Military Doctrine

It would probably be a good idea to have a setting to determine the overall stance of your nation's military. I have a few suggestions. For the moment, let's call it Military Doctrine.

Firstly, no military footings are available until Military Tradition.

Second, various military footings are available due to different events/technologies.

I outline the following ones (note: these are not all of them, and any additions that need to be made to the list or to any of the doctrines are welcome.)

None: Your nation has no general military strategy as military doctrine has not yet advanced to that point. The default.

Offensive:
Available at Military Tradition.
The national army is geared to attacking foreign nations. You gain a small advantage on the attack, and units with a higher attack than defense rating (such as Swordsmen and Modern Armor) are cheaper.

Defensive:
Available at Military Tradition.
The primary concern of your forces is the defense of the nation. You gain small advantages on the defense so long as they are within your territory, and units with higher defense than attack ratings (such as Spearmen, Infantry, and Mech Infantry) are cheaper.

Peacekeeping:
Available upon construction, by any civ, of the United Nations.
This is a more complex version of Defensive, where you gain the same benefits as Defensive, and your units are more effective at peacekeeping (see post #8 on "Completely rethought Barbarians" thread), where their ZoC is larger and peace is reached faster when their units are placed as peacekeepers. You are also more likely to be selected as an operation leader, and your skill with peackeeping gets you a very good reputation as an international peacemaker.

Head of Bloc:
Available only if you are a Superpower and there are multiple Superpowers.
A variant on the Offensive, you are attempting to threaten the other Superpowers into submission. You gain all the advantages of Offensive, and other nations within your bloc turn to you for defense; if you declare war on a nation outside your bloc that was attacking a member of your bloc, you recieve a less-potent rep hit, regardless of who that other nation is.

International Policeman:
Available only if you are the sole Superpower.
A variant of the Head of Bloc in a world where there are no other significant blocs other than the one you head. It is identical to Head of Bloc except that now, all nations look to you for arbitration, regardless of bloc.

Guerrilla:
Available with Nationalism.
A variant on the Offensive, where all units with more than one movement point ignore the cost of the predominant non-flat terrain within your borders (marsh, hills/mountains--they are treated as one, forest, jungle) and all units with one movement point treat all terrain within your borders as road.

There should be more, and the above need editing, but all in all, I think that this is a good start.

I think this is an interesting idea, although I'd like to see more tradeoffs and dilemmas.

Like taking an overall "Brutal" mantra. It keeps your troop morale higher and allows you to take cities quicker, but affects your reputation, and gets people holding grudges against you. It would also make occupations that much more difficult.

I'd like to see war weariness as a factor, in there. For example, defensive civilizations suffer less war weariness while defending -- "we may be passive, but we're not pacifists". Offensive civilizations would suffer more war weariness while defending -- "you mean we're LOSING?"

At any rate, this would be a killer feature if your people actually had opinions. War weariness is the start. But loyalty and unity would allow these tradeoffs to become even more rich.

dh_epic said:

I think this is an interesting idea, although I'd like to see more tradeoffs and dilemmas.

Like taking an overall "Brutal" mantra. It keeps your troop morale higher and allows you to take cities quicker, but affects your reputation, and gets people holding grudges against you. It would also make occupations that much more difficult.

I'd like to see war weariness as a factor, in there. For example, defensive civilizations suffer less war weariness while defending -- "we may be passive, but we're not pacifists". Offensive civilizations would suffer more war weariness while defending -- "you mean we're LOSING?"

At any rate, this would be a killer feature if your people actually had opinions. War weariness is the start. But loyalty and unity would allow these tradeoffs to become even more rich.

Click to expand...

Good ideas. Thank you. I would have put in the drawbacks, but I couldn't think of any that sounded right.

Lockesdonkey said:

[...]
Head of Bloc:
Available only if you are a Superpower and there are multiple Superpowers.
A variant on the Offensive, you are attempting to threaten the other Superpowers into submission. You gain all the advantages of Offensive, and other nations within your bloc turn to you for defense; if you declare war on a nation outside your bloc that was attacking a member of your bloc, you recieve a less-potent rep hit, regardless of who that other nation is.

International Policeman:
Available only if you are the sole Superpower.
A variant of the Head of Bloc in a world where there are no other significant blocs other than the one you head. It is identical to Head of Bloc except that now, all nations look to you for arbitration, regardless of bloc.

[...]

Click to expand...

Nice ideas - at first glance.

The problem is, it is the human glance. In other words, how would the engine determine when a nation is a superpower?

This is, what I miss with a lot of the suggestions offered here and in other threads. They all sound nice, when you look at them from the human perspective.
Unfortunately, 90% of the game are just AI or engine. That doesn't mean that it would be impossible to implement such a feature from a principle point of view, but I miss the explanation of how to do it.

To stay with the superpower example:
What makes a superpower a superpower? The first tank? 30% of world's territory? 25% of all military units? Being 10 advantages ahead? Or just a mishmash of it all?
We all know, that an average human player could cope with such settings, even if his ranking would be somewhere in the middle.
Wouldn't he be the real superpower then?

Please explain in more detail what makes a superpower a superpower in your model.

There are numerous ideas for what constitutes a Superpower. For the life of me, I can't remember what they are.

Lockesdonkey said:

There are numerous ideas for what constitutes a Superpower. For the life of me, I can't remember what they are.

Click to expand...

Please don't get me wrong. I don't want to be bold or confrontative, but exactly this seems to be the problem.
We cannot say "Let's have a great concept!" when we have no clue how this concept should work. This would be just a wishlist as for Christmas.

