Amrunril
Emperor
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2015
- Messages
- 1,236
I'm curious how other players feel about Humankind's system. While I feel like this was put forward as a major selling point of the game, I don't personally see much to recommend it over Civ V and VI's system. Both revolve around a mixture of melee and ranged units engaging in one unit per tile tactical combat, spread across the game's overall strategic map. While there are plenty of more subtle differences, Humankind's biggest adjustment is, effectively, to allow stacking outside of combat. While this is extremely helpful in cutting down unit micromanagement out of combat unit micromanagement, it also introduces several significant issues:
1. Thematically, armies consolidating for movement and spreading out for battle is pretty much completely backwards. A smaller military unit can generally move faster and keep itself fed more easily, so the standard practice for most of history was for armies to spread out while moving but consolidate for battle.
2. On a mechanical level, the need for battles to have discrete beginnings and ends creates a number of problematic artifacts
1. Thematically, armies consolidating for movement and spreading out for battle is pretty much completely backwards. A smaller military unit can generally move faster and keep itself fed more easily, so the standard practice for most of history was for armies to spread out while moving but consolidate for battle.
2. On a mechanical level, the need for battles to have discrete beginnings and ends creates a number of problematic artifacts
- Deployment zones for battle are difficult (or at least unintuitive) to predict. This can result in one army being stuck in too small an area to fully deploy and makes stationing an army in a defensive position very difficult.
- The attacker can usually strike on the first turn of combat with most or all of their units. This can be a massive advantage when using large numbers of ranged units.
- Most importantly, a battle usually ends in the complete destruction of one army. This is obviously ahistorical, and I think it contributes significantly to the game's snowballing tendencies- if winning a battle entails obliterating the opposing army, then the risk of going on to capture cities is dramatically reduced.