New System for Military Units

Even with the BNW expansion pack, amassing an army and dominating the world is the favored way of obtaining victory. However, I have a solution. This system would be more balanced and realistic.

One of the first questions that comes to mind when building/purchasing a military unit is: where do the men come from? You can't just buy or produce humans - you can purchase/produce equipment, pay for training, and so on, but no amount of production or gold can give you the men necessary for military units. So, this is what I propose:

Your military unit limit is also defined by your population, not just your economy. The concept would be new, but it's quite simple - the population of each city would be split into two categories: Military Population and Working Population. The Working Population is the citizens who work on the fields, mines, quarries, and so on, while the Military Population is the citizens who are reserved for building military units.

So, I'll wrap it all up - the old population system is simply split into "working" and "military" population. Of course, balancing is necessary for this concept to work effectively.

This new system encourages civilizations to focus on both city growth and military, not just "conquer, conquer, conquer". A civilization can't simply crank out units until it's a major military force. This shall make Domination Victories considerably harder, and thus improve the Civilization V experience enormously.

Thanks for reading,

-MerchantCo

...Then wouldn't it be a good idea to build tons and tons of Guided Missiles and Tactical Nukes (And maybe the Giant Death Robot) to attack/defend, then? that means you can just focus on Working Population, and so, out produce the rest of the civilizations.

@SmithRobloxian: as I said, it shall need proper balancing to work effectively. Balancing issues like that can be rectified.

I understand the concept, but combatants never really represented a significant part of the population in history (being younger, usually male, well-supplied, specialized training, etc.) to warrant dividing your Civ 5 citizens between either working or soldiering.

One idea is simply the ability to turn workers into combat units (albeit much weaker, militia types) and/or having more bonuses besides gold for disbanding/deleting your combat units.

That idea is pretty interesting. It'd place some, much needed, and realistic limits on military. And population/manpower would finally mean something; more than just numbers to look at on the demographics screen. I think with some tweaking, this could make for a more interesting game.

And as for missiles, limits would be place on that too. During the Cold War, the US and USSR realized how silly it was for them both to have enough ICMB's to nuke the world over a dozen times, so they both signed an agreement and made limits. And as has been said, balancing could solve most problems.

Missiles and Robots not needing any manpower is a deception, they still use up a small percentage of MP as you require scientist which develop specialised weapon mechanics (not jsut the tech itself) and various models. You can also consider the degradation of equipment and machinery a form of used MP for the sake of balance. Hearts of Iron series had a good MP concept, with provinces generating a set amount of MP over time, which translates to MP from citizens in Civ, modified by techs and era. However, I do not want to see this mechanic in CiV as it would make warfare a lot more complex and give the AI even more bonuses as it already has a much larger population anyway. It would also turn CiV more into a warfare simulation rather a Civ sim and if I want simulated warfare I'd play Hearts of Iron.

Treaties limiting missiles would only be acceptable for me if they are managed through world congress/UN resolutions.

Summarised, I don't like the idea, because there is already a hard limit on military might which limits civs in their early warmongering. Adding another limit would limit early aggression civs even more and in the late game it doesn't really matter anymore anyway.

Problem I see here is that this seems like a long-winded way to get to someone's preferred 'realism' with no real benefit to gameplay.

The current unit support system evolved out of 20+ years of tweaking the Civ formula.

Units used to be supported by their home city with the limit being how many units your cities in total can support; Units would disappear when their home city is taken/destroyed. Civ3 globalized unit support on a national level with your gold income and treasury serving as a buffer. So a city could be taken and the unit persist and you can run deficits so long as you have money in your treasury.

Here, you can see the logical progression, adding a certain level of abstraction but making it work from a gameplay perspective.

There's noting wrong with the balance in that regard. Perhaps nukes are a bit too powerful, but at any rate.. war is very well balanced into the game. Neither too strong nor too weak.

Well, actually there are limits to how many units you can train or buy and still have them fighting effectively. In the military overview you can see how your supply is calculated and, if I'm not mistaken it takes in account, among other things, the number of cities and population.

all i gotta say is the current system is still better than losing 5 modern armor in a row to an elite spearman

Moai, please don't be annoying...

sorry bro, my bad