Buildings Limiting Number of Unit?

[Sleeeper]

This tactic means that wars are over in 10-20 turns with me returning all captured cities to my new vassal before revolutions become a problem for me. I then walk my troops back home. This works, for me quite well, especially as I usually attack when their main forces are busy elsewhere.

I prefer to fortificate my stack somewhere on forested hill and get attacked by enemy's army (or even bait/force AI to attack me if they refuse to attack me on hill) to gain some XP for my stack, and when hostile army depletes, beeline cities.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I would agree that a unit should not only be supported in terms of food by the city that built it... that'd be hell.

Instead, each unit should take a base amount, say, .1 food divided by the number of cities in the empire, from EACH city, thus the food cost is completely split across the nation evenly. If we want to combat the effect this has on smaller cities, we could put some sort of contribution percentage bar in the city screen I suppose but I would suggest resolving it instead with a trading mechanism (city a sets up a food support network to city b, giving it 1 food per round each time the network is established and networks can be removed at will sorta thing.)

The food cost/city/total cities would be a decimal # we would establish in the xml for the units themselves and would of course be based largely on the type of troop... cavalry will suck up a lot more food than footmen who would eat a lot more than a helicopter unit etc... (perhaps we could actually base it on unitcombats instead to really simplify the system the concept.)

This is just for realism... the current system isn't really reflective of the real military staffing concerns of a nation. However, the one thing I'd be at a total loss on how we could reflect this would be that the more troops that die, the slower a nation's growth, or the more set back it would be. I mean... those are actually people dying right? People that could've bred? Last I checked people make more people, not food which is really only a limiting factor on population rather than the reason population grows.

 

[Necratoid]

So I'm playing nobel, v18 with raging barbs... and I'm the last Civ on the contient after the second wave of neanderthalls... which was great until I found what killed them all. A stone axeman leader a stack of 40 (FOURTY) Neanderthalls... that city took forever to kill.

...

Then I found another claimed capital city... this one is guarded by... by... :dubiouss: 20 stone age units or so (stone axemen and a slinger and lots of stone spearmen)... and over 120 neanderthalls.
Logistics at work!

While this seige is incredible for leveling the 2 rogues chipping away at said 140+ unit in a single city when I just got the wheel... I can't help but think I that they should have collapsed into a singularity from the sheer mass of 'no' involved in that.

I have a hard time thinking of something that proves my point more that a population 1 city generating this kind of force.

 

[EldrinFal]

there already is ample support cost especially for units outside your cultural borders - but if one wants to tie that to food support instead of gold support one really should have a civ-wide food store - forcing you to keep track of which units were build in which city in order to not have your production cities starve would be terrible.

Edit: further its not unusual to have production and high food in different cities - so you'll really need a way to distribute that. I would also strongly push to limit something like this to out of borders units, otherwise you'll again end up mostly having a steam roller effect where those on the defensive not only lose land and improvements but also defensive units and population to a determined attack - this might be sort of realistic, but I don't see how it improves gameplay.

I had thought that the game keeps track of where a unit is made already. It is listed in the text of the unit name at least. So I was assuming that could be used to set the food drain for each city. Or the city keeps track and it lists the unit when you highlight over the Food indicator, just as it lists buildings now.

I would agree that the food drain only kicks in outside of cultural borders.

But yes, echoing your last remark and mine at the end of my earlier comment, I'm not sure this really ADDS to the fun of the game. Especially now with the food adjustments and cities taking a long time to grow-- after all, I believe Koshling only implemented the food waste to slow growth down. That was the main purpose. And it was done in a realistic way.

 

[Koshling]

So I'm playing nobel, v18 with raging barbs... and I'm the last Civ on the contient after the second wave of neanderthalls... which was great until I found what killed them all. A stone axeman leader a stack of 40 (FOURTY) Neanderthalls... that city took forever to kill.

...

Then I found another claimed capital city... this one is guarded by... by... :dubiouss: 20 stone age units or so (stone axemen and a slinger and lots of stone spearmen)... and over 120 neanderthalls.
Logistics at work!

While this seige is incredible for leveling the 2 rogues chipping away at said 140+ unit in a single city when I just got the wheel... I can't help but think I that they should have collapsed into a singularity from the sheer mass of 'no' involved in that.

