Armies - Should be about economy

[ezzlar]

Over the civ series armies have mainly been a production factor. The more units you can produce the larger army you get. If you only produce units you get a huge army.

You might have to collect some more money from your cities (slider in earlier civs) but usually not that game changing.

To make wars more realistic I would like the following:

- Cost of army increases exponentially.
- Costs differ by unit. A spearman shouldnt be one coin just as an aircraft carrier

Drafting should also be used as an integrated strategy in the game. Without any severe penalties. The AI or yourself usually has huge standing armies over hundreds of years which isnt realistic. Armies are either used for waging wars or defending against a looming threath (like N-S Korea or Taiwan-China) but at a great economic cost to society.

 

[CGG1066]

To make wars more realistic I would like the following:

- Cost of army increases exponentially.
- Costs differ by unit. A spearman shouldnt be one coin just as an aircraft carrier

Well - as I understand it, your first suggestion is how unit maintenance is already calculated. And I'm not sure if your second one really gets you where you want to go.

I think the central issue here is a design decision which parallels a trend in the industry: less is more when it comes to military units. This is reflected in Civ V's high production costs (and long build times) for units, as well as the importance of experience and promotions. Units don't always die when the lose. The game is designed so it's better to have a few core units with promotions. The loss of a unit becomes a "big deal" so your military tactics change, since units are hard to replace.

Before people trash this decision, I think it's important to outline the positivists: it eliminates the effectiveness of player suicide attacks and unit spam. Quality > Quantity.

(As a side note, and please spare me your thoughts on this - if you want to rant, there are plenty of places to do so: but it also helps 1UPT work by cutting down traffic. You're entitled to your opinion as to whether this is good or bad).

On the negative side - you're exactly right. Military might seems a bit too divorced from economic considerations. If you're a productive civilization with little military, you can't build one quickly when you need it. The ability to buy units helps with this, but sort of breaks the immersion factor (At least for me). Plus isn't the same as - it seems strange that one is a perfect substitute for the other.

 

[ezzlar]

Thank you for your feed back.

The high production costs make unit building very slow and once completed seldom deleted. In modern life an army could be mobilized during a short time period and then disbanded (WW1) after the war is over. Civ makes army creation a long process when done is impossible to counter unless you anticipated the move.

I would like armies to be quickly mobilized. But very expensive. And then deleted. A dynamic ebb and flow of wars instead of build ups over ages.

 

[CGG1066]

Oh - I agree with you. But it has to be balanced against the idea's natural consequences: units become more disposable, encouraging suicide attacks; quantity > quality; more traffic to deal with in a 1UPT system.

Solutions to these problems aren't obvious or easy. It might be worth experimenting in a mod with lower unit costs, but I am not a modder. (I realize many of these things could be done in the XML, but I don't know if you have to go into Lula to optimize the AI). Should be worth experimenting with, though.

 

[cbmclean]

If you played Civ II, you remember that each unit had a home city. Depending on certain game factors, each unit "based" from a certain city above a certain number cost one shield (the Civ II equivalent of a hammer) per turn to support.

Perhaps one solution to discourage suicide attacks would be to resurrect the home city concept, with the consequence that if one of a city's units died in combat, there would be a a happiness penalty in that city. In other words, when units die, their home city becomes unhappy. This could really work to discourage suicide attacks.

 

[ezzlar]

Many wars turn into suicide attacks. WW1 had quite a few casualties!

 

[cbmclean]

Many wars turn into suicide attacks. WW1 had quite a few casualties!

True, but those huge casualties had enormous social consequences for all nations involved. I'm not saying that the suicide attacks should disappear. I just think that having unit deaths have consequences is an interesting idea.

 

[Camikaze]

If the concern is that armies are too reliant on production rather than the overall economy, then maybe the answer is to make the economy more reliant on production as well?

