thread but I'm prepared to accept people wanting a military "who's the best general" stats idea but "who's the best mass murderering genocidal lunatic" stats idea is abhorrent to me.

Cidifer · October 30, 2002, 18:42

IT'S A GAME!
Also if I'm playing multiplayer (and to a lesser extrent SP) and I find that one player has kills about a million civilians per war then I'd know he likely uses the tactic of bombarding the cities of his enemies or razing them afterward, this information would surely prove useful in planning my defense, don't you agree?

Also are you forgetting the game world doesn't take place in seconds? each turn is many years long, sometimes hundreds of years at a time so it wouldn't be like killing 3,000 people a second.
Also I think that the infentry representing a division that's a little big, I mean think of how many inf\rifleman you have at once. I like to think of them more as companies or some other smaller group.

Demerzel · October 30, 2002, 19:25

yes I know it's a game but as I plainly said the whole point of CivX is that its an abstraction of reality. the fun is in the abstraction not in the ruthless implemention of reality.

For example, I do not want to have to have feelings of guilt for being forced to "ethnically cleanse" opponent civs because the game is so limited as to force me to do that. Why in hell would I want to see a list of civilian casualties I enforced on the enemy?

with regards to your use of stats to determine if an enemy uses artillery extensively, surely using a spy to determine that s/he has say 50+ of the things pretty much guarantees that they will use them in some capacity.

btw, even if we consider infantry/rifleman/etc.. to regiment in size that is still ~3,000 men and half casualties amount to 1,500 men a pop. in a very large battle with armour scything through enemy defences, that would be say 10-15 modern armour/tanks taking on 30-40 infantry. if all infantry killed thats say 35 * 3,000 men killed. 105,000 dead in one titantic battle and i've had that happen more frequent in game than I'd care to admit yet that pales between the two to three million I've killed in a siege of a size 20+ city.

ONCE AGAIN.

Yes it's a game but let's keep it abstract eh? I sometimes have to reduce a size 20+ city to a size 6 city in order to capture it but I do not want to reflect on the realities of the millions of deaths that really entails. similarly if the enemy attacks with a 30+ stack and I eliminate it, should i glory in the hundred thousand deaths I've inflicted?

I've won, the enemy lost. that's good enough for me. not who can ethnically cleanse the best...

Patroklos · October 30, 2002, 23:51

You are right, it is just a game.

That bieng said, I look at it as a simulation also. I like playing on real world maps to see "how things might have been different," and make senarios to replay historical events. The degree of accuracy is suspect because of the engine, but I can think of no other game that can come close to this and still be interesting and fun.

If you need to bombard a city to size six to take it then yes, you are inteed bing ruthless and killing millions of people. If you want to be true to ethics, then try to take it without the bombardment. Yeah, your casualties would be high, but that is the price of ethics. Real western nations struggle with this problem today, where their ethics require to go to extreme methods to acheive victory without civilian casualties. Play like them then. Perhaps for players such as yourself, one of the challenges could be to see if you can win without bieng a murderer.

And I must say, when you bomb a city in real life you don't normally kill millions, you kill thousands and make millions refugees (yeah in WWII we did kill millions in bombing, but that took 6 years of war to do). I have mentioned including refugees in the game, perhaps as population in cities during wartime that produce nothing but cost money? Whatever it is, it would be easier to just call them "casualties." Or reduce the number of people each pop point represents to reflect that not all of them were killied.

Once again, I view the game as a simulation, and I enjoy realism, or at least as close to it as I can get. In real war civilians die, deal with it. So in my simulations I want to know how many of my and their people were killed. Call me a nazi if you will, but I will call you a hippy (that is only if you call me a nazi of course

).

Note: I already do my best to calculate these numbers on paper when I play (not the shield idea, that would just take too much time). It is tedious but rewarding work, as it once again adds more realism to the game.

And I have to say this, who is the biggest monster (as far as a computer gamer killing nonexistant people goes), those who put a face to those they kill with a quantitative analysis, or those who call them "pop points" and leave them at that?

JohnM2433 · October 31, 2002, 02:09

Maybe bombarding cities should negatively effect your reputation. Then it would make sense to keep track of civilian casualties, and try to minimize them. Having access to the AI's casualty histories would be nice too. If you knew that an AI caused a high number of civilian casualties, you could lower your opinion of them, just as they do to you.

Demerzel · October 31, 2002, 02:21

darn nazi

not bombarding that size 21 city with 30 or 40 bombers before attacking it would have meant I'd have lost nearly half my tank strength trying to winkle out the 10 or so infantry defence. ouch. i don't normally use any kind of bombardment until the very end game but then a well defended AI size 12+ city is too hard to take otherwise.

Cidifer · October 31, 2002, 10:27

If you really don't want to feel "guilty" then there's no need that your wars carry you all the way to an enemies size 20 cities. Most boarders cities are smaller then that and who the heck is going to make you look at the casuality report? We're not talking about a talking report that says "hey you just killed a million people."
Also I don't know about you but genreally I don't build 50+ of one thing unless I have some where around that many in a complementing unit (for example Cavalry\riflemen). Also just becuase I see someone has a whole lot of bombers or artilary doesn't mean they are more likely to go on a bombing spree then someone with half as many who has been doing it all game. For example if I have 2 countries boardering me and I see that one has killed say 3 million enemy soldiers and 500,000 civilians and the other has only killed a 500,000 soldiers and no civilians I'd be more afriad of the 1st one invading me even if the other had a much larger military. The reasoning is, if he's got a smaller military and has been in a bunch or wars it's probably because he's been using his more and has been going after cities more often then the other guy.

