Too Many Military Units (Back to Civ III)

[ghengiskhan]

+1... less unites, same amount of wars... including it in the next patch sounds good.

 

[polypheus]

Yeah, I should have checked to see who wrote the OP before replying. My bad.

As to the rest, having not played Intersel Empire I can't comment on those aspects. But the AIs in any game are always going to build as many units as they can.

The problem is NOT with the AI. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of this thread. The problem is with the practical ability to build massive number of units by human players. Expert experienced human players have realized this and do this. The aggressive Blake AI was in response to this. The better solution would have been to have made BTS so that building such large stacks was very costly or impractical.

As for "standing armies seems ahistoric", well, the US tries to have enough to fight two wars. I keep units I call 'guard' in low-threat cities (no experience, old technology), 'reserve' in high-threat cities (little/no experience, but new tech) and my front-line guys with decent experience ('army') sit somewhere where I can move them easily between potential fronts. I consider that pretty realistic. Against that I have to balance the upkeep costs, which are much worse than Civ3's.

You're defining large standing armies as ahistorical and I don't see that in CivIV terms. With NATO, the 7th Fleet, etc all the way back to the Mongols, the Crusades, the Roman army, etc, large armies have been very common. It comes with building an empire, and that is largely the point of Civ.

All nations have standing armies but no nations have large world war type standing armies during peacetime for eternity. Before the Civil War, the U.S. had very small armies which built up during the Civil War then demobilized. The U.S. certainly does NOT currently have anywhere near the size of the army that it did during WWII.

The Mongols did not keep the horde for hundreds of years. It was again sort of a one-time mobilization. The Crusader armies were again not long time standing armies either. Crusaders over time went home and dispersed. The Romans in fact declined as a "Civ" because they could NOT afford (in both money and especially manpower) large standing armies OVER TIME and had to start recruiting mercenaries who were only loyal to whoever paid them the most money and couldn't be let go after the campaign was over (some decided to turn against Rome and sacked Roman lands instead!)

Rome in fact is a great example of how Civ should be modelled like.

IRL, most nations kept reasonably small standing armies then mobilized big time in preparation for major war then demobilized. No nation have ever kept huge world war sized standing armies indefinitely and prospered.

I would also point out that if you change happiness, then the AIs that prefer the warlike civics are still going to be able to build stacks. Going after the cost structure, either the hammers or the gold, is probably the way to go. CivIV already changed upkeep since Civ3, so that should be a safe route. But if an aggressive AI still has more money than you, you're going to have to be VERY diplomatic or lose the game.

The enforced "military support specialist" then is the best solution. It removes a pop point from cities and makes them into a less productive "specialist". That removes commerce/hammers/food together therefore not giving financial civs a huge edge. (Financial Civs losing pop points to "support citizens" would hurt even if they had infinite gold)

 

[Napo981]

3. It is completely unrealistic and ahistorical that in a standard world-wide setting that nations afford and maintain standing armies capable of easily conquering the world without experiencing at least USSR if not North Korean like collapse. It should be properly balanced with the more realistic drawbacks. There are currently none.

I agree with most of your points, except that one.
Many large armies did exist and conquer most of the known world, sometimes overpower or outnumber their ennemies. I.e. : Romans, Greeks, Napoleon. Even Nazis came close to hold their share over most of the Europe, if it wouldn't be for some strategical errors.

However, some things make it easier in Civ to conquer the world.
- AI rarely, if ever, gang up against a rising Civ. In, history, most countries did join their force against a world-threatening opponent. I.e. : WWII, many medieval wars

- In history... tanks rarely faced up opposition by ... spearmen. High technological differences and low catch up make it easy for a powerful nation to overcome weak nations

- Real civs don't have to win games by conquering their opponents. They usually just try to make their people happy. Bet that if Americans had to conquer the world they would bomb it right away! Fortunately, they just seem to seek petrol.

- Real civs don't play at "chieftain" difficulty level.

- Collapse after conquering. For some resaons, every empire fell off. However, make big empires easily break up would upset most players.

And, it's just a game.. it doesn't have to be historical, but fun. And, effectively, it would be funnier with less micromanaging.

But to effectively counter large conquering armies, or at least make it more difficult to do so, you would have to alter tech sharing, civ break up system, etc.

