1 unit per hex: failed experiment

[jeffreyac]

I do have a question.... People keep talking about 150 units on the map. If I try to run with more than a token defensive force (say, a defensive unit for evey other city) plus a small offensive force of about 6 units, then a couple of workers, the maintenance cost kills me. I can't imagine being able to field 50, let alone 150 units... am I doing something wrong, or are we exxagerating to make a point with this?

(Was actually depressed when I realized that my plan to form a carrier task force of a carrier, 3 planes, a BB or two and somw screening DD's and subs would pretty much bankrupt my entire budget for a military...)

 

[Akka]

I agree with the OP, which makes a good and articulate constructive criticism.
I especially agree about the scale and clutter problems, which both make the game tedious and damage the suspension of disbelief.

 

[MkLh]

1) It makes the mechanics of moving clunky and the game run very slow. The CPU is spending all of it's time doing complex pathing calculations to shuffle units around, and the more units (higher difficulty) they have, the longer it takes. Tasks which were never a problem in earlier games (assigning workers to build a road) are tedious and glitchy. Moving large armies is a buggy pain, and units in battle are frequently sent to their death (both human and AI) because it can't figure out how to get from A to B.

It's not necessary true that 1upt slows things. Civ4 Deity late game was notoriously slow because of the insane stacks AIs had. Now there are less units altogether and less to process for CPU.

Solutions? A modest stacking limit, either with overstacking allowed (but only the "limit" worth of forces permitted to engage in military action) or the AI coded to keep itself 1 or more below the limit at all times (to allow movement.) Unlimited stacking for civilians. Combining units to create armies (and attaching generals) would be a cool idea that would work well. Ranged units can still attack more safely (but don't need to be able to do so from 2-3 hexes), and weak units can be guarded by strong ones in the same hex (a godsend for the AI.) There are plenty of answers to the Civ 4 problem, and unfortunately the Civ 5 model isn't the right one.

In practice, limited stacks would mean in you'd need to organize all your troops in small stacks. Sounds like tedious micro managing to me.

 

[Zelig]

Now there are less units altogether and less to process for CPU.

You would expect that, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Partially because pathfinding is so godawful bad now.

 

[ohioastronomy]

It's not necessary true that 1upt slows things. Civ4 Deity late game was notoriously slow because of the insane stacks AIs had. Now there are less units altogether and less to process for CPU.



In practice, limited stacks would mean in you'd need to organize all your troops in small stacks. Sounds like tedious micro managing to me.

If you zoom out and watch the AI during turns you can see that they spend a lot of time shuffling units around, largely because any single move sets off a chain reaction. It's hard for me to explain why 5 is so much slower than 4 otherwise. Could be wrong though!

Herding an army down a road, or getting 4 workers to build a 12-hex long road, require extreme micro already. You could give people tools to merge armies together for movement, for example, which would help. I think that the logistical problems associated with movement under the new system are the heart of the problem with it, truth be told.

 

[enfo]

Features in CIV5 such as 1UPT and the Giant Death Robot came about because the developers listened to these forums. The OP presents some very good arguments against 1UPT, but the moral of the story is that there will always be a percent of the player base that will find fault with anything.

 

[TheBlackAdderBG]

I do have a question.... People keep talking about 150 units on the map. If I try to run with more than a token defensive force (say, a defensive unit for evey other city) plus a small offensive force of about 6 units, then a couple of workers, the maintenance cost kills me. I can't imagine being able to field 50, let alone 150 units... am I doing something wrong, or are we exxagerating to make a point with this?

(Was actually depressed when I realized that my plan to form a carrier task force of a carrier, 3 planes, a BB or two and somw screening DD's and subs would pretty much bankrupt my entire budget for a military...)

I agree.Never play on hardest difficulties,but having a 10-15 units for attack and 2-3 units in my cities is all i can manage to get before maintenance kill me.I often play on archipelago maps and having 9-10 battleships + 9-10 other naval units is enough and AI play with similar numbers too.And most important is that AI can play naval warfare.

 

[charon2112]

1UPT and ranged units are one of the best things to ever happen to Civ.

