Too Many Military Units (Back to Civ III)

On many threads, I've read that in BTS and with aggressive AI that Civ4 is now reverting back to Civ3 style play where each Civ has and manages literally armies in the hundreds! That is just too messed up and unbalanced not to mention tedious and unwieldy and unfun!

I remember in Civ3 there were truly huge SoDs. I'd build them because the AIs built them and as the AI's sucked with creating and using armies (I mean the Civ3 style 4-units inside 1 army), I'd build essentially nothing but what were effectively uber modern tanks and uber mech inf armies that were unstoppable. It was (sort of) fun at first but then it quickly grew REAL tiresome.

Now I see that some people love the military spam and aggressive AI. Why not go back and play Civ3 then?

Now it looked like for Civ4 the intent was to lower the number of military units. Note for example that in Civ3, IIRC, transports could carry a whopping 8 units and carriers 4, I think. Now they reduced it to 4 and 3 units. Still Civ4 BTS is reverting to the Civ3 ways, I don't like it.

What exactly is the fun and challenge of all Civs building and having and micromanaging hundreds of units? There's no real strategy in it, its just military unit spam. Civ4 did a great job of severely crippling Civ2/Civ3 style city spamming ICS with the new city maintainence system. Remember how in Civ2/Civ3 we'd have like 24 plus CORE cities now we have like only 8! Perhaps Civ4 needs something like it for military units as well!!!

IMHO, I think that say each Civ had eight core cities for from classical to rennaisance eras of the game. I think that the optimum number of units would be:
16 units (2 each for city garrison).
Another 8-16 for the main offense/defense standing army. That's 24-32 total for 8 cities, a very reasonable and manageble number. You could if you wanted, have just one city garrison (8) and then one 24 unit division (or split it into 3 8-unit divisions for defense on multiple fronts)

Beyond that, the unit maintainence costs should start to get VERY expensive so that most Civs would have around the "optimal" size armies. The armies should scale so that army sizes that can be supported in ancient/classical start off small, then gradually increases to the 24-32 units of rennaisance and perhaps increase only slightly from there. In no way though should it be practical to have several hundred unit armies!

You could tie it to city population/civics, etc. Say, free support for a miltary unit every 4 pop points, then very expensive for beyond that or something along those lines.

I think personally that rather than make it more challenging, having all Civs have a soft limit that starts to really penalize armies beyond certain size would make it more challenging:
1. If there was a severe penalty for having huge axeman SoD in the ancient eras, the axeman rush would be VERY expensive and risky. It could fail due to not having enough money to support it or your research goes to zero.

2. By having smaller armies, it makes it much more manageable, fun, and less tedious.

3. More importantly, it makes it, I think, more challenging, not less. Having hundreds of units makes it possible to be strong on all fronts and borders. Having smaller armies makes you much more vulnerable if you mass troops on one front but not the other.

Personally, I think BTS and aggressive AI is going backwards. Instead of the trend started by the original Civ4 of fewer cities, fewer units, we are now reverting to the Civ3 style! WHY????

polypheus said:

BTS and with aggressive AI that Civ4 is now reverting back to Civ3 style play where each Civ has and manages literally armies in the hundreds! That is just too messed up and unbalanced not to mention tedious and unwieldy and unfun!.... fun at first but then it quickly grew REAL tiresome.

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I agree. People say it's a challenge, but for me the challenge is in preparing for the war well, like teching to get some advantage, and then executing it with good tactics. The challenge isn't wading through large numbers.

If you're going for domination , OK then you have the empire set up for continuous war. But if you're not, large numbers to deal with will sidetrack your strat and desired victory condition making the game frustrating, not challenging.

It's as though the developers have tried to make a game that is challenging beyond just war, but the AI and production bonuses are working against that.

I like that the AI wars much more cleverly, but I don't like that I have to drag my empire through long drawn out wars.

