Too Many Military Units (Back to Civ III)

[romelus]

Maintenance cost for armies in enemy territory is much, much more than the cost for the same armies in friendly lands.

In any case, the solution shouldn't be about increase the gold cost of troops. Financial and commerce-based strategies are already powerful, they shouldn't be made to completely dominate in every aspect of the game (e.g. nerfing the importance of production is not an answer).

yes, but you are still talking about maintenance - money you pay for having troops

i'm talking about casualty cost - money for replacing combat casualties. right now it's all or nothing. lose the unit, or keep the unit, which heals back to full strength for free. in the end, the loser of a battle does not inflict ANY damage if the winning unit heals. the true cost of war is not currently reflected.

instead of upping the maintenance, which is an artificial way to reduce unit numbers, a casualty cost actually rewards good tech and good tactics. if you use good tactics, you'll suffer less damage, and spend less on casualty replacement. it's controllable by the player, and indirectly reduces the number of units, as wars become more costly, as they should be.

 

[MrScorpio]

In any case, the solution shouldn't be about increase the gold cost of troops. Financial and commerce-based strategies are already powerful, they shouldn't be made to completely dominate in every aspect of the game (e.g. nerfing the importance of production is not an answer).

I understand your point and I think it is a valid one in terms of balance sake. A commerce solution would make commerce the backbone of every part of the game and may give financial civs and/or leaders a unfair leg up. But I do want to point out that commerce is a major part of every aspect of nations and empires.

 

[MrScorpio]

instead of upping the maintenance, which is an artificial way to reduce unit numbers, a casualty cost actually rewards good tech and good tactics. if you use good tactics, you'll suffer less damage, and spend less on casualty replacement. it's controllable by the player, and indirectly reduces the number of units, as wars become more costly, as they should be.

I'm really enjoying this discussion.

I would disagree that units costing gold is artificial. One, it makes the implicit assumption that the current balance is natural, and therefore making change artificial. I just think the current balance is off. For the reasons I have already stated, and also because I don't see how you can take over a city a hundreds of thousands and only get 100 gold. I personally think that the gold you receive for taking over a City should be higher by a multiple of 10. But if I did that, it wouldn't be an artificial way of getting more gold, just a different way to try to balance things out.

As far as your thoughts, I think it is a good idea. How would you propose to implement it to create that effect?

 

[drachasor]

I understand your point and I think it is a valid one in terms of balance sake. A commerce solution would make commerce the backbone of every part of the game and may give financial civs and/or leaders a unfair leg up. But I do want to point out that commerce is a major part of every aspect of nations and empires.

Commerce already IS a major part of every Civ. Even warmongers need to worry about it. I'd just point out that wealth is very abstract in Civ, especially since it is pretty much wholly separated from the ability to make things (hammers), and ability to feed the population (food). Since commerce, food, and hammers aren't intimately linked to each other, the system is inherently only going to loosely model the real world. That's one reason why I think a hammer-based solution is perfectly fine, because hammers are as much a part of a civ's economy as commerce.

No one seems to have any comments on my proposed solution though.

 

[JavalTigar]

MrScorpio

I don't think you should limit unit production. A Civ should be able build as many military units as it wants to (and is able to). But there are increased costs in keeping a huge standing army at all times. Those costs should be better reflected by the game.

The thread is about limiting the huge stacks of doom. My system still lets you build them, but at the cost of infrastructure.

drachasor

In any case, the solution shouldn't be about increase the gold cost of troops. Financial and commerce-based strategies are already powerful, they shouldn't be made to completely dominate in every aspect of the game (e.g. nerfing the importance of production is not an answer).

Despite my earlier statement about doubling maintenance, I have to agree that so many strategies revolve around finances & gold.

My idea about having all military units cost food as well as shields respects the importance of production. It makes little sense that two size 3 cities could produce enough troops to dominate their closest neighbor all the while growing to twice their size before the first axe is swung.

If you want to produce an army, then there won’t be people plowing the fields. We don’t currently have a system for manpower but it would not be a large xml change to switch all military troops to be set up like settlers and workers. It actually would cause slightly faster production (without adjusting all unit costs), but as the trade off while waging war your home front won’t grow. The rapid development that happened after all the troops came home in the 50’s not while the war was raging. All resources were being funneled into the war effort.

 

[polypheus]

Actually now that I think about it, unhappiness would not be a good solution. That is because it doesn't really make a pop point unproductive unless you are at the happiness cap. And there are tons of ways to increase that cap by increasing happiness especially in the late game. Essentially by using the unhappiness mechanisim, size of armies would be unaffected that much.

Therefore the forced "military support specialist" is the best way. Specialists always remove a pop point from working tiles regardless of anything else. We could make the specialist produce "nothing" which represents that population point being used to support the military and away from civilian endeavors. Or we could even fine-tune it by giving the "military support specialist" maybe just 1-hammer or something if removing a whole citizen and having him "do nothing" is too much. Thus it isn't a loss of a whole citizen but a partial loss.

So in conclusion, happiness won't work but a forced "military support specialist" would. You'd of course have free militia units requiring no support but once armies become large enough you start to feel it in lost civilian productivity across the board.

It would be fairly easy to implement. In fact we already have a so-called "generic citizen specialist" that's fairly unproductive. If you forced people to have to make these "generic citizen specialists" if you go beyond limits then that would work too.

I have read a lot of Civ5ish ideas too and I think they all have merit. But unless its easily moddable for Civ4, its probably a bit too early to discuss them at the moment.

The removing citizens from working tiles and making them into "miliary support citizen" idea that someone else suggested I think does everything that we all want.

Any reason why this idea WON'T work???

 

[JavalTigar]

No one seems to have any comments on my proposed solution though.

The Charlemagne Mod has a supply unit to help heal units but not really a supply factor that you are proposing. Used to be that units were supported from their city of origin but it was removed to a more civ wide maintenance system.

I would get behind any system that cause what the developers liked to call “difficult choices”.

Be a war monger…then have stifled infrastructure / economy.

Expand ….then have your defenses lowered slightly as you settle


All players go through a expansion phase and a warring phase. But the game, as it stands penalized city growth ONLY for those in expansion mode.

 

[polypheus]

My idea about having all military units cost food as well as shields respects the importance of production. It makes little sense that two size 3 cities could produce enough troops to dominate their closest neighbor all the while growing to twice their size before the first axe is swung.

If you want to produce an army, then there won’t be people plowing the fields. We don’t currently have a system for manpower but it would not be a large xml change to switch all military troops to be set up like settlers and workers. It actually would cause slightly faster production (without adjusting all unit costs), but as the trade off while waging war your home front won’t grow. The rapid development that happened after all the troops came home in the 50’s not while the war was raging. All resources were being funneled into the war effort.

With the "military support citizen specialist" (that does little to possibly even nothing) being forced upon you if your armies become too big (thus removing him as a pop point from working tiles or being some other more productive specialist, it achieves everything you list above. Without actually removing the pop point "permanently", it just renders him unproductive for civilian efforts.

That would by definition make big armies cost in commerce/hammers/food together. But the best thing is that this idea is very "easily" moddable within Civ4 unlike more elaborate Civ5ish ideas.

 

[polypheus]

yes, but you are still talking about maintenance - money you pay for having troops

i'm talking about casualty cost - money for replacing combat casualties. right now it's all or nothing. lose the unit, or keep the unit, which heals back to full strength for free. in the end, the loser of a battle does not inflict ANY damage if the winning unit heals. the true cost of war is not currently reflected.

instead of upping the maintenance, which is an artificial way to reduce unit numbers, a casualty cost actually rewards good tech and good tactics. if you use good tactics, you'll suffer less damage, and spend less on casualty replacement. it's controllable by the player, and indirectly reduces the number of units, as wars become more costly, as they should be.

Don't know how easily this would be to mod but this makes a lots of sense to me. You could make the system real simple such that every HP that you lose costs 1gold. This scales well too since it more modern units have more HP, thus cost more gold. Would certainly nerf early ancient era rushes quite a bit!

And this would reflect casualty costs. I like this idea a lot!

 

[romelus]

I'm really enjoying this discussion.

I would disagree that units costing gold is artificial. One, it makes the implicit assumption that the current balance is natural, and therefore making change artificial. I just think the current balance is off. For the reasons I have already stated, and also because I don't see how you can take over a city a hundreds of thousands and only get 100 gold. I personally think that the gold you receive for taking over a City should be higher by a multiple of 10. But if I did that, it wouldn't be an artificial way of getting more gold, just a different way to try to balance things out.

As far as your thoughts, I think it is a good idea. How would you propose to implement it to create that effect?

it's just a choice of words. how about this. upping maintenance will reduce army size, but a casualty cost system will both reduce army size, and reward good teching and battle tactics.

it would be easy to implement. just have a replacements slider, just like research, espionage, etc. when you are in heavy battle and need to heal units fast, you'll have to crack up that slider. if you are just fending off occasional barbarians or at peace, simply keep the percentage at 0. certain buildings could give replacement points. similar to courthouses giving espionage points, a grocer or hospital could give replacement points. the palace starts with some replacement points, so you don't need to spend gold to heal your early scouts or warriors. but if you decide to rush with axes, you better have some reserve gold for replacements, or your units will hardly heal

 

[MrScorpio]

I would get behind any system that cause what the developers liked to call “difficult choices”.

I agree 100%.