But I hope do so they will resolve micromanaging, by adding stack battles.

 

[Fredricko]

I'm not sure if anyone else mentioned this, but there is a field in CIV4UnitClassInfos.xml called <iInstanceCostModifier>X</iInstanceCostModifier> where X is some integer percentage. This field increases the cost in hammers of producing the next unit of this type based on the number of units already in play.

For example:

Say you have <iInstanceCostModifier>10</iInstanceCostModifier> for warriors and you have 4 warriors in play. This mean your next warrior will cost you 15 * (1+4*0.10) = 21

You could probably couple this with some of the other ideas in this thread to come up with a simple and effective solution...Just throwing some ideas out there.

 

[polypheus]

I agree with most of your points, except that one.
Many large armies did exist and conquer most of the known world, sometimes overpower or outnumber their ennemies. I.e. : Romans, Greeks, Napoleon. Even Nazis came close to hold their share over most of the Europe, if it wouldn't be for some strategical errors.

The Romans, Greeks Napoleon and Nazis could not and did not maintain world war sized conquering armies for prolonged periods of time.

1. Roman Empire
It build up its army for early conquest, then it overexpanded and did not have enough gold and manpower to fight against barbs. They were forced to recruit barb mercenaries who when not paid enough turned against the Roman Empire itself. The Roman Empire did field SoD from time to time but did not maintain a huge growing SoD, it could not afford the money or manpower to do so in the long run IRL!

2. Alexander the Great
His conquest halted because he could NOT afford to keep intact his huge "SoD". They were tired, weren't getting enough loot to justify years and years of war and wanted to go home. So they mutineed and Alexander was forced to eventually disband it!

3. Napoleon and Hitler
Neither of them maintained huge SoD armies over centuries. They were mobilized for imminent war.

Again I'm not saying SoD should not exist or are unrealistic!

But what I am saying though that they should be costly to maintain over the long run and fully mobilized for imminent war then demobilized to more normal levels when the major war is over.

Can you name a nation who built up world war sized fully mobilized armies and maintained them for centuries and prospered?

 

[Tennyson]

Rome was a military power from 387BC to 44AD.

Wiki:

Amidst the never ending wars (from the beginning of the Republic up to the Principate, the doors of the temple of Janus were closed only twice - when they were open it meant that Rome was at war),

 

[Napo981]

Again I'm not saying SoD should not exist or are unrealistic!

But what I am saying though that they should be costly to maintain over the long run and fully mobilized for imminent war then demobilized to more normal levels when the major war is over.

Can you name a nation who built up world war sized fully mobilized armies and maintained them for centuries and prospered?

Yeah... after re-reading your post I realized you most pointed out long term financing military force.. but I wanted to argue.

Things are really though to compare between Civ and real life as in reality civs didn't organize so well in the past as we play our game. Development of civs is entireley different, so is the pace of time. No army was kept catalputing one city for 60 years to get his defense down...

But I agree that most civs failed to keep large armies for long, maybe except Romans, who did last some centuries based on a strong army, but I can't go deeper without looking at my history books.

As in Civ IV, I do regularly lower or disband miliraty units to gain some gold per turn, which make me more competitive. Maybe it isn't needed when you play at low difficulty level when you can do plenty of errors and CPUs just keep watching, but the tens of gold per turn can make a difference in a close game.

The rest is just fine tune up. Do want be it more difficult to maintain a large army? Just raise the gold requirement per unit. Add replacement cost during wars as some suggested. You could even add a "war economy" system to allow lower building cost during wartime and allow a boost to any fighting army, making more rewarding to watch your peace army size.

I think this whole problem is just about balancing army cost.

But yeah... too micromanaging with large army.

 

[drachasor]

Managing a large army and having a large army are two different things.

The only good solution for managing a large army is having stack-based combat. Well, that's the best solution, at any rate.

Maintaining a large army is different, perhaps a hammer tax or building military support in a city (like research). That sort of thing should work pretty well.

There's no great solution that will work without a lot of game modding though. Making each unit cost more than the last just benefits financial and commerce-based strategies so much it is crazy. It makes any military-centered civ much, much worse than they are now. It also makes any sort of conquest victory almost impossible to achieve, since you have to provide a military unit for each city you have as well as standing armies.

 

[ds61514]

On a related note, uit seems that in its infinite wisdom, Firaxis has decided to make the game longer. However, this REALLY makes late game wars a pain in the ass.

Let's see:

1) Everyone techs slower
2) People are more stingy in trades (it seems everything is "we don't want to trade just yet....even freaking Meditation!)
3) Wartime AI is better, so wars take longer.
4) Siege was nerfed terribly. The combination of weaker bombard + inability to kill makes going on offense a LOT harder than before.
5) The culture model stays the same.
6) The War weariness model stays the same. WW was already terrible past Renaissance age.

End Result? When I go to war (Emperor level), I HAVE TO (not should, not can, but MUST) go "all in" and attempt to totally exterminate whatever civ I face. I can't half ass it (take half his territory and call it a day) because the culture swallows up any city I take. How is this realistic? A ton of early "empires" were simply a bunch of city states paying tribute to some overlord; why shouldn't I be able to work the land I conquer? This coupled with the new unit spam makes wars both REALLY tedious AND REALLY unproductive unless I select "stack attack," forget about strategic play, and just steamroll my opponent.

Please SIGNIFICANTLY increase a city's culture in its fat cross so that I can actually make use of the cities I conquer. Please let siege become more useful again and PLEASE reduce War Weariness.

 

[arstal]

We didn't have tanks vs spears in Reality, we did have riflemen vs spears, and that's a pretty bad mismatch as is.

War weariness- there's another option that can be looked at to discourage stacking, though I really think that the AI wouldn't handle it.

Everyone you mentioned in the above post- wouldn't hurt stacks a bit- and that's the point of this.

The military support specialist- I can see that encouraging wars- have too many units, just go beat up Asoka. Take a city, then sue for peace.

Any penalty for excessive support has to be global- since units have no home town.

An unhealth penalty might work as well- as units take food. Give +2 health all cities, but units/(cities*(tech and civic choices)) ratio gives unhealth rounded up. That would slow growth, eventually stop growth. AI couldn't handle that.

Increasing damage artillery can do to units might help as well, but then you'd get the trebs of doom again. (I really wish the game had a bombard, it's desperately needed)

My biggest concern with any system is that it doesn't cripple the AI. That's why I suggested unhappiness. The AI can deal with unhappiness, it would slow its research rate, and maybe stop making troops.

The other choice would be events forcing disbanding of troops or riots if you went over a certain limit based on number of cities. Police State would happen more rarely, but be worse.

One other option, take away the AI's 50% upgrade boost- then the stacks of doom would be of inferior quality. A SoD of longbowmen when you have rifles is just annoying. I think a lot of the problem is due to that.

 

[polypheus]

War weariness- there's another option that can be looked at to discourage stacking, though I really think that the AI wouldn't handle it.

We haven't discussed this one much but its basically identical to the "unhappiness" idea IIUC. War weariness is simply unhappiness due to prolonged war in foreign lands. Thus it wouldn't be a new mechanism at all from your suggested unhappiness mechanism.

The military support specialist- I can see that encouraging wars- have too many units, just go beat up Asoka. Take a city, then sue for peace.

I don't think it would encourage wars any more or any less than now. Nations not in imminent war would keep national guard sized armies. Nations wanting to go on the offense however would probably build beyond the "free" limits with the likely intention of going to war. The only difference is that whereas before you mobilized huge armies even if no intending to use them anytime soon, here you'd mobilized only when war is fairly imminent.

It would certainly have a much more historical feel and now espionage would be even more critical (watching Civs mobilize and preparing for attack).

An unhealth penalty might work as well- as units take food. Give +2 health all cities, but units/(cities*(tech and civic choices)) ratio gives unhealth rounded up. That would slow growth, eventually stop growth. AI couldn't handle that.

Maybe maybe not.

Increasing damage artillery can do to units might help as well, but then you'd get the trebs of doom again. (I really wish the game had a bombard, it's desperately needed)

This would do nothing to limit huge SoD. It would just change their mix to have more artillery component that would be it.

My biggest concern with any system is that it doesn't cripple the AI. That's why I suggested unhappiness. The AI can deal with unhappiness, it would slow its research rate, and maybe stop making troops.

