Unit Stacking

[Noddahrassa]

That you can do. What you can't do in real life is mass a quantity of swordsmen large enough to create a neutron star into a single tile. Compared to being able to create a swordsman-neutron-star on a single tile, being limited to 1UpT is much more realistic.

Sorry, but I don't get all this stuff about singularities. A huge Civ IV map has 6656 tiles. Assuming it represents a planet the size of Earth, then one tile has a size of 29500 square miles, or 76600 km². That's more than twice the size of Belgium, for instance. However, more than 10 million people are living in Belgium, and they are not close to collapsing into a singularity, but even have forests, fields and other unoccupied land. So more than 20 million people could easily not only transiently occupy, but even make a living on the smallest Civ IV tile (in smaller maps the tiles represent even larger areas). The US Army has 540000 personnel. So you could have the whole of the mighty US Army 37 times in a single tile, and they would still have plenty of space left.

If you're nonetheless worrying about singularities, maybe they should have introduced a cap of about 500 units per tile or so. Anything less shouldn't be a problem physically, and saying that 1upt is more realistic appears quite a stretch to me.

 

[Noddahrassa]

mmm, yes, cuz there are tiles in real life. bet they overlapped as well, and when alexander (or napoleon) looked upon his army, he only saw one unit. to see the rest he had to click on the stack.

also, i sincerely doubt they actually piled them into one bunch. makes for a pretty funny picture, though, a mass of 650k men piled into one bunch rolling around the place. you do realize, don't you, that you can prove almost any point by exaggerating the truth, like you have?

I'm not exaggerating. You don't seem to get it how F*****G HUGE a tile is. It is larger than a small country! Of course Napoleon didn't have 650k in a "bunch", but he for sure had them all inside an area smaller than half a civ tile. If you are playing a planet-sized game on the resolution of civ, then yes, the whole army would realistically be in one tile. There's simply no denying this.

 

[MrHan]

@Noddahrassa: please don't ignore the points i made in my posts before you reply to them. i specifically explained why, even when considering the issues you pointed out, 1UpT is more realistic than InfiniteUpT. I was going to write another reply when I realized the replies are already in there - you just probably haven't read them or blocked them out due to confirmation bias (which is perfectly natural btw, don't worry). Also keep in mind this is Civ V we are talking about, not Civ IV.



you feel so passionately about SoDs, I recommend you either stick with Civ IV or make a mod once Civ V comes out. I don't see them changing 1UpT, and i'm glad they're not.

also, yes, you were exaggerating. look back at your posts.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Sorry but SoD's represent neither battles nor wars-more like a big pile on, where the person with the biggest pile wins by default. The big points are these:

1) Battles & wars are won on strategy-not simply brute force, & SoD's simply don't allow for that level of finesse, wheras 1upt does.

2) Wars are just really a series of battles-& I see each encounter between 2 units (whether stacked or not) as just one sortie within a battle-not a battle within a war.

3) When you move the combat system from brute-force to tactics & finesse, you eliminate another element of the "Bigger is *always* Better" paradigm which plagued the earlier Civ games (Infinite City Sleaze was another)-which is always a good design goal.

I would argue that defending SoD's is *not* about defending good game-play, but really just about defending an easy exploit.

Aussie.

 

[The_J]

I'm not exaggerating. You don't seem to get it how F*****G HUGE a tile is. It is larger than a small country! Of course Napoleon didn't have 650k in a "bunch", but he for sure had them all inside an area smaller than half a civ tile. If you are playing a planet-sized game on the resolution of civ, then yes, the whole army would realistically be in one tile. There's simply no denying this.

And it makes a siege on a city which has a size of a small country sure more realistic .

 

[Noddahrassa]

@Noddahrassa: please don't ignore the points i made in my posts before you reply to them. i specifically explained why, even when considering the issues you pointed out, 1UpT is more realistic than InfiniteUpT.

I've read both of your posts again. In the first one you mainly joke about neutron stars, singularities, mathematical points and large skewers. I really do not see what kind of "point" you're making here, and if you were serious about the spatial problems, this only betrays a blatant misconception about the sizes of a human being and of Planet Earth.

