VicRatlhead5199
King
Not one bit.
I wouldn't even say the AI handled stacking better, it was pretty awful at it as well. Humans could concentrate a SoD in the right place and march across the AI who tended to spread their troops out more. It didn't even use siege equipment very effectively to hinder the players' creation of SoDs. Not sure what game you guys were playing where stacks improved AI performance but I found wars in earlier civs to be just a matter of filling buckets then throwing those buckets in the right direction and saying "Yay, I win!" Before CiV I played totally peaceful most of the time because war in the earlier civs was boring as hell amounting to repeatedly commanding the same stack to attack the same city repeatedly. I don't even remember having to put much thought into stack composition. Just made sure to have some defensive units, offensive units and siege equipment. If I wanted good war I had to play Total War.
I'll admit the current 1upt has some drawbacks. Mainly unit balance. The units really need more specific strengths and weaknesses to prevent any one unit from dominating. Then the "stupid AI" would just need to build a variety of units to overcome its poor tactics since each different unit would force the player to attack in a different way. I'm hoping they stick to 1upt and improve it rather than going back to derping around with stacks in VI.
Maybe limited stacks based on unit class like Gedemon mentioned might work but I'd worry that all stacks would quickly become uniform and therefore kind of boring again.
I wouldn't even say the AI handled stacking better, it was pretty awful at it as well. Humans could concentrate a SoD in the right place and march across the AI who tended to spread their troops out more. It didn't even use siege equipment very effectively to hinder the players' creation of SoDs. Not sure what game you guys were playing where stacks improved AI performance but I found wars in earlier civs to be just a matter of filling buckets then throwing those buckets in the right direction and saying "Yay, I win!" Before CiV I played totally peaceful most of the time because war in the earlier civs was boring as hell amounting to repeatedly commanding the same stack to attack the same city repeatedly. I don't even remember having to put much thought into stack composition. Just made sure to have some defensive units, offensive units and siege equipment. If I wanted good war I had to play Total War.
I'll admit the current 1upt has some drawbacks. Mainly unit balance. The units really need more specific strengths and weaknesses to prevent any one unit from dominating. Then the "stupid AI" would just need to build a variety of units to overcome its poor tactics since each different unit would force the player to attack in a different way. I'm hoping they stick to 1upt and improve it rather than going back to derping around with stacks in VI.
Maybe limited stacks based on unit class like Gedemon mentioned might work but I'd worry that all stacks would quickly become uniform and therefore kind of boring again.