I have a hard time thinking of something that proves my point more that a population 1 city generating this kind of force.

The city didn't (at least no evidence it did) generate them. The issue is that barbarians are barbarians - it's all one team - so neanderthals will join up with regular barbs abs defend their cities etc. Once aiandy does the work to allow multiple barbarian teams this effect should go away since Neanderthals will then get their own team

 

[Praetyre]

I'm not really sure an effective solution could be found to the fact that units don't displace population. 1 population unit does not represent a fixed amount of people; there is a difference of 50 people between a size 1 and size 2 city, but it is 500 between a size 9 and 10, 5000 between size 14 and 15, 10,000 between 16 and 17 and so on. Furthermore, different units will represent very different numbers of people, though I'd be happy to provide my own estimates if anyone's interested in making the "Soldiers" not be several orders of magnitude greater than actual population. For instance, a spy unit may represent a cell of about 50 people, while an Axeman could be 5000, a Rifleman 10,000 and what have you. There's also the fact these represent fundamentally different types of "brain drain" on a nation's economy. The loss of 5000 burly axemen who could have returned home to do domestic police duty or hard labor is not the same as the loss of 50 eggheads who could have turned their skills towards being priests or scientists.

 

[Necratoid]

I'm not sure you understand my point... ignoring the lack of people to make 150 units on one square... the logistics fail in ways that sanity does while staring into the eyes of an old one.

If by no evidence you mean I'm watching them generate at a rate of 1 new unit every 2-3 rounds then sure. That may be the stack itself... but non neanderthalls are popping up as well and those I think the city is making at the rate of 1 every 5-8 turns or so.

The point is I suggested my logistics requirement specifically so that a stack like this will need to resort to canabalism around 15-25 units. Its the completely unsupported stack size I take issue with. The city itself is just keeping that Stack of Apocolyptic DOOM!!! stationary.

Go back and read my suggestion post on the previous page then read my last post.

 

[Praetyre]

Your point was not the one I was addressing, but if you like;

I think that I must share part of the blame for this problem. Way back in V13-14 or thereabouts, I noticed that unit production was ludicrously slow on the speeds C2C is meant to be played at, and suggested to StrategyOnly that it be raised to normal levels so that longer speeds become, effectively, multiple normal games stacked on top of each other rather than a single normal game stretched to gargantuan proportions. This, combined with the gazillion barbarian spawns (particularily animals and Neanderthals), can potentially result in the humongous armies you describe.

I don't think there's a single "silver bullet" for this problem, sadly. Lowering barbarian spawn rates mighr help, but I think the bigger issue here is the lack of competition among barbs, such as the proposed predator/prey dichotomy. Not only would that keep their numbers down, it would be balanced by the experience the predators would receive as the result of their victories. You could also go with the food-support option, but food is quite limited as is (and should be), and you'd have to figure in the effects of Military Civics. You could also use civics to limit army sizes (excluding invisible allegiance, espionage, non combat, national and world units from the count), but you'd have to find some way to scale it with map size.

I do like the idea of restricting army sizes with technology, though. But again, you'd need to scale it like you would with civics. And you'd need to take into account the effects that technologies like Military Tradition would have, as well.

 

[ori]

Frankly, instead of removal by units just make them cost unit production - implement a civ wide -x% penalty on unit production for owning a unit (or having a unit outside your borders) - that would effectively reduce army sizes I guess without actually killing off growth or even starving cities that are effectively your production hubs and the like.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I'm not really sure an effective solution could be found to the fact that units don't displace population. 1 population unit does not represent a fixed amount of people; there is a difference of 50 people between a size 1 and size 2 city, but it is 500 between a size 9 and 10, 5000 between size 14 and 15, 10,000 between 16 and 17 and so on. Furthermore, different units will represent very different numbers of people, though I'd be happy to provide my own estimates if anyone's interested in making the "Soldiers" not be several orders of magnitude greater than actual population. For instance, a spy unit may represent a cell of about 50 people, while an Axeman could be 5000, a Rifleman 10,000 and what have you. There's also the fact these represent fundamentally different types of "brain drain" on a nation's economy. The loss of 5000 burly axemen who could have returned home to do domestic police duty or hard labor is not the same as the loss of 50 eggheads who could have turned their skills towards being priests or scientists.

I hadn't thought about that last point... that may have to be further considered.

