Stacks of Doom are great!

flyingbunnys said:

1. They were boring.
2. They were unrealistic.
3. They were unbalanced.
5. They required almost no strategy.
5. They made battles feel incomplete, and simplistic.

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I'm just curious what difficulty level these people played on... Because they always make Civ IV sound so easy; "Make an invincible stack to conquer the world, pump out missionaries to make everybody love you".

I would consider myself rather good at the game, playing mostly at Immortal. While an early axeman rush often is profitable, but it will hurt the science output and if you don't have plenty of gold/gems/beavers, it will be very hard to support all units and cities, unless of course you raze everything, which will hurt you even more in the long run. It's not like you can pump out 30 axemen and steamroll the world.

I cannot stress this enough: Civilization is about strategic management, not battle tactics... Like the original Settlers! games... The battle outcome will mostly be based on how well your empire is doing and on which units you send in. When people complain about the "my stack is bigger than yours"-issue, they actually complain about the very concept of the game, which is to be more productive/efficiant than your opponents.

I've built missionaries occasionally to increase my income, but I'm finding it hard to believe that someone successfully manipulated the entire world to love them. Religion is only one thing that affects the diplomatic modifiers and many Civs don't even care about it. And there will always be Civs that don't like the Civics you have picked. And if you actually waste all your hammers on building missionaries, your Civ will probably be crippled in many ways, so even if you actually make everybody love you, it's not like your going to win the game by doing so... At least not after they tweaked the AP in a patch.

And all these "exploits", are actually what made Civ IV such a great game. Yes, building tons of Axemen can be deadly powerful. But building missionaries on the other hand, can boost your income and improve your relations with other leaders. Spamming cottages will secure your economy in the future, but specialist can give you a quick economy boost. Spies can instantly bring the cultural defenses.

There are TONS of really powerful tools, but you can't use them all at the same time. And the AI can use these tools as well. This leads to endless combinations and stories to tell.

Bad Brett said:

I'm finding it hard to believe that someone successfully manipulated the entire world to love them.

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Open borders, years of peace, fair and forthwright trading, fought a war together, honored a request, and I suspect I'm missing several more.

That doesn't touch on religion, which often needed zero missionaries (the dominant religion spread to you), or power ratios, which combined with distance both modify an AI's behavior.

Nares said:

Open borders, years of peace, fair and forthwright trading, fought a war together, honored a request, and I suspect I'm missing several more.

That doesn't touch on religion, which often needed zero missionaries (the dominant religion spread to you), or power ratios, which combined with distance both modify an AI's behavior.

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If you fight a war together, that means that other AI's will hate you instead. What I meant is that it's very hard to make the entire world love you. Eventually someone will hate you.

To be able to befriend your closest neighbour by picking the same civics, religions and fight wars togehter is not an exploit; It's a realistic mechanism and it gives builders the chance to defend their wonders without launching pre-emptive strikes.

vincentz said:

TACTICAL VIEW OR AUTORESOLVE?

Spoiler :

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This is unlikely to ever be in the game as long as it has Sid's name on it. He's pretty much said so already:

Sid said:

So I call it the "Covert Action Rule". Don't try to do too many games in one package. And that's actually done me a lot of good. You can look at the games I've done since Civilization, and there's always opportunities to throw in more stuff. When two units get together in Civilization and have a battle, why don't we drop out to a war game and spend ten minutes or so in duking out this battle? Well, the Covert Action Rule. Focus on what the game is.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_Action#The_Covert_Action_Rule

Isnt it excactly what he did in Pirates???

edit : besides. Sid's vision is Civ Rev. I certainly hope he doesnt have anything to do with civ 6 other than putting his name on the box

Of all the Civ-like games I've played Civ: Call to Power 2 had the best approach to this. There was a 12 unit cap on any one square with units ordered by functionality, i.e. melee at the front, ranged at the back and flanking at the sides. Ranged fired first, then melee hammered it out with flanking units attacking from the front or sides. As front units died the ones behind moved forward. It was simple and easy and the AI could handle it well. The stack couple was grouped into an army and very easy to move around. In many ways the game is superior to the current incarnation of Civ.

vincentz said:

Isnt it excactly what he did in Pirates???

