The first time you lose a battleship to a pikeman, you’ll probably turn the bloody game off! 
I like that idea. Maybe any stacks over a (relatively low) limit gets attrition which can be changed with policies (ex foraging), tech, roads, etc.
I, as a long time player, disagree in turn, sir. 1UpH was a massive, massive improvement.
I agree the AI never quite got the hang of it to the extent it did in Civ III (in Civ IV I am pretty sure the AI just cheated liberally) but that’s a problem with the AI, not the concept.
1UpH was a great idea in principle, and every hint is that it will be improved upon. I like the idea of the nature of the hex itself affecting the stack limit, either a hard cap or infliction of attrition damage.
AI is always so hard to do well in these games. Someone should get some really good AI programmers and software engineers to build some nice AI API’s that can be extended and take advantage of modern GPU’s and CPU extension.
Just a really nice AI platform that allows less experienced developers to concentrate on a more abstract AI actions.
Personally, when I play at all any more, it’s still Civ3. I probably would have liked 4, too, but the Mac system requirements were so ludicrously high that it was near the end of its cycle by the time I was able to play it. I had high hopes for Alpha Centauri, when I found a cheap bundle that included it, but it never really grabbed me, I think because I didn’t have a basis for comparison: In Earthbased Civ, I can brag to myself about building railroads in 1500, or going to the Moon in 1850, but that doesn’t work in Alpha Cen.
And I still don’t understand what the benefit of one unit per hex is supposed to be. What’s so annoying about a stack of doom? What’s so un-annoying about one unit per hex?
There’s no strategy involved. It’s simply a, well, a big stack of doom. If you have the units to defeat it, you win. If not, you lose. Sure, it’s functional, but SoD is a very limiting, artificial, and uninteresting way to play. Limiting units per tiles means that you have to carefully organize your advance, make decisions about the flanks, and plan to move in reinforcements. This wasn’t implemented as well in Civ5 as it might be. But the idea is very sound.
On the subject of hexes, my opinion is that they work very well, just not in the way intended. The grid systems actually had the advantage in that every tile actually connected to eight other tiles. Hexes, obviously connect to six. However, they mask the awkward and artificial lines between tiles better and probably make it easier to generate interesting terrain, as well as making it easier to show the borders on terrain.
The one thing I hope changes is to remove the annoying “gaps” in your city coverage. In my mind, cities only really matter in that they concentrate resources (and implicitly, population) from a region. What would be really awesome is if the game generated regions dynamically, so that a city might draw on tiles that are upstream but outside the “standard city radius”, or that you might not be able to access tiles which are nearby by blocked by mountains until you cut a road through.
Of course there’s no strategy involved. There’s also no skill involved in how your soldiers aim their guns, and for the same reason: Civ isn’t meant to simulate to that level of detail. The strategy is in managing your tech and economy to be able to create that stack of doom in the first place, and in moving it to the right place so you can respond quickly when Gandhi declares war on you, and in figuring out how to get it to objectives like wonder cities or strategic resources while accumulating a minimum of war weariness, and so on.
One unit per hex, meanwhile, does add a level of strategy, but it’s a level of strategy that bears no resemblance whatsoever to actual warfare. It’s like you’re playing some sort of game of checkers on top of your history-simulator game. If I wanted that, I’d play checkers.
You’re free to have your opinion. But if that’s the case, then why simulate fighting with units in the first place? You may as well have warfare conducted at even more abstract layer. And that might be fine - but it’s not how Civilization simulates warfare.
If you want to make that argument, you’re going to first have to identify what in Civilization bears any resemblance to real warfare, or a real economy, or real scientific research, or whatever, whatsoever.
OK, here’s one way it resembles real warfare: In both real warfare and in the game, having a whole lot of troops in one place offers you a big advantage, and makes it really difficult and annoying for your enemies to defeat you. At least, up through Civ4, that is.
And I’ll grant that most aspects of Civ are only a crude simulation of reality. There are a lot of things that exist in reality but which don’t in the game, or which are represented in the game by something much simpler. But one unit per hex isn’t a crude simulation. It’s not a simulation of anything at all. It’s something that exists in the game that doesn’t correspond to anything in reality. Why is it there?
Any simulation game must have a tradeoff between fidelity of the simulation and complexity. But it makes no sense to add a feature that both decreases fidelity and increases complexity.
But in real warfare you can’t have all of your troops in one plot of land (square mile, kilometer, whatever they represent). When you read of large armies marching the sources can say things like “the army stretched for miles it was so large.” Being able to maneuver a large force across rivers, through mountains, etc is part of the actual, real world difficulty which I think 1upt does much better at recreating. If there’s a very heavily defended city between two mountains I have to decide who do I move up, where should i put my archers, should I put one on the hill to get vision but then that leaves my flank exposed to their knight, blah blah blah. Before it was: put everyone in one stack of doom then go. Maybe two if you wanted a duel attack.
When I first started working in the games industry, I had four properties that I wanted to work on. In no particular order, they were Star Wars, X-Com, Dungeons and Dragons, and Civilization.
I just have D&D left.
Anyway, the upshot is that I have a build of Civ VI on my work PC. I can’t say much about it, obviously, but I’m pretty sure they won’t mind me saying this: I like it. A lot.
I know you can not talk about it, but can you give me a copy?
That’d be cool. Thanks.
Totally!
You just have to give me sixty bucks, and wait until launch day.
For someone who grew up with the awesomeness of Civ II, what would be the key point differences, besides higher graphics and what I expect is better AI? Stacks of Doom sounds like what Civ II had, you could have multiple of your units in one tile. Also, unlike Civ I, it had proportional damage, and while you could defeat a troop, you’d still be badly damaged. I was told later versions modified the government systems such as yes, you could get some corruption under Communism. So what would be a side by side comparison?
OK, let me amend my previous statement. One unit per hex might make sense if the hexes were only a fraction of a square mile. But the game’s hexes are all about ten thousand square miles. You can fit so many troops in that area that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about it as being a limit.
Or to look at it another way: Suppose your nation is at war with another nation with which you share a long border. You’re going to want to have some troops in every city near the border. In the small podunk towns, you’re going to put some minimal amount of force, just enough to pick off vanguard scouts and slow the rest down. In your big important industrial cities, you’re going to want many times that force. Why isn’t this possible?
At some point I think one has to accept that military units in Civ are an abstraction. Stackable or not, it makes no sense to have a unit called “Tank” that spreads out over an area the size of England. Military units at that scale aren’t of a single type. For that matter it makes no sense for it to take years for a military unit to move one tile. It is as if the Nazi invasion of France started in May 1940 and only in 1942 did you find out who won.
Similarly, the complaints about “oh geez, a spearman defeated my tank” ignore the fact that the battle represents not one spearman versus one tank, but an entire army of men fighting another, the latter of whom is probably not going to keep using spears but who will improvise and steal guns and stuff in trying to stop the tanks and will, once in awhile, be successful.
Or for that matter, how does a civilization pre-Iron Age maintain a standing army that can be equivalent in size and manpower to modern armies? Absurd.
“Civilization” has always represented military actions on an abstract level with an effort made to add some tactical fun. All the scale and logical complaints about Civ 5 have equivalent complaints in 1, 2, 3 and 4. The designers had to strike a balance between strategic advantage (which works; a civilization with tanks and battleships will always defeat a civilization with swordsmen and catapults, even if it loses a unit or two on the way) and tactical gameplay, which, IMHO, has generally always been fun, though I found Civ IV the most boring one.
You could go to one extreme or the other. On one extreme you could simply have no field units at all, or have a generic unit called “ARMY” which is awarded a strength score based on a set of variables; civilizational technological level, economic health, and your military budget. You’ve discovered how to split the atom and allocated 50% of commerce to military? Great, your ARMY has a strength of 128 and will steamroll the civ with gunpowder and a low budget, whose ARMIES have a strength of 28. No point having an air force function, the ARMY score could account for the presence of air power. That would be boring, though.
Conversely you could jack the game’s military simulator level through the roof and turn it into V for Victory. But that would, in a word, be absolutely hideous; you’d spend 98% of the game managing the armed forces.
Honestly, I think they generally have done a great job balancing the two, right from the beginning. Of course Civ 1 was simplistic, it had to be. Civ 4’s Stacks of Doom made it kind of boring at times and frustrating to fight the AI, and Civ 5’s 1UpH system is hard for the computer AI to fight well.
I know what I’d like them to do in Civ 6 and if they asked me I’d tell them, though I am not a game designer and so the unintended consequences of my ideas could screw up other aspects of the game, but the comments I hear from them are quite encouraging. They recognize the fact that there was a set way you have to use the civic policies to win - a fact I figured out very early on, and which did sort of make the exercise of civics pointless and caused many of the policy trees to be unused. They recognize that it becomes unfairly hard to expand beyond 4-6 cities. A lot of their other ideas are clever - having a quarry boosts related scientific advancement, for example. It lounds to me like people who love Civ are trying to make a better Civ game, and inasmuch as they have succeeded five times in a row, I am inclined to believe they will succeed again.
Agreed, and I surely hope that they do succeed. I also reckon that they did succeed, eventually, with Civ V. While I was put off by early reports, once the expansions and fixes were in place, I liked it very well. I can’t say if I’ve put more hours into it than earlier iterations-- I’m sure I played II more-- Civ V is the game with the most hours in my Steam library.
I agree, but I still think the “Spearman defeats tank” thing should never happen either.
Part of the problem for me is that I think I need impossibly large armies to take even a single city in Civ V - it feels like my empire’s entire production goes towards cranking out units which get slaughtered as they try and take a city belonging to a civ at a lower tech level than I am. Even what I would consider a relatively minor conflict required World War II levels of mobilisation, it seemed.
In one game, I’d become involved in a war against the Aztecs (because we’ve all been there) and they had three or four cities on a medium-sized island uncomfortably close to my capital city. So I invaded the island. And even with every. single. hex on that island filled with my military units, it still took a huge amount of time and the loss of huge numbers of units to capture the cities; I looked at the bulk of the Aztec cities elsewhere and just thought “I cannot be bothered.”
Which is why I usually play a tech/diplomacy game and win by either getting to Alpha Centauri first, or become head of the UN. 
That’s Civ V in a nutshell, really, although certain units (such as bombers, Keshiks, longbows, rocket artillery-- ranged, air, and artillery do most of the work with a melee unit reserved for the final assault, typically) and the siege promotion can speed things up. Of course, taking cities has happiness and diplomacy penalties.
One warmongering trick is to declare war on a desirable city state in the opening of the game before you meet any AI players. You then milk promotions and workers from the city state and never suffer diplomatic penalties, even, IIRC, if you eventually decide to take the CS.
I’ve never actually had a problem with the whole “spearman defeats tank” thing, in any of the Civ games. It happens only, what, once every few games or so? And because we play a lot of games, that adds up to a lot of instances of it… but remember, each game represents all of history. Something that happens once per game is something that you’d expect to happen one time in all of history, and something that happens once every several games is something that would be unlikely to happen even once in all of history.
Can I believe that spearmen could routinely defeat tanks? Of course not. But can I believe that once, in all of history, with a perfect storm of lucky conditions, a spearman just might have beaten a tank? Sure.