 

[Windsor]

The high production costs make unit building very slow and once completed seldom deleted. In modern life an army could be mobilized during a short time period and then disbanded (WW1) after the war is over. Civ makes army creation a long process when done is impossible to counter unless you anticipated the move.

I don't completely agree with this. When you have used "hammers" on training soldiers, weapons(that includes simply having the industry) and all the infrastructure, then it's possible to mobilize that force quickly. A country which have neglected it's military will need some time to rebuild.

I also see a gameplay problem here. If economy rules, then why focus on anything but science and gold? What's the downside of focusing on economy? In the series so far it has been that your vulnerable, if you could just mobilize as you need then you don't have that trade off.

 

[ezzlar]

I would say that the largest problem is the accumulation of units over time. There really is no stop to this. Once the carrier is up it´s no more expensive than the infantry unit. So if you can produce something, there is no need to think about if you can afford it.

Camikaze: Interesting thought. I will try to write something about a economy/hammer alternative.

 

[ezzlar]

I don't completely agree with this. When you have used "hammers" on training soldiers, weapons(that includes simply having the industry) and all the infrastructure, then it's possible to mobilize that force quickly. A country which have neglected it's military will need some time to rebuild.

I also see a gameplay problem here. If economy rules, then why focus on anything but science and gold? What's the downside of focusing on economy? In the series so far it has been that your vulnerable, if you could just mobilize as you need then you don't have that trade off.

I am mostly thinking militia/conscription. Easy to fast set up units even if you are not a military civ. But if you want to create an army for the offensive you need to set aside resources for the military.

 

[Roto-Router]

One approach might be the one from Civ4 Colonization; each military unit requires a unit of population. When not acting as a military unit the population unit can go back into a city and do productive work. Building "units" then becomes more about building a certain amount of military hardware required for the unit to use: bows, swords, muskets, Giant Death Robots, whatever. "Upgrades" in this sense might mean building (slowly) or buying (quickly) enough military kit to supply the population unit. Combat experience would still "level up" the population unit.

In Colonization this required a good deal of micromanagement, so if the game was going to take this approach it would need to provide a "Mobilization Tool" to keep the player from having to dig through a bunch of different cities looking for his good soldiers. I can see myself stashing almost all my soldier population units in some central city, which I would all but empty out if a war came.

You'd need to beef up city growth a bit for this approach to work, obviously. It might be enough to return the Granary to its old function rather than the fixed +2 food bonus it has in this game. Or tile yields might need to be adjusted. Easy mod either way.

Re: maintenance I agree with having different per-turn amounts based on the unit type, though that is not how it works currently. Rather, each unit - regardless of type - costs a flat per-turn amount which is based on the era: in the ancient era units cost the least and future era they cost the most, though I don't know offhand what those values are.

With the above idea maintenance would only get paid on mobilized units, though you might have some nominal costs to store the weapons. "Where to store the weapons" probably gets too down into the weeds to be fun; for this kind of game it might be enough to just have some virtual storehouse, and you can assume that the right weapons are in the right places to build the units.

You'd probably have to apply some per-turn limit on the number of units that could be mobilized to avoid having civs create instant carpets-o-doom when attacked. I imagine you could allow any population units with promotions to be mobilized instantly, then on top of that allow 1 per turn per city, or 5-10 per turn for the whole empire, or some similar kind of limit. You'd probably also have to make some maximum ratio of military to overall population size.

 

[Camikaze]

I don't completely agree with this. When you have used "hammers" on training soldiers, weapons(that includes simply having the industry) and all the infrastructure, then it's possible to mobilize that force quickly. A country which have neglected it's military will need some time to rebuild.

I also see a gameplay problem here. If economy rules, then why focus on anything but science and gold? What's the downside of focusing on economy? In the series so far it has been that your vulnerable, if you could just mobilize as you need then you don't have that trade off.

Does there need to be a downside? I can see that you don't want an overpowered strategy, but if economic factors are part of all strategies, then it doesn't just overpower one path to victory.