Self-Destructing Cities

[Maeyanie]

This one has happened two games so far, with the 2nd update installed. Not sure if it happened before.
After a long time playing (late 2022 or so) with almost continuous war, cities start becoming very fragile.

I managed to get a savegame with it all set up and reproducable, at least for me. There's some infantry and a handful of bombers attacking Nong'an in China (eastern side, just SW of my spy on recon duty). The city gets bombed down to about 50%, then suddenly blows up.
http://www.maeyanie.com/CityBug.zip

[tkobo]

Not sure if it applies,but in sr2010 there was a minimum population number for a city.

It wasnt zero oddly.

And if that population number was reached,ie the city lost enough people that its population was at the number,the city was destroyed.


So IF the system works the same, a city doesnt have to reach zero population to be destroyed.

[Maeyanie]

Well, I have also had a city with 0 population which wasn't destroyed... I had a single artillery piece in range for a really long time before I got around to seriously attacking it. But, it could be related... population and city health might combine, or something. We'll see what is the official word.

[Zan]

I bombed Paris down to 0 pop.It was not destroyed and never regained any pop after I captured it.

[vortex79]

The problem is that the town/city centers have a health level and get damaged regardless of changes in population. Effectively, the city/town has been leveled to rubble and the people left or died.

[llsoth]

Does it happen just as the city is about to be captured?

[Maeyanie]

In the case I have in this savegame, no. The Chinese still have several units in the city. Though most of the time it's as the city gets captured, yeah.

[AtomicBoboli]

I encountered this bug fighting China as Russia. Tried using only light infantry with no preliminary bombardment, and still the cities would be destroyed. Almost every city has been wiped out in this manner. Only captured one city so far, and that only because it surrendered before I got into range.

Based on my observations, it appears to be the fault of the garrisons. As soon as the last one tries to flee, the unit seems to invoke "scorched earth" policy and destroys the city, killing every last person. As far as I know, scorched earth policy has been disabled for the player, but it might still be there for the AI.

Being able to include cities in that policy makes things weird. I would imagine China should take a DAR and UN approval hit for massacring cities, if this tactic should be possible at all.

[Apoffys]

A work-around is airdropping for example special forces. If you have several teams and a team of helicopters to transport them to the nearest airport for a new drop, it works fairly well, and the AI doesn't get to massacre their citizens.

[Maeyanie]

Pretty sure this isn't intentional... but, it would be nice to get an official answer...

[Balthagor]

I have the save game and have seen what is listed in this thread occur. I have passed it along to George with details but he has not given me more info yet. I was unable to find an explanation for it.

[Roest]

Same problem i encountered before. Select your units and even though the attack fortification role is deactived, click it on and deactivate it again. Now the city survives.

[AtomicBoboli]

Tried that (Roest's recommendation) and that works. Its unfortunate that "destroy_everything = TRUE" is the default for units, and there's no way to reset that globally. Why its removed from the global settings I do not understand. A lot of things that were pretty easy to do in 2010 now require flying back and forth between menus and dozens of mouse clicks.

The tool tips are great, but I really miss the unit, reserves and construction pop-up screens. That was my main place for renaming units, managing construction & scrapping, and loading missiles. And now its gone - and the tool tips that replace them are not interactive, nor do they convey all the needed information. Playing as Russia, I recently came to understand the desirability of close combat values in my units when going against the large numbers of highly entrenched garrisons in China. (Argh, the BMP bites, even doing things that infantry should do. I've upped my training expenditure, but they're still petty pathetic compared to the BTR.) Frustratingly, those values are not present in the tool tip for the tanks, requiring me to click around to try and find them.

The missile diagrams all look like light blue blobs that just waste the space allocated to the already football-field length Russian missile names. There's a bunch of things that could be done for the UI issues, but I've went off on that tangent already. I am just frustrated that Supreme Ruler's controls and interface, while not always so bad, deviate so significantly from the RTS norm that it is akin to trying to drive the Citroen CX.

Anyways, thanks for that fix. Shame I did not figure that out before I had already leveled most of Manchuria...

[vortex79]

I think I've identified some possibilities as to why this occurs after totally destroying several cities myself.

What I think I've seen happen many times repeated:

Artillery is destroying units so fast that the city/town may also be accidentally removed as part of damage. I've noticed that cities tend to evaporate under mass bombardment. This occurs whether or not a city is emptied of population. I've had it happen with cities that had 250K people still left.. or some cities left behind with 0 pop still left. I've had it happen when cities are completely empty of "health" or "structural" strength.. and when they are still at 1/4 bars of said strength.

The common denominator is heavy usage of indirect fire. I think perhaps the cities are weaker than the units themselves at taking fire and the result is they do not outlast the units. Cities/towns need to have a greater resistance to indirect fire. It should almost always be easier to destroy a unit than the urban terrain around it. Air strikes and missile strikes, unless nuclear, almost never destroy cities. Naval bombardment poses the same risk as standard artillery.

I completely destroyed most of the urban complexes around Dallas while trying to invade it with a 75% offensive artillery force consisting of Paladins and GLRS artillery.

I have attack all deactivated on all my units globally so far as I am aware, but to be honest, the Global ROE screen really is handicapped in terms of role assignment ability.