City entrenchment bug

[Wushuki]

Units that entrench themselves in cities actually reduce their defense rather than increase it in some situations. Below I explain why.

Trenches and cities are mutually exclusive, if you choose to entrench in a city the trench will simply not be build and not add the defense bonus. So you do not receive the +2 soft defense bonus of a trench when entrenching in a city. However, the trench is build in the sense that it changes the maximum ground cover value of the city to the maximum entrenchment value of the trench. The maximum ground cover for cities (and mountains) is 2 and for capitals 3. The maximum entrenchment value at the start is 1. That means that if you build a trench your units will have a lower entrenchment than they would have had ground cover, effectively increasing the damage they take once they decide to entrench.

Not adding the trench bonus to the city bonus looks like a design choice to prevent defense bonus values from becoming too high. Otherwise a city on a mountain with a trench would get a defense bonus of 6 (1 for the city, 2 for the trench and 3 for the mountain), which might have been considered too high. That I can understand. However, reducing the defense of units for entrenching is not logical and should be changed. In the code a check should be made to test whether the maximum entrenchment of the trench is higher than the maximum ground cover of the square and the maximum entrenchment should then be made equal to the highest of these two values. Otherwise entrenching in cities like Belgrade at the start reduces your actual defense.

Another problem that I see here is that the defense bonus of the city is used and not the defense bonus of the trench when calculating the defense bonus. The defense bonus of the city is lower than the defense bonus of the trench and thus when you entrench in empty squares you will have a higher defense bonus than when you entrench in cities. So you are better off not defending in cities, but in empty squares beside them. Should cities not be more difficult to take than regular squares? If so, then the defense bonus of the trench should be used, rather than the defense bonus of the city when there is a trench in a city.

In summary I suggest 2 changes:

1) Do not replace the maximum ground defense value with the maximum entrenchment value is the former was higher.

2) Use the defense values of trenches instead of the defense values of cities if both are present in a square to make sure that cities are not easier to capture than normal squares of the same type.

All of the above claims about how it works were tested in the editor.

[Hubert Cater]

Thanks for this Wushuki and #2 was my error and I've fixed this for the first patch and for #1 we are looking into the best solution with what you've suggested being the likely candidate.

Hubert

[lettowvorbeck]

Hubert,

Will the first patch include the ww2 scenario(s) and the fixes for the ww1 game or will they be released at different times?

[Karhu]

Well spotted Wushuki - this is very good to know!

[Hubert Cater]

Hubert,

Will the first patch include the ww2 scenario(s) and the fixes for the ww1 game or will they be released at different times?

Not 100% sure either way right now to be honest.

WWI fixes are our top priority and if the WW2 add-on makes it in time for the first patch then it will be included, if not then shortly thereafter sort of thing.

[lettowvorbeck]

Thanks, Hubert. I am primarily interested in the WW1 fixes so I can start pbem games. Hopefully, it will be soon!