Poll: do you think there are too many units on the map?

[Krajzen]

I seriously hate the amount of clutter and chaos civ6 map contains. There are simply to many units. All the time and everywhere, too many units. Both religious and military ones. Too many of them in general.
- The map looks ugly and barely readable
- There is a huge mess
- There are countless traffic jams problems everywhere and anywhere
- There are constant AI "border threats and promises" spam
- There are so many units they often don't fit inside borders (it becomes super ridiculous when AI puts dozens of its units in your territory, as they don't fit inside theirs)
- There is constant pain with micromanaging gigantic armies
- AI is terrible at managing that amount of units
- Add to this terrain restrictions and 25 000 missionaries spam and I can't stand it. I never felt civ5 maps to be so overcrowded (only civ6 huge map size is significantly smaller than analogical size from civ5).

I honestly think units, all units, should be more expensive to build and maintain so there would be two or even three times less of them on them (in case of religious ones it can be even 4-5x less for me) - of course, various other measures would be necessary to balance this, so smaller armies would be capable of conquest (as in civ5), but I need some solution to this. I'm considering making some mod drastically increasing unit build times and maintenance.

I was curious if many people think similarly.

 

[Xenotitan]

Perhaps the concept of supply from civ V could be reintroduced. You could only support so many units, based on the number of cities and population you have. Also the AI and perhaps the strategic resource dependencies need to be reworked, especially for city states, because they'll often have a bazillion warriors running around in the modern era. The AI should also know when to give up on converting another civilization and use its faith for other things, such as great person patronage, instead.

 

[Brutus2]

It is too cluttered for sure but I do think it just needs some AI adjustments. I do like 1UPT as I think it makes combat so much better than the old "stacks of doom" especially playing against human players. I also think having some stacking with support units and corps/armies is a nice improvement.

When it comes to the AI they just need to make some changes. The AI tends to spam units to fill every tile and if you give them open borders those units pour into your territory and park there with no apparent objective but to troll you. However, that can be fixed. No need to get rid of 1UPT over that. Same with religious units. I don't mind when they send lots of religious units into my territory because that's just the AI trying to win. Its part of the game and no different than if they were to declare war and invade with military. If I don't like it, I can make my own apostles and fight back. The problem is when they just park around your city and sit there doing nothing and that does need to be fixed. The AI needs to make sure their units have an objective when they set out and if that objective becomes invalid find another objective. If they are not at war their military units need to stay home and defend not park themselves in someone else's territory. This is an AI issue in my opinion.

 

[Totibbs]

Last game I need to convert another enemy city for a Religion Victory. Unfortunatly my ally surrounded all enemy cities with... horseman. Lots of them. He didnt attack the city with the horseman and the common enemy targetet one or another catapult. So there never became an open spot for me to get an Apostle next to the city center to convert it.
Lucky there is kind of a bug. If you dont have vision to a tile but your Apostle can get there in 1 move, it can "stack" with an allied horseman so you can convert the city.

 

[bladex]

plenty of units too bad the Ai doesn't know what to do with them except take over city states

 

[Elhoim]

In terms of fixing what Civ VI is, they need to do what Vox Populi did. Allow civilian units stacking, allow placing your militarty units along enemies civilians (and the other way around). That would fix most issues.

What I would prefer is a system similar to Endless Legend, in which you have armies that occupy a single tile, with several units in them, and you can only have a limited number of them (fixed number + tech/districts/policies + number of cities). When two armies meet, a part of the board becomes the battle field and the armies "expand", allowing all units to be used. What I would make different from EL is that you have control over the units instead of watching the battle giving general commands. This would be the best of both worlds as it would keep the strategic layer of the fights, but make it MUCH easier for both the player and the AI to move armies around.

 

[gunnergoz]

Too many spammed religious units for my tastes. Also, allied military units keep blocking areas my builders need access to. Allies need to keep their military at home until war calls them out.

 

[smartcanuck1988]

The religious unit spamming is rather annoying.

I was thinking about the cluttered units, and I think the problem is that the game wants to represent every mechanic with a unit. I understand it for military units (obviously), but some things like traders, religious units, spies, and maybe even great people (aside from generals/admirals), I don't see why they need to be a 'unit' on the map. Just look at EU4 and how it manages all these different mechanics without being too cluttered.

In terms of military units, I think 1UPT is enjoyable but perhaps 4UPT is better and could help reduce clutter. Basically each tile holds 1 Army. An "Army" consists of 4 slots for a combination of melee, cav, range, and support. Similar to the government policies, different "Military Tactics" will alter the number of slots for each type. Support units would be like the "wildtype" policy slot. Would be interesting if some civ UA is to have an extra slot of a specific type.

