Military Campaign

[Archgoose]

So I finished the Grand Campaign following the city building path and that was great, even the hard difficulty missions weren't that bad. So I decided to try following the military path, and I'm definitely getting the impression that military was kind of an after thought where programming is concerned.

City Guards are just awful. When Raiders attack I would expect competent programming that has City Guard Commanders make a beeline straight for the nearest Guard Post to the Raiders accompanied by Guards to defend. I was very disappointed to find that is not the case, so while it is known Raiders are attacking, and it's clear they're coming from the south, all your Guards and Commander are prancing about the northern Guard Post. You have two options, either have a Commander per Guard Post which overwhelmingly stunts your growth, or build elaborate labyrinths out of walls with the hope that they'll slow the Raiders up long enough for the Guards to reconsider their position (which considering how often Raiders get hung up on walls is actually a workable strategy), which is a huge waste of time, space, and bricks. Commanders taking educated spots is also highly problematic because it totally stunts your city growth and not in a fun strategic way but in a "oh God this is going to take four times as long as the city building level" way.

Don't get me wrong, I actually really like this game for the city building aspects. When you don't need to worry about military the game is very well done.* Just, like I said, I feel like military was a big after thought both conceptually and in programming. I'm still going to slog through the military campaign for the completist aspect of it, but I can already tell it's going to be brutal and unentertaining.

* PS. Regarding City Building, the one critique I do have with the City Building campaign is what I call the snowball aspect of it. It felt like the first 40% of the level was a struggle, and once you reached a tipping point you easily snowballed to victory. Basically, once I had enough to get Large Basalt Statues I knew I had won the level, it was just a matter of waiting for the Pyramids to get built from that point onwards.

[Davypi]

I wouldn't say that the military was an afterthough, but it probably is the least interesting part of the game. I just had a game where lack of security caused two of my nobles to leave, so its obviously meant to be a challenge for you to deal with.

One thing to bear in mind wtih all of CotN is that it was one of the first games that allowed all of the citizens to have an independent AI routine. In previous games like Zeus or Cleopatra, players had to create paths for the workers to follow and they wouldn't deviate from them. The point being that the AI in the game is somewhat primitive and since a large city can have 400 citizens, it also had to be kept simple enough so that it wouldn't burden the CPU. So to your issues, yes, the commanders who are in charge of the city watch will make stupid decisions as do the guards themselves. This also why your bricklayers will sometimes make some bad choices about what they should be building.

If I remember correctly, invaders will always come from the same side of the local map, regardless of where the bandit camps are on the world view. So basically what you want to do is wait for the first group of raiders to show up and figure out where they are coming from. Then build one guard post on that side of your settlement and thats all you need for the whole game. Its a cheap solution and not what you would call strategic, but the point of the mechanic is to force you to spend resources to defend the city. It is not meant to be a tactical mechanic.

[Archgoose]

Yeah, I played Zeus, Pharoah, and Cleopatra before this, and I remember the joys of roadblock pathbuilding :) . I was actually really pleased with how CotN took the good parts from Phar/Cleo and fixed a lot of the problems, but I do still think the defence programming in Phar/Cleo was better than CotN because at least military units would automatically go right to engaging enemy Raiders. Having walls with guard towers and gates that would auto-engage also helped. I found it really perplexing why there are no gates or towers in CotN.

Bricklayers' bouts of foolishness are also easy enough to handle simply by strategic placement of Brickyards. Perhaps a solution would be if Guard Posts acted more like Brickyards. Commanders would not be necessary to be at the Post. Provided there is a City Guard Commander and sufficient Guards the Guards would be distributed evenly across the Posts. Commanders would still visit Posts as their jobs, but they would never NEED to have been there or be there in order for Guards to patrol. I know there is some overhang after a Commander leaves a Post where Guards continue patrolling, but IMO it should be permanent. Once a Post is built, there should always be a set number of Guards at that Post. Seems like that would've been a simple and elegant solution.

In the mission I am playing the Raiders actually come from three different map edges despite both raider sites being from the South. Sometimes they will come via the Nile bank to the East, sometimes they come from the desert to the North, and other times they come via the Nile bank/desert to the South (haven't had an attack from the West yet), which is where my frustration stems from because I need three different Guard Posts at each different entry point to the city, the size of my city makes transiting between the Posts pretty much half a day's journey, and there are no obvious bottlenecks to build Walls to funnel enemies towards a single entry.