 

[MkLh]

1upt works just as well as stacks. The problem's the AI.

I always think of this when I see a thread like this. Go back and play Civ4, and examine on the war AI. It's the most pathetic thing I've ever seen. The fact that the AI in Civ5 is at least somewhat competent and doesn't require a 10:1 ratio (probably more like 3:1 or 5:1) to win against me is good. Of course I want the AI much better, but it's leagues ahead of Civ4.

No it's not, and AI in Civ4 certainly didn't need 10:1 ratio in troops - 3:1 was already a big threat. But obviously stacks helped there.

 

[Slaists]

OP: a good post and good, valid reasoning.

I played one game in CIV 5 and I agree with most of what you are observing. Basically, the AI in CIV 5 has no idea how to deal with the no-stacking limit. My little "army of doom": 3 archers + 2 stone-age warriors were successful at taking over cities well into the 1400's... AD, mind you.

 

[teks]

Civ5's strongest feature, and saving grace is 1upt, and hexes. Combat is fun now.

A lot of people are suggesting a compromise. Let us just stack a couple units. Sadly this would completely destroy the entire theory behind 1upt, because everyone will just stack pikemen, and crossbow men together, and wala horses are useless.

You know how water units embark. if road systems played to a similar tune it could fix things. Units traversing road turn into a caravan, and can combine, overlap, or what have you. Only problem is one surprise attack, and blamo. Your up <snip> creek.

I don't play small maps, but I bet 1upt is much harder on the small maps.

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Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[boredatwork]

And for this game and scale I'd contend it is an extremely poor match, and the problems with it make it hard to enjoy the other innovations in the game.

I agree that as a wargame Civ5 is bland and broken - however I disagree that 1UPT is necessarily incompatible with a civ style game as a whole.

I think all of your points basically relate back to your number #4 and the size of the game. Not that the concept of overlaying tactical combat onto a strategic map is flawed in the context of a GAME (as opposed to a simulation), but rather they didn't make the strategic map sufficiently large enough to provide real operational depth.

I made a post back in March where I defended 1UPT:

I have no problem with 1UPT system - it worked great for PG and I can see it working great for the Civ series as well.

The only thing I'm slightly concerned about is the scale of the maps - PG worked because in general there was plenty of terrain in and around objectives to maximize maneuver. If it's true that infantry are being given the 2 hex movement range they need to make 1UPT work, (and presumably tanks and cav 4-5 hexes) I hope that means maps are increasing 1.5-2 times current dimensions for a given number of cities to give proper room to maneuver. (ie trading space for time, penetrating front lines to attack artillery from behind, cutting off wounded units path to escape, etc.)

Obviously they didn't agree with me and made empires MUCH smaller.

The result is a given number of units is compressed into a much smaller amount of terrain with less room to maneuver and ultimately results in the the type of failings you list.

Cramming 20 units forward on a less than 10 hex front against 1 city at a time in sequential fashion with subsequent cities being only 3 hexes away has killed the operational depth of the game and resulted in the tediousness of having to "shuffle" units around which places a premium on the AI. Because roads are so short there is little point in trying to use them for movement as the "end" will quickly become cluttered.

On the otherhand those same 20 units advancing on a 40 hex front with a choice of 4 or 5 border cities to strike at and 7-10 hexes depth beyond till the next "row" of cities would have made for much more interesting and varied operational options - fighting withdrawal, elastic defense, flank attack, feint attacks, multipronged offensives, etc are all things that would have been experienced to advantaged with greater depth.

3) It distorts the rest of the game. Civ was designed around a different paradigm, and the changes needed to avoid unit overpopulation made the peaceful game imbalanced and boring (e.g. weak production and high costs for large empires, both driven largely by the need to avoid massive unit production.)

I don't think this was a specific consequence of 1UPT but rather the design decisions to "streamline" the game in order to appeal to people who didn't want to build 20+ city empires, or build every building in every city.

4) It's prone to artificial tactics...

Yes but let's be fair and clarify this has nothing to do with 1UPT. Stacking could be equally victim to a poorly designed IGOUGO combat system.

