A new mod enters the ring - Introducing "Close to Home"

[Charriu]

The problem with forts in my mind was always how ridiculously long they took. 10 worker turns is a bit much.

That's certainly one thing keeping players from using them and could certainly be reduced. The other bigger problem is their usefulness on defense. Of course the actual defense on the tile itself can be enormous if you place it on a hill with a forest making it a +100% defense that can't be bombarded. I concidered defending the isthmuses on PB59 that way. The problem of course arises when you have a more open map. Nothing keeps the enemy from just passing by your forts, capture your city and deny the defensive bonus.
Basically forts are a niche defensive option for choke points.

There are some additional niche options like accessing resources on an island. Like for example you can place a fort on a 1 tile island with a resource and therefore get access to that resource. This was a nice less aggressive option to get the wine in PB59.

Also also there is this very, very, very niche option: Imagine a resource under a jungle and you don't have Iron Working. You can place a fort on it and access the resource that way.

[T-hawk]

Maybe what you really want is a dedicated "canal" tile improvement? Rather than having forts be this weird mishmash of all sorts of unrelated functionality.

[BING_XI_LAO]

It might be considered feature bloat, but perhaps Protective should have fort construction bonus.
Also what if fort defense bonus was increased in general? That would make it easier to defend a fort (cost-efficiently at least if not actually keeping it) with just like 1 longbowman or whatever. Would still be a bad idea to put one right next to a city, but when would you anyway? This would make the "enemy can use my fort" problem worse when it happens, but less likely to happen.
Also it would be nice if they gave +10% healing, but I'm sure that violates the minimalist design concept of CtH.

[Charriu]

Forts act as cities. Therefore they get the better healing rate from cities. I would have to test, but even city garrison promotion might apply in there.

I also thought about a fort bonus for PRO, but haven't come up with something good.
Increasing the forts defense won't help it. You can still just walk around it and conquer the city. In a choke point they already work wonders.

[Krill]

Yeah, forts act se cities for any promotion bonuses, as airfields and canals, so CG and CR promotions work against them, and collateral and flanking effects (if any) apply as per city combat.

[Charriu]

And targeting like the Khmer UU does not work there.

[Charriu]

Before I start discussing the traits I first want to address the issues that Miguelito brought up namely:

• Forts
  
• Nukes
  
• Paratroopers
  
• Plane bombardment
  
• Culture after conquest
  

1. Forts

As others have shown you can do quite a lot with forts. I also believe that the +25% defense it provides are more then enough. Pumping this number up will never solve the biggest problem of forts: Their immobility. This of course is an unsolvable problem. Ramk has also shown that you can use them on the defense in a good way. So what about the proposed changes.
Make enemies use the defensive bonus. I agree with others that this will lead to fewer forts being built as they will be a liability for the defender.
And here is what I want to do with them
Reduce the build time from 10 to 5. This may be too much, but then again it is no problem to increase that with later versions. I think the long build time is one - if not the biggest - issue keeping defenders from using them. It just takes to long to construct them.
Forts can be used as channels under open borders. I was surprised to see that you can't use the channel function in foreign culture under open borders. To me this looks like a bug or oversight, since you can use all the other modes of transport with open borders, so why not channels.
Forts can be used as channels if you control the tile. This includes neutral areas and enemy territory. I think this might be the most controversial point. This change means dropping the majority of units on the tile gives you control of the channel, but only if you are at war with the owner of the tile. There are some edge cases that I have to iron out namely. What happens with ships in the channel when the control of the tile changes?

2. Nukes

I wondering if the cost increase was the wrong change. It leads to the biggest players being the only players, who can afford to build them. Maybe there is some worth in everybody having nukes for MAD purposes. But for now with only one game I would still like to keep the cost up. What are the in-game solutions to massive nukes so far:

- Usage of nukes increases global warming (but we disabled global warming)
- Usage of nukes increases war weariness in a bigger way leading to more unhappiness (but meta is developing towards no war weariness)
- Bomb shelters reduce the damage
- SDI shoots down missile (Tactical nukes are less affected)
- Nukes can be disabled completely via UN resolutions.

