No More Stacks of Doom

[kochman]

Just wanted to get a poll going on this topic to guage reaction...

[r_rolo1]

Ambivalent. The fact that there was no real cap to civ III and IV SoD allowed some monstruosities to happen and had to be corrected somehow. But I can see the proposed solution creating a whole new set of issues and it might be a little too extreme for my taste ( i always defended some kind of soft cap to the SoD sizes ... meaning that you could do them if you wanted, but there would be good reasons to not increase them to the infinite ... a interesting choice , like a certain well known game developer said once .... Put it in any way you want, but one unit per tile does not let you choose how many units you put in a tile )

[Herrhals]

totally lame, doesn't make sense realistically. 50 armies of war elephants (not just the pixel representation) marching through a forest is going to ruin the forest or flatten some dumb hill, not to mention inadvertently destroying improvements in all territories including friendly.

[Daedal]

I'm happy SoDs are going away, but I also agree with r_rolo1. One unit per tile makes no more sense than a hundred units per tile. There's a whole layer of complexity that could be explored in Civ 5 by allowing some variability there. Imagine that some units could stack better than others, but would be weaker individually. Or that certain technologies, buildings, wonders or improvements could change the way units can stack on a tile.

[awesome]

Originally Posted by Herrhals

totally lame, doesn't make sense realistically. 50 armies of war elephants (not just the pixel representation) marching through a forest is going to ruin the forest or flatten some dumb hill, not to mention inadvertently destroying improvements in all territories including friendly.

given the size of the tiles, only allowing one unit per tile is just as unrealistic.

[Razorwing]

I kinda like the stacks of doom. It's quite fun to use my stack of doom to face off against the AI's stack of doom in one huge, cataclysmic battle that will decide the fate of the entire war. But on the other hand, once you've won such a battle, the outcome of the rest of the war is rather clear, so I suppose it lessens the fun in that respect.

[climat]

Agree with r rolo1. SoD had to be controled in some way but one unit per tile is too extreme.

[bonafide11]

I find it funny how people argue whether stacks of doom is realistic or not. Who knows how much of land a tile represents or how large of an army a single unit represents? The debate of whether or not it is realistic is completely irrelevant. The decision to get rid of the stack of doom isn't about realism, but it's to make the game more fun; stacks of doom slow the game down and make it way too boring, especially at the end game when you have enormous stacks to shuffle through.

[Klyde182]

How would you defend your City with only one troop unit?
Here is another thought, you have 50 units & you only have 40 Hexes of territory?

[bonafide11]

Originally Posted by Klyde182

How would you defend your City with only one troop unit?
Here is another thought, you have 50 units & you only have 40 Hexes of territory?

For the first question, you need to defend the tiles around your city as well as the city itself. Plus you'll get city defense bonuses and I'm sure you can build a wall for extra bonuses.

For the second question, simple -- move the units to hexes outside of your territory.

[kochman]

Originally Posted by Klyde182

How would you defend your City with only one troop unit?
Here is another thought, you have 50 units & you only have 40 Hexes of territory?

So, you have honestly never seen a boardgame that doesn't allowed stacking, nor played a computer game that doesn't allow stacking?
Have you played chess? How do you defend your king?

In depth.

[Tlalynet]

So what about the Advanced Civilization method of preventing stacks of doom? If you have more tokens on a tile than the tile can support food wise they are automatically removed at the end of the turn. You had many tokens per tile (you needed 7 just to take a city, so one unit per tile would make the game impossible) but you never had stacks of doom.

[Andrew_Jay]

I'm wondering if the moderators could try and reduce the proliferation of "OMG One Unit Per Hex!" threads? I count some 9 or 10 theards on this same topic.

[attackfighter]

I think there should be a few units allowed per tile, say 3 or so. I also like what Tlalynet said, limiting stacking depending on the region - for instance grassland could support the full 3 units while hills could only support 2. Another layer of depth would be to have technology influence it; researching railroads could allow +1 unit per tile or something.

[Tlalynet]

@ Andrew Jay

This thread was essentially hijacked to the one unit per tile thing, the thread is about stacks of doom in general.

@ Attackfighter
I like the original civ in that agriculture is kind of like a minor military tech, you can support 1 more unit per tile and that makes a huge difference in areas where there are several 1 pop max tiles around.

[kochman]

Originally Posted by Andrew_Jay

I'm wondering if the moderators could try and reduce the proliferation of "OMG One Unit Per Hex!" threads? I count some 9 or 10 theards on this same topic.

So, you are basically trying to apply a one thread per topic limit to go with the one tile per hex discussion...

And, yes, this thread was hijacked. I knew it would be, of course... Just wanted to get some kind of guage of how many people were really upset about this. Seems like well under 1/2.

[TheBladeRoden]

The only thing I'm worried about is how cramped it's going to be

[TylerD]

I don't really see how you can judge it yet, seeing as we have no idea of the mechanics of the new style combat system.

[Klyde182]

SoDs' are easy to defend against, that is what artillery is for, now that you have been promised ranged attack one hex away again allows for/ if a player choose stack all his eggs in basket then you pound it away with Artillery. That's what the Russians did, they had 1000 of arty pieces per mile of front in WW2.

[bonafide11]

Originally Posted by Klyde182

SoDs' are easy to defend against, that is what artillery is for, now that you have ranged attack one hex away allows for/ if a player choose stack all his eggs in basket then you pound it away with Artillery. That's what the Russians did, they had 1000 of arty pieces per mile of front in WW2.

Again, you're entirely missing the point. Firaxis isn't getting rid of SoDs because they were overpowered or too hard to defend against, but SoDs slow the game down, get redundant, and take away from the fun and strategy of the game. Nobody has ever argued that SoDs are too hard to defend against -- all you need is a larger SoD, but that's not fun.