The only criticism I have with this is that unhappiness IIUC only takes affect when there is net unhappiness. If nations have a large surplus happiness in cities, they'd then have large SoD caps effectively.

The "military support specialist" OTOH takes effect always immediately when a Civ breaches the excess troop limit. I'd also think the AI could be made to handle it well.

One other option, take away the AI's 50% upgrade boost- then the stacks of doom would be of inferior quality. A SoD of longbowmen when you have rifles is just annoying. I think a lot of the problem is due to that.

I wouldn't want any solution that was aimed at AIs. The main reason for the huge SoD huge number of units problem is due to the human ability to create them. The aggressive Blake AI was simply a way for the AIs to play this unit spamming game. An effective solution would require changing the game mechanics themselves so that even in human-only multiplayer it would discourage (but not eliminate or make impossible) large number of units being spammed.

 

[arstal]

The solution needs to fit these categories

1) Not crippling the AI. If the AI is a gimp, it's no fun.
2) Make both the human and AI want to have fewer units.
3) Not imbalancing the game.

One factor I see as a problem is the AI getting half price upgrades. The SoD's wouldn't be as annoying if they were a giant turkey shoot.

Would giving an attack penalty to overstacked units make the AI stack less?

 

[Endomatic]

I'm getting kind of frustrated myself. The AI does nothing but build units. No buildings, not even granaries. Just units, and more units. So when I attack Ragnar in 1000 BC (approx, I forget), he has bloody 8 archers in each city.

So I build some Immortals, they should do well right?

So I get up a stack of 12 immortals. I go into his borders and start pillaging, you know messing up his economy. He responds by sending out archers, since it's all he has.

We skirmish some, I mostly win because they're not in a city and immortals get an archer bonus. Then I finally come to attacking a city. I have 8 immortals left. He has 4 archers, no walls, and a very small defense bonus. The archers are level 1 and have no improvements aside from their starting (+25% city Def).

I lose all 8 immortals. He loses ONE archer.

I'm pissed right? Probably bad luck I guess.

So I build some more and I go back with another 10 immortals. He's still got quite a few archers, but he also has catapults now.

Get this, I start losing immortals to catapults. EVERY. DAMN. TIME.

I'll attack and the thing will just lay me the hell out. Since when does this garbage happen? Catapults shouldn't be killing anything but defense bonuses.

I lost all my immortals to about 4 or 5 catapults.

What is it? Do Immortals just suck?

 

[MrScorpio]

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.

I think increasing gold cost is the easiest and most straightforward. I would like to think there is a reason it is how the game designers stopped people from spamming cities like Civ 3. I am not saying its the most realistic (even though the gold could in theory represent actually paying for food, lodging, supplies, equipment and replacement men) or even the most accurate reflection of what a huge standing army is. I also think it would have the least collateral effects also on the ai because the ai is already programmed to know how to manage its economy.

I often think ther eis too little military. u can't strategically deploy. everything has to go in the SOD, especially early. no defending resources, or ur backdoor, I've even used ponzy schemes of removing garrisons from my cities while replacing the garrison 3-5 turns later w/ fresh units from farther back just to get more units forward.

perhaps by modern era u can have scouts, and multiple fronts and other such things that make me feel more strategic.

I think your frustration is misplaced. The reason that there aren't these other things you are looking for is because you pretty much HAVE to have a sod under the current game conditions to be competitive. It is among the most effective strategies to win the game because their is no substantial downside to maintaining a huge standing army. As poly said, thats why blake's ai focuses on giving the ai the ability to match us in doing so. "One does not learn to build sod's from one's friends, but from one's enemies."

However, if there was a downside to building sod's, then you would not be forced to put everything into a sod. You could strategically deploy to your border cities and your resources and only focus on building a sod if you wanted to strike someone or you felt someone was about to strike you (better do some spying, so you know what everyone around you is doing).

 

[arstal]

After playing some more (I mostly play sp, at noble, on normal speed)- I'm growing more convinced that part of the root of the problem is that AI upgrades its units too easily. That's why it makes those big SoD's instead of disbanding them.

