One Unit per Tile Debate

NobleZarkon said:

That's right, one of the reasons I hate 1UPT.

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Your install is seriously messed up! It must be so frustrating to try and play that way. If it really was one-and-only-one unit per hex, I would hate it too. Are the AI civs unable to stack either? What happens when you capture a worker or settler?

You misinterpreted what I meant Beetle, with multiple civilian units per tile I still meant: where only one can be active, and all other can occupy that tile for the purpose of moving through. It's mostly the movement that causes illogical and silly issues, I should have been clearer on this.

I don't see a logical reason why multiple great people can't live in the same city either. It's not like they provide any benefit while they are there...

SickFak said:

I obviously pointed a flawed reasoning is all. No, bad AI is not solely due to 1upt - you are right, as is he if that is what he tried to say - but it does make it more obvious / hurts AI more, is anyone seriously going to deny that?
I don't want SoDs back, never, what I want is hybrid with limited stacks. Like I mentioned before, making logistics run smoother, with range bonuses against the stacks (more units in a tile, easier to hit) and prevent range OPism by making penalties to range attack the less health attacked unit has (less people in a tile, harder to hit), making them do what they supposed to > soften ranks before battle and clean up with melee instead of concentrated kills.

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What I was saying is if you fix Ranged, you fix the majority of the AI sucks at combat issues. It's pretty clear the AI was designed to be melee heavy with ranged as support. If a human also follows that playstyle then the AI is actually a challenging opponent. Make Ranged less powerful so that humans are forced to invest more in melee units can fix the issue, so can programming the AI to use mostly ranged to mimick the humans playstyle.

So when discussing 1UPT vs stacks bringing up the bad AI is irrelevant. Because the problem isn't the AI can't handle 1UPT, it's that it can't handle Ranged combat.

As some mods already do, allowing only two or three stacking units would be good. And since I personally think the combat for 1upt is superb I would just leave it as is for military units. The one thing that bugs me the most is moving embarked armies. I feel like I'm moving an entire country. If stacking would be allowed for embarked as it theoretically would for civilian units that would be a lot easier since embarked units are very vulnerable unless you're Songhai.




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I've experienced unit stacking in SMAC, civ 2 and civ 4 as well as 1UPT in civ 5. Although I voted for 1UPT, I'm going to break it down a bit relating the games I've mentioned:

In SMAC, unit stacking actually worked, because if your unit stack got attacked by 1 unit and you were defeated, the rest of your troops would sustain a 35% damage penalty and it killed already wounded units as well. The only exception was garrisoned units (and unit stacks in bunkers, too, I think), which was good for defending. In turn, SMAC balanced unit quality and quantity very well. The only issue with this combat system was often bad luck, even if your unit was stronger than your opponent, but the development of the reactors alleviates this a little.

In civ 2, it's a bit similar to SMAC, if I can recall, though not always the case.

In civ 4, collateral damage was limited to just siege/artillery gear (and bombers correct me if I'm wrong) and that was the biggest mistake ever. I absolutely hated seeing stacks of units that I could not defeat, unless I had some catapults stored away. The combat system, along with , was truly broken and there is no way I am returning to civ 4.

In civ 5, I first saw 1UPT and, combined with independent city strength, I found it rather balanced, but a bit inconvenient for attackers. In vanilla, the balance seemed just right but in G&K and BNW, it became much harder to attack enemies unless you had a good mix of ranged and melee units. And of course there's no more complete kills unless your unit has something like over 3 times the strength of its opponent (e.g. tank v scout). Then, going to the industrial era and beyond, fighting becomes more balanced between attacker and defender when artilleries, battleships and bombers are added.

Agreed, the stacking with significant collateral damage that was in SMAC was fine. One of many disappointments with III, and IV just doubled-down on the stack of doom.

I am guessing that the reason the developers did not go this route is that they could not get the AI programmed to understand how vulnerable stacks are (when there is reasonable collateral damage).

So, given a brain dead AI as a constraint, we are left with 1UPT as the best compromise.

Voted unit stacking for now:
Ai dont seams to be able OUPT as well as stacking.
Add in some other changes from Civ 5 like not to the death battles give the humans very very large advantage over the ai who realy can't use its economy advantages and suffers badly from unit sniping.

I hate 1 upt. It's the single reason I can't stand civ5 for very long. Not cus of the strategy but just because it's so cumbersome to move my army around. Civ should be about building an empire not the tedium of micro managing unit movements.

At first it was difficult for me to transition from stacking to 1upt, but eventually I got the hang of it. You build the minimum you need for maximum maneuverability. Not "you" specifically but just in general.


