Buildings Limiting Number of Unit?

[Hydromancerx]

In games like Age of Empires you have to build houses in order to build units. Each houses give X number of unit population and once you reach the limit you cannot make anymore units until you make more buildings. If buildings are destroyed your units still exist but you cannot build any more until you build more houses.

My idea would be to do the same thing with C2C. Each house building would give X number of units you could build. More advanced or dense houses would allow for more units. Thus the more cities you have the more buildings you can make.

For instance lets say a Grass Hut allows for 5 units while a Wood Hut would allow fore more. One other feature of the game was that units like horses took up 2 population. Thus larger/complex units may take up more population.

Would such a system be worth it? Would the AI be crippled and be too dumb to build houses?

 

[ori]

one thing one should keep in mind is that this lends itself to steam rolling your neighbors - essentially it means a larger empire can field a larger military (which to some extend is currently the case already) and that the smaller your empire gets the smaller your military gets, so once you are winning a war by taking out enemy cities you will very likely keep on winning simply because they cannot even field as large an army as you can anymore...

 

[Hankc]

Maybe you could apply it to cultures instead? Say, every Culture(Japanese) allows you to build 5 samurai, every Culture(Toltec) allows 5 coyote warriors etc.

 

[bill2505]

In games like Age of Empires you have to build houses in order to build units. Each houses give X number of unit population and once you reach the limit you cannot make anymore units until you make more buildings. If buildings are destroyed your units still exist but you cannot build any more until you build more houses.

My idea would be to do the same thing with C2C. Each house building would give X number of units you could build. More advanced or dense houses would allow for more units. Thus the more cities you have the more buildings you can make.

For instance lets say a Grass Hut allows for 5 units while a Wood Hut would allow fore more. One other feature of the game was that units like horses took up 2 population. Thus larger/complex units may take up more population.

Would such a system be worth it? Would the AI be crippled and be too dumb to build houses?

l like this idea . of course civ is a different game and needs adjusting

 

[Sleeeper]

I agree with ori.
Weaker civ has a chance to eliminate threat (though temporary) by using larger amount of weaker units to kill few strong units from attacking civ. With these limits that would not be possible.

 

[bill2505]

I agree with ori.
Weaker civ has a chance to eliminate threat (though temporary) by using larger amount of weaker units to kill few strong units from attacking civ. With these limits that would not be possible.

maybe you are right but this system is not realistic

 

[Retrospect]

I'd much rather see unit types limited via the goods system that you have implemented. Much like CiV 5. Where you can only build a certain amount of horsemen etc. Wether this is tied directly to the resource, goods system or buildings is something I would definitely like to see as an option. Although in now thinking as I type this, that it's not possible.

 

[ori]

@bill2505: there needs to be a fair bit of compromise between realism and gameplay. In a strict implementation of this you'll end up only having one option: get a big empire, I like civ precisely because it allows other strategies as well.
Now I have much less of a beef with limiting certain units, but outright disallowing a small empire to survive a war would just not be terribly good gameplaywise IMHO.

 

[Necratoid]

It may be better to make it a matter of units per square... huge armies bleed the area dry of food and such as the move through. This means Stacks of Doom get increased upkeep and deplete your nearest city or cities of food as they consume all the resources around them. the farther you are from anything else the most cost this army becomes... the Stack of Doom get too large and the city goes into negate food and eventually starts starving. Maybe a promotionm say forager, recon units autosupport themselves if food is avaiable, that depletes the nearest city period for X units worth of upkeep.

Historically accurate and if want to be really vicious... too many units will eventually cause the city to revolt as you starve out your own/the other guy's population. If you choke the supply lines enough the troops start taking damage from starving. Then war weariness kicks in.

Of course then the troops need to start carring rations for the lean times... maybe eat the pack/war animals. Lots of options here you can do without directly making cities equal armies. Sacking terrian tiles gets you rations.

In short, a direct cities/supply buildings to troops ratio means if your bigger already your going to win without RNG screw. Adding in logistics while complex (to varying levels) seems more logical. Of course programming the AI to deal with this is another matter.

 

[robomani]

If you want units to eat food you could look at that : http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388545

«-----Game Play-----

- Depending on how Civ4UnitInfos.xml is setup some units will provide food and
some units will consume food

- Notification messages provide key information of when units will begin to
starve and run out of food

- Units can be setup with food to provide your units with food during campaigns
outside of cities

- Units cannot heal when they are starving

- Depending on the configuration units will scavange from the tiles that they
are on instead of consuming their own food supplies (if they have any) or
food provided from other units (if allowed or if there are any in the same
tile).

- Depending on the configuration units will be fed by the city occupying the
same tile as the unit is on.»

 

[EldrinFal]

I would lean towards a food per unit upkeep requirement, which could be a tag for each unit. I think something like this used to be implemented in earlier Civ games? Ideally the unit should be able to then rebase to draw food from another city.

This isn't an RTS, so I wouldn't really desire a "feature" that required making X buildings to support more troops.

 

[little_cyclone]

Since we're talking population and housing, why not go up a level from military, your cities can only have a certain population dependent on how much housing has been constructed in that city? This would naturally cap your number of military units, as with a smaller population, you're only able to produce so many so fast..

