ICBA

ICBA usually means I Can't Be Assed.  Today though, I will suggest a new interpretation - InterContinenal Ballistic Arrows.  In Civ 6 archers can fire enormous distances, far enough that it strains any sense of immersion for me.  Even firing into an adjacent hex is a huge stretch since a hex is somewhere between 100 and 1000 kilometers wide, but at least that would require them being on the same landmass.  However, as it stands archers can fire 2 hexes, often shooting over bodies of water as large as Lake Superior or the English Channel.

It just feels wrong to me to have an archer in London deciding to bombard a target in northern France.

I can usually overlook silliness like this.  After all, this is a game where the Eiffel Tower takes up a full hex, and requires you to plow under thousands of square kilometers of land to accommodate it.  Scale is ... inexact in Civ 6.

But I don't like the way archers operate mechanically either.  The AI isn't good at figuring them out, and every time I go against it I am on the same plan.  Make a pile of archers, declare war, let their enormous army pour into my territory, mow them down with archers for a dozen turns while I make melee units, then rush into their territory when they are out of units and crush them.

When I am attacking the AI I mostly just laugh at their units while I rotate out blockers to heal, and keep pouring on the damage with archers.  When *they* get archers though... ugh.  I lose units constantly, because any time I get into their territory they rush archers up to me and tear apart my lines.  When I encounter their archers in neutral territory they aren't good at protecting them so I can beat them up, but when I am on the attack it is a nightmare.

I don't like that the default solution to difficulty is to give the AI tons of units and then you just kill them all with ranged units.

My plan to fix both this immersion and technical problem is to give all ranged units a range of 1.  Nobody gets to have ICBAs.  If you want to shoot 2 hexes, wait until you get balloons and artillery in the WW1 era, where longer shots from your ranged units makes a lot of sense.  Naturally this makes archers bad, so I compensated by raising the strength of ranged units of all types a little bit.

I tested this out a few times and I love the results.  I can't just maul the AI with ranged units without thinking anymore.  I still like building some of them to assault barbarian huts, defend cities, and peck away at fortified units, but they aren't the one size fits all solution.  Archers against the AI in unmodded civ 6 is like using a baseball bat to fight a baby - it feels too powerful for the job.  The new ranged units feel like a nerf hammer - still enough to beat the baby, but it feels like more of a fight.

The more critical component here though is that things *feel* a lot more sensible, especially in the early eras.  You can't blast away at targets from absurd distances, Quadriremes are a lot more reasonable to build, and you actually have to get up in people's faces to fight.  I like it on all fronts.  It does lead to chokepoints being really hard to assault though, so you have to plan to lose some units beating through good defensive locations.  I like that though, even when it costs me.