1 unit/tile overkill

The major issues with 1UPT:

- Difficulty in arranging your units when they can only move 2 tiles at a time. Which means you end up playing one of those old picture puzzle games with the missing piece where you slid the pieces around into the hole to unscramble the picture. Allowing us a base movement rate of 3 would help a lot.

- Archers only have a range of 2. Which means they pretty much have to crawl up the backsides of the melee to have a chance of hitting something. Couple that with the 2 tile movement speed and you have a bottleneck. Range of 2 is okay, but more advanced versions of an archer with a range of 3 would give you more options.

- Siege engines with a range of only 2. Now you have a unit with less health then the ranged archers, which has to spend a movement point to setup, and most of the time can't hit anything. Siege should probably have a range of 3 and cannons and higher a range of 4. Let them setup back from the front lines (especially modern artillery).

- When going from a system where you can stack dozens of units on a single tile to one where you are forcing 1UPT, the tiles need to represent less physical distance and you need more of them on the game board to keep the same feel. Cities being able to work 36 tiles instead of only 20 is part of this, but the limits on range of only 2 units works against being able to spread out over a larger area and still have combat.

That's kinda more... realistic.
3 movement tiles... why?
Of course archers move slowly. Archers need to be so perfectly organized and synchronized that moving them through a war was really slow.
And sieges are even more realistic there. They were used to destroy big things like walls and citys. They are really heavy. How do you think they were transported through battle?
Again... they were being realistic. 1 tile is kilometers. Lots of it. It's not like they can fly through places easily.
 
And why exactly is that reasonable to you? 1upt seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Then you sound like an unreasonable person.

Going from an infinite number down to one seems like a choice made without much testing.

Perfect example:

I was building a road from my empire to the front line of a war. This road was going through forests and jungles and hills. Along the way my workers would errect forts. In one section, my entire operation was held up several turns - costing me dearly on the front lines - because in between a mountain pass, my worker was building a road on the hill tile between the mountains. The only way around was several tiles north or south, but the pass was an ideal road. Well, while my worker built this road through the forested hill between the mountains, my other workers were unable to pass him and continue on infront and keep working on the road.

Why?

Because a worker can only move 1 tile, and a forest/hill takes that entire 1 turn. Because they couldn't go ontop of my worker that was there, and they couldn't pass him, nor could they skip over him due to only having 1 turn, I had a backup of several workers waiting. Eventually it cleared out, but it's so unbelievably unrealistic (AND UNFUN!) that I was frusterated.

Also, what's the point of not allowing more than one worker to work on something? If I have 5 worker units idle and I want a fort, and I want it in 1 turn, I should be able to dump 5 workers on it and have it happen - remember each turn is 5 years (?) - so putting all of those workers on a fort would have it quickly happen.

Bottom line, 1UPT presents more problems than solutions, it's nonsensical given the scale of the world (unless each unit is like 10 million people?), and it only causes problems when moving about workers and military unit.

I'd like to see an update remove the limit. Even if you don't let the stack attack as one, let us move them as one -- save my carpal tunnel please?
 
How about taking your army across the water? There's a tiresome task...

This.

Friends and I played a standard sized continents. Never again.

One friend and I were on one continent, and the other two were on the other. It took me about 10 turns? to get from my continent to the other to my one friend, and then another 10 turns? to get deeper along the coast to my other friend.

By the time I had longswords arriving, I already had muskets.

It's tedious, boring, long, and unrealistic. A boat moves MUCH faster than people marching, or even horses - it sails all night and day. In one turn - 5 years - a boat should EASILY reach the shores, but 20 turns? That was nearly 100+ years! It was stupid!
 
This whole point of contention would go away if they changed the relative scale between the various entities.

The fact is that units/armies/whatever should not take up the same space as a city, or even a farm.

My proposal then is simple:

The objects sitting on the hex grid should be scaled according to desired game mechanics relative to each other.

the key being "relative to each other."

For example:
A city and a mountain could be a 7 hex size.
A unit could be one hex.
Rivers might span 2... So bigger rivers mean longer bridges / traversals


I think this would work well... Plus it's scalable throughout the eras...

I don't wanna see CIV go into tactical map and strat map (like Total War). I want the board game feel for CIV, and the tactics for TW.

Ah, interesting. I've just come to the same conclusion except that I phrased it as each 'build hex' (unit of terrain, city, whatever) could consist of 7 'movement hexes'. It's about decoupling the build hexes from the movement hexes, which are currently identical. I can't see any reason why this should be so.

I anticipate one objection, which is that necessarily an improvement applies to all seven movement hexes within a build hex. So how do workers, who occupy movement hexes, do their stuff? That one is easy, abolish workers entirely and move to the far more elegant solution from Call to Power, namely Public Works. (I'm not sure about settlers, as of right now). There are also cosmetic problems, namely roads might look pretty awful.

