Civ 5: Planned operations

Military operations are often planned in detail, long before they are executed. Often these plans leak to the enemy, due to espionage. When circumstances change (maybe because the enemy found out the plan) commanders often face the dilemma between sticking to the old plan, or improvising.

Civ 4 handles unit orders in real-time. Goto orders are just a part of the interface, and are identical to manual movement in a gameplay point of view.

So this is my suggestion:

With a certain promotion or a certain technology, units get the ability to receive two kinds of orders - Immediate Operation, and Planned Operation.

Immediate Operation is identical to a Go-to order (or any mission for air units) with these changes:
* The unit is frozen for the current turn. The order is executed from the next turn.
* During the operation, the unit gets a combat bonus (25% suggested) for attack and defense.
* If the operation order is cancelled, the unit loses the bonus and its current turn.
* There is a maximum number of turns (5 suggested) for operations. This can be enhanced by promotions.

A unit which gets a Planned Operation freezes, until activated by the player. Then the order is carried out immediately.

Spies have the ability to find out enemy operation paths.

What do we gain with planned operations?

* Players can put prepare attacks even during peacetime. (Napoleon prepares knights specifically to attack Frankfurt, as soon as the war starts.)
* Espionage becomes more important to defenders to counter a planned attacks. (Frederick finds out Napoleon's plans to attack Frankfurt with knights, and puts pikemen at the frontline.)
* A player can change plans to confuse the defender. (Napoleon's spies find the German pikemen, so he gives the knights plans to attack Hamburg instead, and plans to attack Frankfurt with crossbowmen instead.)
* A good plan can be great. (The operational bonus allows Napoleon's crossbowmen to beat Frederick's pikemen.) A bad plan (Napoleon did not think about the fortified hills around Hamburg) presents the choice of moving on to certain death, or reworking, with loss of time.

That actually sounds cool. I like the idea.

Optimizer said:

Immediate Operation is identical to a Go-to order (or any mission for air units) with these changes:
* The unit is frozen for the current turn. The order is executed from the next turn.
* During the operation, the unit gets a combat bonus (25% suggested) for attack and defense.
* If the operation order is cancelled, the unit loses the bonus and its current turn.
* There is a maximum number of turns (5 suggested) for operations. This can be enhanced by promotions.

....

What do we gain with planned operations?

* Players can put prepare attacks even during peacetime. (Napoleon prepares knights specifically to attack Frankfurt, as soon as the war starts.)
* Espionage becomes more important to defenders to counter a planned attacks. (Frederick finds out Napoleon's plans to attack Frankfurt with knights, and puts pikemen at the frontline.)
* A player can change plans to confuse the defender. (Napoleon's spies find the German pikemen, so he gives the knights plans to attack Hamburg instead, and plans to attack Frankfurt with crossbowmen instead.)
* A good plan can be great. (The operational bonus allows Napoleon's crossbowmen to beat Frederick's pikemen.) A bad plan (Napoleon did not think about the fortified hills around Hamburg) presents the choice of moving on to certain death, or reworking, with loss of time.

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In that case I'll just take immediate operations and get the 25% bonus.

That's better than allowing my opponent to steal my plans and get no bonus.

Planned operations would atleast require some kind of advantage to the attacker to be viable.

The planned operations should of course have a combat bonus, just like the immediate operations, maybe even greater.

It should be possible to coordinate your plans with other AI(if it was smart enough), so they can also strike at around the same time, or whatever fits the plan.

Why the immediate operation bonus? All battles with bonus or all battle with no bonus is the same.

But keep in mind guys that the AI should be able to handle those features your thinking of. For me the improvement of the AI is all I wish for a future CIV 5.

Naokaukodem said:

Why the immediate operation bonus? All battles with bonus or all battle with no bonus is the same.

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Well, you would still be able to attack directly without a bonus, so there is still a choice.

It should be possible, but not obligatory. I don't think I would ever use it-it would be too complicated.

I Like this plan alot becasue i dog ear alot of my units for stuff

I'm horrible with turn-by-turn military strategy. I end up getting caught up in individual battles and lose sight of the big picture. I would love the option to set up and execute strategies ahead of time, especially if it includes a feature which lists all of my military plans in one easy-to-read interface.

