No 1UPT

[Fins]

Chess doesn't have risk-free ranged damage without movement, and it isn't trying to be a strategic or tactical wargame.
...

It doesn't. So what? And yes, it isn't _trying_ to be a strategic wargame; rather, it _is_ a strategic wargame.

In chess, starting strategies are known as "gambits". End-game strategies - in english are simply called "endgame strategies", in other languages there are special terms for those though, like russian " endshpil' ". Google search for "chess strategy" - with quotes, that is, - returns ~346000 results. So you see, chess is strategic game.

As for "wargame" - well, it is exactly war going on on a chessboard; pieces like knights, bishops, castles and pawns clearly indicate that, especially when advanced design pieces are being used to play the game.

 

[nimling]

If you cannot understand why this line of argument is ridiculous, I'd be shocked.

This sort of trolling is saddening to see. I've always said, bad design breeds bad behavior.

Moderator Action: Please don't accuse another member of trolling. If you disagree with a post, explain why rather than making such accusations.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Agent327]

Perhaps you should look up the meaning of trolling sometime.

I too (as the OP) do not like 1UpT.
civ is a strategy game. that is more strategy. less tactics. however 1UpT is here to stay.

That said, for anyone who doesn't like 1UPT, there's this thing called mods. (2UPT, 5PT, no limit, all available.)

 

[nimling]

The problem of mods is that the AI doesn't understand them very well, and their implementation is going to be rough if and when Firaxis releases patch.
Besides, 2 or 5 units per tile doesn't address how ranged combat is broken, or that any stacking limitation is arbitrary.

What's really bad is the arguments that crop up in favor of 1UPT are just baffling and stupid, just like the arguments people make for multiplayer's implementation in Civ5 - literally one of the worst experiences imaginable, where players are obliged to camp on ticks, chew up clock, and can't even queue orders. When people defend that nonsense as an actual game, it's no wonder so many people give up on Civ5.
Moderator Action: It is so easy to dismiss the arguments of others by calling them names, like baffling and stupid. It is much more difficult to prove they are that by discussion. Please stop being so dismissive of others, as it borders on trolling, and discuss the topic instead, you might learn something.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

I'll be honest, the moment I heard Civ5 would use 1UPT I knew it was going to get reamed critically, even after several people explained in excruciating detail why 1UPT doesn't work, people who are better than me.

So yeah, that 1UPT doesn't work and creates numerous imbalances is not an opinion, it's a fact. That ranged combat is broken is also a fact, not an opinion. Basically everyone worth listening to has told me, regardless of their experience with Civilization or strategy games, the same thing, and this covers players old and young alike (so it's not even a "Firaxis is dumbing it down" argument - 1UPT isn't dumbed down, it's just dumb). The only arguments in favor of Civ5's implementation come from people who want to defend bad game design, and people with criticisms of Civ3-4's stacks of doom - some valid, some not.

I for one would much rather have Civ4-style SoDs than the implementation in Civ5. That way, the mechanics of the base game could be worked on in order to ship a product with far more replay value.

I suppose the best hope will be for someone to release an actually good TBS, despite limited production values. Easier said than done, but several iterations of 1UPT have shown why it's a bad idea.

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action: As a reminder, the focus of the Ideas & Suggestions subforum is for changes to the base game by Firaxis either in the game itself (via patch / expansion / DLC) OR more commonly for something this big the next game in the Civilization series.
It's Creation & Customization whose focus is on discussions about creating mods, desirability or doing so, how easy it is, how it would impact the AI, etc.

 

[GenEngineer]

Just to throw in my two cents (and add another voice to the topic), I vastly prefer 1 unit per tile. I started at Civ IV, but preferred Civ V because of that exact switch (among other reasons). In my mind, unlimited units on a single tile just turns the game into a question of who has the bigger army, which is less entertaining to me than the way it is in Civ V and BE. If yo don't like it, fine - that's your opinion. But that doesn't automatically mean that everyone has to agree with you.