Your idea with the rivers sounds quite promising too, Shabbabaram.
 
I gotta side with you on this point though, and this has killed my immersion in this game.

Why can an archer shoot over a lake, but my musket men can't?

I'm going to reiterate one my points above.

1upt is awesome. But you need many many times more hexes for it to work. The current system in Civ V does not work for me.

Once some tactical maps and mods get created I may come back, but for now, I've shelved Civ V for mainly this reason.

This.

It's because of the scaling that I advocate a limited number of units per tile.

Someone mentioned that he actually sets up infantry in the middle with cav on the wings and archers in the rear. When I read this, I wondered where in the world he's able to do that? There just isn't a large enough of an area to accomplish that. Everywhere I've fought in the game it'd be impossible to do this because there's a lake, or a mountain or an ocean in the way.

1upt in a tactical simulation works great when the game possesses a tactical map, as it is, Blitz is correct, it's a strategic map, hence 1upt doesn't work for it.

This is why I still advocate a limited number of units per tile. The only other solution you could come up with, and it's a good idea, is to switch from a strategic map to a tactical map just for combat, have the two opposing sides setup their armies, and then do an RTS version of fighting.

Take a page from the archaic XCom series on this one; a marriage of Civ's turn-based strategy with an under-layer of RTS would be remarkable.
 
the only way i could get behind 2 or 3 stacks is if i have my army lined up and i need to, say, pick off the pikemen with my crossbows or trebs so my cav could move in to take the rest out. i would have to be able to know what each unit is in the stack and then pick where i want my damage to go.

this sounds so tedious and time consuming and strategically a much larger burden than the game needs. 1upt is far better, imo.
 
This is the worst misconception that exists on the entire forum here. It's not just you or your fault of course, you probably heard it from some dozens of others first.

If the developers had this as their actual "intention" they were complete fools - but I don't think that was the case. The "intention" was to introduce something new to the series that would impress players/take up a lot of time/allow for just doing more stuff moving units around in combat, because it was believed players were "bored" with the older civ games.

The reduction of the total number of units was accomplished an entirely different way with an entirely different reason - by increasing the cost of units and changing AI handicaps. Neither of those things proved effective, but they are also unrelated to having 1 unit per tile - they could have simply reduced production and made units more expensive overall regardless of whatever system unit movement and combat used.

This is not a misconception. For long-term players of civ, SODs has been an essential debate amongst players that the developers have tried to address in each iteration.

Civ2 If one unit died, all units in the stack died.
Civ3 Armies and fortifications, ZOC
Civ4 Tried to nerf SODs by introducing collateral damage.
 
It seems to me that a limited stack, let's say 3 units, keeps many of the disadvantages of unlimited stack.
With 3upt in medieval era you could just stack one crossbowman, one longsword and one pikemen and there would be no counter to your stack. Indeed it would not be very different from having unlimited stack.

I would just bombard you to death. In my defensive position I'd have 3 adjacent tiles with archers in them (protected by infantry) that would bombard you to death.
 
Never yet heard a cogent argument for why 1upt is better than, say, 2upt. 2upt would at least ease the unit collisions.

But what many still don't want to get is that it was a fundamental mistake to design a builder game around an arbitrary unit stacking limit. The response that "Civ was always 'really' a wargame is cynically disingenuous - balancing the secondary wargame aspect with the main builder game was always an issue in the Civ series, but that is a different issue from subordinating the builder game to the wargame, as in CivV. But brian reynold's Alpha Centuari - a wildly unbalanced game - was far more builder immersive than CivV.

Stating that "it was always a wargame" is really to agree with the (Shafer) design decision (also evidenced in the diplomacy design) to scrap the motto "BUILD an empire to stand the test of time" and convert CivV into a wargame. And 1upt guaranteed a not so good wargame at that - why overload commercially produced AIs that are invariably subpar with additional unit moving tasks? It is always easier for such an AI to handle a limited number of stacks? Simple arithmetic would tell you that. Instead, CivV AI has to consider the possibility of a (single) unit in every hex. That's more work for the AI, e.g., the AI developer.
 
Having 2 or 3 units per tile would just not be...clean. It would be complicated and messy. 1 UPT meets "good design" principle in that is is as simple as possible.

For instance, you would put a ranged unit in the same tile as a strong melee unit, for protection, right? So in that situation it would be fair for the archer to fire with impunity at anything that wanders by, totally protected?

In the current system, your ranged units like archers are vulnerable because the enemy can flank the defenders with cavalry. You know, like in actual warfare. In order to get around this, you have to maneuvre your forces carefully, using the terrain to your benefit. You know - Tactics!