This could also add something else to trade, (casualty reports). Whenever a civ goes to war with another one both sides should save a report of their casualties taken and inflicted, that way when you meet new civs you can trade these to get an idea of how they (as well as the other civs around them) have been playing on their continent while you've been on yours.

Basically if you don't like it you don't have to read it, (we'll never get it anyway so it doesn't matter) and if you really felt bad about it you wouldn't do it in the 1st place, you know (or should know) that every time a city drops a size from bombardment that means thousands of people have been killed. Why doesn't that make you feel bad?

Martinus · October 31, 2002, 11:03

I think we are facing one of those "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody sees it" absurdities.

I mean, come on. If you shoot a man in the street, would you only feel guilty if you read about the murder in a newspaper on the next day? I'd call it psycho

Martinus · October 31, 2002, 11:05

Besides, I think it is a great idea both ways, actually, adding to a realism. Not only you can avoid mass murder, you could actually make it a point in a MP game with likewise minded players to "punish" genocidal civs (at least it would make a nice, yet another, casus belli to kick someone else's ass).

Die genocidal evildoers

Apolex · October 31, 2002, 14:53

Quote:

Originally posted by Demerzel
darn nazi

not bombarding that size 21 city with 30 or 40 bombers before attacking it would have meant I'd have lost nearly half my tank strength trying to winkle out the 10 or so infantry defence. ouch. i don't normally use any kind of bombardment until the very end game but then a well defended AI size 12+ city is too hard to take otherwise.

Yeah, these are the horrors of war, which are simulated in a game like this. If that makes you squeemish, may I suggest The Sims for you? The calculation you just did was the same one the United States did when determining whether or not to use the atomic bomb. An invasion of Japan would have killed millions on both sides. The US decided to drop the bomb and instantly kill thousands (REAL people, not pixels!) It's a terrible thing, but you're doing the same thing in this game even if there aren't stats to show it. Maybe you would want the stats in there to try and minimize how many people you kill. I think the idea of it affecting your reputation is interesting.

Demerzel · October 31, 2002, 15:11

i'm just saying that keeping it abstract is one of the fun points of the game.

sheesh.

Lunacy · October 31, 2002, 16:21

Quote:

Originally posted by JohnM2433
Maybe bombarding cities should negatively effect your reputation. Then it would make sense to keep track of civilian casualties, and try to minimize them.

The game would feel more real if bombarding cities non-stop and the resulting civilian casualties had a REALLY negative impact on the attacking civ - particularly in the modern age. Such a strategy could result in more citizens protesting, a really bad reputation with the other civs, trade embargos and possibly even expulsion from the UN (meaning you would loose control of the UN if you were the one who built it). Also - this might be an incentive to try to get weaponry that allows you to do precision attacks. I've never built any of the stealth units but, aside from the humanitarian aspects, if I knew that killing a ton of civilians was going to create a lot of problems that would definitely cause me to consider building the stealth planes that allow precision bombing.

I think nuking is far too easy also. There should be TREMENDOUS consequences if you nuke another civ - not only political but environmental. If you have troops or cities of your own nearby they should have to contend with the possibility of radiation poisoning. Also, the clean-up of any location that's been nuked should take a LONG time and possibly even cost money.

One final thing about the bombing which I think is somewhat unrealistic is that the planes never accidentally drop those bombs on friendly troops. That's a very real part of war - friendly fire. If you bomb something that's right next to one of your units I think there should be a risk there that you might hurt some of your own units.

Lunacy

Apolex · October 31, 2002, 16:57

Quote:

Originally posted by Lunacy

One final thing about the bombing which I think is somewhat unrealistic is that the planes never accidentally drop those bombs on friendly troops. That's a very real part of war - friendly fire. If you bomb something that's right next to one of your units I think there should be a risk there that you might hurt some of your own units.

Lunacy

I agree with your other points, but this last one is silly. If the units in Civ III represent 1000-2000 men each, then the results from friendly fire would be completely insignificant. In the Gulf War, the US lost a total of about 200 troops to friendly fire, out of like 500,000. A friendly fire incident (at it's worst) causes maybe 20 casualities... that's not even NEAR enough to warrant even a hit-point loss in one of your units.

In addition, bombing 'right next' to your units in Civ III is a tile away which probably represents at least 50 miles away in distance... way too far away to cause accidents.

True, friendly fire does occur in real life, but so does influenza, stds, awol, etc., (these probably cause more troop loss than friendly fire), but it's not practical or realistic to put them in the game as far as casualities go.

Cidifer · October 31, 2002, 17:03

Also in the game you never bomb at the same time your troops are engaged in comat, meaning when they are on a tile with an enemy they are fighting with no air support, that can only come before and after battles in a way it's also unrealistic but I think it works pretty well this way.