Let us besiege cities. Not just attack cities, besiege them. Currently, city defenders get defensive bonuses for occupying a city, thus with two relatively balanced armies the city the attacker will always be at an disadvantage. This is a relatively straight forward and also very good concept. It SHOULD be hard to attack cities, attacking should require more/better forces than defending. In many respects I think the defensive bonus of cities needs to be increased, especially in the early game. However, any strategy should also have a weakness that can be exploited.
Currently, the only method attackers have to draw cities defenders out is pillaging resource tiles. However, if you're building your cities properly, you've snaked out your build to attach any outlying resources to your city defenses, making this method useless. An attacker has no reliable method of drawing out a defender that has attached all nearby resources to main city. Even if you've been unable to incorporate a certain resource, a proper build will leave the least valuable (or most easily reconstructed) ones outside. Go ahead and pillage my clay pit, I've still got 1000 materials stockpiled; I don't think I'll be running out soon. Thus the one method attackers have of drawing defenders out is nerfed, especially in late game when most cities will be properly built out.
Here is what I propose:
Allow attacking stacks the option to besiege a city, once besieged certain penalties start to kick in. For instance, the besieged city no longer contributes resources to the global pool, besieged city produces at much lower rate, besieged city does not grow or perhaps even begins to shrink, units stationed in the besieged city start taking a low amount of damage each turn, etc.
This mechanic could also be used to tame down the impetus mentioned earlier to unrealistically snake a city across miles of wasteland in order to get a resource inside you walls. For instance, make the damage per turn units stationed inside the city take proportional to the length of the city walls/# soldiers stationed in the city (i.e. the number of tiles on the exterior of the city for calculation purposes/number of soldiers in the army). Intuitively, soldiers forced to patrol miles and miles of walls on ever decreasing rations would begin to get a little weary and might not fight as effectively. Allow any siege weapons or certain creatures (dragons, earth elementals, etc.) the attacker has to increase these penalties.
This in turn leads to much more interesting strategic choices when faced with an attack. Do I march out immediately and attack to preserve my strength and production, taking the risk that I may ultimately lose the city? Do I let the enemy besiege my town and hope I can eventually produce enough units locally in order to break the siege? Do I bring in an army from another city or call on an ally to break the siege (Charge of Rohan in Return of the King anyone?)? Do I counter attack into my enemies territory at a different location to draw off the besieging forces? All the while I know that every turn I wait my soldiers are getting closer and closer to falling to a final assault.
This also opens up some interesting new building ideas: structures that help a town endure a siege. Granaries and wells reduce the damage taken by units and keep population growing, Warehouses that allow the city to continue to produce at normal rates, secret tunnels allow the city to continue to contribute a portion of production to global stores, etc.
Just an Idea... suggestions?
Having a settlment besieged would make sense. Force your opponent to sally forth to face you outside their city or loose all the resources it produces.
In this way walls would be more for holding out until reinforcements arrive than what they are now which is a structure that prettymuch gives every friendly unit a magical forcefield for no real reason.
I'd also like to see walls appear on the tactical map, but that may be a little too far off the rails for this thread.
+1
In addition this would need to be balanced with something that made going into enemy territory and holding a protracted siege costly/dangerous.
In Civ IV this was done with supply costs for units outside of your national borders, moving a unit into enemy territory, or uncontrolled territory dramatically increased the amount of upkeep required. This is an excellent mechanic that could be easily copied for Elemental, however, there are even more interesting things that could be implemented: Spells.
Specifically, spells that made it very dangerous to enter enemy lands. There are already a few such as tremor in the earth line that can only be cast in your area of influence, however, this repertoire needs to be dramatically expanded. Best inclusion would be more direct damage spells that function on the strategic Map. These would be buffed when casting within your territory.
This might be a long shot, but I was thinking about multistage battles that could reflect the difficulty in taking a city. For example, attacking a level 3 city might involve just one battle, but taking on a level 4 city requires a battle by the city walls, and if the attacker is successful, then they have to fight in the inner city, against some sort of resistance, with maybe armed peasants = population in city / 100 (or something) armed with rudimentary weapons to give the defender one last fighting chance.
A level 5 city may have 3 stages, the outer wall, the keep, and the inner last defense, where the outer wall contains the stationed units fighting, the keep is a fight against some kinds of guardians, and the inner wall are the peasants defending their home. This may allow for reinforcements to also return to the city in time (except teleport might mess this up). How far the attacker gets before loses, the city suffers an ever increasing penalty, possibly like:
Outer wall defeated: no defense bonus, no resource generation for a certain period of time
Keep defeated: - defense to troops, troop production - 100%, improvements destroyed
Inner defense defeated: city taken
I particularly like the idea of scaling the defensive bonuses of various walls and spells inversely to the perimeter length. It makes perfect sense - longer perimeters are harder to defend - and it would be relatively simple to implement in the game.
A similar but slightly different application would be to build one-tile sections of wall around the city just like other buildings, and the wall is only "effective" if the wall sections completely enclose the city. Then, city-protection spells still scale inversely with the total number of city tiles, including wall tiles. The would make the 5-tile minimum distance between cities MUCH more important, and if a player walls up a city early, in order to add more buildings, they'd have to demolish a wall, build the building, and then build walls around the new building: it's a bit more of an investment and a possible reason to not build the perimeter wall too early to save time. And this would also not be too hard to implement.
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