At the root of it, that's what it's about. Some people just prefer civ having strategic warfare - not tactical. Personally I think as long as civ doesn't lose it's empire building aspect, tactical warfare is a great addition that adds a lot of fun and immersion to the game.
 
In the current system, your ranged units like archers are vulnerable because the enemy can flank the defenders with cavalry. You know, like in actual warfare. In order to get around this, you have to maneuvre your forces carefully, using the terrain to your benefit. You know - Tactics!

That's the theory, but it's not what actually happens in game, for 2 reasons. 1) the scale of the map is too small and it is too cluttered with stuff for those kind of flanking manoeuvers. 2) the combat AI is fail.
 
"limited stacks" are stupid because if you don't have the maximum number of units on the tile than you're mini-stack is simply fighting at lower than maximum capacity. At that point, why not just simply make it so you can only have 1 unit per tile?

Because if I have a limit of, say, 5 units per stack I can make:

Assault stack - 5 swordsmen
Heavy assault - 4 swordsmen, 1 general
Artillery battery - 4 arty, 1 pikeman
Heavy Cavalry - 4 cavalry, 1 general (problems with movement, though)
Mixed force - 1 general, 1 pikeman, 2 swordsmen, 1 arty
Combat Engineers - 2 pikeman, 3 workers

Given the ability to make a stack of 5, I can tailor those stacks to perform various actions.

If a mixed stack with 2 or more cavalry could move at cavalry speed, then I could also make:

Flying arty - 1 general, 2 cavalry, 2 arty.

With 1UpT there's no way to choose or customize your forces. With infinite UpT there's no need to choose. With a limited count you can choose the best mix for the job at hand without getting bogged down by the simple task of trying to get one unit past another.
 
Because if I have a limit of, say, 5 units per stack I can make:

Assault stack - 5 swordsmen
Heavy assault - 4 swordsmen, 1 general
Artillery battery - 4 arty, 1 pikeman
Heavy Cavalry - 4 cavalry, 1 general (problems with movement, though)
Mixed force - 1 general, 1 pikeman, 2 swordsmen, 1 arty
Combat Engineers - 2 pikeman, 3 workers

Given the ability to make a stack of 5, I can tailor those stacks to perform various actions.

If a mixed stack with 2 or more cavalry could move at cavalry speed, then I could also make:

Flying arty - 1 general, 2 cavalry, 2 arty.

With 1UpT there's no way to choose or customize your forces. With infinite UpT there's no need to choose. With a limited count you can choose the best mix for the job at hand without getting bogged down by the simple task of trying to get one unit past another.

i think what he is referring to is any stack that isn't 5, like a 2, 3, or 4 stack. logic would pretty much tell you it's either a 5-stack or not at all, which leads to decisions like whether to start building 1 unit knowing you need to build 4 more after it.

and in 1upt i constantly choose and customize my forces. knowing when/where to place a unit with specific promotions in the right spot is crucial. im not sure how you see that as an impossibility. its just customization in a different way.
 
That's the theory, but it's not what actually happens in game, for 2 reasons. 1) the scale of the map is too small and it is too cluttered with stuff for those kind of flanking manoeuvers. 2) the combat AI is fail.

I respectfully disagree

1) Sometimes it can be cluttered, but flanking maneuvers are for wide open plains, not every setting. There are plenty of situations where flanking is not realistic, and brute force is needed to push through rough terrain. I think there is decent balance. I flank/get flanked in open parts of continents/pangea maps pretty frequently.

2) The AI is underrated in my opinion. On a high level when they have enough units/tech, they can actually be pretty decent at taking cities. If I neglect my military, I will lose cities. Just last night I had a seige broken up when some lancers came out of nowhere and flanked my cannons.

Now of course it's not perfect. But just saying it's "fail" doesn't do it justice. The difficulty involved with programming the combat AI has got to be astronomical, with the number of decisions/variables being so high in civ. I think they did a better job than they get credit for most of the time. Yes it can still use a little work...I will admit that.
 
Because if I have a limit of, say, 5 units per stack I can make:

Assault stack - 5 swordsmen
Heavy assault - 4 swordsmen, 1 general
Artillery battery - 4 arty, 1 pikeman
Heavy Cavalry - 4 cavalry, 1 general (problems with movement, though)
Mixed force - 1 general, 1 pikeman, 2 swordsmen, 1 arty
Combat Engineers - 2 pikeman, 3 workers

Given the ability to make a stack of 5, I can tailor those stacks to perform various actions.

If a mixed stack with 2 or more cavalry could move at cavalry speed, then I could also make:

Flying arty - 1 general, 2 cavalry, 2 arty.

With 1UpT there's no way to choose or customize your forces. With infinite UpT there's no need to choose. With a limited count you can choose the best mix for the job at hand without getting bogged down by the simple task of trying to get one unit past another.

Excellent point. With the Xupt functionality, you actually have to carefully plan out the stack composition according to battlefield needs.

