While working on civ balancing for my “high effort rage post” on Chinese DLC implementation, I managed to overcome the Farming yield problem by means of much lower Chinese taxation rates, however, I ran into another major problem.
This photo is an eroded section of the Nanjing city walls, dating from the Ming dynasty, not so megalithic as earlier sites, but still immense and noted for resisting WWII-era artillery for many days in late 1937.
Buildable Terrain: Chinese City Wall
There is one big problem in this game’s timeframe and fortifications, and that is Chinese walls.
Chepstow Castle with 6-meter walls is considered thick, and Borl Castle with 12-meter walls is an outlier. City walls peaked under the Roman Empire, often reaching 10m heights (commensurate with Chinese towns) but only 1.5-2.5m thicknesses. The Theodosian Walls of Constantinople were 4.5-6m thick at the base and 12m high for the thickest, tallest inner wall.
Shang dynasty Chinese city walls, 15th century BC, were about 20m thick at the base. The Qi state during the Warring States period had its capital of Linzi, established 859 BC, enclosed by walls of 20-43m thickness. These walls would be about 10-15m tall for most major cities (I only found the number for Handan’s walls which would convert to 15m tall). Ming prefectural and provincial capital walls were 10-20m thick at the base, and 5-10m thick at the top, and these were mostly newly built since the Mongols had demolished city walls throughout most of northern China during the Yuan. The rammed-earth cores of Chinese city walls were also extremely effective at absorbing the energy of artillery impacts, and their design even resists all reasonable sapping attempts that don’t involve a lot of explosives. As in… a 10m tall trapezoidal cross-section wall collapsed down by 2m, to give 8m tall trapezoidal cross-section barrier, wow, such a big deal!
The editor only allows cliffs to be placed in 3x3 sub-grids of the map, which is also why the map edge sizes are normally always multiples of 3. As I envision them, Chinese City Walls can only be built on these same 3x3 positions that cliffs are arranged by.
This would be the first “buildable terrain” in the game. It cannot be Delete-demolished, and repair can only be done by auto-repair (from idle villagers finding work) or by the Repair command, otherwise they will simply walk on it if your right-click on its surface. Units may move onto/through the wall (which counts as higher elevation when shooting off it) via any unlocked gate adjacent to the wall—Gates gain the auto-lock option (i.e. when enemies approach) when built next to a Chinese City Wall. Siege Towers will deposit troops directly onto the wall when instructed to target the wall. Towers (and only towers) may be built on top of the wall and gain +1 range and +3 vision when thus constructed. If you build or have these walls, pay attention that the enemy doesn’t build a ramp (represented by a gate building) next to it and come rushing up your walls! The icon is normally found in row 3 slot 3 on the civilian buildings tab (Where Feitoria is for Portuguese, in case I need to use Row 1 slot 5 of military buildings for something else).
Now, considering some terrain like Kaifeng’s many waterways… City wall build permissions/variant checks may be ruled as below, with the idea that you cannot just wall off a huge bay, it can at most span a small river or bay mouth with two water gates. We know walls can transform because wall “towers” can turn into linear wall segments when you extend the wall. And linking two walls can cause both “towers” to vanish. However, this does not occur when you have two neighbouring wall “towers” next to each other, and you build another wall segment touching both of them. The game can clearly judge these proximity rules.
On at least one land tile: Buildable, becomes Water Gate 水门 if situated over at least 6 water tiles (modelled with visible portcullis arches on the two visible faces, passable to ships in all directions, may be locked against ship traffic)
On no land tiles but adjacent to a City Wall (but not Water Gate): Buildable, becomes a Terminus Tower, see Shanghai Pass’s Old Dragon Head for example. If you connect this to a City Wall on the other side, it will be remodelled into a Water Gate.
On no land tiles, between two City Walls or one City Wall and one Water Gate: Buildable, automatically becomes a Water Gate.
Adjacent to (i.e. between) only Water Gates or Terminus Towers and on no land tiles: Not buildable.
If destroyed, all units and on top take half HP damage and structures on top take 80% HP damage in the collapse (potentially fatal), and it is replaced by Chinese City Wall Ruins, which are indestructible and passable by units, but are unbuildable except rebuild or clearing away. The rebuild occurs by placing the same Chinese City Wall building on the ruins (NOT by right-click!) which will not remove the ruins until the building completes, and gives 50% refund on completion (if the construction is cancelled or fails, the Ruins are left untouched). Clearing occurs by mining the 10 stone value in the Ruins away, but Villagers work at a massive debuff in mining rate (something approaching 2% work efficiency, multiplicative AFTER all other calculations, so it takes as long to excavate as 500 regular stone would take to mine). Fishing Boats can also mine it away at a similar individual work speed, but will not carry any stone.
Once built, the Chinese City Wall DOES NOT OFFER VISION (we know this is possible with the AOE1 Blind Lame Priest unit), so you need to patrol it with units or place buildings along it (only Outposts and Towers can be built here, so no “walls on walls” to spot enemies. Attacker notifications still work, because the noise of trying to bring down the walls should draw attention, but if the enemy sneaks up and over unguarded walls, then they could just get in.
The properties of the Chinese City Wall should be something like so:
15000 base HP (upgradable by Masonry and Architecture), 20 stone / 120 seconds cost (mostly rammed earth, with stone outer facings, so it’s cheap but takes a lot of time), 150/150 melee/pierce armor (Trebuchets can still do some damage), same armor classes as Fortified Walls (so Standard Building, Building, Stone Defenses, and Walls and Gates) with 80% bonus damage resistance (Petards and Trebuchets can still do some damage, everything else just scratches).
I strongly advise you get yourself some siege towers for an assault, or suppress defenders using siege equipment, then build yourself a ramp (i.e. a Gate on your side of the City Wall) to continue the escalade, followed by another ramp on the other side that will let you across, instead of getting locked down by the enemy. Or distract the enemy elsewhere along the walls and suddenly storm a gate among a merchant convoy to force it open. Or you could just seize other parts of the map.
It REALLY is basically Buildable Terrain. In fact, if not for the “trying to breach the walls will make so much noise anyone would notice” problem, I would have it default to Gaia ownership (though repairable by all parties)!
What do you guys think of the idea of buildable terrain? The same item could simply be named something more neutral such as “colossal walls” for other civs to use. If the “other buildings” buttons were removed we could also use that space (row 3 slot 4) to implement buildable (and destructible) bridges in-game for all civs.
The aforementioned “high effort rage post” this idea would be used in may be found here: