Rarely do I watch game sites and even more rarely do I read previews or believe what they say. But I’m always up for dev interviews.
This, I like.
Actual military strategy beyond “crush with giant stacks” (because now it’s one military unit per tile, though I bet not in cities).
Cultural borders you choose to pursue.
More recognizable civ strategies.
Building up a specific culture, with actual bonuses from it (as far as I’m concerned, this can replace the clunky government/culture mechanic from Civ4.
Hexes are actually a step back in some ways. In a square grid system with diagonals treated as longer, a “circle” is an octagon, while in a hex grid system, a “circle” is a hexagon, which is obviously a worse approximation. Previous Civ games treated diagonals as longer for purposes of cultural boundaries, distance from capital calculations, and the like, but didn’t for unit movement. So now, the area a unit could travel to in N turns will be a better shape, but cultural borders will be a worse shape. Of course, they could have just kept the square grid and fixed unit diagonal movement.
Except that “crush with giant stacks” is a perfectly valid military strategy. Why shouldn’t I be able to use that strategy? If players are using that strategy more than they should, then the proper fix is to enable other strategies that can compete with it, rather than just to declare by fiat “no stacks”.
I don’t see why a hex pattern is WORSE for cultural borders. I don’t see that it’s much better, but what’s specifically bad about it?
As we do not yet fully know how cultural borders are being handled, the new system might end up being really awesome. The old one was, frankly, pretty rudimentary.
I’m conflicted about the lack of religion in Civ 5. Religion played a large part in the historical clash of civilizations and founding religions and converting your neighbors to the true faith was kind of fun, but building temples, monasteries and keeping out other religious spies was kind of needless busy work. And the computer tended to steamroll with religion so that often everyone in the world would be Hindu except for me.
I like that they’re focusing on making a better AI than more multiplayer options, the developer was right, even playing a hotseat game with one other player takes forever. Whether this new AI will behave like a human player remains to be seen.
I’m hoping they make inherent AI have a little bit less of an effect. In Civ IV, it really doesn’t matter what you do, Tokugawa *will *declare war on you at some point. Diplomacy just seems to have a very minor effect at times, even when you have a list full of positive diplomacy modifiers.
Yeah, I wish there were more things to talk about as well. The interviews I’ve read seem to stress the new minor civilizations, so we’ll see if that makes a difference. The diplomatic intractability of the AI is frustrating as well, they won’t trade you shit unless they make out like bandits…and no I don’t want to declare war to help your piss ant cause or give you iron for free.
Not…really. In real-world military strategy, there’s a concept called unit frontage that essentially describes how tightly packed soldiers/tanks/whatever are. Too small a unit frontage per unit really reduces their overall fighting ability and makes them vulnerable to different attacks.
So maybe having a stacking penalty or making stacks progressively more vulnerable to siege/artillery would have worked more logically.
Many tabletop wargames of the old Avalon Hill sort (which Civ can resemble in terms of combat) have pretty severe stacking limits or no stacking as well.
I’d be happy if the single-unit-stacks was combined with some Diplomacy moves–adjacent units can assist in attacks/defenses. That would make it a lot less problematic for me.
Sure, but remember that each tile is something like a hundred miles across. You can fit a heck of a lot of units into ten thousand square miles without reducing their effectiveness. Now, granted, each Civ unit is supposed to represent some large number of soldiers, so it might still make sense to have stack limits, or penalties for stacks that are too large, but it should at least be possible to put mixed forces into a stack.
I would think that limiting one unit of each type to a hex would be a better implementation. I mean what good is an undefended artillery unit? Also with 6 hexes surrounding a city, you can only attack with 6 units at a time?
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were an encirclement bonus/penalty for the attacker and defender, respectively. Some of the combat screenshots do show a flanking bonus for adjancent units, so it would’t be too different.
Not necessarily : arty units can shoot from further than 1 hex away, and if you lose an attacking unit to retaliation, that’s one hex freed for another attack. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some units could move, attack, move (mostly cavalry and tanks)
There are some huge potential problems in the one unit per stack rule, and I’m not confident they can make it work yet.
For one it imposes an additional limit to your army strength in the form of terrain. Depending on your defensive terrain or the terrain you are invading, there is a limit to how many military units are effective. For example you might find that to invade the Egyptians you can field exactly 5 swordsmen, 2 archers and 3 siege units. Any units beyond those are useless, as they cannot fit in the terrain. This has a few implications.
If units are as cheap to manufacture as they have been in the first four Civ games, it’ll be very easy to reach your maximum army capacity for a particular terrrain. This might mean someone who focuses 80% building 20% army can have an equal army to someone focusing on 80% army 20% building. While this benefits me as a more builder type, it’s bad for the balance of the game.
If units are very expensive (15-20 turns to manufacture for example), then the difference between having n units and n+1 units becomes huge. If you get your 2nd unit our while the other guy is some turns short on his, you have a huge military advantage.
I fully expect my own playing style to benefit from these changes However if I only focus on my army a little bit, I should not be able to be even against someone focusing fully on their military. Terrain puts an artificial limit to everyone’s army strength. It’s just a question of how long it’ll take to reach that limit.
A 2nd problem is the question of mobility. It’ll be very interesting to see if they allow basic military units like swordsmen to move several hexes each turn. With Panzer General type games, it’s usually typical to control units moving ~3-7 hexes per turn instead of the more common Civ 1-3 squares.
Imagine you are close to your terrain army limit, and you need to move a 1-moving footman through your own army to the frontlines. You will have to move every single unit in between the two points, and those units might not always room to move. You might end up destroying your own army’s mobility by building too many units, which is silly in Civilization scale battles.
The best solution for me would be to let the same unit type differ in strength. Let’s say you can build a unit of 100 swordsmen in 3 turns, and you can fit up to 1000 swordsmen in one hex. Then you could choose to build 2 500 strength swordsmen units, or 1 1000 strength swordsmen unit, or just build a 100 swordsmen unit and build something else the rest of the time.
One thing in diplomacy I want them to fix is I should get a relationship bonus if I refuse to cancel trade with someone.
EX: Country A tells me to break all trade agreements with country B. I refuse. Country A is now mad at me, but country B should at least be a little happier.