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Since we're talking population and housing, why not go up a level from military, your cities can only have a certain population dependent on how much housing has been constructed in that city? This would naturally cap your number of military units, as with a smaller population, you're only able to produce so many so fast..

I have been repeatedly told that you can't do this sort of thing.

 

[little_cyclone]

Hmmmm, back to the drawing board it is then....

 

[Thunderbrd]

I would definately be more for a method where troops require food support.

Alternatively, it would be better to limit troop #s to population levels than to buildings themselves I think, though cheap buildings could represent population levels themselves (a building for each # that costs next to nothing to build...)

I usually play smaller nations with more powerful and fewer key cities. Still, I usually have some of the highest city populations on the board while having some of the fewest city counts. I wouldn't be afraid of such a system... I think it might actually force the ai to keep from overwhelming its own economy with 18000000 troops more than it needs... quality over quantity I say... my 20 troop armies usually easily wipe out entire nations worth of hundreds of units because I consider xp to be one of the most important factors in civics and buildings and anything I can get a free promo from I'll usually stretch for. This means it takes me a long time to field my army and against a less careful aggressive nation I may end up playing a potentially losing defensive fight before I actually have an army... but once I do, God help them.

So yeah, such limits, if reasonable at all, won't hinder me but will seriously be a problem for AIs that consider quantity more valuable than any quality concerns.

 

[EldrinFal]

I think I still prefer the current model where the power of my resources, economy, and manufacturing capability determine the strength of my army versus the population of my cities. Just feels like another artificial limit connecting military size to population size.

Plus, someone before mentioned a strategy of gifting an army of animals to a computer player to sink their economy. Same could happen here, but instead basically lock up their military with useless units. So that would be an ADDITIONAL aspect Koshling would have to program into the AI.

Food support cost is simpler, but even that I'm not 100% sure we really need.

 

[ori]

there already is ample support cost especially for units outside your cultural borders - but if one wants to tie that to food support instead of gold support one really should have a civ-wide food store - forcing you to keep track of which units were build in which city in order to not have your production cities starve would be terrible.

Edit: further its not unusual to have production and high food in different cities - so you'll really need a way to distribute that. I would also strongly push to limit something like this to out of borders units, otherwise you'll again end up mostly having a steam roller effect where those on the defensive not only lose land and improvements but also defensive units and population to a determined attack - this might be sort of realistic, but I don't see how it improves gameplay.

 

[Necratoid]

Then give the cities free military support for X number of units in a stationed inside a city. Say 3 +1 or 2 for every era you are into the game past prehistoric. The amount of population in the city granting further free support per unit staying their. Say +1 free support for every 7-10 pop of that city. Note this is within the cities borders not just the city square itself.

My issue is that the AI likes to make stacks of 20-30 units and the RNG me to death. Knights owning riflemen with 2-3 times the XP 3-1 in favor of the knights if I dare attack them. Yeah! Go knights! :sarcastic:

What I'm talking about is the upkeep only rally mattering when:

1) The invading a country with no chance of supply trains just marches in and wanders around breaking stuff. A guy mentioned his idea of war is to march a Stack of Doom or theww through dozens or hundreds of squares and raize the capital. This is the other side of this coin. In normal possible wars ignoring the fact the rest of the country exists and doing this would starve your army out and/or trash the landscape. Starvation is the most effect force in a seige when things are close to equal.

2) Invading a city far inside cultural borders and dropping Stack after Stack of Doom so a city is under control with 1800+ revolution modifier is going to rapidly eat up huge amounts of resources. Currently its peanuts to bother with for the AI. At some point the city should be crushed under the sheer weight of military vs. general population and just leave.

3) Civs that aren't to sedentary lifestyle field 15 troops armies... the entire point of sedentary lifestyle is its the point where you have enough population to produce enough food so that people can do something besides subsistant farmering and hunting and gathering.

In short, You just can't produce enough men to field these armies at some point.... fielding them inside other peoples well entrenched Civs with no supply lines is utterly insane.

 

[little_cyclone]

I think I still prefer the current model where the power of my resources, economy, and manufacturing capability determine the strength of my army versus the population of my cities. Just feels like another artificial limit connecting military size to population size.

Seconded.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

1) The invading a country with no chance of supply trains just marches in and wanders around breaking stuff. A guy mentioned his idea of war is to march a Stack of Doom or theww through dozens or hundreds of squares and raize the capital. This is the other side of this coin. In normal possible wars ignoring the fact the rest of the country exists and doing this would starve your army out and/or trash the landscape. Starvation is the most effect force in a seige when things are close to equal.

If you are talking about my comments on vassalage then you did not get the full story. I have one army of 8-10 infantry of the time, 6 artilary of the time, a healer and maybe a leader. I use that to beeline to their capital, by which I mean blitz through taking out (capturing) the cities on the way. I have a defensive stack following behind the main army to leave a defensive unit in the captured cities.

This tactic means that wars are over in 10-20 turns with me returning all captured cities to my new vassal before revolutions become a problem for me. I then walk my troops back home. This works, for me quite well, especially as I usually attack when their main forces are busy elsewhere.