Our ideas - as nice as they may sound in the beginning - should be able to put into bits and bytes without needing the number crunching capacity of Deep Blue and unlimited processing time.
This in no way means that I would disqualify your ideas - I just don't see how it could work in a proper, balanced way in the game.
Any suggestion would be helpful, and as soon as this suggestion sounds practicable, I will gladly second it.

Commander Bello said:

What makes a superpower a superpower? The first tank? 30% of world's territory? 25% of all military units? Being 10 advantages ahead? Or just a mishmash of it all?

Click to expand...

To me, a super power should be the first or second in culture, being several techs ahead, thus having the best(not biggest) military*, and at least a medium amouint of territory.

For an explanation on the military part, I think that the biggest miltary shouldn't get the superpower status. I think it should be a value of it's units, as this:
A spearman has 1/2/1 values, right? Add up the attack and defence, and you get 3. Every spearman adds 3 points to your military power. When it comes to artillery, you add up the bombard strength and rate of fire. airplanes have their values added up, plus 1 point for every type of mission they can do (recon, air superiority, etc)

As far as superpowers themselves go, I think this is a good idea of yours, Lockesdonkey. Maybe there should be another side-effect of being a super power. Maybe, you could get a shield's bonus for 20 turns, kinda like a second(or first) GA. "Hey we're the best!!!!"

_-Nate-_

A superpower is generally someone who has a shot at winning the game, still. Obviously this is a moot point at least until the middle ages, and even that's ambitious. Fortunately, Military Tradition happens at the end of the middle age.

I know this may seem kind of arbitrary... But maybe the top two nations with more than 15% of the world's land or population, plus any other nation with more than 20% of the world's land or population. So you'd almost always have at least 2 superpowers, but conceivably you could have more than 2.

Basically anyone who is 1/3 to 1/5 of the way to domination victory. And if they improved cultural victory in a way that culture could become a large source of power, then being well on your way to cultural victory would make you a superpower. Same thing if they implemented a good economic victory.

Although I will add -- and this isn't your fault -- the international policeman one is kind of pointless. If you're the sole superpower, then you've all but won the game. Everyone is too far behind to catch up with you, no?

One of the problems I see with this is that it would even give more benefit for the expansionist and militaristic scheme.
And it would make the strong nations again stronger. In any case, it would not lead to other directions than to build up your military to the most extent.

A good idea, but flawed. Players don't really need encouragement to build up their military anyway.

Rihalto, The point of military doctrine is that it can be used by any size military.

And dh_epic, yes, I understand...but I don't have any other ideas, and I think that some sort of doctrine based on that should exist. Possibly we could rename "Head of Bloc"...?

The basic idea is good, but you'd need to flesh it out. Particularly the part about being a Superpower: Who decides who is a superpower? Does it have to do with Land Size and Population? Or do you use score of sheer military and economic might? Do you vote on it on an International level or does the game just name the top 2/3 players "Superpowers"?

I honestly do not know. The ideas that dh_epic floated are good.

@Lockesdonkey

I still say this idea will benefit big empires far more than small ones, simply because big empires will have far more units on which the benefits will be given. Also, there doesn't seem to be any opportunity cost involved. Who wouldn't immediately take a defensive stance when on the losing end of a war, or an offensive stance before starting an invasion? It's a no brainer decision.

How about you cannot change your doctrine during the war?

I like the "military readiness' in CTP. To make your troops for ready for war, you pay more upkeep. While at peacetime, you can tune it down and save money.

Lockesdonkey said:

How about you cannot change your doctrine during the war?

Click to expand...

Or maybe it takes 5 or so turns to switch?

Before I am at all convinced that this is a good idea, tell me a bit more about what the difference in training the soldier receives depending on stance. It seems this is amore of a high level political decision which should have political effects rather than direct benefits for the soldiers in the field.

why not have offencive and defencive as not needing techs, the ancients sometimes had better doctrines than many countries have today...

I would support a turn limit change over of military doctrine. War is where most strategies and tactics are tested out.

To have strategies, tactics, doctrine, whatever you want to call it, implemented in this way makes a lot of sense in the Civ Game scope. This idea adds of alot of interesting situations and tactics, which the current game does not have. It brings more things to warfare without turning the game into a war game.

I like the way the ideas are being implemented. However, I have a problem with the actually suggestions.

Definitions:

Military Power Index (MPI):

MPI:Attack: Attack strength of every unit added together
MPI: Defense Defensive Strength of every unit added together

Superpower:
There would be two types of Superpowers, regional and worldwide.

A regional superpower would be when u have more then 33% more MPI:Attack then all the others on that continent. If there are multiple civs with in 10% of each other, they all have the title superpower.

A Worldwide superpower would be when u have more then 33% more MPI:Attack then all the others in the world. If there are multiple civs with in 10% of each other, they all have the title superpower.

MPP would merge the Defense MPI together. So, say the Warsaw Pact had 1000 MPI points and NATO had 1050 MPI points. These would become useful for comparing defensive strengths.

Take the Warsaw Pact and NATO again. These would both be superpowers by because they are both very powerful and within 10% of their power.

I think this approach makes sense to superpower with a concept all can understand and makes sense.

Similar indexes could be for things such as projecting power: The ability to move men and machines. This would include bombers, artillery, helicopters, paratroopers, transports, etc. It would measure how good you can move your military- very imporant for transoceanic campaigns and Transport Capacity-Total movement of units by air and sea.

Similar concepts could be added if land transportation limits are added.