In the second post you say it is unrealistic to display only one unit of the stack on the screen. Well, that's a graphics issue, I don't care if they show one large guy or many small ones, it doesn't affect the mechanics in the slightest measure.

I've answered to the "bunch" of 650k men.

You're right that the clash of two SoDs is a battle, not a war. But it is an agreeably abridged battle that reflects the way heads of state experience battles, and in civ, you're playing as head of state. You know where your armies are, you tell them to attack, and then they fight, and then some of the guys die and some don't. That's all the influence you have, because you're not the general. It is assumed that you and your opponent have generals of the same quality, and they cancel each other out.

In the end, it all boils down to taste. When I play civ, I want to build an empire, direct the economy and the politics, take care of the broad picture, and not outsmart my opponent in the single battle. There are other games to do that. Introducing this feature into civ feels kind of grotesque for me, because it simply doesn't fit.

I'm also aware that this will be Civ5, not Civ4, but since nobody here has played Civ5 yet, Civ4 is the best starting point for judging new features that we have.

you feel so passionately about SoDs, I recommend you either stick with Civ IV or make a mod once Civ V comes out.

Yeah, I've figured this out for myself, thanks.

 

[Noddahrassa]

1) Battles & wars are won on strategy-not simply brute force, & SoD's simply don't allow for that level of finesse, wheras 1upt does.

I disagree. Unit piling allows for strategy, it doesn't allow for tactics. Strategy is from which units to make up your army, how many armies to have, and which battles to fight. This is well possible in Civ4. How to fight a battle is not strategy but tactics.

2) Wars are just really a series of battles-& I see each encounter between 2 units (whether stacked or not) as just one sortie within a battle-not a battle within a war.

I consider encounters fought on the same tile during the same turn as one battle. But that's it. Battles don't take years, and hence several turns. What takes years is wars.

3) When you move the combat system from brute-force to tactics & finesse, you eliminate another element of the "Bigger is *always* Better" paradigm which plagued the earlier Civ games (Infinite City Sleaze was another)-which is always a good design goal.

Well, I never saw the problem. And it is not "bigger is always better", but "bigger or more advanced is better", which is realistic enough for me to describe a war.

 

[sgrig]

While so far I'm a bit agnostic on the whole 1upt issue, as it remains to be seen how exactly it is implemented, my main concern is that all the extra tactical issues will bring about a lot of extra mm with them. In Civ4 wartime turns can take ages, but if moreover you have to think about the exact location of every unit, and timing attacks so that all units are in range of the attack target, I think it could get tedious for many people, and not much fun.

 

[plasmacannon]

Civ uses a smaller planet.
So, fewer units can fit into each tile.

Once, they develop a "zoom in" feature, they can represent a larger planet, like Earth, to scale, better.

At that point armys would arrive in a stack, then, the game would "zoom in" for the tactical battle with different units in different tiles.

Master of Orion 1 had this back in 1993.

Which even had reduced missile fire when hiding behind terrain (asteroids).
Archers, xbows, musketmen and others should have this penalty too, when firing though trees.

 

[Snorrius]

Master of Magic also had this feature, though it must be said they had limit on stack (9 units as far as I remember).

 

[MrHan]

@Noddahrassa: I'm starting to get annoyed at how you read only what you want to read, as opposed to the whole post. Here, i'll point it out for you. Here's the point I was making. I'll even bold it for you.

You're missing the point. The point isn't that they wouldn't fit - you can fit anything into anything given that you have enough energy; even neutron degeneracy dissolves after a certain point. The point is: why the hell would you? What isn't realistic is not the fact that you can fit x number of people in a certain area, because you most definitely can (singularities); it's the fact that, no matter how many you squeeze into a single tile, they fight as if they had all the room necessary to fight effectively available to them - as if all other units temporarily didn't exist. You could probably pack all US military equipment in a tile the size of Massachussetts, but upon doing so they would become completely ineffective. This is what makes Infinite UpT unrealistic and makes 1UpT the much more realistic alternative, especially when given the tiled environment of a Civ game.

