thestonesfan
A Client of Ron Kuby
How there aren't any, that is. Or at least, they are very rare. War in civ works, and it's generally fun, but it's kind of a haphazard mixture of ideas that doesn't really make sense.
Forgive me, but I must bring up the example of another turn-based series of games. Heroes of Might and Magic. These games, I feel, do war right. Granted, they are much more combat oriented games, but there is no reason Civ can't borrow a few of the elements that really work.
Civ3 started to change things, in a fashion, with the concept of armies. But, armies are not common. They are a rarity. This is pretty strange to me. After all, war largely consists of opposing armies attempting to annihilate each other. This is generally accomplished by one side or the other in a series of a few major battles. In Civilization, a war is made up of dozens of small battles between homogenous military units. Dumb, unrealistic, and needlessly annoying.
And really, who ever heard of an entire military unit consisting solely of archers?
If you've never played a HOMM game, here is how it works. You hire a hero(leader) and that hero can lead any number of units in his army, but can only lead several types at once. For example, I might have any army with Pikeman, Crossbowmen, Knights, and Catapults. Each adds something to my force. The crossbows give me ranged support, the knights give me mobility and good offense, the pikes give me defense, and the catapults can bombard city walls or enemy units.
Now, I'm not necessarily suggesting they have a seperate model for the tactical combat like HOMM does. Not that I would be opposed to such a thing. But we can get into that later. My main suggestion would be that instead of building units, you build armies. You specify how many of what type of unit goes into that army, and the cost and time needed to build it is dependent on what you want. Each type of unit helps your army in some way.
An army should be a big deal. You shouldn't have all that many, and they should be expensive to maintain. So, for simple city guarding, you can build garrisons instead.
This way, I think war would be much more interesting. Instead of many insignificant units running around getting into many insignificant battles, you would have fewer, but more decisive, clashes of mighty armies.
And since there would be fewer battles, I think that the option to manage each at a tactical level would be great, and wouldn't get tiresome.
Forgive me, but I must bring up the example of another turn-based series of games. Heroes of Might and Magic. These games, I feel, do war right. Granted, they are much more combat oriented games, but there is no reason Civ can't borrow a few of the elements that really work.
Civ3 started to change things, in a fashion, with the concept of armies. But, armies are not common. They are a rarity. This is pretty strange to me. After all, war largely consists of opposing armies attempting to annihilate each other. This is generally accomplished by one side or the other in a series of a few major battles. In Civilization, a war is made up of dozens of small battles between homogenous military units. Dumb, unrealistic, and needlessly annoying.
And really, who ever heard of an entire military unit consisting solely of archers?
If you've never played a HOMM game, here is how it works. You hire a hero(leader) and that hero can lead any number of units in his army, but can only lead several types at once. For example, I might have any army with Pikeman, Crossbowmen, Knights, and Catapults. Each adds something to my force. The crossbows give me ranged support, the knights give me mobility and good offense, the pikes give me defense, and the catapults can bombard city walls or enemy units.
Now, I'm not necessarily suggesting they have a seperate model for the tactical combat like HOMM does. Not that I would be opposed to such a thing. But we can get into that later. My main suggestion would be that instead of building units, you build armies. You specify how many of what type of unit goes into that army, and the cost and time needed to build it is dependent on what you want. Each type of unit helps your army in some way.
An army should be a big deal. You shouldn't have all that many, and they should be expensive to maintain. So, for simple city guarding, you can build garrisons instead.
This way, I think war would be much more interesting. Instead of many insignificant units running around getting into many insignificant battles, you would have fewer, but more decisive, clashes of mighty armies.
And since there would be fewer battles, I think that the option to manage each at a tactical level would be great, and wouldn't get tiresome.
