Some ideas for warfare: Supplies matter more, recruitment, etc.

There you go some suggestions related to units and combat...

1. About supplies

There is already a ''Supply'' factor that you can see in the military overview. It depends on population (I believe) At the early game, building a considerable army can make you run out of supplies. When that happens, production decreases up to 70%.

However, at the mid and late game, we have more than enough to build lots of units. Supplies doesn't seem to matter anymore. We can defend our empires against the enemy while attacking another civilization.

That's why I would decrease the supply we can get at the mid and late game. The idea is to keep those units as important as they were at the first turns of the game and avoid missile spamming and carpets of doom. However, I'm not saying to have barely enough units to defend ourselves. Simply make attacking more risky, as we have less to defend our cities.

In addition we could gain more supplies by building defensive buildings. That would make those buildings more important, instead of ''I'll build them only if the give me happiness''. We could gain additional supplies by cutting forests as well. And we could even trade supplies with other civilizations.

The Supply factor is something that should be expanded. There are lots of opportunities with it.

2. Recruitment

What about bringing back recruitment? If I remember correctly, there was a civic in Civ4 that would lets build units with population instead of production.

We could unlock that by researching Military Science. In cities that has 6 or more population, we could get more units by sacrifising population. By doing this, happiness decreases by 3 (and maybe more if we take too much population). You can recruit 1 units each turn.

These happiness penalties would decrease as time passes without recruitment.

In order to prevent having a mega-army with massive recruitment, these units would be ''not professional''. They don't gain XP with barracks, armories, etc. and they start at level 0. This level 0 gives -15% Strength until you gain enough XP to get in level 1, in which this penalty is removed and you can start getting promotions.

More to come when I get the inspiration. If you like or don't like my ideas, don't hesistate to explain why.

Currently, only Germany and the Ottomans are capable of exceeding supply limits while maintaining positive net income in the medieval (and even the Renaissance) era. This is because of two things: lower land unit maintenance costs and Landsknechts, which are spammable for Germany, and the Ottomans can amass a huge fleet with all melee ships capable of capturing enemy ships and much lower naval unit maintenance costs.

I agree that supply limits should be lowered however.

I like the idea of recruitment it would help stop warmongers from amassing huge armies when their population is small.

I agree with your general premise: right now, gold manteinance is a small deterrent against building a huge army, and some kind of supply system would be the answer to that. However, I think that your deterrance is still a bit tad lacking, there should be a higher penalty rather than the production bonus, so let me try with this:

Supply mechanic

Each 3 citizens in your empire generates 1 point of supplies devoted to support units. Only certain social policies like Autocracy and some wonders like the Pentagon can provide additional supplies. Take in mind that if walls, castles and the like would give supply points, that would severly break the whole mechanic, giving the edge to wide civs and making a "snowball effect" (bigger empires able to mantain bigger armies which in turn will make you conquer new cities for your big empire).

Penalties for exceeding the supply limit

As long as you keep your army under the supply limit, everything will be fine and dandy. However, if you happen to produce a unit that surpasses the supply limit, you will recieve the following penalties:

- You will loss 1 food point in every single of your cities per undersupplied unit in order to reflect the demographic toll of war

- No units in your empire can gain promotions while being unsupplied (you can, however, gain experience so you can expend it once you balanced your supplies), meaning that these new units will start unpromoted.


All of this would have the following effects:

1 - A higher toll on wide empires and on growth: having a disproportionate army will break your demography, and will ruin, in the long run, your science and gold production as well. You might even start loosing popullation!

2- You will have a big yet untrained army, a la Tsarist Russia, forcing you to choose between quality and quantity

Ikael said:

I agree with your general premise: right now, gold manteinance is a small deterrent against building a huge army, and some kind of supply system would be the answer to that. However, I think that your deterrance is still a bit tad lacking, there should be a higher penalty rather than the production bonus, so let me try with this:

Supply mechanic

Each 3 citizens in your empire generates 1 point of supplies devoted to support units. Only certain social policies like Autocracy and some wonders like the Pentagon can provide additional supplies. Take in mind that if walls, castles and the like would give supply points, that would severly break the whole mechanic, giving the edge to wide civs and making a "snowball effect" (bigger empires able to mantain bigger armies which in turn will make you conquer new cities for your big empire).

Penalties for exceeding the supply limit

As long as you keep your army under the supply limit, everything will be fine and dandy. However, if you happen to produce a unit that surpasses the supply limit, you will recieve the following penalties:

- You will loss 1 food point in every single of your cities per undersupplied unit in order to reflect the demographic toll of war

- No units in your empire can gain promotions while being unsupplied (you can, however, gain experience so you can expend it once you balanced your supplies), meaning that these new units will start unpromoted.


All of this would have the following effects:

1 - A higher toll on wide empires and on growth: having a disproportionate army will break your demography, and will ruin, in the long run, your science and gold production as well. You might even start loosing popullation!

2- You will have a big yet untrained army, a la Tsarist Russia, forcing you to choose between quality and quantity

Click to expand...

Very nice ideas. I didn't think of the penalty when I wrote my suggestion (that production penalty is already in the game).

With this system, wide empires have it harder to defend themselves (if they grow slowly), and getting happiness over 0 is more important.

When I said about ''defensive buildings give supplies'', I just wanted them to be more important, but it's true that it would leads us to a snowball effect. These buildings would matter more if there were a stability or crime factor.