"Total" Health for Units

This may sound confusing, but there should be 3 "health" counts on a unit.
The first would be the power it is now, like 4.1/5.0. But units should be able to lose "total health", so a unit constantly in combat with a strength of 5 would lose regular health (4.1/5.0)but also it's total health (something like 4.1/4.5/5.0) so the unit could only heal to 5 in a friendly city. Example: You send a warrior wandering off at the beginning of the game. It unluckily finds a horde of barbarians and defeats them, but 20 of their 50 men die in combat. When you click the "Fortify until healed" button, how do those 30 men re-appear? So the Total health would be depleted to 0.9, or whatever 40% of the unit's health is. Then you could sent the unit back to your city, and the total health would go up. This would represent new recruits making up for the 30 people who died.

But then we don't need three healths but just that if wounded it need to comeback to any city to full heal. Right?

Roman Legions used to recruit from the local population

Could be then a promotion, like Speech that then it can heal in neutral territories and then Speech 2 that can heal in enemy territories.

Sending units back home takes to long and is to tedious. Also, adding another health-number will make the game more complex and harder to understand. Civ should keep the numbers they throw at you to a minimum.

Unit healing can be explained by recruiting from the local population or reinforcements from home.

My model is similar-ish to this one. Your men are either healthy or sick, and when units die they need to be replaced.

This is a good way to slow a Stack of Death or any invading force. The best option would be for you to send enough troops out to be able to replenish your forces.

There is no reason why you couldn't select "Send Reinforcements" on a unit, and have the computer calculate for you, add it to a recruiting queue and then send the unit out automatically to your location; but a few recruits on their own would be easy pickings for an enemy.

And of course, this could be a game option that a user has "Easy Replacement" (healing) or the more complex method.

It could be interesting to remove healing. Then you could re-organize your army in order to have full force units.

Should be play-tested.

I think it would massively detract from war (making the other options more on-par). War (especially in the ancient times) should be hard to wage. It's no small feat to amass 100,000 troops and cross into enemy territory to sack a few cities. (Actually that raises a good point, that has probably been raised a 1,000 times in other threads) -- you should be able to sack the city (e.g. pull down any military type buildings, and steal gold/tech/resources...) without actually conquering).

Oh, in regards to that means you need 3 health bars... no, my model puts it all into the one health bar. See http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8155280&postcount=1 (Although I have now changed it to a vertical bar). The image on that post, the man at the top shows it.

The green portion of the bar represents "healthy", yellow "sick" and grey "dead" (as in, troops needing replenishment). The bar would be the same size regardless of if the unit represents 10 or 100,000 troops.

'Twould be tedious, to say the least. It would make offensive wars nearly impossible, too, especially if you were attacking on a different continent. How on earth would you get all of your injured units back home and still maintain a fight?

Also, I'm a little confused as to what the 3 health things are. Please elaborate.

I think it would be hard, not tedious. (Especially if you could have single-use transport ships which can be automatically constructed by a unit with orders to move to another continent). It would make war a lot less of a feature, if keeping your war machine meant a steady flow of troops to the battle.

While there is still room for getting some 'green' peasants to join you (even in enemy territory, if they don't like their own government much), to get combat ready troops requires sending them afar.

Wouldn't this go a long way to removing the SoD and the games over-dependence on war?

CivMyWay said:

I think it would be hard, not tedious. (Especially if you could have single-use transport ships which can be automatically constructed by a unit with orders to move to another continent). It would make war a lot less of a feature, if keeping your war machine meant a steady flow of troops to the battle.

While there is still room for getting some 'green' peasants to join you (even in enemy territory, if they don't like their own government much), to get combat ready troops requires sending them afar.

Wouldn't this go a long way to removing the SoD and the games over-dependence on war?

Click to expand...

Hi

War in civ4 can already be a long costly tedious grind so I dont see how slowing it down with added micromanagement, costs, penalties or some combination thereof is a positive.

As for going a long way to removing the sod. The main reason SoD's are used is because it can take a LOT of units to conquer a civ and SoD's are the LEAST tedious method of managing large numbers of troops. Now for sake of argument lets say there is a situations where I decide a stack of 40 is necessary to begin a succesful war against a civ. This reduced health until reinforcemnts arrive idea would mean that my stack of 40 wont be as effective cuz after a few wars most of my maces or whatever are going to be stuck a str 5 or 6 or whatever the number is. Its NOT an incentive to slow down my stack of 40 as much as an incentive to make sure I have a stack of 60 so I WONT have to slow down. So really far from reducing an SOD it creates situations where they will now be even bigger.

Now for this "over dependence" on war. What does that mean exactly? Not only are there several "non war" victory conditions but games on all difficulties can be won without fighting a single battle (not to mention I have read people talking about someone posting a high diff victory in which they not only didnt fight a battle they didnt build a SINGLE military unit)

Now MAYBE there is an "over preference" of people willing to use warfare at SOME stage of a given game but thats exactly what it is --a preference. It doesnt mean that a non war option is NOT available its just that most people tend not to prefer it. But even if some, maybe even most people, prefer option A doesnt at all stop those who chose option B or C or even D if thats what they wish.

Kaytie

Camikaze said:

'Twould be tedious, to say the least. It would make offensive wars nearly impossible, too, especially if you were attacking on a different continent. How on earth would you get all of your injured units back home and still maintain a fight?

Click to expand...

Are you commenting my idea? If yes, I would answer that there would be no need to call your units back home, you could merge them on the battlefield.

i see where everyone comes from but i think it requires too much work.
how do tanks fit in? and replacement guns, maces yes easy enough to replace but guns are not.
if you are looking for realism there is the dead end, im for leaving this aspect as it is i think the inhibiting factor for war should be logistics, large armies need a lot of food.

KatyieKat under your barrage of logic, and my inexperience with other game modes, I admit the weakness of my argument, my shortcomings, and withdraw my "over dependence on war" comment.

I advocate that units represent an actual number of men. So yes, you are right, SoD would just be larger... which would be harder to achieve. If a significant SoD comes into your land now, they can fortify and slowly recover. (My memory of who can heal and when might be wrong). If units actually died, then even throwing smaller units at a SoD will weaken it.

I think that it should be hard to conquer another's land --- especially if it is on an entire other continent. If you have a limited number of recruitable soldiers, then I think you will be a lot more cautious about who and what battles you engage in.

Spartan, I don't see how maces or tanks or guns are any different. Guns or tanks are simply new units (personnel and vehicles).

CivMyWay said:

I think it would be hard, not tedious. (Especially if you could have single-use transport ships which can be automatically constructed by a unit with orders to move to another continent). It would make war a lot less of a feature, if keeping your war machine meant a steady flow of troops to the battle.

While there is still room for getting some 'green' peasants to join you (even in enemy territory, if they don't like their own government much), to get combat ready troops requires sending them afar.

Wouldn't this go a long way to removing the SoD and the games over-dependence on war?

Click to expand...

True. And actually, seeing as you put it that way, it would seem a good idea. However, I can't help but think that this would over rectify the problem. I dunno. It would definitely be subject to testing, although, yes, now that you mention that, it would be quite good.

Naokaukodem said:

Are you commenting my idea? If yes, I would answer that there would be no need to call your units back home, you could merge them on the battlefield.

Click to expand...

Well, I wasn't specifically, but now that I read it, yes, that would be a viable solution.