 

[polypheus]

it's just a choice of words. how about this. upping maintenance will reduce army size, but a casualty cost system will both reduce army size, and reward good teching and battle tactics.

it would be easy to implement. just have a replacements slider, just like research, espionage, etc. when you are in heavy battle and need to heal units fast, you'll have to crack up that slider. if you are just fending off occasional barbarians or at peace, simply keep the percentage at 0. certain buildings could give replacement points. similar to courthouses giving espionage points, a grocer or hospital could give replacement points. the palace starts with some replacement points, so you don't need to spend gold to heal your early scouts or warriors. but if you decide to rush with axes, you better have some reserve gold for replacements, or your units will hardly heal

This idea is good but might not be that easy to implement. What about just adding up all HPs lost and charging a certain percentage of gold for it? It would have the exact same effect but without adding a new replacements slider and tracing replacement points. You'd just need to track total HPs lost and then charge gold for lost HPs.

 

[NP300]

I was giving this matter some thought, and it occurred to me that one way to represent the loss of population during war would be to make military units cost food support. This way, if you build too many units, your cities would start to starve and drop in size.

But, this could bring us back to the Civ1/Civ2 micromanagement nightmare where you had to keep track of which unit had which home city. So if food were used, it would have to be abstracted and not be a return to Civ2.

Then I realized that Civ4 already has a high-level abstraction for this: health and unhealth! Perhaps military units could cause unhealth. Maybe there could be -1 health for every 10 units, just to use an example. So if you built hundreds of units your health would take a nose-dive and, unless you took costly measures (hospitals etc), your cities would start to drop in size. A decision to build hospitals to increase the health would subtract hammers from your war effort. It would be an interesting trade-off.

If a unit is disbanded then the health could return, to represent the return of those men into your population. If a unit is lost/gifted, then it would continue to cause unhealth for a certain number of turns (say 20) to represent the fact that the dead men are lost forever. This would have the bonus of providing an incentive to disband units that will not be upgraded. It would also provide a disincentive to suicide attacks.

This concept could be taken a little further to represent prisoners of war and prisoner exchanges. For example, if you lose a unit, there would be a chance (say 50%) that the men do not die and are instead taken prisoner. As long as the enemy holds them prisoner, you get unhealth. But if you do a prisoner exchange (or say free them by destroying your enemy), you get the health points back. Likewise, prisoners that you captured from another civ could add health to your civ as long as you hold them to represent POW slave labor. The enemy POWs could perhaps add only half as much health as would getting your own POWs back to provide incentives for prisoner exchanges. Thus, if a prisoner held by your enemy costs .1 health points, then the prisoners you hold from the other civ would give you 0.05 health points. This would give incentives for prisoner exchanges after the end of a war.

The concept could also be extended to represent casualties, whereby the loss of hitpoints would cause unhealth for a set number of turns. If one unit is worth 0.10 health, then losing 10 hitpoints (out of 100) could cause -0.01 health for 20 turns.

 

[romelus]

This idea is good but might not be that easy to implement. What about just adding up all HPs lost and charging a certain percentage of gold for it? It would have the exact same effect but without adding a new replacements slider and tracing replacement points. You'd just need to track total HPs lost and then charge gold for lost HPs.

that works too. the slider gives control over how much to spend on replacements. i just want a way for wars to be more costly.

 

[JavalTigar]

polypheus

That would by definition make big armies cost in commerce/hammers/food together. But the best thing is that this idea is very "easily" moddable within Civ4 unlike more elaborate Civ5ish ideas.

It would make big armies cost. But by that system, there will eventually be a top end limit where all your cities are reduced to nothing cause they are all out at “support the troops” rallies instead of doing their jobs. Starvation will occur and cities will shrink. And the whole civ will fall into ruin.

My cost change doesn’t limit the size of army you can produce but the rate at which you can. If you had four size 4 cities each producing a swordsman every 5 turns. Then that is the constant rate at which they will produce. So after 20 turns there will be 16 swords.

Right now in 20 turns you may have 22 swords and growing cause each city popped at least one point in that time and may be close to another. Not to mention that each city is now producing more commerce and therefore more science and so on.

As for easily moddable, that could be debatable cause your talking and several graphics (icon, specialist civilpedia entry), placement in the city screen etc. My proposal is a cut and paste in xml.

I do understand where you are coming from but I think your putting too much restriction on Large Armies

 

[TheLastOne36]

Actually i wouldn't mind more,

Hussars, Ballista's, Mortors, and Halbards would be great

 

[polypheus]

It would make big armies cost. But by that system, there will eventually be a top end limit where all your cities are reduced to nothing cause they are all out at “support the troops” rallies instead of doing their jobs. Starvation will occur and cities will shrink. And the whole civ will fall into ruin./

I know you're joking of course but the "military support specialist" wouldn't represent
"support the troop rallies". They would represent normal civilians being put into work in maintaining and supporting the military establishment instead of actual civilian work. The "military support specialist" wouldn't really be doing "nothing" it would be doing stuff like maintaing equipment, building parts of military, sharpening/replacing swords, etc etc in the invisible background.