In case you haven't noticed, the rest of the post was a joke I was cracking at your worship of MUpT. As for your latest argument - battles taking years with 1UpT instead of a single turn - notice how the average war in Civ IV would last decades, and notice how it takes years for a military unit to even move through a single tile. You're failing to see the entire scope of the game and concentrating on a single fraction of it and picking it apart for whatever your reasons when, in reality, the game as a whole actually is a fairly accurate (and fun) representation of real life. Civ IV did its job well, and so will Civ V with 1UpT.

Now at this point I've realized I'm only being childish if I continue trying to convince you, so I'll just agree to disagree from now on

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I disagree. Unit piling allows for strategy, it doesn't allow for tactics. Strategy is from which units to make up your army, how many armies to have, and which battles to fight. This is well possible in Civ4. How to fight a battle is not strategy but tactics.

I consider encounters fought on the same tile during the same turn as one battle. But that's it. Battles don't take years, and hence several turns. What takes years is wars.

Well, I never saw the problem. And it is not "bigger is always better", but "bigger or more advanced is better", which is realistic enough for me to describe a war.

Please do tell me how unit piling allows for strategy? It actually significantly diminishes the importance of Rock-Papers-Scissors by making it far more about who can bring the most units into the field-which will always be the person who can churn those units out the fastest. Its not a strategy, its an *EXPLOIT*-BIG DIFFERENCE.

Second, a single stack vs stack combat can be done in a single turn, so how does this equate to being a war rather than a battle-after all you don't know what fraction of the turn the combat actually took. Additionally, if you have issues with a single battle taking years, not days to months, then how must you feel about it taking decades to cross from 1 side of your nation to another? Yet again we have an inconsistent demand for "realism"-in a game which really doesn't allow for it!

Thirdly, OF COURSE you haven't noticed a problem-those people who make full use of an EXPLOIT rarely notice the PROBLEM inherent in the exploit-but endlessly bemoan attempts to solve it that remove their ability to EXPLOIT the system. As has been said, if 1upt offends your sensibilities so much, then simply don't buy Civ4, but please don't try and make lame justifications for retaining the SoD.

 

[cardgame]

uhh, civ 3 had 1upt?

You might want to try playing it again.

I personally think it would be easy to mod ciV to have more units per tile, but the game hasn't come out yet and I'll admit it I don't know *%$# about modding outside of notepad type stuff.

 

[Noddahrassa]

@Noddahrassa: I'm starting to get annoyed at how you read only what you want to read, as opposed to the whole post. Here, i'll point it out for you. Here's the point I was making. I'll even bold it for you.

Oh great, so your post did actually contain one serious sentence. Fine, but I have answered to that already. A tile is as big as a small country. If you have one division in one part and another division in another part of it, they don't interfere at all. Simple as that. You still don't seem to get how large a tile is and how much space there is, so please stop coming forward with these "there's not enough room for this and that" arguments. That's simply horses**t.

 

[Noddahrassa]

Please do tell me how unit piling allows for strategy? It actually significantly diminishes the importance of Rock-Papers-Scissors by making it far more about who can bring the most units into the field-which will always be the person who can churn those units out the fastest.

More of the rock-paper-scissors is tactics, not strategy. Strategy is to decide which troops to assemble (r-p-s is quite important for that) and where to send them. Directing these troops in battle is not strategy, I'm sorry. And it is not true that churning out more units will make you win. It also depends on how advanced your units are.

Second, a single stack vs stack combat can be done in a single turn, so how does this equate to being a war rather than a battle-after all you don't know what fraction of the turn the combat actually took.

Yes, if you work down your whole stack in a single turn, it is one big battle. If it takes several turns, it's a war. Where's the problem?

As has been said, if 1upt offends your sensibilities so much, then simply don't buy Civ4

I have already...

but please don't try and make lame justifications for retaining the SoD.

I've proposed reasons why I think that the SoD reflects wars better than 1upt. I also made a suggestion how to improve this with supply requirements. I can't see how 1upt should be superior to this.

 

[Jopo]

I´m with this opinion very strongly, unit stacking is VITAL to concentrating your forces strategically.
I´ve played Panzer General and its sister games in the old days, they had a major problem with units getting spread out into long columms on roads just waiting to go to the front line, it was impossible to just try to pass a unit by on a roadline, all roadlines were just clogged up with advancing units, it´s a MAJOR MISTAKE to disable stacking, I hope they make it so that you can MOD stacking back into the game, at least missiles and airplanes can stack, so just add stacking capability to all units and you´ve corrected the mistake.
It seems that they´re going to make a big mistake just because they want to make something new and they looked to a classic game for a solution and now they´re going to introduce a WEAKNESS of the old game, Panzer General, back to a new game, CIV 5, it´s a MISTAKE, a BIG mistake, I hope they hear the message in the design team and drop the idea or change it a bit.

