Moving armies in Civ V is problematic.

Long time Civ III and Civ IV player here, also long time lurker for that matter.I Picked up Civ V, and have been playing it for a couple of days straight. However, I find that the game's combat system has a major flaw in it - It is impossible to move large armies.

In Civ IV, moving large armies was never a problem, as you could stack them, and generally you would run around with a SOD. If you needed to split up your stacks, you could hotkey your units.

Fast forward to Civ V. Units no longer stack. This causes 2 problems, one of which I ABSOLUTELY cannot believe didn't come during the game's production. Assume for my example that I want to move 5 Riflemen and 3 cannons to one part of the map to the other.

3 problems happen in this example.

• #1 It is impossible to determine which exact squares you have sent your units to, unless you happen to have a eidetic memory.
• #2 When units cross each others paths, they will stop and ask for orders. A good example is if 2 units arrive at a narrow one-hex chasm at the same time. This throws the whole system into chaos, as it is impossible to tell which part of your army's formation this unit belonged too.
• #3 YOU CANNOT HOTKEY MILITARY UNITS. In any RTS, you MUST be able to hotkey military units. It isn't needed as much in turn-based games, because you have a long time to make decisions, but if this had been implemented, the above 2 gripes would have just been minor inconveniences.

In my latest game today, this reached the point of where I would just build new units instead of bothering too move my 13+ stacks of units, as I could not bear the frustration.

I have full confidence that if Firaxis supports this game, it will last for a long time.

Starcraft didn't really pick up steam until Brood war was released. Even then, without blizzard's constant support it would have never become an e-sport in Korea. If you support your game properly, then it's going to be around for a while. There's a reason why Command and Conquer 3 was such a failure.

Totally agree with you. As the game grows and you get more armies it's a pain in the ass to try getting them to stick to a plan. Countless times I've realized I've been moving a certain unit back and forth for some turns. And it gets worse when you resume a game 1 or 2 days later.

Think devs want us to take notes and all that crap

PS: Btw, first post on these forums. Hello everyone!

May I suggest:

If you want to move your armies in such a way that they'll be walking to their destination for a while, do it this way instead.

1. Determine the area you're moving to.
2. Send all your units to the same square, but make that square one turn short of the tactical destination.
3. Deploy your units to their specific formation from the staging area.

I have been using this method to fine effect lately. It doesn't take particularly more time than sending them in formation in the first place. In fact, it might just take less considering that battle lines change and you may have to redo the formation anyway if the tactical situation evolves while your units are walking.

Also, I've yet to run into the situation in SP where a 13-unit army has been necessary. Either you are playing on a higher level, or maybe your army is too big.

That works fine in theory, but not in a real situation. Units will stop randomly for no apparent reason ( I suspect this is due to tile pathing ), and the whole system gets thrown into dissaray.

Also, if you tell all your units to move to the same tile, they will collide with each other, due to no apparent right-of-way pathing. It's akin to being at a 4-way stop, where 2 cars arrive at the same time, but no right-of-way rules have been established.

I really do like the limitation of units in hexes, it seems to fit the feel of the game, I just wish that there were techs later on in the tree that improved how many you could fit in each hex. Like military science making it 2 in one hex and 3 in one hex sometime in late modern age.

One thing I think I've noticed is that any unit routed through a city (or ending its turn in a city?) will become a garrison. This is problematic.

Slightly OT, but on the topic of moving military units, has anyone figured out how to combine the movement of a worker/settler and a military unit? The adviser keeps bleating at me to protect my settlers, but I can't stack a unit and a settler together and have them move as one. Am I missing something?

I do not think that option is in the game, but it's one that I would like as well.

slowjames said:

May I suggest:

If you want to move your armies in such a way that they'll be walking to their destination for a while, do it this way instead.

1. Determine the area you're moving to.
2. Send all your units to the same square, but make that square one turn short of the tactical destination.
3. Deploy your units to their specific formation from the staging area.

I have been using this method to fine effect lately. It doesn't take particularly more time than sending them in formation in the first place. In fact, it might just take less considering that battle lines change and you may have to redo the formation anyway if the tactical situation evolves while your units are walking.

Also, I've yet to run into the situation in SP where a 13-unit army has been necessary. Either you are playing on a higher level, or maybe your army is too big.

Click to expand...

The real problem here is units "forgetting" the destination you chose for them. When your armies starts getting big it starts being a pain in the arse.

I noted similar difficulties in maneuvering a task force through a mountainous region a few games back. It does carry its own risks, and is inapplicable in certain situations, but don't forget that once you have optics, you can move and/or position troops in the water, too.

Yup, multi-turn military routes could really use an overlay showing their paths and hotkeys and a one button bind unit to settler/worker. All these things would be good.

And give me back my ability to draw on the map! Good for military planning.

I've noticed this as well. I tried to group units (hotkey them), but the game doesn't support that, obviously. Really peculiar is that you cannot click a unit and see its path and destination. That makes any larger troop movements fairly tedious and isn't much fun. In my game today (small continents, standard size) I wiped out the two civs that were on my continent, and then just switched to playing for a diplomatic victory because it didn't seem fun to have to navigate a large army across the world.

The routing AI will cause any unit to stop when any other unit with which it cannot stack ends a turn anywhere along the path of the first unit....regardless of how far away that 2nd unit ends its turn.

Indeed, the AI should be able to calculate and adjust for this.

slowjames said:

May I suggest:

If you want to move your armies in such a way that they'll be walking to their destination for a while, do it this way instead.

1. Determine the area you're moving to.
2. Send all your units to the same square, but make that square one turn short of the tactical destination.
3. Deploy your units to their specific formation from the staging area.

I have been using this method to fine effect lately. It doesn't take particularly more time than sending them in formation in the first place. In fact, it might just take less considering that battle lines change and you may have to redo the formation anyway if the tactical situation evolves while your units are walking.

Click to expand...

This is what I do and it still causes massive problems. If a unit occupies the end tile you sent them to every single unit will ask for new orders. Also, if the unit wants to move onto a tile that another unit is on on any given turn it will stop and ask for orders instead of rerouting itself.

Thry said:

[*]#1 It is impossible to determine which exact squares you have sent your units to, unless you happen to have a eidetic memory.

Click to expand...

This is pain. In Civ4, it was possible to put captions in map squares by alt+s. Apparently there is no such feature any more. It would be so helpful.

I agree. I hate how I can't tell which units I've sent to a destination or not. In Civ4, I could click a unit and see the path they're following and destination.

I think I might just play small maps until this has been addressed, unless I go for a non-conquest victory.

I have to agree that I think a lot of people here are using armies that are simply too big.

I'm making the same mistake. I'm so used to churning out units that I have a flood of soldiers running around. I'm playing lower difficulties so I can learn the new game mechanics, but it's hard to break the habit of always making more units.

Even with small armies moving 5 units or so it's a kind of PITA.

My suggestion is to be able to select 5 units (that have available movement orders) and are on adjacent tiles and then press a button 'Create convoy', that will actually create a convoy. The unit should not be able to attack or defend. There should be an undeploy capability where you could extract e.g. 3 units from the convoy and deploy them and then send the remaining convoy somewhere else. That's how I imagine it.