I also worry that “one unit per tile” means we’ll be losing some granularity in units. If a single swordsman is the equivalent of a stack of ten or twenty swordsmen in the old games, then that means that a civilization will advance the strength of its military in increments equivalent to ten or twenty swordsmen at a time. In the older games, if I have a military composed of ten swordsmen and my opponent is a little ahead of me militarily, that might mean he has 12 or 13, which still gives me a reasonable chance. Here, though, it looks to me like my opponent being a little ahead of me might mean something more like him having 2 units to my 1, or worse, he has one but mine hasn’t popped yet at all (since presumably a one-per-tile unit would take longer to build than stackables).
Between this and the hex tiles, it kind of looks to me like we’re seeing change for the sake of change, rather than to actually solve problems. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The stack of death is broke. The “fight to the death” unit battle mechanic is broke. Civ 5 will be a much more enjoyable game if broke issues like that are redesigned. You are making assumptions about how the units operate that I don’t think you’re entitled to make. One possible way the 1-per-tile army units could operate which you don’t seem to have considered is that the units begin small, and increase as city production provides reinforcements for it. I expect the game will not be as bland as “wait 30 turns without any units, in order to produce an army unit that’s about as powerful as 30 turns worth of units from civ4”
If the biggest complaint about civ4 is the stacks of doom, who are you to tell everyone they’re wrong? The stack of doom is not fun.
It sounds like you’re just a conservative gamer at heart. Civ2 is a thousand times better than civ1, and civ4 is a hundred and eighty eight thousand times better than civ3. Objectively.
Well, yeah. I mean, I can’t just set up the worksheet as a visual representation of the map. Anyways, it’s probably for the best - once you get into worksheets complicated enough that you need VBA, you might as well just go ahead and write a damn program.
As for the one-unit-per-hex thing, I’m hoping that means units are more customizable and there are less of them - like, instead of building twelve swordsmen, you build a swordsman unit, then invest in upgrading it. One of the main reasons I get sick of Civ4 is hitting endgame, and suddenly having to deal with dozens of units. Sure, you can stack 'o death them, but I don’t play Civ for the amazing tactical depth, so I’d really rather just have a few army units and not worry about them.
If you have one unit per tile but that unit grows with reinforcements, how is that actually any different from a stack of death? Or perhaps we should start at a more basic level: What’s wrong with a stack of death in the first place?
As for military units fighting to the death, battles would be kind of pointless if you couldn’t render your opponent incapable of fighting. Now, maybe what actually happens when you defeat your enemy is that you kill a tenth of his soldiers, and the rest retreat in chaos and disperse into the countryside… But how is that any different, game-wise, from what we have now?
Well, the only real problem I have with big stacks is needing to have lots of military units, which is a drain on my attention. So, if you just have a few units that upgrade (whether that’s reinforcements or equipment or what have you), there’s a little less micromanaging. If you’ve played Dawn of War , the squads are sort of like that - you get a certain number of squads, and you can reinforce or upgrade them, but they function as a unit - so, you might have twenty marines, but they’re in groups of five, so you’ve only really got four ‘units’ to manage.
It’d certainly be a pretty radical departure for Civ, and I rather doubt anything like that will happen, but it would be interesting for me.
In the open, defensive units have advantages that far outclass attacker advantages. There are NO exclusive attacker advantages outside of withdrawal chances for cavalry, or city raider. The problem with huge stacks of death is that a defensive unit with defense multipliers can defend weaker attack units multiple times. If a stack of 20 defense units and 10 attack units comes into your territory, you better have more than 30 units to combat them. You’ll need 2 units (at least) per defensive death-stack unit before you get to attack the threatening units. If you ONLY have 40 units to combat their 30 unit stack, you wont be able to attack their artillery. There is no way to “pin” an advancing stack of death or outmaneuver it. It marches relentlessly toward your city, and if it reaches your city, the city-raider multipliers are enough to beat your defenders.
This is the reason stacks of death weren’t a problem in civ2. If an advancing stack came toward your territory, your units had zones of control to force the stack to either bog down or split up. In civ4, there’s absolutely no way to combat a stack except with brute force, until you get bombers. Even then, bomber utility is extremely limited by bomber stack-size limitations. Bombers become less useful the bigger the stack is, and by the time bombers enter the game, you have computers at prince level with stacks of death of over 100 units. You can usually only fit around 12 bombers in the areas around the stack, because the stack usually appears at the edge of your territory, and only 2 or 3 cities are within bomber range of the stack as it approaches. Also, bombers are fantastically expensive compared to stack units, meaning if you have a bomber fleet, your ground military is lacking compared to the stack. No matter what, you lose vs. a stack unless you have enough production to just bludgeon the stack in the 2 or 3 turns it takes the stack to reach your nearest city.