I think this will keep the strategic/tactical side of limiting the stacks, but can deal with some of the clutter.

 

[katanaD]

what annoys me most is how all my building is put on hold as my builders cannot get anywhere when i get the swarms of horsemen or religious units

also how can a civ with only 1 city have 30+ horsemen at once?

my current game one moment i kid you not fully `1/3 of the entire screen tiles had horsemen and religious units. thats simply silly

 

[skallben]

The policy bug in antique/classic era is a big reason, when anyone can build heavy chariots at the rate of one per city and turn it's broken. Along with the religious units. On top of bug fixes we need a limited stacking so civilian units cant block out military units and vice versa. It's ridiculous to not be able to travel ones own roads or improve ones own lands.

 

[joncnunn]

There's a mix of things I've seeing:

1. Some city states are indeed building too many units.

2. While the number of religious AI units seem fine (especially if that AI is going after religious victory); it's causing traffic jams. If at peace with you, they shouldn't prevent you from having one of your own non-religious units end the turn in the same tile.

3. The number of military AI units seem fine; but it's also causing traffic jams in some situations; at least this one can be largely avoided in the first part of the game by simply refusing to sign open boarders. But unfortunately, later on open boarders get automatically included in alliances.

 

[Balkans]

I wrote the following into suggestions thread, i think it fits nicely of what is discussed in this thread:

"I was thinking about solution for carpet of units problem (or traffic jam where AI has so much units it can't even move them) and possible solution could be unit upkeep price.

If carefully balanced you would have to find a middle of having an army and not going into bankruptcy. This is also good because if the front line is 10 hexes wide what good is it to have 100 units behind it - they absolutely don't mean anything because they can't get involved into front lines to make a difference. I think one unit per tile would really shine this way because every unit would matter a lot. There wouldn't be part of the game where you can spam units and fill the map with them and still have money. A lot of strategic elements would matter - for example - if you move all of your army to the north you risk problems down south etc...

I know that AI would never be able to outplay human with same amount of army or using mind games but you could balance that by giving different kind of bonuses to the AI and whatnot - i am primarily talking about the solution of filling the map with so much units that there is no place to actually move them. Then we wouldn't watch how AI has to keep it's units all over across open borders neighbors land, neutral land and city states land.

Let's say for example that game allows you to have this kinda of ridiculous traffic jam of units - but make it so that the price is so high that you have to satisfy very clear criteria in order to pull that of - being filthy rich or starve your nation to death but have a strong army because of using all the funds on military.

Redesigning the army upkeep and balancing the number of units with other things taken into account could possibly be a great new way of improving civilization vi game.

Maybe it doesn't make sense what i'm suggesting, but somehow i feel that civ vi would be much more beautiful game without the mid-late game traffic jams - it just looks so bizarre and nonsensical."

 

[Chanter100]

I was about ready to come here and complain about religious units. I have so many from another civ right now that I can't even move my own great person or units.. It's ridiculous and there's nothing I can do about it except declare war on the civ to get rid of them. I DO NOT like how religion is handled in this version..

 

[Sync]

I don't want to hijack the thread with a SoD vs 1UPT argument, but the micromanagement of units in the late game gets pretty ridiculous. Forming units into corps helps with this, but you're effectively merging two units into one which is only slightly stronger. Doing this just to avoid your units from blocking one another leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Honestly do prefer stacks to this.

Regardless of views on SoD vs 1UPT, I don't see a convincing argument as to why non-military units shouldn't be exempt from 1UPT.

I was about ready to come here and complain about religious units. I have so many from another civ right now that I can't even move my own great person or units.. It's ridiculous and there's nothing I can do about it except declare war on the civ to get rid of them. I DO NOT like how religion is handled in this version..

This being a good example. Why can't I move on the same tile as a missionary of a civ that I'm not at war with? Just handle it the Civ4 way. When you attempt to move on the tile have a pop-up box appear asking if you are declaring war on that civ or not. If no, then you can share the same tile.

 

[TomeTraveler]

I voted "No, it's fine" but I also admit that the AIs needs to better handle their units. I didn't select that option because it's not really part of "too many units." The AI especially needs a strict re-coding for the purposes of not abusing open borders: Units within another civ's borders should never be there except for some specific purpose, such as in transit, or exploring, or defending an allied civ's terrain. Or perhaps give us an option to toggle a certain number of hexes within our borders as forbidden, to maintain internal routing.

 

[Namæless]

To me, real problem is the outdated units that AI and city-states spams. 1900 a.d. and the map is still swarmed by warriors and chariots. Sometimes you can barely move, and other times the problem remains but you are forced to dow them just to move forward.