If you must go with 1upt, change the conception from individual units (tactical) to army groups (strategic). Army groups defined as a collection of individual units where each newly incorporated unit enhances the armies abilities/traits. You could go with two different options for mechanics.

Option A (the simple version) is each unit just gives bonuses to the overall army group and all units take damage equally as they share the armies health points.

1. additional infantry units increase an armies health points. Thus, a large number of infantry will be more difficult to eliminate.
2. cavalry will increase the speed of an army and could provide a significant flanking bonus (more damage) to the army who possesses a larger cavalry wing.
3. engineer units would increase defensive bonuses (mitigates damage)
4. archers provide ranged attack capabilities; more archers equals greater ranged damage
5. siege units provide both siege and attack bonuses

Option B (the complex version), health is replaced by actual numbers of units, each fully healthy unit that you move into an army group would represent a certain amount of troops, and a battle simulation would be run where each group of units in the army act independently and suffer attrition according to the battle they face.

Battle lay-out
The game screen would switch to an animated view of a simulated battle.

The armies would be laid out, more or less, with cavalry on the wings, 3 blocks of infantry in the center (blocks of potentially equal numbers for both sides, with extra infantry designated to the rear as reserves), and archers in the rear.

Battle lay-out would be affected by the terrain within which it is fought depending upon which options the defender would choose to use.

For example, rivers and mountains could permit the defender the option to limit the blocks of infantry to equal numbers on both sides (to nullify the advantage of numbers), and also create only a single wing of battle for cavalry units and would therefore would lessen flanking/encirclement/retreating damage as described below. Hills could increase archer range and damage, and forests could enhance the ease of ability to withdraw without suffering catastrophic slaughter (defenders melting into the woods).

Battles would be fought in rounds, with each round causing partial losses to each individual section of the army.

As battle commences, the two lines would start to move towards each other, archers/ranged units would fire upon the infantry, weakening the infantry. Next, the two cavalry wings would face each other attemtping to drive-off the opposing cavalry, simultaneously the infantry would meet and damage each other.

Each round, as the infantry take damage the reserves would auto-fill the losses.

As the battle progressives, certain conditions could develop:
1. as an army loses all its cavalry, it would suffer catastrophic losses to its archers/ranged and then subsequently suffer severe flanking damage.

2. If an army begins to lose too many infantry and its reserves are exhausted then it would also suffer increased flanking damage as it becomes gradually encircled by opposing infantry.

3. If an army loses all its infantry, than its corresponding cavalry would simply run away and retreat.

4. At the end of each round, the human commander could order a retreat of certain units. He could call off his cavalry, or retreat his archers, or even retreat his main infantry line.

As he retreats his infantry, however, he could suffer significant slaughter casualties if his line has been compromised. The slaughter factor would be mitigated by an orderly retreat of an unbroken line of veteraned units or by the presence of forests.

Hence, if a commander began to see his cavalry losing, he could withdraw his archers to prevent them from being annihilated, or even withdraw his cavalry to prevent their extinction. This would endanger his infantry of course, but he could still do it, and even begin an orderly retreat of his main line.

This sort of battle mechanic would encourage players to really, finally, construct balanced, well-thought out armies.

So, basically, the human would simply watch the animated battle unfold and could intervene only in an attempt to retreat portions of his army.

With Firaxis taking on the Strategic/Tactical scope of Xcom, they could easily learn from their experience there and incorporate a similar idea into future Civ releases.
 
I think they should pitch the whole 1UPT in the rubbish but at the very, very, very least, they should allow a worker unit and a spaceship part to coexist in the same hex.
 
I think they should pitch the whole 1UPT in the rubbish but at the very, very, very least, they should allow a worker unit and a spaceship part to coexist in the same hex.

I agree with your very, very, very least part that units like workers and GP and spaceship parts should be able to occupy the same tile, but to totally bin 1 UPT military units would be to take away the best part of Civ 5. If that makes Civ 5 less empire management and more tactical war game then so be it. The expansion may add enough depth to satisfy us in those other non-war areas, we'll see.

I find 1UPT wars to be much more rewarding than stacks, and it's the funnest part of the game for me. I suppose it's important to play at the difficulty level that pushes you, if you're not losing units and cities some of the time then it's probably not that much fun. The AI can only compete with strong human play via extra numbers, that's the reality and it's not the optimal situation, but I still find wars to be a lot of fun.
 
I think they should pitch the whole 1UPT in the rubbish but at the very, very, very least, they should allow a worker unit and a spaceship part to coexist in the same hex.

Completely agree about civilian units stacking. While I'm not particularly overjoyed by the implementation of 1UPT I can certainly see the arguments in favour of it for combat. But managing worker/great person traffic jams is not fun and adds absolutely zero value to the game.
 
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