I was playing the total realism mod for warlords, when I was thinking about how silly it was that there were so many units all over the map. In my empire, tanks would roll past lone warriors gaurding ancient copper mines on their way to be transported across the ocean.

I guess it just seems silly to me that in the early game a small group of units is plenty to wage early wars, but as the years go on it is far to easy to pump out bombers, tanks, marines, and whatever else at the rate of a unit per turn in multiple cities, as well as the AI doing the same thing. So I tried to think of new ways to limit the need to have so many units all over the map.

My first thought was that there should be some sort of group upgrade system. Instead of just paying some gold to upgrade a unit, it should take gold and units. For example, if you could upgrade a group of three archers to longbowmen (just a random number and unit for the sake of demonstration) and a small fee of gold to do the upgrade. And when the era's change over a prompt would come up asking if you wanted to upgrade obsolete units or retire them (maybe with some small cultural boost to the cities that produced them)

My second idea had to do with the idea of a marginal cost to each unit. For example, lets say you build your first bomber for 100 hammers (I know that is not the actual cost). Then the next bomber would cost a bit more, then a bit more, to some point where it is just to expensive and time consuming to build a bomber, when some other unit or building is a better choice. I know that in reality, the first unit is the most expensive, then after the prototype each additional unit may be cheaper through a systematic production procedure.

But I think by making units more expensive in this way it would mimic other factors. Like limited resources, or the popluace first taking pride in thier military strength and then becoming increasingly more upset that so much of the governement spending dedicated to military units.

I think a third option to help limit the number of units in the game would be to allow multiple cities to group production together to help build a unit. I don't think this should apply to wonders (maybe national ones though). Maybe some sort of national wonder or just a building like "military industrial complex" or something. But each contributing city would be limited. Like the first would contribute 80%, the second 60%, and so on. Or it could just be limited by distance to the producing city.

This is not the most fleshed out plan, but i was trying to come up with ways to limit the overall number of units near the end game, but not some artificial hard limit that would just make you switch to producing wealth, research or culture becasue you can't make anything else. But a way to make production strategic, and make the choices more difficult and factoring in some sort of oppurtunity cost. I guess that is part of the reason that the beginning of a game is so much fun. There are overall fewer units and it is not tedious like the endgame is. I know that with more cities near the endgame, there will be more units it is just inevitable. but it just gets out of hand. Maybe it is just a side effect of the mod, but i remember having this issue in the normal versions as well.

funny, our main complaint when civ4 came out was you couldn't build units fast enough because the costs were so high.

1 unit a turn? hardly. I have never seen it. perhaps because I'm not focussing on produciton enough. Though my city with the military academy and heroic epic can shell out troops fairly quickly.

Granted, the ai's can have large amounts of units mid to late game. Especially catapults and trebuchets. Very annoying. I guess they do nothing but build units all the time, and don't build buildings.

funny, our main complaint when civ4 came out was you couldn't build units fast enough because the costs were so high.

1 unit a turn? hardly. I have never seen it. perhaps because I'm not focussing on produciton enough. Though my city with the military academy and heroic epic can shell out troops fairly quickly.

Granted, the ai's can have large amounts of units mid to late game. Especially catapults and trebuchets. Very annoying. I guess they do nothing but build units all the time, and don't build buildings.

I am going back to play the unmodded version again to see if it is just a function of a mod and longer play periods. This is something that is more of a problem in the modern eras. But ill see.

In the last game I played, I had 1 city that had the Heroic Epic, Military Academy, Ironworks (with both Iron and Coal heheh. My first time ever with both resources), and of course a Forge, Factory, and Coal Power Plant. I think that was it. Anyway, it was pumping out *almost* one stealth bomber per turn. If I'd switched to the Police State civic it would have been one per turn:).

But, granted, normally even my top production cities spend 2 or 3 turns on bombers.

Hey, my first post:).

You can easily build an archer or axeman a turn if you have Heroic Epic in a really good location.