In Civ6 they implemented corps: make the script good so the AI to use them... we have the exact opposite here

 

[Nefelia]

There are some problems that lead to unit clutter:

1. Gods of the Forge bug makes it so all civ can pump out units much more quickly than they should.

2. No maintenance costs on Warrior and Slinger unit makes it possible to field massive armies with no restraining mechanic.

3. Far too often the AI does nothing with their large standing armies, leading to stale gameplay and unit clutter that never goes away.

These issues can easily be dealt with by fixing the bugs, balance changes (maintenance cost of 0.5 got for Warrior/Slinger?), and improvements to the AI. As such, I am not overly concerned, though I am hoping they do not make us wait too long for the first few patches.

 

[Nefelia]

plenty of units too bad the Ai doesn't know what to do with them except take over city states

Maybe they need to look at the AI code for attacking city states and see what they have done right there that didn't carry over to their code for attacking the player's cities? I had Norway bring over 15 Warriors and surround my city while my troops were off preparing to crush Scythia. I thought it was pretty much game over for me... but Norway never even attacked despite the fact that he had completely caught me with my pants down.


@Balkans:

I completely agree with you regarding maintenance costs. The trick would be to raise them high enough to reduce the ridiculous carpet of units while not reducing the AIs ability to wage war and be a credible threat (once warmongering penalties are addressed, anyway).

 

[@Rob76]

A good solution is to step away from the tyranny of/ 1upt, but not all the way to SoD. We already have an excellent mod for multiple units per tile, brought to us by gyogen2. Check it out:

/https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/multiple-unit-per-tile.25511/

This mod gives us real choice on this issue. I'm playing w/ 2upt limit, and the strategic feel of the game is much improved, to say nothing of dissolving the unit clutter issue quite a bit. Sure, Firaxis will eventually improve AI to at least reduce the unit clutter problem, but if they had any real regard for the players that keep feeding them money, then they would give us multiple choices on upt. That way the 1upt crowd could go on playing their artificially awkward but uniquely challenging game, and those who want more strategic rrealism and tactical flexibility could play 2upt, or 3 upt, or...whatever.

Isn't choice a better solution in this case?

 

[UWHabs]

Putting aside the religious clutter, and the AI nonsense of spamming a million warriors, trying to think about how to handle this is an interesting conundrum. Just thinking out loud here now:

I think unit maintenance needs to go up. Increase it by one or two per unit. However, also I would say it should be doubled when outside of your home lands (including occupied territory). This would also make it more costly to go to war.

However, I think you should be able to "store" units in encampments. Maybe 1 unit per building (so 4 max including the encampment itself), and these units would be maintenance-free. It would also be really cool if on a declaration of war, those units could be immediately re-positioned within range (however could not attack incoming units). This would reduce the clutter, and would also give the defense one chance to set up. Could even play around with the rules on this - maybe a surprise war you don't get a chance to do that, but once you're denounced essentially those units get put on standby. Maybe similarly you'd store your military vessels in a harbor.

This could be a good compromise to let you keep a standing army around, however you obviously would have to house them somehow. The theory goes that after a war, you'd keep your most experienced units around, however would be expected to rebuild your future corps for the next invasion.

I'd also like to see you be able to bring back the "mobilize for war." What this would do is for a short, set period (10 turns? 20 turns?), you could essentially swap your government's policy slots for all military slots, with the notion being that you will essentially switch your economy into military mode, and have all your cities building units. I think do to this properly, you'd also have to have units be much cheaper as well, so that with the right policy card in place, a top production city can churn out a new unit every turn. As it stands now, even with good overlap in factories, it can still be 5 or 6 turns to train a musketman. However, to compensate, units also should be weaker overall, so that they die more easily in combat.

Taken all together, I think during war, units should die, and have to be replaced. I've had wars in my game where I'm only a little ahead in tech, but I can still manage everyone so that I either don't lose any units, or so that I only lose maybe 1 guy. Sure if I'm 2 eras ahead, then I won't lose guys, but otherwise I'd rather see the units be a little more like cannon fodder, where they're cheap to build, cheap to store, expensive to maintain on active duty, but weak overall. That is the one thing that SOD did have to them was that you would have to replace guys. Right now, I have my army of about 10-12 units, and I know for a fact that I can essentially walk them through one of my neighbours, capture every city along the way, and I won't need to add more guys from my homeland. To me, that just seems wrong - any war, even one where I'm an era ahead of them in tech, I should still have to be bringing new troops in to the front lines. Right now, it's too easy to push forward, heal up, and then push forward again.