Having land units insta-turn into ships is still a terrible idea in Civ5.

You think having armies of transformers (transports in disguise) is more "immersive"?

Neither one is. This should have nothing to do with "immersion" since the only goal is to get the unit from a land tile to a sea tile (and vice versa).
 
It's too bad that the AI hasn't improved, but I recall that it really struggled with transports too.

the ai as a whole is preety bad in civ 5.I mean its had some upgrades like this new patch that came out and the changes gods and kings made but still the game is still easy and its due to the ai being largely ...bad
 
I take it you have never played a traditional wargame (board or computer)? The greatest "immersion" for me is the 1upt and having to solve the puzzle of effectively moving pieces on a board given then rules and modifiers of terrain, placement, range, zones of control and command influence. Or we could just stack them all together and throw most of those rules out the window. ;)

Except you're talking about tactical wargames, while Civ takes place at the grand strategy level. Mustering and logistics ought to be emphasized, and stacks, while they certainly weren't perfect, at least meshed really well with the genre. If tactical combat is deemed a must-have, then it makes much more sense to compartmentalize it a la Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Magic, etc. (That's the convenient solution, anyways!) I understand the desire to go for some sort of grand, unified system where tactical combat takes place on the same playing field as the empire building, but that requires a much more sophisticated approach (SupCom-esque map zoom, for instance).
 
Neither one is. This should have nothing to do with "immersion" since the only goal is to get the unit from a land tile to a sea tile (and vice versa).

Wrong. Immersion helps intuition and therfore gameplay. People intuitively KNOW you need a ship to go on the sea. They KNOW that troops don`t just turn into ships.

It`s like gravity. Land Units in the game stay on the `ground` for imersion, reality and because we KNOW that`s what they should do. Otherwise tanks and chariots might as well just fly everywhere, ignoring wheels and tracks and the ground.
 
I happen to like the new embarkation system. That said, I don't see why transports couldn't exist under the 1UPT system. Even in Civ 5, a worker can share a with a military unit. Surely the code could be adapted to allow two units to share one tile at sea.

The real, central problem of Civ5 is 1UPT. Think of how many arbitrary limitations it saddles the player with, and how many compromises have to be made.
 
Except you're talking about tactical wargames, while Civ takes place at the grand strategy level. Mustering and logistics ought to be emphasized, and stacks, while they certainly weren't perfect, at least meshed really well with the genre.

Exactly. The 'tactical' game of Civ 5 simply does not scale to the world you play in. You never feel like you're a global power with 7 tanks and 4 infantry, but because of space limitations that's all you need. Limited stacks would have been a far more appropriate response to stacks of doom.
 
I just think the whole insta-ship thing is ridiculous. I mean, my unit can travel half way round the world, be in unchartered territory, miles from civilization then just pop onto a ship it pulls out of its back pocket and toodle across the ocean... :undecide:
 
I just think the whole insta-ship thing is ridiculous. I mean, my unit can travel half way round the world, be in unchartered territory, miles from civilization then just pop onto a ship it pulls out of its back pocket and toodle across the ocean... :undecide:

Agree. I think this ability should only be available when the unit is in friendly territory.
 
Wrong. Immersion helps intuition and therfore gameplay. People intuitively KNOW you need a ship to go on the sea. They KNOW that troops don`t just turn into ships.

It`s like gravity. Land Units in the game stay on the `ground` for imersion, reality and because we KNOW that`s what they should do. Otherwise tanks and chariots might as well just fly everywhere, ignoring wheels and tracks and the ground.

Not at the scale of Civ. You shouldn't intuitively see gangplanks and boat ramp but zoomed out, you see units that were on land and then are on ships. How they got there is irrelevant at this scale.
 
The real, central problem of Civ5 is 1UPT. Think of how many arbitrary limitations it saddles the player with, and how many compromises have to be made.

I couldn't disagree more! For two reasons:

1. You could easily add transports and keep 1UPT; the two could cohabit a sea hex the way workers/settlers and military units cohabit land hexes. The engine surely could be modified to support this behavior at sea.

2. The stacking limit is one of the best things about Civ 5. I wouldn't mind a relaxed stacking limit -- 2 or 3 units per hex, maybe. But most serious wargames have stacking limits/penalties for a reason: they reflect real-world logistical limits on cramming units into one place. You can't put an Army on an atoll. Besides, stacking limits make gameplay far more interesting than Stacks 'O Doom.
 
I actually like the single stack thing, because it`s much easier to understand who is attacking you and with what. I find it better for strategy, not just tactics. But I do understand how it makes a Player feel like he only has a squad of troops instead of hundreds or thousands on the battlefield. I think that the Devs should`ve changed the unit graphics to represent whole armies which would have gone a long way to helping people get used to it. I have found the REd extreme Mod helps a bit to alleviate this. But that`s not what this thread is about.

I believe the insta-ship thing is a way bigger problem that needs serious changing.
 