BTW your example of how Civs can ruin themselves with shortages and starvation and having it fall into ruins due to shifting too much resources to the military side sounds exactly like what happen to North Korea and to some extent USSR.

My cost change doesn’t limit the size of army you can produce but the rate at which you can. If you had four size 4 cities each producing a swordsman every 5 turns. Then that is the constant rate at which they will produce. So after 20 turns there will be 16 swords.

Both the extra cost solution and the "miltary support specialist" solution would eventually limit how many units can be fielded. Heck even the present system limits it in extreme cases. I've had ancient era games where I had too many cities and too many units and were forced to disband them.

But military support isn't just in gold. Its less people working the fields, less people making commerce, more resources to just maintain the existing army making it harder to produce more. Having it cost the total productivity of an actual citizen is more reflective.

If we made "military support citizen" not do nothing but say, produce just 1 food and 1 hammer, that also would work and wouldn't be as drastic.

As for easily moddable, that could be debatable cause your talking and several graphics (icon, specialist civilpedia entry), placement in the city screen etc. My proposal is a cut and paste in xml.

I do understand where you are coming from but I think your putting too much restriction on Large Armies

If simply increasing gold costs works then I'm all for it. But I think it probably wouldn't be as balanced and work as well as the "military support specialist" idea.

 

[MarkM]

For younger people who have never heard of Intersel Empire, I will briefly explain it. Its a game like Civ with cities over a grid map. Each "Civ" starts with one city. All the rest of the cities are "neutral" (think barb cities except they are always empty and can be conquered easily). You can only conquer not build cities and each city can build a variety of modern military units. Then you just spam them over the map and fight until you win and take over the world.

Don't get in wrong this was a REALLY fun game when I played in on my ancient Commodore 64. But its REALLY REALLY silly that here I am playing Civ4 would supposedly tries to model civiliation being played like this ancient Intersel Empire game.

That's why there's commerce and science, war weariness, diplomacy, happiness, health, etc. etc. But the game mechanics are really out of whack when players (human or AI) are allowed to build hundreds of military units. I'm not saying there should be fewer wars or no wars. I'm saying that I don't want to be playing glorified Intersel Empire.

by the way if you still like that kind of simple model (start on just one part of the map, capture preexisting neutral cities and facilities which in turn lets you produce more military) check out Advance Wars (in particular Advance Wars Dual Strike on Nintendo DS), it is the modern descendant of Empire. This is coming from a guy who played Empire on the Atari ST back in the 80s btw, I know of what I speak! My son loves AWDS, it is possibly the deepest, most play value DS game out there, you can even have wireless human vs human battles if you have two DS.

 

[leo.]

I can only agree that wars in civ4 are again stupid and boring.
Especially in war games it's just who can build up more settlers, more workers and more units in a time - the one who gets more food and more hammers.

Technology is often not very important and i've seen a lot of people who don't build any cottages until the medieval era!

And because of the production spamming people who try to outtech another civ can't beat the amount of ancient(!) army.
Btw. swords still beat muskets and knights kill helicopters and thats in my opinion wrong. The unit strength should be better balanced, if swordsman had 6 strength points a musketman should have 20.

I would suggest this:
Units that cost gold like pacifism doesn't make very much sense i think.

A much more better solution would be to make the units - additonal to the gold costs for non-free units and additional to 2 or more free def units - taking hammers from the city or even the whole civ.

But even more neccessary is it, i think, to make workers and settlers cost food again
They could take just a food from the city or cost the city 1 population.

I think its important to avoid making workers at a city population of 1.

The hammers you get out of chopping forests should be decreased significantly or - even better - only be usable for buildings, not units.

 

[Napo981]

I just getting off the ongoing discussion about how to limit army size to get back to the OP topic about managing army.

But on the way, I don't think SoD represent a so unrealistic concept as big armies have existed and will exist, specially backed by by large nations. Of course, too much money on army means less on infrastructures.

As the OP said, managing military units is a real pain.

All come back to the battle system used. All Civs always favored managing one by one units and one by one battles, whcih can be long and annoying with large armies.

The first thing I propose is a military manager, a window or adviser where you could plan, move and build strategies without moving each unit individually. For example, you could determine the standard garrison for each city and where to concentrate your firepower, all of that without moving a unit the conventionnal (and long!! ) way. Besides, basic info on your ennemy's firepower could be given.

The second thing would be to have stack battles, instead of individual units battles. Each unit would add firepower to the whole stack, representing a combined force rather than individual power.

War would be faster and easier. Balance would be hard to acheive, but not impossible.