So... Don't play with the aggressive AI setting then and let people who do enjoy it keep it.

Auren said:

So... Don't play with the aggressive AI setting then and let people who do enjoy it keep it.

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That's not really the point. The point isn't that the AIs can spam tons of military units and then humans can also. The point is why is the game designed so that it is practical and possible to spam and have so many military units at all to begin with. Why is that particularly fun??? I dunno maybe some people love the tedium of micromanging hundreds of units, I find it unrealistic and tedious myself.

Remember back in Civ2 days with ICS. It was REAL easy to win on deity. You just spammed cities everywhere and you'd have great tech, lots of gold, etc. I introducted a friend to Civ2 many years ago (never played Civ before in his life) and explained to him this very basic strategy. In the inside of a couple of days he was beating deity regularly!

So what did Civ3 do to address this? Instead of coming up with a real solution to ICS, the designers said, "well how about we just make the AIs do ICS to keep up with the humans"? The "corruption" did limit the effectiveness of far-flung cities but rather than fix ICS they just decided to concede ICS by making the AIs better at ICS themselves.

Now in Civ4, they finally fixed the problem. Buildings don't have maintainence but cities DO! That it itself much more balances things out and makes it possible to be hurt and bankrupt with too many cities while a more balanced perfectionist can succeed. Because buildings don't cost anything but cities do you are better off with a few cities with high population with all the buildings than lots of villages everywhere with no buildings! This was NOT how it was in Civ2/Civ3 (at most you'd just asymtotically have diminishing returns, it never HURT you to have tons of cities and since cities cost nothing but buildings DID it was actually cheaper to spam more zero-cost cities rather then a few cities with lots of buildings! ) So for the most part ICS is gone.

Now in Civ4, they attempted to address this IMS (Infinite Military Syndrome). But rather than really address it like they did for ICS what did they do? They made the AIs as good as humans in spamming and having hundreds of units. Why did they not just re-design it so that both humans and AIs could not practically build too many units at all in the first place? What is so challenging and fun to be able to build hundred of units?

It looks like Civ4 BTS is trying to solve IMS the way Civ3 tried to solve ICS by making the AIs do IMS better. It would be far better to solve IMS itself in the first place!

The problem is not whether to turn off aggressive AIs or not. The problem is that armies sizes are unrealistically large. As long as humans can build unrealisically large armies starting in the ancient era with axe rushes, there are two solutions:

1. Have an aggressive AI option that lets the computer AI spams tons of units too to counter human IMS. In order words concede IMS.
2. How about we fix IMS to begin with by making military costs much more expensive and tying them to population or civics? (Like Civ4 did with ICS and finally fixed ICS?)

We could increase the unit maintenance (3 golds per unit ? + one free per city ?). I agree there are too many units now, especially in the late game.

I agree with polyheus. Wars with huge armies are not fun. They are as you say, less manageble and tedious. I find that unchecking agressive AI doesnt solve this problem at all. Because in those games its often that there are long periods of peace where everybody is just rearming slowly until their armys are massive. Agressive AI ensures more wars but AI seem to prioritise military more. For my sake i love agressive AI but i hate wars fought with huge army vs. huge army.

The solution could be as you imply either forcing civs to reduce army size with higher maintenance, or just fix the AIs military priortising in core gamecode.
Another solution could be to increase production cost of units. Specialy in mid to late game where this is more of a problem. Also i think these units would need higher strenght to compensate fore this.

At the end of the day i just want to play a game of civ bts with lots of wars without having to build a huge army to keep up with your rivals on the battlefield.

Induvidual battles would also become alot more important. If you'd lose a good unit or two then you could suddenly be in a serious disadvantage. More challanging, more fun.

A mod anyone?

Does game length affect this? I play on epic and have not made it to the modern era yet, but I have not seen huge stacks like ones in the 100's as I have read about on the forum. I know production is scaled, but it seems that this might have to do with playing in marathon mode. I am not sure.