I'm still trying to think of a good solution. Should either be in combat mechanics (maybe give siege weapons collateral damage on defense? Attack penalty for offense based on # of troops in stack?) or the unhappiness thing, which would divert AI resources to something else. I do think changing the AI upgrade cost to 100% would help depower the SoD some (and it's an AI cheat which I tend to oppose in principle)

 

[aelf]

AI upgrade discount has been deemed necessary to keep the AI competitive. However, this has been nerfed in the higher levels to become a flat 50% discount instead of, IIRC, 95% on either Immortal or Deity. Ironically, though, to make up for this the AI has been programmed to build mroe units. So this solves the issue of attacking the AI and then suddenly finding all its units upgraded within one turn, but introduces the issue of unit spam. Basically, now, instead of just having to press a tech advantage quickly, you have to have a little competition with the AI to see who can outnumber who. Even if you don't want to take the offensive, you still have to spam units in case the now 'competitive' AI sees you as a low-hanging fruit, whether the AI is your friend or not.

Civ4 has become a world of paranoia that has only one reliable solution.

 

[azzaman333]

Depending on your neighbours, and relations.

 

[polypheus]

AI upgrade discount has been deemed necessary to keep the AI competitive. However, this has been nerfed in the higher levels to become a flat 50% discount instead of, IIRC, 95% on either Immortal or Deity. Ironically, though, to make up for this the AI has been programmed to build mroe units. So this solves the issue of attacking the AI and then suddenly finding all its units upgraded within one turn, but introduces the issue of unit spam. Basically, now, instead of just having to press a tech advantage quickly, you have to have a little competition with the AI to see who can outnumber who. Even if you don't want to take the offensive, you still have to spam units in case the now 'competitive' AI sees you as a low-hanging fruit, whether the AI is your friend or not.

Civ4 has become a world of paranoia that has only one reliable solution.

Sorry to be repetitive but as I mentioned before many pages ago (so some of you may not have seen it buried in this thread), the IMS (Infinite Military Spam) problem reminds me so much of the ICS (Infinite City Spam) problem from Civ2-3 days. In Civ3, rather than really solving ICS by changing the mechanics to very much discourage city spamming but in a sensible way (as we now see in Civ4), they just made the AIs do ICS well enough to compete with human ICS.

We are seeing now the same issue with IMS. Firaxis recognized that experienced players have found that IMS is usually the best solution. So in BTS, new AI, they simply decided to have the AIs do IMS.

What would have made more sense is to solve IMS by making it not impossible or with hard limits (you can still do ICS for instance in Civ4 but the new game mechanics just make it much less optimal of a solution in most cases then a more balanced expansion) but with the same thinking applied to solving ICS finally in Civ4:

which is to make it so that it is possible to do IMS but with enough drawbacks such that it is very often not the optimum strategy for HUMAN players.

Once you do that, they it is no longer necessary to have all the AIs play this IMS game to begin with.

 

[mice]

AI upgrade discount has been deemed necessary to keep the AI competitive. However, this has been nerfed in the higher levels to become a flat 50% discount instead of, IIRC, 95% on either Immortal or Deity. Ironically, though, to make up for this the AI has been programmed to build mroe units. So this solves the issue of attacking the AI and then suddenly finding all its units upgraded within one turn, but introduces the issue of unit spam. Basically, now, instead of just having to press a tech advantage quickly, you have to have a little competition with the AI to see who can outnumber who. Even if you don't want to take the offensive, you still have to spam units in case the now 'competitive' AI sees you as a low-hanging fruit, whether the AI is your friend or not.

Civ4 has become a world of paranoia that has only one reliable solution.

This is evident even at settler level where the AI now spams the same number of units as it did at Noble in WL/Vanilla. In fact Noble WL is easier to beat at war than Settler BTS ( which I think is ridiculous).

 

[Moonlit Knight]

This is evident even at settler level where the AI now spams the same number of units as it did at Noble in WL/Vanilla. In fact Noble WL is easier to beat at war than Settler BTS ( which I think is ridiculous).

I'm finding the opposite. Admittedly I have turned off tech brokering (a great feature IMO!) but I have found prince on BTS is MUCH easier than Prince on Warlords. Even with tech brokering on keeping up with them technologically is much easier and turning it off normally means I am one of the science leaders come the industrial age.