But I've been considering that what we're really talking about here is much of what you just said. Troops ARE people and should thus be considered a portion of your population. And that is exactly what CivIV has NEVER attempted to do.

This leads to issues with irrational troop counts and a complete strategic disregard for loss of life (though it is somewhat proxied by the happiness system and war weariness). But how to represent that troops are people of the nation?

My proposition is this.

• Unit Combat types define the percentage of population that each type of unit represents. Thus a Melee unit would represent .1 population. Thus that Melee unit would add .1 to a Troop Population count value.
• A Unit at home doesn't waste more food than a normal citizen in the city, thus you would create a numeric drain on the food of each city by totaling the amount of Troop Population inside the national borders and divide that total by the number of cities and each city is drained that much food each round.
• A unit in the field costs more to feed... more activity, more waste in transportation and maintenance of supply lines and storage methods etc... Thus each round we total the Troop Population outside the national borders, multiply it by two and divide that total by the number of cities and each city is drained that much food each round.
• We do the same as above with production as these troops would usually otherwise be included in industry.
• Current gold maintenance of units is already considered in a more complex system that considers the pay of those people, hazard pay, maintenance of the troops by purchasing goods provided by private sources that would otherwise never have gone to the state etc...
• When a unit DIES, its population is subtracted from the nation. This means that population must have a secondary # value that is decimalized, a Casualty value perhaps, that only impacts the population when it finally totals a full integer and doesn't impact cities with a population of 1. Otherwise it would tally much like the food costs except be a permanent growth until 1 is reached then it would take its toll on the city population and reset itself back down to 0. So in otherwords, when we lose a melee unit, .1 is divided by the amount of cities in the empire and that value is then added to the Casualty Value. Won't be much of course - with 5 cities, .1 becomes .02. Once a city's Casualty Value reaches a full 1, it subtracts one from the pop of the city and subtracts one from itself.
• If troops are given to another nation, I'm thinking casualty values would be added to the cities of the nation that gave and subtracted from the cities of the nation that received.
• When troops are dissolved, no changes are made in casualty values but those troops obviously stop being a drain on your food, production and wealth.

I think that would about cover it and wouldn't even take tooooooo much programming in the dll to enact. Not something to do overnight perhaps and the AI should then be taught to respect troop volumes a bit more but this would make the game feel 1000% more real to me. How about you?

 

[Koshling]

I hadn't thought about that last point... that may have to be further considered.

But I've been considering that what we're really talking about here is much of what you just said. Troops ARE people and should thus be considered a portion of your population. And that is exactly what CivIV has NEVER attempted to do.

This leads to issues with irrational troop counts and a complete strategic disregard for loss of life (though it is somewhat proxied by the happiness system and war weariness). But how to represent that troops are people of the nation?

My proposition is this.

• Unit Combat types define the percentage of population that each type of unit represents. Thus a Melee unit would represent .1 population. Thus that Melee unit would add .1 to a Troop Population count value.
• A Unit at home doesn't waste more food than a normal citizen in the city, thus you would create a numeric drain on the food of each city by totaling the amount of Troop Population inside the national borders and divide that total by the number of cities and each city is drained that much food each round.
• A unit in the field costs more to feed... more activity, more waste in transportation and maintenance of supply lines and storage methods etc... Thus each round we total the Troop Population outside the national borders, multiply it by two and divide that total by the number of cities and each city is drained that much food each round.
• We do the same as above with production as these troops would usually otherwise be included in industry.
• Current gold maintenance of units is already considered in a more complex system that considers the pay of those people, hazard pay, maintenance of the troops by purchasing goods provided by private sources that would otherwise never have gone to the state etc...
• When a unit DIES, its population is subtracted from the nation. This means that population must have a secondary # value that is decimalized, a Casualty value perhaps, that only impacts the population when it finally totals a full integer and doesn't impact cities with a population of 1. Otherwise it would tally much like the food costs except be a permanent growth until 1 is reached then it would take its toll on the city population and reset itself back down to 0. So in otherwords, when we lose a melee unit, .1 is divided by the amount of cities in the empire and that value is then added to the Casualty Value. Won't be much of course - with 5 cities, .1 becomes .02. Once a city's Casualty Value reaches a full 1, it subtracts one from the pop of the city and subtracts one from itself.
• If troops are given to another nation, I'm thinking casualty values would be added to the cities of the nation that gave and subtracted from the cities of the nation that received.
• When troops are dissolved, no changes are made in casualty values but those troops obviously stop being a drain on your food, production and wealth.

I think that would about cover it and wouldn't even take tooooooo much programming in the dll to enact. Not something to do overnight perhaps and the AI should then be taught to respect troop volumes a bit more but this would make the game feel 1000% more real to me. How about you?

Would this really add to gameplay?

 

[Necratoid]

It'll add to it greatly... see by evening out the food costs equally throughout the nation... every city below a certain size will starve to death near instantly.

Sadly I'm not being sarcastic.

It also completely ignores that barbs ignore that entirely and thus Rocks Falls... all Civs Die.

It also ignores that it takes 2 or 3 military units at minimum to guard a city... thus a pop 2 city that contains 50-100 people requires somewhere between 10-15 thousand people to guard it without the berserkering in paranioa.

Lets not try to logic out how this works with the liberal civic.

It also ignores my idea of having troups in the field having to spread out or starve at a certain stack size.

Then there is the idea that you have 5000 guys fielded in a axemen unit... I mean the Roman legions had centurians leading 100 men as a large base unit. Lets not go into the problem that a platoon is what 9 guys?

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

It also ignores that it takes 2 or 3 military units at minimum to guard a city... thus a pop 2 city that contains 50-100 people requires somewhere between 10-15 thousand people to guard it without the berserkering in paranioa.

Through out most of the game I have two defensive and one spy in each of my cities. Plus one or two "armies" of about 15-20 units including support staff - healers, dogs to see invisible, a defender to protect the artilary. Then there is the navy.

It also ignores my idea of having troups in the field having to spread out or starve at a certain stack size.

One mod (Total Realism?) had a mechanism of over crowding on a tile. All units on the plot had the overcrowded promotion applied to them which reduced their effectiveness at attack ad defend. When they moved to a plot with few enough units on it they lost this promotion.

I tried the idea of one unit per 1,000 population and did not enjoy it.

 

[Necratoid]

Always remember that a city is a capital city of a province/state/whatever.

As far as Boston is conserned, the rest of the state exists as a support staff to allow it to exist. The same with New York city. That is why all those little towns and cottages and the like exist in game. To feed resources into each major city. Tax money, food, raw materials... all allowing such a large population to exist in that small an area.

My idea would be more: A major city can support 1 army unit per population point up to 5-ten and then its one more every 5. As long as your in this wide support zone domestic troops don't have an impact. This would basically be the way free troop support is covered from civics. Some techs like logistics would increase this cap.

It would not hurt a Civ unless they massively over build their military. Its when they leave the Civs borders and have no supply chain or exceed the supply limit that is soaked up by your Civ that it starts to matter. As barbs have no supply chain they have to live off the land like everyone else.

Arguing the specifics of what this penalty is and how much support can be instituted after the basic idea is hammered out... Forest good for supporting armies... serts and ic horrid.

 

[Thunderbrd]

It wouldn't drain the smaller cities of their food too badly if we have the trade routes established that I have in mind down the road for goods... I'll re-address the issue then because I see the point right now.

Overall, the impact of one unit, according to the currently proposed formula would be minimal - I mean 1 axemen drains 5 cities of .02 food each? So over the course of 5 cities you'd have say, at a high volume of defensive troops about 5 defenders, that's a whopping half a food being drained for each city IN TOTAL.

I'm sure they can find the food to support an attack army too without it being too great a strain.

The drain would be extemely gradual and would allow for large militaries still but would lead to a noteworthy slowing of growth and production - thus those who played with more conservative armies and took the risk to be 'less' defended or who spent more effort on army quality over quantity would find that they grow and develop faster. Already true where gold is concerned but gold doesn't impact much OUTSIDE of troop support and creates a drain on research when the armies are too large and the player too aggressive with war.

Would it improve play? I would think it would for my tastes but I'm always happy to make large changes like these be OPTIONS due to understanding there will always be personality conflicts on such things.

 

[Necratoid]

5 cities... .2 an axeman per city... 3 units minimum per city... 15 units at .2 is minus three production to start... add in the workers at at least that rate to be consistant... 2 per city so another 2 ... meaning 5 per city with out any actually doing anything. Still new cities starved out of existance.