 

[nimling]

Having wars determined by who can spam ranged units is not more fun.
Civ V / BE is no different, the only difference is that the game uses carpet of doom and obscures the SoD issues of earlier games with more micromanagement; or alternatively, in MP the game is literally unplayable.
There are better ways to implement tactical combat, but the most workable method would be to implement tactical combat as in Master of Orion - which, while it works, would slow down the game far too much, or necessitate tactical combat to be automated to move the game along (which is fine, but many players would not like the lack of control).

For civilization IV, if battles were strictly about who had the bigger stack, no one would ever be able to win on Deity, and MP games would be predictable. The difference between Civ V and Civ IV from an MP standpoint is that in Civ V, war is mostly about who can click the ranged attack button faster, and spamming ranged carpets and unit heals saps away much strategic thinking. In Civ IV the focus is more on strategic positioning of big stacks, one big stack is not strategically optimal simply because it can only be in one given place, doing one thing.
The original AI for Civilization IV did try to split up stacks to pillage the countryside, but for a lot of reasons the AI's implementation of this was poor. The AI doesn't have a very good mind for grand strategy, or the value of splitting up SoDs to fight in multiple theaters... a human player, however, does. Civ IV's other flaws have less to do with SoD, and more to do with the particular implementation of SoD and single-file combat.

The point of this thread is to put together viable alternatives to Civ 4's SoD problem, not fix an obviously broken system - and Civ V combat is very, very broken and un-fun. It's not even a matter of the AI's inability to fight with 1UPT, it's not fun for human vs. human matchups and the silliness of ranged archers makes early war an ungodly chore, unrealistic, and un-strategic.

The other alternative is to do away with tile-based units altogether. Master of Orion did fine without tiles on the grand strategic level - translating that to a Civilization game is possible, and gets around both the SoD issue and the intractable 1000-year-war issue. (One advantage of SoD also is that it allows for large armies to amass and fight a war much faster, while Civ V's carpet of doom means slogging through tedious busy-work against two players with large armies.)

It's quite saddening to see people on this forum lash out against someone for stating the obvious, and arguing in favor of bad design. BE could be a much better game, but the developers need to heed why Civ V failed and repair those great mistakes (despite critical and sales success - sure Firaxis can sell Civilization and games journalism is terrible, but a bad game design has long-term impact on brand quality, and the backlash against BE and Starships is an indicator of that). To be fair, I think BE's creators did recognize some of the flaws in Civ5 combat mechanics, but were constrained in solving those problems by trying to stick too close to the Civ5 engine, and the crux of the problem is that 1UPT simply does not work under the conditions Civ5 and BE are played in. Just hacking in Civ4-style SoDs would be better than what they have at the moment.

 

[Gorbles]

How do you define broken, and how does this definition match CiV, but not Civ IV?

You say you're stating the obvious, but you have to understand that what you're posting is simply your opinion, which going on the responses of other posters you have failed to prove in any defining way as of yet.

 

[Hail]

Didn't this problem exist in Civ3? I played Civ3 the least out of the series.

yes it does. ranged units in civ3 are op, but they cannot defend and are capturable, so they must be defended. bombers are completely op and break the game imho.


Fins, what about GO? it even does not have unit types!

civ:be failed at 1UpT even more than civ5. in civ:be, there are even more terrain types that were made impassible. and the map seems/feels smaller.

what I suggest:

• units cost pop.
• a group of units fights as one aka in CtP.
• remove healing. to "heal" a unit, the player must move it to a city and use up it's pop linearly to replace the killed portion.

 

[Galgus]

That sounds really boring to me to be honest. You basically want to get rid of the somewhat tactical combat we have now and replace it with something that I can only describe as "stack as much as possible and go!"

1UPT works just fine, even for the AI - the problem the computer has is the terrain. Play the Civ 5 Civil War Scenario and you'll see that it does a somewhat decent job in open terrain, but the normal maps are just extremely narrow and rough terrain has such an enormous impact on how fights go. More often than not the AI blocks itself with its own units.