But in my games the stacks are usually between 10 to 15 units for a conquering army, and the AI have had between 3 to 7 units defending the cities. When I do declare they are quick to pop rush more units, but that is to be expected.

Upping the army maintenance cost could solve that, but changing the AI priority wouldn't, since you could then build the same huge stack as before at the same cheap price and roll over the AIs (which would be a bit cheesy).

klokwerk said:

We could increase the unit maintenance (3 golds per unit ? + one free per city ?). I agree there are too many units now, especially in the late game.

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There are lots of solutions. Some combination of making military unit maintainance cost more and tie it to total population and civics would be the the way to go. Once the armed forces exceeds the low cost, you pay the exhorbitant "mercenary" cost for extra units way higher than the free/low cost of initial units. (BTW this is exactly how it has and continues to work in real life. There's a free/low cost of a military proportional to population and economy but once you exceed that it becomes REAL expensive to maintain, ask North Korea)

There are lots of people who love aggressive AI because the AIs can now do IMS almost as good as humans. But this begs the question of why is there IMS AT ALL?

And I'm not just talking about the late game. I'm talking about the early game too.

Why does axe rush work? Because with 1-2 pop2/3 cities, you could build a dozen or so axeman. IMHO that makes no sense and is completely unrealistic. An ancient era where your military population is several times larger than your civilian one??? That makes no sense even it the modern era. The US has like a 2million man army in a nation of 300million and now during war its costing hundreds of billions. And the worse example is North Korea with a 1million man army with 20million people and note how that country is starving and has crumbling, nonexistent infrastructure with that kind of military maintainence.

It's planned for the next xp pack : 'Beyond the SoD'

Conversly, during vanilla Civ4, there were people who complained that there were almost no wars, or too little war. It's always going to be warmongers vs. builders (an old Civ3 debate, too, IIRC).

I don't think we would have less wars, just the same wars but with less units. Or I didn't understand the OP...

martin031 said:

Does game length affect this? I play on epic and have not made it to the modern era yet, but I have not seen huge stacks like ones in the 100's as I have read about on the forum. I know production is scaled, but it seems that this might have to do with playing in marathon mode. I am not sure.

But in my games the stacks are usually between 10 to 15 units for a conquering army, and the AI have had between 3 to 7 units defending the cities. When I do declare they are quick to pop rush more units, but that is to be expected.

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Im not sure, though i would expect marathon games to include more units than quick games. I also mostly play epic gamespeed. And i have neither seen stacks og anything near 100. And im glad a havent, i think i would just quit the game if i did. But stacks dont have to be that high for me to get bored. Enemy stacks of 15++ is generally too much for my taste. Of course sometimes its okay it depends abit on the situation.

klokwerk said:

Upping the army maintenance cost could solve that, but changing the AI priority wouldn't, since you could then build the same huge stack as before at the same cheap price and roll over the AIs (which would be a bit cheesy).

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Not if building such a huge army yourself would mean that you lag behind in tech and have to build weaker units.
But ofcourse, it often doesnt, so you have a point.

klokwerk said:

I don't think we would have less wars, just the same wars but with less units. Or I didn't understand the OP...

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Exactly right!

You wouldn't have less wars. You'd have the same number of wars as the situation calls for. You just would NOT have tons of units vastly out of proportion with the total population and economy of civs.

And as Sneerk points out it would make it more challenging not less. A loss of a unit with fewer units become much more painful. And with armies being smaller, you'd be force to have a strong force and be vulnerable elsewhere or have mediocre strength everywhere, etc. No more dozens of units in every city.

Of course there shouldn't be hard caps. But if you want to do IMS you should REALLY suffer just like you do if you tried ICS today!

Maybe part of the problem is that maintenance only goes up linearly with the number of units past the free support limit. Having an optimum number of units could be one way of reducing the number of units, but my first thought was that it might be exploitable in some way.