Unfortunately the first two points are more or less ineffective nowadays. I also want to briefly talk about the last one. My guess is that it might have been possible that players in PB59 voted in favor of that. The problem is that it only needs one player to defy the resolution to stop it. Now there is a consequence for defying and that is massive unhappiness in the defying nation. But looking at Amicalola's empire in PB59 I guess that the unhappiness could just be ignored for him. Am I right here?
What about proposals so far:
Reduce nukes range while loaded on a boat. This has to be coded and explained in a meaningful way in-game. Because of those two I'm hesitant to implement that for now and would like to use already provided solutions so far.
Reduce movement for boats loaded with nukes. This has to be coded and explained in a meaningful way in-game. Because of those two I'm hesitant to implement that for now and would like to use already provided solutions so far.
Remove immunity to nukes from ICBM. This might only be a feeling, but I would guess that the bigger problems with nukes are the tactical nukes and not the ICBMs. After all they cost more and can be shot down by SDI.
This leaves me with the following changes I want to implement:
Reduce the blast radius for tactical nukes to the impact tile itself. What are the consequences of this. It reduces the range of the nuke by 1 more or less. It also leads to fewer fallout and of course most importantly it affects fewer units. Of course the last point also means that it is harder to extend your SDI shield to other players. This would also leave the ICBM as the more damaging weapon, but you also have better defense against those.
Remove Range promotions for tactical nukes. I'm not sure if tactical nukes can even take those promotions. If yes this would be a simple change to reduce their range.

3. Paratroopers

The proposal here was to enable them to attack in the same turn they drop. civac provided some good example for why not to do this namely. Dropping nukes until a city is undefended and then move in with a paratrooper. I think for now we can leave with them the way they are. I don't think their purpose was to start massive invasions with paratroopers, but rather to disrupt enemy supply lines and prepare the field for an invasion. I would opt to no change so far.

4. Bombarding via planes

Two proposals were made here. The first was in regards to bombing strategic resources. I think if I understood Miguelito correctly then he had an issue with defending players being able to more or less immediately reconnect those resources. Therefore it was not possible to take away all uranium resources from Piccadilly. I don't think this warrants a change though, not because the proposal is totally bad, but rather because it would be mainly ineffective. Aside from the actual resources there are two more ways to get resources that can't be pillaged, which would circumvent the need to reconnect resources. The first one is to get that resource via a gift as it so often happens in our games, when the defending player is supported with copper, iron and later other resources. The other way to circumvent that is with the later corporations like "Standard Ethanol" and "Aluminium Co." which generate oil and aluminum.
Now the second proposal is more interesting and I would implement:

Bombarding enemy road networks via planes. This could be interesting as you have said and more effective in disrupting the enemies defense. You can already pillage roads with ground troops. I'm interested to hear what people think of this.

5. Culture after conquest

I would love to fix this, but as of now I probably do more harm here then good. I would first need to take a deep dive into what exactly is happening here and understand it, before I propose any change or fix for this.

[Miguelito]

4. Bombarding via planes

Two proposals were made here. The first was in regards to bombing strategic resources. I think if I understood Miguelito correctly then he had an issue with defending players being able to more or less immediately reconnect those resources. Therefore it was not possible to take away all uranium resources from Piccadilly.

Nope, I meant exactly the opposite . Planes (and arguably guided missiles) should not be able to bomb strategic resources, just as nukes have not sicne you changed it. The ability to remotely disconnect an enemy's resources just gives a huge advantage to the attacker playing second. An alternative would be an agreement to never rebuild an improvement that was bombed the same turn. Or we just figure that playing first in the modern era comes with significant advantages, and leave that advantage to the second in turn order.

3. Paratroopers

The proposal here was to enable them to attack in the same turn they drop. civac provided some good example for why not to do this namely. Dropping nukes until a city is undefended and then move in with a paratrooper. I think for now we can leave with them the way they are. I don't think their purpose was to start massive invasions with paratroopers, but rather to disrupt enemy supply lines and prepare the field for an invasion. I would opt to no change so far.

