Remove mechanic - docks randomly being destroyed

[Civ_ONE]

There was always one mechanic that decided games that I never understood.

Why do docks sometimes get targeted by enemy troops even though towers or ships are hitting those troops?
Those docks then die, sometimes unnoticed, causing a massive loss of gold, creating a massive disadvantage.
This mechanic is too significant to be ignored and yet it is randomly generated, possibly occurring more for west than east.

One way to fix this is to make docks immune until the towers are destroyed.

Just losing 2 pents is 1600 gold lost. The game just got decided then and there, randomly.

[XGDeath3]

This occurs because of unit collision. When too many melee units stack up in the area, they can't move immediately, and then start hitting the nearest target. This is an issue with top and not bottom because of the large stack ups (Boats can be on top of each other where melee units on the ground cannot.)

I'm curious what would happen if the docks were immune until the towers die, but at the same time, a bit apprehensive. Dock killing vs tower killing is a choice made by players. If you want to get the towers down quicker, you mass range. If you want to kill docks, you mass melee. Another thing to worry about is: if landed unit NEVER target docks, will towers fall that much more quickly? That is a lot of damage that can be soaked by docks before they die or are deactivated.


Just my thoughts. I suppose I wouldn't be completely opposed to trying immune docks, but off-hand I don't think that is a good change.

[Quetra]

Like with worker pulling, its not an issue I can really fix. As for immune docks, I would have to draw up an arbitrary region as to where the docks would be invulnerable since if it were the whole outer sea area that would allow players to build much further up than usual and stall pushes easier than before. I could move the shallow sea line back but then ships would changed to land units later than usual (which matters because the land units sometimes have less hp than their ship counterparts.)

It is somewhat less likely to happen from my experience if you don't build in the first two rows between the towers, though still a problem.