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It's definately a step in the right direction if you ask me. Tactical combat makes the game so much more enjoyable. It's not perfect yet, especially many of the (unnessesary) limitations like not allowing multiple workers to sit on the same tile make the system feel annoying from time to time and the amount of units later in the game is just too high, but I think Civ5 is a good basis to improve on. I'm looking forward to future games and I'm interested if they manage to sort out the issues. So yeah, for me it's clearly 1UPT > Doomstacks - and it still has a lot of room to improve.

CaterpillarKing said:

At first it was difficult for me to transition from stacking to 1upt, but eventually I got the hang of it. You build the minimum you need for maximum maneuverability. Not "you" specifically but just in general.


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Yeah but you also need to make sure you have enough to take cities etc. If I bring 3 siege units to a city now all the land is blocked and I can't move melee units into range when the enemy counter attacks me. It's just frustrating. Put the melee in the front line and their city defenses wreck them.

civvver said:

Yeah but you also need to make sure you have enough to take cities etc. If I bring 3 siege units to a city now all the land is blocked and I can't move melee units into range when the enemy counter attacks me. It's just frustrating. Put the melee in the front line and their city defenses wreck them.

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This sounds like a good thing. Either you are using inferior units, or the city is in an extremely good defensive spot. Either way that city should be able to repel your attack especially if they still have a standing army to counteract you with.

If you use era equivalent units then they can quite easily soak up the damage from cities in order to give your 3 siege units plenty of time to reduce the city to rubble. If your having trouble keep in mind putting your melee units in rough terrain with the drill/cover promotions makes them tough to kill. Also don't forget to pillage for +25HP as well. And another unit with the Heal promotion helps too.

They're just different considerations from different games with different tactical mechanics. In Civ5, you want to shield your city from ranged attacks using rough terrain, as they can block shots and restrict tiles an enemy can shoot you from. So you want to settle adjacent to these tiles. In Civ4, your opponents will use defensive terrain next to your city to protect themselves, meaning you want to chop all forests next to cities and not settle next to hills.

Or salients. In Civ4, a salient is a dangerous offensive option: you can strike from a salient to a number of different cities, and pick off cities before your opponent can react and reinforce them. In Civ5, a city that forms a salient is a vulnerability, as your opponent can get a good surround off and maximise the number of shots they can fire.

Put me in the camp of stacking limited by -modifiers (or other gameplay mechanics that decrease the power of, or increase the risk of stacking). Forcing 1UPT removes the possibility of interesting choices in regards to unit movement. It doesn't make for tactical combat. It just forces one specific type of tactical combat in every situation.

And in any case, I agree that civilian units have no reason to be 1UPT limited in movement. (They can be 1UPT limited in doing other things if necessary, but I'd rather see exploits fixed rather than options removed. Make it so the output of pillaging scales by time the improvement has existed or something.)

I tried Gedemon's Combat and Stacking Overhaul, that allowed limited stacking. Personally, I limited the number of units per plot to 2, which seemed a perfect balance between stacking and 1UPT, better then any of those 2 generic possibilities. It forced me to think how to place units, how to combine their offensive and defensive abilities, while solved most problems with unit movement. Generally I can recommend this mode, though it needs further development. What I didnt like were too many different units classess, which could stack on one tile, increasing the real limit of UPT - I modified it myself, as it was simple change in xml file. Second issue was a bug with city defence set to "0" - attack on city was always succesful, despite of strength of defender. This was very annoying and possible exploit, unfortunately hardcoded.

It would be nice if you could stack 2Or3 units per tile

1UPT is a bad choice overall for the game.
Civ is not, and will never be a tactical combat game.
The focus is empire building, not war exclusively.
The AI has not been coded correctly to utilize it, even after several patches AND two expansions.
It merely clutters up the game. If I'm attacking, I don't want to spend most of my turn attempting to move all my units in position. It's like being in downtown Houston during rush hour.
Not only is it a bad gameplay choice, it is also unrealistic.
Of course, some armies were spread out (such as the German advance in WWI) but many of them were tightly packed (Romans at Cannae anyone?)
Overall, it is both a poor gameplay choice and unrealistic.
Slightly OT, what is with this whole "cities can bombard" thing? Wow such realism Firaxis.
*waits for 1UPT lovers to rip into him*

I'd like a mix of both systems.
The biggest problem civ5 has is that armies are too big compared to the map. Making it annoying to move across terrain and the AI has a lot of difficulty to manage anything beyond 5 units.

However I don't like stacks either. They're just boring.

I see 2 possible solutions:

-Hexes are all divided in smaller hexes for units. So that units stay at 1UPT but are on a lower scale.
-The game allows some limited stacking. For example, every square could fit small armies of a range a melee and a siege unit. The fighting part would have to be reworked though.

To what Greek said, it kind of makes sense as it makes cities a city and defender all in one.

1UPT. I hated stacks of doom.

However, I think it should be 1UPT until either the discovery of steam-power or combustion - when that happens it should go up to 2UPT for the rest of the game.

I think that could help to make the late game a little more interesting and dangerous.