games.on.net Interview with D. Shirk 4/11/13

Note: Trade units do not get blocked by military or civilian. NICE to see that confirmed finally.

What they need, and have always needed, is the ability to hitch a military unit to a civilian unit (or trade unit now). Basically, if you have a military and other unit on the same tile, you could press a button to join them so that wherever the civilian moves, the military unit goes with it automatically. Also, you'd need to make it so that the movement of the joined units would be limited to the slower of the 2.
 
What they need, and have always needed, is the ability to hitch a military unit to a civilian unit (or trade unit now). Basically, if you have a military and other unit on the same tile, you could press a button to join them so that wherever the civilian moves, the military unit goes with it automatically. Also, you'd need to make it so that the movement of the joined units would be limited to the slower of the 2.

According to this article, they seem to want you to station military units along the trade route to act as protectors.
 
According to this article, they seem to want you to station military units along the trade route to act as protectors.

Yeah, which is annoying. It's the same as protecting workers right now, though this will be even more frustrating since at least workers stay put for 5-10 turns at a time and aren't constantly moving.
 
Yeah, which is annoying. It's the same as protecting workers right now, though this will be even more frustrating since at least workers stay put for 5-10 turns at a tie and aren't constantly moving.

Don't move 1 unit, keep several units stationary at 1 per 5 tiles of route distance or so.
 
Me thinks that mounted units would be ideal for the role.

Especially mounted units with increased visibility fortified on hills. Then you wouldn't need as many to watch over the trade route.
 
Don't move 1 unit, keep several units stationary at 1 per 5 tiles of route distance or so.

With multiple trade routes going in different directions, that's a ton of units to have just for the purpose of protecting them. The maintenance costs alone would negative a substantial amount of the extra gold.
 
Especially mounted units with increased visibility fortified on hills. Then you wouldn't need as many to watch over the trade route.

Don't Conquistadors have +1 sight? A bonus for Spain and America then.
 
Gives mounted units something to do, so I'm for it.

I must have glossed over the part where it says trade units won't block up tiles. I hope that's true, because the whole system is going to get really messy otherwise.
 
With multiple trade routes going in different directions, that's a ton of units to have just for the purpose of protecting them. The maintenance costs alone would negative a substantial amount of the extra gold.

That's hard to tell yet.
I think you're not suppose to have very long trade routes right off the game, at least not by land, which make sense.
Also it means your units will stay busy in peace time which is nice.

So a buff to mounted and naval units definitively, they needed it.
 
With multiple trade routes going in different directions, that's a ton of units to have just for the purpose of protecting them. The maintenance costs alone would negative a substantial amount of the extra gold.

Yes, but from the sounds of things, the length of the trade route grows over time. When barbarians are a problem, the trade route will be so short you just need one unit to watch over it. When your trade route is longer, you want to worry about enemy civs more than barbs, so just having one roving guard wouldn't be enough anyway.
 
Hypocrisy ideology? So, does that mean they're including a new "politician" unit, something that runs around, city to city, making false promises (to increase production and happiness), but eventually gets deleted when a random scandal occurs? :lol:
 
With multiple trade routes going in different directions, that's a ton of units to have just for the purpose of protecting them. The maintenance costs alone would negative a substantial amount of the extra gold.

Well, say you have a trade route from one of your cities to a CS. The trade route is 10 tiles long, but at least 2 of those tiles will be within the vision range of your civ (your own tile + the one tile range extending from your border), and that’ll increase as your cultural borders widen. If you’re friends with that CS, you’ll be able to see the tiles within its borders as well. So you’ll have to station units to keep watch over, at most, 8 tiles. Which means, once your cultural borders touch the CS’s cultural borders, you’ll no longer need to worry about spotting barbs, just having enough units within striking distance of any barbs that do show up.

Now, water routes on the other hand . . .
 
Well, say you have a trade route from one of your cities to a CS. The trade route is 10 tiles long, but at least 2 of those tiles will be within the vision range of your civ (your own tile + the one tile range extending from your border), and that’ll increase as your cultural borders widen. If you’re friends with that CS, you’ll be able to see the tiles within its borders as well. So you’ll have to station units to keep watch over, at most, 8 tiles. Which means, once your cultural borders touch the CS’s cultural borders, you’ll no longer need to worry about spotting barbs, just having enough units within striking distance of any barbs that do show up.

Now, water routes on the other hand . . .

from your wording (and dennis') I understand that barbarians would not be able to attack a caravan as long as it is in your vision range. Is that correct?
 
Yes, but from the sounds of things, the length of the trade route grows over time. When barbarians are a problem, the trade route will be so short you just need one unit to watch over it. When your trade route is longer, you want to worry about enemy civs more than barbs, so just having one roving guard wouldn't be enough anyway.

This is forgetting multiplayer though. If you don't have an escort on a worker/settler/or even missionary in cases, odds are high you will lose that unit. With Caravans roaming and if they don't have attachable escorts (as it seems they don't), other humans will be able to take advantage of the system and just kill caravans fairly easy. And this gives the human a lot of potential exploits on Immortal/Deity, seeing how mkany players already war and steal/kill workers/settlers of AI already, crippling AI's ability to get gold will be fairly easy considering how bad the AI is at escorting already.
 
I must have glossed over the part where it says trade units won't block up tiles. I hope that's true, because the whole system is going to get really messy otherwise.

It was here:

Dennis: Yes, we really like where it’s gone. Stacks were a lot of fun for what they were in Civilization 4. But we really like where it’s at now. We love the action depth that you have and the extra decisions you have to make with what kind of units, the kind of harm you have. There wasn’t so many decisions to be made when you were doing stacks because you could just create endless amounts of units and have these bulky stacks and whoever had the biggest one or the best combination of units in the stack was going to win the battle. We just liked the perspective that this gave players who would love to play a combat game. We kind of added in a little bit of a war game aspect to it. So I have a feeling that one unit per tile is going to be around for a while. Whether we make some adjustments to that there’s no telling. But like what we did with trade units, we put trade units on their own layer now. They don’t interfere with other civilian units, they don’t interfere with military units. There might be spent more of that coming into play.

(Emphasis added.)
 
This is forgetting multiplayer though. If you don't have an escort on a worker/settler/or even missionary in cases, odds are high you will lose that unit. With Caravans roaming and if they don't have attachable escorts (as it seems they don't), other humans will be able to take advantage of the system and just kill caravans fairly easy. And this gives the human a lot of potential exploits on Immortal/Deity, seeing how mkany players already war and steal/kill workers/settlers of AI already, crippling AI's ability to get gold will be fairly easy considering how bad the AI is at escorting already.

Has anything ever been optimized for multiplayer mode?
 
If they're on their own layer, I wonder how attacking them works?
 
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