On why civ5's combat system is nothing more than a good idea...

[Drakarska]

You could usually fight SoD's with the right unit compositions and promotions and focusing on collateral damage rather than matching numbers. I never found the AI to match unit diversity to the point he would have favorable matchups or as much collateral damage potential as I did. My bigger gripes in civ 4 were the way the AI would sprawl in ******ed places and declare war on you while taking 30 turns to send their army to you.

Agreed. You could handle SoD's with a much smaller "combined" arms group, especially if you had severeal armies and used the terrain to your advantage. This worked even in the Anc and Med eras, all you needed was patience.

 

[Aristos]

I feel a new term has been coined.

I reveal the Blanket of Doom!

Amazing...

I welcome the term: the Blanket of Doom it is. I think it puts the new system in perspective, and counters one of the poor arguments with which civ5 is being compared to civ4. Stack of Doom has its problems, and it is not the perfect solution by any way, but this picture shows that a badly implented 1upt neglects even the few strenghts that Stacks have: maneuverability.

The Blanket of Doom. (Carpet?)

 

[Terrance888]

No, Carpet of doom will make COD and then Call of Duty will ask us why CiV players who also play COD is going down.

 

[fed1943]

What was wrong with stack of military?
Their moves? No. Just the combat.
Then, one obvious solution: allow stacks of military units; but forbid a stacked unit to attack;and
when a stack is attacked, the attacker can choose the unit being attacked.

 

[Aristos]

What was wrong with stack of military?
Their moves? No. Just the combat.
Then, one obvious solution: allow stacks of military units; but forbid a stacked unit to attack;and
when a stack is attacked, the attacker can choose the unit being attacked.

What was wrong was the unlimited number of units in the stack, without penalty. They tried to introduce the "stack killers" as siege/arty units, but it broke the immersion/reality factor (who likes to "suicide" catapults?). But the solution to that was not to go to the other extreme, using a system that does not scale well with the scope of a civ game. The solution was a system ala Call To Power, but they ignored it. Why? I don't know. The "I'm a genius because I modded FF" syndrome maybe? We'll probably never know.

 

[effexop]

What was wrong was the unlimited number of units in the stack, without penalty. They tried to introduce the "stack killers" as siege/arty units, but it broke the immersion/reality factor (who likes to "suicide" catapults?). But the solution to that was not to go to the other extreme, using a system that does not scale well with the scope of a civ game. The solution was a system ala Call To Power, but they ignored it. Why? I don't know. The "I'm a genius because I modded FF" syndrome maybe? We'll probably never know.

My bet is that they ignored it because it would seem too complex and not enough "streamlined" for the "mass audience".

 

[Aristos]

My bet is that they ignored it because it would seem too complex and not enough "streamlined" for the "mass audience".

but if you make the tactical AI good enough to make 1upt work (even if out of scale in a civ game), the "mass audience" would run away from the game like rabbits...

wait... maybe that's why the AI is so dumb.

 

[LordTC]

JLoZeppeli:

Question:

If you have 1000 units in your Civ and put it all in your SoD, what percentage of your Civ's force do you lose when you lose that SoD?

If you have 10 units in your army and you put it all in one battle and lose them all, what percentage of your forces do you lose?

The difference is when I have my 1000 unit SoD fight a 1000 unit SoD and lose.. they have 10 units or so left.. they lose 99% I lose 100%.

When I have 4 units fight 4 units in Civ 5 it's often the AI loses 4 units and all 4 human units survive.

With the low production rates in Civ4, I can often build enough units to hold off the fragment of ir stack of doom that survives. Lastly in Civ4, if our stacks of doom clash, and a 3rd player comes along, both of us are going to be in a lot of trouble. In Civ5, the winner of the war will have better units than the 3rd player who has fewer promotions due to not fighting!

 

[astonished]

After reading through all this, I think I would like to see limited stacking or it become 1upt during war time (for ease of moving units in peacetime). 1upt looked fun at first but it's wearing me out and I'm bored trying to just move units into positions or scout occupied areas. Of course a SoD is not the answer, but this iteration isn't either. I think I will wait until they get it right before purchasing any more civ related products.

 

[Romtos]

In EU3, you can literally take every province but one. Then you need to declare war again and take the last province through annexation.

I frankly find that annoying, and I with EU3 would fix it.

That has been 'fixed'. There is now an option which let's you set the maximum provinces during an annexation. In vanilla it's still 1 but you can easily mod the 'defines' file to make it 2, 3 or 10000.

 

[freeluos]

What was wrong was the unlimited number of units in the stack, without penalty. They tried to introduce the "stack killers" as siege/arty units, but it broke the immersion/reality factor (who likes to "suicide" catapults?). But the solution to that was not to go to the other extreme, using a system that does not scale well with the scope of a civ game. The solution was a system ala Call To Power, but they ignored it. Why? I don't know. The "I'm a genius because I modded FF" syndrome maybe? We'll probably never know.

In CTP you only could stack up to 9 units (military and civilian as far as I can recall).

But it was a great combat system.