Please reconsider this. First, "Dropping nukes until a city is undefended and then move in with a paratrooper." is already possible in the current implementation, and is actually the only thing paras are good for. The silly part is just that they are prevented from entering an undefended city if a zero-strength unit (worker, GP, ICBM...) still remains in the city. And with bomb shelters it is near impossible to nuke those away (and in case of ICBM actually impossible, regardless of shelters), unlike actual military units who just suffer less damage so you need double the amount of nukes (fair). So zero strength units turn into a cornerstone of city defense. I don't like it.

Just try to think of any case you where you would want to use paras in the current implementation where they can only attack the turn after dropping. Along the coast any unit on a transport is much faster. If you drop them inland where boats can't reach they just get picked up on the enemy's railroad network by tanks or whatever. Fwiw they also can't drop after moving so a para assault often takes 3 turns: 1) Move to launch site, 2) drop, 3) attack (you can skip 1) if you can ferry in the para on a boat). And the defender is warned from turn 1 omn and can prepare.
The only scenario I can think of is some strange island hopping against very weak defenses where for some reason you don't have transports around.

In my mind the paras' thing should be surprise attacks, if the enemy neglects their backlines. You could even dial down their strength if necessary, but there is nothing surprising about a unit that you see coming 3 turns in advance.

I built a bunch of paras in PB59 but that was due to the fact that we had to take an island in the inner sea that straight up could not be reached by ships. With your fort/canal fix that would not have been an issue . When I later tried to use the remaining ones against Amica's island it went exactly as badly as expected.



Regarding the fort defense bonus, do consider that units with CR get boni attacking a fort. So the current bonus nearly vanishes against CR1 units, and against CR2 it is detrimental.
If you made forts in enemy territory give defense boni we could actually see invading armies build field fortifications during sieges or on the march (provided they bring enough workers). Would also need to enable workers to build them in enemy territory. I think that would be pretty cool.

I was also thinking whether forts should provide a tile bonus, like +1c, +1h at engineering, +1h/f with Pro, +1 something at a late tech (Artillery?). Basically make them a subpar tile improvement, which might actually be viable for Pro.

[Cornflakes]

My opinions:
Forts - Using a canal in friendly territory via open borders is fine. Controlling a fort in enemy territory to gain use as a canal is not a good change. Controlling a fort in neutral territory to gain use as a canal is fine, but the can of worms that it opens is what to do if you lose "control" (i.e. exploiting teleportation, or unintentionally moving away your land unit before moving away your ship) ... a simpler solution would be to just always allow forts in neutral territory to be used as canals same as in an open borders situation.

Paratroopers - Allow them to attack on the turn that they parachute. They can be defended against via interception (maybe revisit the interception chance as a means to prevent them from being overpowered). Rather than decreasing the paratrooper strength, you could give gunpowder units a bonus vs. paratroopers. This way they can still be deadly vs ancient trash OR against damaged units (as the bonuses are less affective at lower base strength) ... make the bonus such that a full strength rifle on flat land has 50/50 odds. Then several paratroopers can swarm a backlines city defended by a single rifle, or a combined arms attack with bombers/missiles can damage the defender and give paratroopers odds on cleanup.

Bombing of strategic resources - Make strategic resources un-pillage-able, there are few things more frustrating than queuing up and whipping units as a first-in-turn-order player, and getting a resource pillaged after you play but before the turn rolls. A more elegant solution may be to grant the palace a copy of strategic resources at a certain tech level ... e.g. grant copper in the classical era (at Iron Working?), horses in the medieval era (at Guilds?), iron in the renaissance era (at Gunpowder?), oil in the atomic era (at Flight?) ... representing the advancement of technology improving the ability to extract resources from more unfavorable or difficult-to-access locations.

[Charriu]

I'm wondering what the actual problem with "removing strategic resources" (bombardment, pillaging or anything else) is. Is it:

a) The advantages and disadvantages produced due to turn order especially in PBs?
b) The annoyance of loosing the production and units for the turn the resource is disconnected?
c) The annoyance of reconnecting the resource at your next turn?
d) The enemies ability to remove the access to a resource in general?

I'm fully aware that some of those points seem equal although I would say they are minor variants of each other that could have drastically different solutions.