I couldn't disagree more! For two reasons:

1. You could easily add transports and keep 1UPT; the two could cohabit a sea hex the way workers/settlers and military units cohabit land hexes. The engine surely could be modified to support this behavior at sea.

2. The stacking limit is one of the best things about Civ 5. I wouldn't mind a relaxed stacking limit -- 2 or 3 units per hex, maybe. But most serious wargames have stacking limits/penalties for a reason: they reflect real-world logistical limits on cramming units into one place. You can't put an Army on an atoll. Besides, stacking limits make gameplay far more interesting than Stacks 'O Doom.

Transports + 1upt is even worse than the current situation, and you still wind up with armies of moderate size taking up, practically, entire oceans. It is ridiculous if you think about it.

Wargames often have 1upt, but Civ is not a wargame. Many tactical wargames tend to take place over a very limited space of terrain....a few square miles, perhaps. Civ takes place on the global stage, and does it with very few hexes. I strongly agree with stacking limits.....but right now there is NO military stacking. It is worse than an abstraction, it just makes no sense.
 
Transports + 1upt is even worse than the current situation, and you still wind up with armies of moderate size taking up, practically, entire oceans. It is ridiculous if you think about it.

Wargames often have 1upt, but Civ is not a wargame. Many tactical wargames tend to take place over a very limited space of terrain....a few square miles, perhaps. Civ takes place on the global stage, and does it with very few hexes. I strongly agree with stacking limits.....but right now there is NO military stacking. It is worse than an abstraction, it just makes no sense.

And what good would allowing 2-3 units per tile do? If you can't stand the idea of having a small army, then just imagine that each unit has more soldiers in it. Is it the graphics holding you back?

Look, there's a legitimate problem with the AI pathing. Let's fix the AI. The embarkation system is fine.
 
And what good would allowing 2-3 units per tile do? If you can't stand the idea of having a small army, then just imagine that each unit has more soldiers in it. Is it the graphics holding you back?

Imaging the units are massive doesn't help. You don't send "just a bunch of tanks" for miles and miles and miles. Formations are integrated and have variety. Stacking allows you to at least roughly simulate this. 1upt does not, owing to the mis-match of scale.
 
I am generally in favor of how Civ V removed the need to build specialized units for the sole purpose of transporting land units across the water, because they were so useless after transporting the bulk of your military to another theater. Sure, there is the trickle of reinforcing military units and the follow up Worker train that still need water transports from the mainland, but the majority of the water transports are still unused, which is a huge waste of hammers and gold maintenance. I'd rather just play a pangaea game than have to build a bunch of sea transports that are quickly useless.

Now, if dedicated water transports could be used in some sort of civilian capacity, like, say, fortifying a water transport over an improved sea resource to increase its gold production, I might be in favor of the return of dedicated sea transports.

There are things that I still think can be improved though. Keep in mind that I'm working from a vanilla Civ V point of view here.

The first improvement I would like to see is a deeper implementation of combat and civilian units at sea, for the purposes of tile stacking limits. In vanilla Civ V, water tiles can only have one unit, with the Carrier and its attendant aircraft and the missile carrying naval vessels being notable exceptions. I would like to see embarked land units be treated as "civilian" water units. Furthermore, I'd like to see the same "1 civilian, 1 combat" unit tile stacking limits that already are in place for land tiles be implemented for water tiles as well.

The second improvement I would like to see is giving incentive to disembarking into a friendly city. Currently, it costs the same amount of points for units to disembark onto a land tile, regardless of the terrain of the land tile. It would be cool if disembarking onto a friendly city tile didn't automatically use all remaining movement points. Heck, it would be even cooler if aquatic city improvements such as the Harbor and the Seaport treated disembarking as moving road-road and rail-rail, respectively.
 
Not having to load troops onto transport ships doesn't break immersion for me. I'm ok with not having to manage that bit of logistics when it comes to my thousand year empire.

With that being said there is something different about this version of the game. Maybe its me, but V feels much more like a race. In prior versions I actually DID enjoy loading up settlers onto a transport. Settler, worker, and some troops. That was indeed very "immersive". When it came to fighting wars I never felt the same way about loading troops onto transports for some reason. That felt more like a needless chore. War was a necessary part of the empire, but not one I wanted to delve into the nuts and bolts of too much.

But for settlers, I did fell like I was sending some brave souls out to colonize new lands and it was worthy of fanfare. Those settlers could change the fate of my empire.

I don't know if its a lack of transports so much as the entire game really feels like a race where the checkpoints are too easily identifiable. Maybe I'm playing at levels that are too difficult for me, but I don't feel as if I'm exploring new lands and new relationships. Just racing to an end. If I don't do X, Y, and Z before a certain point the game is "lost".

So no, I don't miss transports for troops and having to manage transports for settlers/civilians isn't the key to an overall lack of immersion for me.
 
transports are just too much micro-management. A real pain in the ass.

I agree with an earlier poster - older Civs that required them were so much bother, I would avoid water maps altogether.

Embark is a huge improvement.
 
Top Bottom