I have an idea: They say the REASON for stacking being dropped is because they want people to deploy their armies more to the field...
...So, have STACKING PENALTIES and FLANKING ATTACKS, if a marching stack is attacked from the sides it gets FLANKED and the attacker gets a big bonus and the defender a minus, it was used in Sid Meier´s Pirates land combat part, if a unit gets attacked from the sides or the rear, the attacker gets 2x or 4x bonus, that would encourage deployment more effectively than FORCING it by denying stacking, have bonuses for FLANKING and REAR ATTACKING, all units FACE into some direction, if a unit is attacked from a direction it is not facing, it gets flanked, you would have to be more careful in deploying your army.

Besides, at least Great People, spies etc. should be able to stack and really its more realistic to have more than one unit in a tile, one tile represents a large land mass, a couple of divisions of infantry can easily fit into that space, if a city of millions of people is placed on one tile, how can a few units of maybe 10.000 men NOT fit into the same tile?

-Cheers from Finland !

 

[snowlyon]

definately NOT a fan of the 1upt for CIV. it doesnt fit as this is a game about MACRO control not micro control. given one now will have to direct each individual army and also keep track of their movements to avoid logjams (etc) just seems like to much of a hassle and a knee jerk reaction patch for SoD's.

I still think they could have rectifying it by just simply limit the number of units per tile. my suggestion would be 3-4...this allows for a bit of ease in having to micro-control ones armies and still fits the "realistic" look given the land space being utilized by said occupying armies.

ahh well, least the all you 1upt seeking folks will be happy.. ~

 

[Ahriman]

I hope they make it so that you can MOD stacking back into the game, at least missiles and airplanes can stack, so just add stacking capability to all units and you´ve corrected the mistake

This argument drives me nuts. They will design the entire game, and AI, around 1upt. Even if you develop a mod/hack to restore stacking, the AI won't understand it, and the combat system won't be designed to support it (imagine stacking where a single unit doesn't die in every combat).

You'd have to completely rewrite the AI and the combat engine and redesign the units stats to make this work.

Face it people, 1upt is going to be hard-coded into the game.

 

[CyberChrist]

Face it people, 1upt is going to be hard-coded into the game.

While I am certain it would be possible for a hardcore modder with a couple of weeks spare time to rewire the AI code, then I'd have to agree that for any other casual type modder it probably might as well be hardcoded.


@Noddahrassa:

 

[Schuesseled]

Oh great, so your post did actually contain one serious sentence. Fine, but I have answered to that already. A tile is as big as a small country. If you have one division in one part and another division in another part of it, they don't interfere at all. Simple as that. You still don't seem to get how large a tile is and how much space there is, so please stop coming forward with these "there's not enough room for this and that" arguments. That's simply horses**t.

What you can't simply grasp is that just because there are x tiles in a civ map doesnt mean the area of those tiles are equal to the area of the earth divided by x. This is a game for heavens sake.

Are you seriously try to make people believe that the tile with a farm in it equals to a stretch of farmland outsizing belgium. And that the tile with the mine on it has the productive capacity of an entire country when in fact in the game it is merely a hill.

50 warriors units stacked on a hill tile, literally represent 50 warrior armies/battallions sitting on a little hill. It's not realistic and simply not sensible. Having 1upt will allow armies to stretch across the landscape, so that only one army will be able to fit into one tile of countryside.

THE GAME ISN'T ON THE SAME SCALE AS OUR PLANET

If warriors towering over forests and cities doesn't already explain that to you, then i believe there is no hope of convicing you of it.

Anyway having said that, other than making the game more sensible, 1upt has one significant purpose, its gone take the combat away from being 100% city focused, your armies will be meeting everywhere to fight not just huge stacks sitting in the city and the forest outside it. Hopefully this will work out to be much more entertaining.