I fully agree.

The only way this would work would be a separate battle screen when armies clash - like Rome Total War.

Otherwise it just kills most of the tactics in war.

 

[legalizefreedom]

1UPT and hexes are about the only redeeming qualities of Civ V. I prefer it and not just in this game. All of my favorite strategy games are 1UPT.

If something isn't working correctly, I believe it should be fixed around 1UPT.

 

[Gorbles]

I'd honestly like to read an argument against 1UPT that isn't "1UPT sucks this is a fact" or centred around the AI's failure to cope with life.

Gaming AI in general fails at coping with life, this is a problem area that games development in general needs to look at, not just Firaxis.

 

[Gort]

1 UPT makes moving units along roads in peacetime annoying and generally breaks pathfinding since units are always getting in each other's way.

 

[Gorbles]

I don't see those as critical flaws with 1UPT, though. Certainly even with my Worker armies in BE (given that I no longer automate them either) I haven't had troubles pathing them, especially once I have Roads up. Once I have Magrails it's an absolute laugh, most average-size landmasses take a couple of turns to go from north to south.

Pathfinding is an AI-specific problem from how I understand the term, sorry if you meant something else. Pathfinding is basically only an issue in real-time games where units path themselves, or for the AI in Civ. games as they path themselves.

Unless you meant in how you're multi-turn routing multiple units, and they end up blocking each other at certain points? The game normally handles this well, or so I thought.

 

[Gort]

I don't see those as critical flaws with 1UPT, though.

Yeah, the critical flaw with 1 UPT in civ games is that the AI is terrible at it, which makes warfare dull.

 

[Gorbles]

So Civ. isn't designed for PvP gameplay? Why do we even bother ranting about game balance then? Design I can understand, as poor design impacts enjoyment even in single player mode . . . but all the balance arguments I've got into over the past few months involved some kind of implicit understanding that everything is about PvP gameplay.

Which is it? We can't keep picking the game mode that supports our argument. Either the game is designed for solo play, or the game is designed with multiplay vs. human players in mind.

Finally, the AI sucking at 1UPT is not a problem with 1UPT:

I'd honestly like to read an argument against 1UPT that isn't "1UPT sucks this is a fact" or centred around the AI's failure to cope with life.

Gaming AI in general fails at coping with life, this is a problem area that games development in general needs to look at, not just Firaxis.

As per my post, a few posts up.

 

[Gort]

So Civ. isn't designed for PvP gameplay? Why do we even bother ranting about game balance then? Design I can understand, as poor design impacts enjoyment even in single player mode . . . but all the balance arguments I've got into over the past few months involved some kind of implicit understanding that everything is about PvP gameplay.

Which is it? We can't keep picking the game mode that supports our argument. Either the game is designed for solo play, or the game is designed with multiplay vs. human players in mind.

AI players and alien units are features of both forms of the game. The issue is larger in singleplayer, though.

Finally, the AI sucking at 1UPT is not a problem with 1UPT:

This is a bit like saying we don't need planes because if you had strong enough arms you could flap them and fly, so the solution is to work out your arms more.

Game designers need to make games that are suited to the level of AI that is actually available to them. The AI in this game cannot cope with 1UPT, so it should be replaced with a system that the AI can cope with better.

 

[Gorbles]

You have it backwards. If you continually limit games design and implementation in order to suit shortcomings in other areas, those other areas will never be advanced.

The problem there is AI, not 1UPT. Which is why I asked for other arguments, so I'm done going in circles on this little tangent now, sorry.

 

[Galgus]

Yeah, the critical flaw with 1 UPT in civ games is that the AI is terrible at it, which makes warfare dull.

Yet with unit stacking warfare is even more dull - tactical maneuvering practically dies as wars turn into "who has the bigger army?"

 

[Hail]

Yet with unit stacking warfare is even more dull - tactical maneuvering practically dies as wars turn into "who has the bigger army?"

yet, I think that civ is a strategy game.