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If you read the whole quote on the wiki page, he does mention it, but it sounds like he doesn't see it a problem in that game:

Sid said:

I think, individually, those each could have been good games. Together, they fought with each other. You would have this mystery that you were trying to solve, then you would be facing this action sequence, and you'd do this cool action thing, and you'd get on the building, and you'd say, "What was the mystery I was trying to solve?" Covert Action integrated a story and action poorly, because the action was actually too intense. In Pirates!, you would do a sword fight or a ship battle, and a minute or two later, you were kind of back on your way. In Covert Action, you'd spend ten minutes or so of real time in a mission, and by the time you got out of [the mission], you had no idea of what was going on in the world.

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For the record, I loved Covert Action in it's day ...

Dralix said:

This is unlikely to ever be in the game as long as it has Sid's name on it. He's pretty much said so already:

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It probably can be modded in, though.

Androrc the Orc said:

It probably can be modded in, though.

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I don't know the first thing about modding, so I don't know what is and isn't possible, but if so, then great.

Sometimes I think that people forget about the whole point of modding when discussing Civ V. I've heard people ask why they should rely on mods to "fix" the game. While I'll agree that something like an adequate AI should be in the base game, other "problems" are exactly the thing of mods.

The designers have their vision of things, like tile yields, or production/tech times. Don't like them? Mod it. The whole reason mods exist is because different people have different tastes and mods allow people to tailor the game as they want it.

Its definately one of my favorite approaches in games. You have a strategic view for management and then action in a tactical.
It worked so sweet in tons of games, and while it somehow would focus on combat and battles, its perfectly capable of maintaining Civ'ing in the strategic view (maybe even better than 1UPT Civ5).

@ Dralix.
Yep, I read it, but after I posted. But this idea wouldnt be very far from land battles in Pirates, maybe even shorter time, less micromanagement, better implementation. He does kinda contradict himself.

I'm surprised how many people like 1 upt. As I mentioned in an earlier post this thread, I don't think I'll ever finish my first game.

It took like 20 minutes to set all my troops up for a war declaration (some where ambhibious). That simply is not fun for me. 20 minutes just to get everything in position! Not to mention the war itself was very tedious. I guess I don't like tactical level games. They ruined civilization for me as far as I'm concerned. I prefer things on a strategic level. I prefer building, not spending hours on just one war.

Complain all you want about stacks -- boring, frustrating, whatever -- those are personal preferences. But you can't really call them unrealistic compared to 1UPT.

They are appropriate for the level of detail Civ is supposed to be. Warfare at the strategic level is about diplomacy and production. The only positioning you should have to micro at that level is getting your units to the correct theater and picking their objectives (which city you want to take first).

Stalin, Churchill, and FDR beat Hitler by outproducing him, not by putting archers tanks in the right spot to support the longswordsmen infantry. The people who had to do that part didn't have to deal with empire management. This isn't to say tactics isn't important and it's not a defense of stacks as fun -- it's just not really the same level at all.

Stacks allowed at least one lower level of warfare as well -- the operational level. SoD feels annoying and tedious to deal with when you play against AI because they probably declared war on you first after their stack had already formed. If you attacked first or if you fought against a human player, you would get to notice the operational level, which is much more fun than strategic level and makes more sense than the tactical level.

Force Concentration -- If you caught the AI unawares, you'll have a chance to defeat his units piecemeal as he tries to mass them into a stack of death.

Economy of Force -- Human players are less willing than AI to only complete 1 objective at a time (the price of a SoD). So it's a race to see who had the right number of stacks in the right configurations.

I like Civ5's combat, it's kinda fun. It's jarring to me of course because of how inappropriate it is to strategic empire management, but that's fine, it's only a game. I am annoyed like hell by the Civ4 AI's stacks of death, like everyone else. But in the right conditions (usually against human players), stack combat is actually very exciting. It's just not as unrealistic as everyone thinks!

In war history books and wikipedia articles, they always show maps with clean lines to signify the front. Other than a few exceptional wars like the late stages of Korea, the late stages of the Iran-Iraq war, or the western front in World War 1, that's actually pretty deceptive. Most of the time, what you really had were mass concentrations of units shadowing each other, kind of like stacks chasing other stacks. The rest of the "lines" were relatively minor units trying look for weaknesses to exploit (smaller stacks separated to expand your field of view so you couldn't be surprised through the fog of war).

The opening of Napoleon's 1812 campaign in Russia can be summarized as a humongous French stack chasing a Russian stack as it fell back trying to accumulate more and more slaved/drafted units. His retreat is eerily similar to a huge stack of damaged units trying to get back to friendly territory as it is nipped in the heels by fresh enemy cavalry and hounded by Russia's own and now-complete (and fully-healed) stack of doom.