The stack of death in civ4 sucks. I suspect it’s effectiveness was encouraged by developers so they didn’t have to work too hard making a good war A.I.
ETA. this post was in response to Chronos asking what was wrong with the stack of doom in the first place.
OK, my experience is all with Civ3, where stacks of death usually consist of tanks or cavalry, both of which have an attack value twice as great as their defense value. So if my enemy starts moving a stack of tanks into my territory, then I bring up my tanks, and pretty thoroughly crush them before they can reach me. If I don’t have tanks, then yeah, that sucks, but really, is it any surprise that it sucks when your enemy has tanks and you don’t? And even then, cavalry attacking tanks aren’t completely hopeless.
So if there really is a stack of death problem in Civ4, maybe it can be fixed just by bringing back separate attack and defense values for units?
I like the single battle value civ 4 units have. I think the best way the stack of death has been handled was with zones of control in civ2 (and alpha centauri). The problem with zones of control is that the computer AI isn’t strong enough to figure out how to use the zones against you, or respond to you doing it.
This (the snippage) is the main reason why I usually end a game by the time it enters a period where there’s tons of these things wandering around. As a veteran wargamer, I just find the SoD horribly boring; the single stack rules seem to be bringing a lot more tactical “meat” to the table, tho I would have preferred a tactical map, as seen on a number of games over the years (c.f. Age of Wonders or Heroes of Might & Magic, even if they are fantasy games).
Within the Civ4 engine, I thought the folks behind the Fall From Heaven II mod did some nice things to make the combat interesting. Yeah, the AI still tended towards the SoD (and if a civ was isolated on an island, the AI could never figure out how to get off the island with transports, so they would just keep building preposterous numbers of units), but at least you had some ability to customize your unit mix to deal with them. You could build assassins to target the weakest units in the stack (and promote your strongest units so that they defend against assassins), cast spells that damaged the entire stack or stunned a good percentage of the units, utilized promotions that gave your units more mobility for hit-and-run attacks, utilized units and races that received defense or mobility bonuses in certain terrain, and the map itself tended to create lots of defensible choke points.
The drawback is that games tend to be highly dependent on what kind of map has been generated, and the only real tactic the AI has in the late game is to try to steamroll you with their stack.
I am a bit worried about this too. What I’m hoping is that this will mean not all units are equal.
For example let’s say you build one unit of swordsmen, and it’s represented on the map as 3 swordsmen, which would equate to maybe 300 soldiers. Now you could either choose to build another unit of swords, or reinforce the original unit to 6 swords. This could have a limit to say 15 soldiers per one unit. So you could create one unit of 1500 swordsmen, or 5 units of 300 swordsmen with the same amount of production time. This would let them keep the granularity in units.
It would also be a good time to include the kills/wounded system of Panzer General. I always found it a bit awkward that you can rest a nearly dead unit back to full health fairly easily. So if you fought with a 10 soldiers strong unit, you might end up with 2 of them dead and 3 wounded. You could recover the wounded by resting, but the dead would require additional recruitment in cities.
I am very much against the “one-unit-per-tile” idea. A big problem I foresee is moving units: if you’re trying to move a large number of units towards a target, but you can’t move a unit onto a tile that’s already occupied… what a clusterfuck. Especially if they don’t fix one of the things that got broke in Civ 4, where if you tell a unit to wait, the game insists on going back to that unit after the next one, instead of sending it to the end of the queue (like in previous versions).
My impression about this one-unit idea, though, is it is just that - an idea. From what I can tell from a small amount of reading the forums at Civfanatics, a couple of early screenshots showed what appeared to be many tiles with single units on them, most likely done to make it look cool. This idea took hold and is now being reported as fact. Has it been confirmed?
I REALLY hope it won’t work this way. The Stack-o-Death bitching nonwithstanding at least your group needed unit variety (longbowman, pikeman, maceman etc.) for different attacks on it. Only ten swordsman in the stack was what was really lame.
To be honest the stack never bothered me. Depending on the map those squares represented tens if not hundreds of miles across and how many warriors could a primitive culture mobilize and pay for? So many that a square hundred miles couldn’t contain two of the smallest platoons?
This article, based on an interview with the Civ 5 lead designer, confirms “one military unit per tile”. Note that this includes garrison units for cities.
I’m intrigued upon reading that cities themselves will have a defensive rating, thus minimizing the need to even HAVE a garrison unit. That will totally change the way I play, at least in early game.
And I’m glad to see the SoD gotten rid of. It’s gaming the system, and I hate that. Imagine if all of the D-Day forces had stayed together, moving in one giant group straight for Berlin. Rediculous.
I think the new combat system looks interesting. It looks like the fewer, more powerful units will have tactical level battles when they meet. I think this makes the idea that they can be reinforced/added to more likely.
