Army budget

Civ Call To Power, had a cool feature. In which you could put your army on differnt levels of readyness. It would take a 1 or 2 turns to change the levels. Thier was full strength, half and quarter from what I remember. Anyways the less ready your army the less upkeep you paid. This could be a expansion pack add on. Mabye allow levels to be declared for specfic units.

Example full strength on the Russian border but quarter next to India. Ghandia won't atack me, right?

Mabye civ 5 already has enuff options with army, still this was my favorite part of Call To Power.

Thats just what Ghandi wants you to think!

Seriously though, I like this idea.

I really like this idea. It adds a new layer of strategy in that you have to identify threats and decide if the wealth bonus is worth the cost to make your troops ready if in fact you are attacked.

It's also quite realistic.

Sounds really cool, reminds me of a DefCon type of thing!

How about make it simpler and say that a unit in sentry mode (or similar) does not pay as much maintenance?

Yes, a mode to "hibernate" your units, maybe with a button for "select whole army".
And a popup to quit it for all if war is declared.

Yes, I remember that. It was one of the features I really missed later when I went back to Civ.

I like the sound of this!
A while ago I read this:
http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/happybirthdaypenguin/html/35.html
(which makes me want to read it's source Niall Ferguson's bestselling The Pity of War)

In there's an excellent description of how the various foreign ministries telegrammed each other in the build up to WW1 and what the various parties were trying to achieve.
I don't remember all the details, but there were big troop build-ups, particularly by Germany and Russia and I found it particularly interesting and enlightening to hear that once the politicians pulled the trigger, then the generals effectively cut comms and wouldn't respond to political directives.... it was too late, they were at war and they were going to do their job!

This idea of having variable unit upkeep made me think of the comms situation and how, before advanced comms, you could have a financial penalty for pulling out of a war too soon.
So, not only the buildup and preparedness of your forces impacts finances, but also yo-yo-ing from war to peace too rapidly. Maybe the penalty is on the first turn (or two) of war, but it forces a little consideration about declaration... perhaps there is no penalty if you are not the aggressor - you get a free transition to and from war if you are attacked, but your costs still escalate from the second turn (presuming your units weren't in a war ready state)

I would even say, given the new 1uphex, that you could apply readiness on a 'front' basis rather than individual units - so all adjacent units would consist a 'front' and be at the same state of readiness. Reinforcements or other movements could be added to or removed from the 'front'. Having many 'fronts' could also be costly....

Don't know if that all makes sense, it kinda came together as a concept as I was typing

I like the idea of useing Fronts/Army's. However it does pose a possible problem. Many people, not being me. Feel strongly about unit's being auto named 1st armor, 34th Legion Etc. Forceing units' into map sized larger formations such as Korps, Army or Front. Brings forth the issue of civ being put into a wargame. Which is something the series has tried to advoid. The current war model is great and thier is no reason to go back to civ 1 or 2 battles.
I think putting a call to power model in for army readyness is about all the civ community would take. But I would love to wrong on this one.

I like this idea.

I'd also like to see reservist forces, giving us the option to quickly mobilise a larger, more experienced force within a shorter time than drafting allows.

To keep such a force in readiness, it seems realistic that gold has to be spent over time, and a certain amount of production lost as citizens spend their time training.

This is a really cool idea. Ive seen it work in Europa Universallis 3: httt and its an awesome feature. It would help smaller countries raise there income and stabalize their economy. And when war time comes they could put the maintanence back to normal/high so that they can fight properly. It would offer a part of gameplay civ has never seen before. I like it

Hadron said:

I like this idea.

I'd also like to see reservist forces, giving us the option to quickly mobilise a larger, more experienced force within a shorter time than drafting allows.

To keep such a force in readiness, it seems realistic that gold has to be spent over time, and a certain amount of production lost as citizens spend their time training.

Click to expand...

Yes, absolutely, reserve forces, militias, AND mercenaries are all worthwhile concepts in addition to/in convert with levels of readiness.

I like this idea from a player standpoint. From a game balance standpoint however, I think a feature like this will inherently favor human players. I can't see the AI being adept at knowing when to switch in and out of these modes.

sounds like a fair comment mercury529, though I'm no expert on AI implementation, so I'll leave decisions of feasibility to the game designers.

I thought a little more about the varying costs of 'war readiness' and going in and out of war and the thing I didn't like about what we're currently proposing is that the system feels too negative - where's the cost/benefit trade off?...

So I wondered if, when at war, you could have some kind of percentage production bonus on military units and city improvement and research bonus on militarily linked techs and possibly have some negative impact on building non-military units and buildings and researching non-military techs...
The percentages don't have to be big, but enough so they provide a counter balance to the increased military support costs of being at war and kind of incentivise the unit and tech arms races that naturally occur during war.

I agree that the feature is realistic, but...

Does it really add anything to gameplay value? Yes, it may allow you to support more units through micromanagement, but is this really any more "fun" than just upping the unit allowance or lowering unit upkeep?

Units are cheaper to maintain if they idle and aren't fortified.

Baaam.

AriochIV - yeah, micromanagement boredom would be a concern if you implement individual unit controls.
I'm primarily talking about a national state of preparedness and am not really convinced about individual unit controls.... thinking about it, if there was interest in the feature but at a national level was too blunt, then you could do checkboxes relating to the other civs you border (are close to) so you're more prepared on some borders than others, but not on a unit level.

Creating fronts, to my mind, would give you some discount as a chunk of your forces are grouped in an area. That could happen automatically, so there is a financial (as well as defensive) benefit from clumping your forces together - I suppose I'm thinking of supplying those troops becomes easier.

I'm imagining that supporting the troops costs a bit more at war, maybe even based on distance from cultural borders, but that would happen automatically as a small percentage increase and so wouldn't be a big micromanagement overhead.

And my point about small percentage pluses and minuses for production and science would also be applies automatically at a national level, based on whether you were at war or not.

This is a bit like changing civics in Civ IV between Monotheism at peace and Theology at war. It made sense it terms of the economics, but was it fun? I didn't think so. And apparenly Firaxis didn't think so either, because it has been removed from the game.

If you are always in reserve mode in peace and active mode in war, then (to use Blizzard terminology) there is no "interesting choice" there... just a button that you have to push when you declare war. There's nothing fun or interesting about it.

On the one hand, you don't want a game that plays itself, but you do want the actions that the player takes to be meaningful and interesting, and not something that could just be automated.

I like the idea of reservists - it could be realized in a colonization kind of fashion: in peacetime you create the units in having them ready in your cities as means of equipment, in wartimes you draft population to create actual units from your prepared machinery.

Your peacetime standing army will protect the boarders and cost a considerable upkeep, the reservist army won't cost much (or anything) until drafted. You could even think of adding idle military units as pop in cities (just like in colonization) - not just to cut costs but to actually create value by exploiting a city tile.

Souron said:

How about make it simpler and say that a unit in sentry mode (or similar) does not pay as much maintenance?

Click to expand...

sounds like a lot of micro-management even with one unit per tile, but since we dont really know how many units overall a civ will have in the late ages, it could be kind of cool.