Carpet of Doom vs Stack of Doom

As already noted, the screenshot is from a modded vanilla civ5 game. I assume that means unpatched.

dexters said:

As already noted, the screenshot is from a modded vanilla civ5 game. I assume that means unpatched.

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Vanilla usually means right out of the box.

Modded means all bets are off, and the entire argument (over CoD, not 1UPT) just had a critical hole of logic blown through it's center.

OneFootInThe... said:

but if AI was any good, and you were a good player, like SOD "end game" in previous versions of civ COD is a natural "end game" outcome...

the fact that AI is poor currently that you do not need to have nearly as big army as it has, to compete effectively is another issue altogether.

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...except this isn't even remotely true. Most of the units on a carpet of doom would be worthless and just be a huge money-sink (and you would hit the max units cap). You simply couldn't bring them to bear. And given unit maintenance, they would be economically crippling to retain. If someone brought a CoD at you, you'd be better off investing in air power and artillery, holding them at a choke-ish point, kill their troops faster than they could be brought to bear and just buy a diplo win before they could get through your defenses. Of course, if they were playing well, they'd have brought a ton of air power to bear instead, and you'd have to match them with a full scale war machine, but if they were playing well, no Carpet of Doom would result and you wouldn't get to criticize civ V the way you want to -_-

It's telling that even in multiplayer, this literally never happens. Stack of Dooms, on the other hand, are the normal way of playing Civ IV. Comparing Carpet of Doom to Stack of Doom is just ridiculous. Frankly, it just sounds like you're grasping for a criticism. There's no such thing as Carpet of Doom, at least nowhere near this scale (i.e. not larger than 10-15 units moving through an area, which can be intimidating but does not look like an absurdity).

SoD for two simple reasons: It requires fewer trivial decisions and makes for a more robust game. A handful of units with limited stacking can be very successful in limited/economic warfare, but the system can also handle several hundred units in an army without major problems if you remember in time to disable combat animations.
Tactical tricks are quite possible, the main problem is that most players don't bother (simplistic stack use works well enough that mid-level players are probably better off refining their economic rather than their tactical play. It doesn't help that the combat mechanics are rather misleading).

Yes, a true CoD isn't a common occurrence... but on high levels it's already rather obnoxious (more so than stacks imo) and Civ5 is jumping through hoops to limit military buildups in ways that are very damaging to the rest of the game.
To shine, 1upt would need a different scale... more space for tactical movement rather than just managing traffic jams, smaller cities spaced more widely, possibly a more sophisticated combat system to be worth the effort. In short, it would be necessary to do this properly from the ground up instead of tacking wargame trappings onto a Civ that tries to stay reasonably close to its predecessors.

I've only seen one carpet of doom from an AI. Diety continents map, and the other continent was a true carpet. So I declared war, and the entire carpet slid out to sea. Fortunately, I had more destroyers than the AI, so I sunk most of it before it reached me.

As for worker traffic jams, those of you who claim that they can't happen ... have you ever gone conquering on large (or huge) maps? When you're capturing cities fast enough that your national border is advancing an average of three or four hexes forward per turn, then you need a *lot* of workers to fix the mess the AI made of the terrain. (All those farms ... shudder...). I often have a three- or four-deep wall of workers advancing across the continent. That's a pain to manage. It's not uncommon for a worker to finish a job, and be unable to move anywhere because all nearby tiles already have a worker.

Creepy Old Man said:

I've only seen one carpet of doom from an AI. Diety continents map, and the other continent was a true carpet. So I declared war, and the entire carpet slid out to sea. Fortunately, I had more destroyers than the AI, so I sunk most of it before it reached me.

As for worker traffic jams, those of you who claim that they can't happen ... have you ever gone conquering on large (or huge) maps? When you're capturing cities fast enough that your national border is advancing an average of three or four hexes forward per turn, then you need a *lot* of workers to fix the mess the AI made of the terrain. (All those farms ... shudder...). I often have a three- or four-deep wall of workers advancing across the continent. That's a pain to manage. It's not uncommon for a worker to finish a job, and be unable to move anywhere because all nearby tiles already have a worker.

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Agreed. It is quite a pain and in my opinion quite an unnecessary one. It's because they want to slavishly stick to 1UPT. It definitely needs to be modified at the very least to allow civilian stacking.

They definitely need to allow workers to stack in some way to prevent this annoying issue.

I liked civ2's way of doing it.

I chose SoD, only because I think it fits the scale of Civ much more effectively.

A "refined" stacking system is the answer, I really do think it is.

Menzies said:

They definitely need to allow workers to stack in some way to prevent this annoying issue.

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Also I think you should be able to stack a civilian unit with any type of foreign units. I hate when I can't complete a road to one of my cities just because a foreign settler is blocking the path for no reason at all.

I prefer stacks of doom to carpets of doom, I think. But I should qualify that by saying I haven't really come across many carpets of doom in my games. It just really sucks when it does happen.

CoD, SoDs wouldn't work with city defense. CtP is worse than SoD because it doesn't fit in with civ. I laughed at the SoD pic in the OP because I've never heard of the Egyptian city "Dickerdale".

Bibor said:

"Carpet of doom" is a myth. That screenshot was made using a production mod in vanilla Civ5.

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I made a Carpet of doom with England with 10 battleships and 5 destroyers, and don't forget the cherry on the top, the aircraft carrier.

The dead walk among us...