I suppose if maintenance increased quadratically or even exponentially then that might work (who knows, maybe then you'd disband that Warrior that's been defending your capital since 4000BC by the Modern Age), it could also break everything, but is unit spam a huge problem? I haven't noticed it so far, but I've only played without Agg AI on so far, on Monarch/Emperor, the AI does build a lot more units than in Warlords, but it wasn't building enough before. I haven't seen a Civ3 sized SoD yet, although that could just be a matter of time.

Any change would also be likely to have a major effect on the game in general, so I doubt anything will happen before Civ5.

well, the army maintenance cost shouldn't be a flat fee, maintenance should vary depends on the type of unit. I mean come on a tank shouldn't cost the same price to maintain as a warrior. more advanced units should cost more to maintain than ancient units. something like ancient units cost 1 gold, medieval 2g, renaissance 3g, industrial 4g, mordern 5g. maintenace for away units also increase in same propotion. So when you goto war your tank thats in enemy territory will cost you 10g times inflation to maintain.

Sneerk said:

Im not sure, though i would expect marathon games to include more units than quick games. I also mostly play epic gamespeed. And i have neither seen stacks og anything near 100. And im glad a havent, i think i would just quit the game if i did. But stacks dont have to be that high for me to get bored. Enemy stacks of 15++ is generally too much for my taste. Of course sometimes its okay it depends abit on the situation.


Not if building such a huge army yourself would mean that you lag behind in tech and have to build weaker units.
But ofcourse, it often doesnt, so you have a point.

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I agree that even 15 units begins to be too much if they are in every city or streaming in stacks across your borders.

One suggestion I had made a few months back was that unit upgrades could require units and gold. So you could not just spam cheap units and then run gold at 100% and then mass upgrade them. It would cost x number of units plus gold. For example you would have to upgrade two archers plus gold to get a longbowman. How the promotions would be assigned would need to work out, but I think that could be solved.

It could also implement some sort of "unit decay". That after some amount of time, say two eras, units can no longer be upgraded, and begin to lose strength or become obsolete and disbanded. It seems silly to have warriors runing around with cannons and calvary, and with a click of a button upgrade them. But again, their are some logistics with this that would have to be worked out, with out adding too much micromanagement. But as you work through the tech tree, you would have to look through your units and determine which ones you want to upgrade and which ones will be disbanded.

Stacks of Doom are indeed back. I've seen them a lot from the AI in my first game. But you're missing a basic point. Even with the return of SoD, Civ4 is worlds better than Civ3. And if you learn the hot-keys, the only micromanagement of units is the paper-rock-scissors type, which is actually enjoyable. All-in-all it was nice that Soren tried to innovate against SoD's with the artillery type units, but this latest tweak in Civ4 is better since artillery was abusable to an extreme. Everything feels much more balanced to me in BTS.

And actually the better ai uses SoD's more intelligently. It's no longer possible to judge the AI's unseen production strength by the waning size of SoD's that it sends against you. Often I'd thought I weathered the worst SoD, and tried to capitalize with some seriously understrength but aggressive maneuvering---only to get whomped by an unseen SoD. So they are managed somewhat better now.

If it's tedious to watch, just turn on stack attack.

polypheus said:

Now I see that some people love the military spam and aggressive AI. Why not go back and play Civ3 then?

Personally, I think BTS and aggressive AI is going backwards. Instead of the trend started by the original Civ4 of fewer cities, fewer units, we are now reverting to the Civ3 style! WHY????

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The larger your empire, the larger your army it makes sense how army maintenance scales with population, A 20 size city defended by a mere 3-4 units would just be stupid wouldn't it. And combat is one of the more entertaining aspects of the game. When you are playing on a huge map, huge armies make it more realistic. I like seeing big Ai stacks, as it makes more of a challenge, then just he player having a stack of doom facing helpless defenders outnumbered 10-1.