Lets try a new game....in the prehistoric era... 1 city, 2 units units to start off. This is using the minor Civ starting option to avoid whiny demanding leaders slowing us down making semi-idle threats every turn. So -2 to start... meaning we can't build any new units and the 2 we have just starved to death. Okay racing for that nutcracking stone so we can break even... stupid gather eating the little food I have... lets kill destroy that. Assuming the Neanderthalls don't over run us we can have 2-3 guys with counting the new gather.

Fast forward a bit: okay we got stable with one city and even dumb lucked into a few animal herds so we can actually have 3 defenders a pair of workers and a 2-3 guards for that new settlement. Fast forward a bit more: Okay made I made my first settlement and... er its starving to death... okay nevermind its just draining food production from the capital... wish I had enough to try hunting again. Wait... I'm halucinating... only the military units are fed... now if I can get that cart path finished I can get some enough to grow to size 2 in 500 turns. Score!

Yeah... not work so well.

 

[JosEPh_II]

T-Bird,
You idea would work IF we went back to v16 or even v15 Food production and food/pop values. (Gold would also need to be restored as well to those versions values) Unfortunately the mod has not stayed with those. Instead City Limits was introduced to start curbing growth thru Gov't Civics. As well as upping considerably the Cost of most building and the amount of food needed to grow a city.

Unfortunately Necratoid is correct in his assessment, even with its "veiled" cynicism. goodjob: Nectrtoid) The mod with it's current Gold, Maintenance and Food/pop values just wouldn't support this idea w/o some major revisions/going back to Older ways.

JosEPh.

 

[Thunderbrd]

You're calculating wrong.

.1 per axemen divided by the number of cities per city. You are saying .2 per city and that doesn't take into consideration that you're dividing the amount of the food cost by the amount of cities. The difference is certainly cripplingly profound if you overlook that step.

This means that if you have 2 cities, and 10 units (assuming all are melee - and that's 5 units per city mind you) then you would be costing each city .5 food total. (10 units x .1 food cost)=1 food upkeep, then split between both cities you have .5 food drained each round from those cities.

We start a game, we can build and maintain 10 units before its even costing us a full food and production in our one city.

Other adjustments to food and production metrics can easily be made to accommodate. I'm currently working on ways we can get 'big picture' calculations at different stages of the game that will help with those sorts of adjustments.

 

[ori]

the problem with this is that your production cities will likely starve before those that actually have more in the way of food production - you'll still end up crippling a civ that starts to go the route of large military just by shutting down any production center they may have - and starvation is a much more punitive method of stopping additional troop buildup than much anything because it doesn't just stop being punitive when the troops are gone. If you want an additional cost for troops above the current gold maintenance then it should only be present when the troops are there and not linger for ever...

 

[BlueGenie]

My penny would be cast with those in opposition in this matter. Adding another resource to be drained by military units is not something I'd want to see. As it is (v18+) it already costs a bunch of gold, quite a bunch, to house an effective military. Don't forget the animals you want to keep for Carnivals (and possibly in later versions for Zoos), herds, and so on. Each of those already cost gold, food would drain cities even more than Nect's examples. And a decent Navy? Way more drain on food then too.

In my eyes isn't what makes people be born, it's like it always has been; an incentive for people to copulate and have children. Any society expands and grows in population the better a society fares (and not only with food but in the game it symbolises this), the more healthy people are, the more they feel secure.

I also would like to point out that our 50 spies, the 5000 axemen, those 10000 riflemen, or special unit Delta's 9 members, all LIVE at home when they aren't out fighting for their homes and countries. Each turn in the start counts several years in which I'm certain they are home with their families a lot. (When I disband a unit I imagine I'm sending them home, not executing them.) Troop movement is only slow because it wouldn't work in a game environment to be able to have them anywhere on any given turn.
When they are out of borders (and support kicks in) they aren't home. The current gold costs should include getting them food, not exclude it and cost more, in food or anything else.

In conclusion we already have a system to use to "break up" stacks of doom. It's called limiting amount of troops on a plot and can be found under the C2C tab in BUG. I usually have it on 12.
Know that it only counts attack capable units so you can unfortunately have 200 units on one plot IF 12 can attack and the rest are Defend Only units. It's still not a stack of doom though.

Cheers