Keep in mind that the Second World War, one of the most vigorous wars ever fought with one of the highest per day casualty rates, killed on average 10 000 soldiers per day and twice that many civilians. Certainly, a part of that was deliberate action to commit genocide, but another sizable chunk was battles being fought in and around urban areas as well as the results of deprivation of food and other resources necessary to maintain the war effort.
Well, that is a bit misleading because such a vast amount of civilian casualties in WW2 came from the Holocaust and other similar war crimes. But if you look at actual urban battles, we have a great case with Arnhem, where the British paratroopers fought the Germans - so it was a surprise operation that did not give time for civilians to flee - and the town was subject of artillery and aerial bombing, as well as fierce street fighting over a period of 9 days. Dutch authorities recorded only 452 casualties, whereas combined British and German casualties were about 3.5 thousand dead. Arnhem had a population of about 90 thousand back in the WW2 period. So that's a very small percentage. In Stalingrad, less than two thousand civilians died, though numbers are really sketchy as Soviets drafted significant numbers into militia and factories, and many others had time to flee the city. In contrast, the 1939 siege of Warsaw caused 18 thousand civilian casualties in 20 days, most of whom perished due to aerial bombing, out of a total population of about 1.3 million. Still a fairly low percentage.
The overwhelming majority of civilian casualties came from the unrestricted strategic bombing campaigns, from the few extended sieges (like Leningrad), from war crimes and anti-partisan operations, and finally from disease & malnutrition & starvation. Now, these are certainly elements closely related to warfare, but they are not the outcomes of actual battles. They are, somewhat crudely, represented in Aurora by changes to the population growth via radiation and atmosphere changes; ie nuclear winter does not depopulate the Earth immediately, just slowly kills people off. As there is no current system that would model agriculture or maintenance of civilian populations, I don't mind that collateral damage to the civilian population being a bit too high, but the VB6 levels were far too high, in my opinion. Since Steve already confirmed that for C# the amounts of collateral damage will be reduced, I'm happy. I just wanted to clear up this very popular misconception that fighting itself, even in urban areas, produces large amounts of civilian casualties, which it does not.