I actually think that ALL operations should be planned operations

1. during the turn you plan your operations (so does your enemy)
2. you hit end turn
3. the game then resolves the operations (some are "intercept the enemy" operations... some are dependent on enemy strength v. your strength... ie if there is a SoD there your units won't bother it because you gave them a cautious mission)
4. you see the result... "we took Washington, New York, Chicago and Boston and destroyed 30 Tanks, we lost 23 bombers and 14 Fighters and 134 infantry")

Krikkitone said:

1. during the turn you plan your operations (so does your enemy)
2. you hit end turn
3. the game then resolves the operations (some are "intercept the enemy" operations... some are dependent on enemy strength v. your strength... ie if there is a SoD there your units won't bother it because you gave them a cautious mission)
4. you see the result... "we took Washington, New York, Chicago and Boston and destroyed 30 Tanks, we lost 23 bombers and 14 Fighters and 134 infantry")

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I hate this notion with the fury of a million exploding nuns, because unless you get to make your plans at the level of detail of "OK, send the first tank two squares west and attack the defensive unit north of the city, if that succeeds then move into the city, if it fails then do one of these other things depending on how much damage you have taken and move the second tank up and continue attacking that defensive unit, otherwise... " and so on you are losing the flexibility you have with moving individual units. And if you can make plans in that degree of fine detail you might as well be moving the individual units anyway.

I like the basic Civ combat system because it sits on a precise boundary between strategy and logistics. I dislike such things as individual unit promotions because they pull that balance over into tactical thinking, but I think this is the first idea I've seen that I find really unappealing on grounds of making it too much liogistics and too little strategy.

Or to put it another way, if I have a thousand tanks in the field, I want to be free to move every single one of them one at a time if I need to.

Well I definitely disagree as to the balance and mostly I think civ has too much detail in its war game (as i mentioned in the other thread) Mostly in the time that it takes to do war... that is really the 'nerf' to the warmonger is that it takes immense real time to conduct a war even when those decisions aren't significantly effecting the outcome. To the point where a war becomes boring (yes you could say up the difficulty level, but a culture/space race at that point is not as boring because it doesn't take as long, and you can make some additional decisions that affect things)

I would prefer if it was even more abstracted (and also if more detail were put into some of the other parts of the game.)

Krikkitone said:

Well I definitely disagree as to the balance and mostly I think civ has too much detail in its war game (as i mentioned in the other thread) Mostly in the time that it takes to do war... that is really the 'nerf' to the warmonger is that it takes immense real time to conduct a war even when those decisions aren't significantly effecting the outcome. To the point where a war becomes boring (yes you could say up the difficulty level, but a culture/space race at that point is not as boring because it doesn't take as long, and you can make some additional decisions that affect things)

I would prefer if it was even more abstracted (and also if more detail were put into some of the other parts of the game.)

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Abstract, eh? I don't know about that, but I can think of ways to make controlling soldiers easier.

On offense: You should be able to specify tiles as meeting points. Then you could select soldiers and order them to move to any tile you've selected as a meeting point. Good for when you're gathering soldiers from many cities, and don't want to constantly look back and forth between where your soldiers are and where you want them to go. Furthermore, if you change the location of a meeting tile where soldiers are currently going, every soldier assigned to move to that tile would start moving to the new location. You wouldn't have to issue orders to every soldier or group.

On defense: You should have the ability to click-drag select a bunch of soldiers and then click-drag select a bunch of tiles, like the outskirts of a city, or a border, and the soldiers continuously carry out an order within that region (default: attack all enemy soldiers).

Ramesses said:

On offense: You should be able to specify tiles as meeting points. Then you could select soldiers and order them to move to any tile you've selected as a meeting point. Good for when you're gathering soldiers from many cities, and don't want to constantly look back and forth between where your soldiers are and where you want them to go. Furthermore, if you change the location of a meeting tile where soldiers are currently going, every soldier assigned to move to that tile would start moving to the new location. You wouldn't have to issue orders to every soldier or group.

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I like that notion, given that the AI can figure out the most sensible ways of actually getting there, which appears to be a mostly solved problem as of Civ 3.

On defense: You should have the ability to click-drag select a bunch of soldiers and then click-drag select a bunch of tiles, like the outskirts of a city, or a border, and the soldiers continuously carry out an order within that region (default: attack all enemy soldiers).

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I don't know about this one, though. I don't trust the AI running the missions for me to do them as well as I would.

I think what I would like, though, is to be able to lay out a route and tell any unit "Patrol this route until further orders, or until you encounter (any of a number of conditions) at which point ask for orders on how to respond.)"

rysmiel said:

I don't know about this one, though. I don't trust the AI running the missions for me to do them as well as I would.

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That would be another benefit of abstracting combat more. If it was somewhat more abstract, the AI could better handle it. The fact that the major player benefit over the AI is in military micromanagement is a problem. It means you can almost always win a war by managing your units sensibly... not necessarily well... just sensibly.

Krikkitone said:

The fact that the major player benefit over the AI is in military micromanagement is a problem. It means you can almost always win a war by managing your units sensibly... not necessarily well... just sensibly.

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I think this discussion is kind of at an impasse, because you are talking about what I regard as one of the major benefits of this combat system as a problem.

Ideally, there would be a mode of abstracting plans for large numbers of units which you could use if you favoured and I could switch off when I install the game and never have to think about ever again, I suppose.