I'm really oversimplifying and generalizing, but again it's really not that unrealistic!

On Civ IV I played on Noble and V I play on Prince. It's not that I can't play higher difficulties I just like the difficulties where the AI doesn't get "bonuses". That is if and when I play by myself which I rarely did. I usually did hotseat or LAN or online. BTW still waiting for my hotseat 2k.

I know in my original post it sounded like I was saying 1UPT was the only way, as if I don't see any flaws, but I see the flaws in 1UPT. I just rather have the 1UPT over the SoD.

For example units can't move over the same tile even in peace time. Lots of units are difficult to move all at once, even when they don't need deployed till they arrive.

Personally I would favor stacks where only one leader unit can attack or defend. This would make movement easier, and eliminate the blocked path problem.

Smaller hexs might help too, or sub hexes.

Most of good classic TBS used 1upt. Check (freeware) Panzer General 2 or Wesnoth, among others. Advance Wars is also great, though not free.

But so far, for world-scale empire-building game I think SOD is both more wieldy and more realistic. Most of the history wars, except first half of 20th century, was decided in SOD vs SOD - like battles.

The great thing about 1upt is that we get multiple versions of this discussion every single day!

I liked them. Especially since they were much easier to use/manage in MP; compare that to the complete and utter unplayable garbage that is Civ5 MP and you'll know what I mean.

Bad Brett said:

I'm just curious what difficulty level these people played on... Because they always make Civ IV sound so easy; "Make an invincible stack to conquer the world, pump out missionaries to make everybody love you".

I would consider myself rather good at the game, playing mostly at Immortal. While an early axeman rush often is profitable, but it will hurt the science output and if you don't have plenty of gold/gems/beavers, it will be very hard to support all units and cities, unless of course you raze everything, which will hurt you even more in the long run. It's not like you can pump out 30 axemen and steamroll the world.

I cannot stress this enough: Civilization is about strategic management, not battle tactics... Like the original Settlers! games... The battle outcome will mostly be based on how well your empire is doing and on which units you send in. When people complain about the "my stack is bigger than yours"-issue, they actually complain about the very concept of the game, which is to be more productive/efficiant than your opponents.

I've built missionaries occasionally to increase my income, but I'm finding it hard to believe that someone successfully manipulated the entire world to love them. Religion is only one thing that affects the diplomatic modifiers and many Civs don't even care about it. And there will always be Civs that don't like the Civics you have picked. And if you actually waste all your hammers on building missionaries, your Civ will probably be crippled in many ways, so even if you actually make everybody love you, it's not like your going to win the game by doing so... At least not after they tweaked the AP in a patch.

And all these "exploits", are actually what made Civ IV such a great game. Yes, building tons of Axemen can be deadly powerful. But building missionaries on the other hand, can boost your income and improve your relations with other leaders. Spamming cottages will secure your economy in the future, but specialist can give you a quick economy boost. Spies can instantly bring the cultural defenses.

There are TONS of really powerful tools, but you can't use them all at the same time. And the AI can use these tools as well. This leads to endless combinations and stories to tell.

Click to expand...

Excellent post.

@Bad Brett
@marty4286

Love your posts!

And marty, from what I know of the Civil War, while there were fronts WITHIN battles, but there were also "stacks chasing each other" between Lee and Grant and mobility of "stacks" themselves became an issue. I agree that SoDs are not necessarily "unrealistic."

Again, the argument isn't between 1UPT and stacks, it's between 1UPT and SOD. As has been mentioned, SOD != stacks (rather SOD instanceof stack ).

I like 1UPT, and I like small stacks. 1UPT is not really ideal for strategic games on maps this small, it's too "horizontal", but SOD was too "vertical", I just had a big stack from which I would choose units to attack another vertical stack.

1UPT "looks" better on the map, with units spread out and ranged and flanking units represented well. But it just has problems with the scale of the maps and the AI. Choosing between 1UPT and SOD I'd probably go with 1UPT because I like the idea better. However, for me the real solution would be limited stacking (closer to CTP than to the Civ III army) or a tactical battle map (would be very cool but it's far from Civ's philosophy and might be jarring going to and from).

And lol at Kerosene31's post. So funny because it's true.

Is Carpet of Death better than Stack of Death?