5) The new problems created with 1 unit are worse than the big stack problem they solved.

Again I think an argument could be made that 1unit was fine but the problems were created by not designing the size of the rest of the game in a fashion to accomodate it.

Solutions? A modest stacking limit, either with overstacking allowed (but only the "limit" worth of forces permitted to engage in military action) or the AI coded to keep itself 1 or more below the limit at all times (to allow movement.)

The problem is stacking still feels artificial unless you come up with a good way to manage the combat between stacks - in Civ4 for example suppose you had 2 identical stacks with an axeman, a chariot, and a pikeman each. The "loser" is automatically the one who initiates the attack - regardless of terrain, location, etc - because the attacker always has to face the defender best suited to beat him. While to some extant that was a deliberate counter to the disadvantages of the IGO UGO turn structure, it also means that the only viable tactic it to defeat an opponent is mass superior numbers against him.

 

[Oolon]

I agree with all of this and want to add that a stack of units with say 2 Archers, 2 Horsemen, 2 spearman and 2 Axemen should get a combined forces bonus as they have range, shock and flanking. The stack should essentially become a unit on it's own, made up of smaller component parts. This army combination should always defeat 8 Archers, 8 Axemen, 8 spearmen or 8 horsemen.

Bonus promotions could be given to each unit, for every other unit of a different kind that the stack posseses.

I'm actually really intrigued by this idea. Let's go with it.

A hex can hold four military units. They can be any four mixed units, or specialist units, or whatever.

Have you guys ever played Gemcraft? There was a process in which you would take various colors of gems and combine them to enhance damage or enhance special abilities, or combine abilities.

Blue gems would freeze, so combining blue gems would give you a specialty gem that froze longer. Red gems would do splash damage, so combining red gems would increase the splash radius. If you combined a blue and a red gem, however, you'd increase damage, decrease the freezing and the splash, but combine the freezing and the splash effect together to get freezing splash damage. Less effective than its pure color brethren at their specialized task, but more effective in a new task. The game became about ways of maximizing these gem upgrades to get the effects you wanted.

Adding cavalry in a small stack would give you bonus to infantry. Adding spearmen a bonus to cavalry. But having a mixed force with cavalry would be less effective against infantry and slower than a specialized, fast-moving, exclusive cavalry force would be, but the decision to create specialist stacks would be dynamic and you could take a turn or two to reform stacks.

I'll investigate what modding something like this would involve, but I'm going to write it out in a design document for later and see what I can do about it. I like the small stack ideas, though, but I would want to add something more to it than just four units occupying the same hex to eliminate traffic jams. It would become a "one army per hex" system.

 

[enfo]

You know how water units embark. if road systems played to a similar tune it could fix things. Units traversing road turn into a caravan, and can combine, overlap, or what have you. Only problem is one surprise attack, and blamo. Your up <snip> creek.

This is an awesome suggestion.

Allow for unlimited civilian stacking. Keep 1UPT with military units. Military units have two new features :

1) Mobilize/Deploy. Turn into a civilian unit that travel through roads and can stack with other civilian units.

2) Blockade/Stop Blockade. Toggle a mode to block all other units from passing through civilian or military, or allow all non military units to pass through.

 

[Akka]

The problem is stacking still feels artificial unless you come up with a good way to manage the combat between stacks - in Civ4 for example suppose you had 2 identical stacks with an axeman, a chariot, and a pikeman each. The "loser" is automatically the one who initiates the attack - regardless of terrain, location, etc - because the attacker always has to face the defender best suited to beat him. While to some extant that was a deliberate counter to the disadvantages of the IGO UGO turn structure, it also means that the only viable tactic it to defeat an opponent is mass superior numbers against him.

The Civ4 mod Fall From Heavens 2 had a very interesting take on this : a promotion, that made it so that a unit would attack the WEAKEST unit in a stack, rather than the strongest. Made for a big change in the strategic decisions in the game.

 

[Monadenia]

Letting me move all of my pieces at once, for example, gives enormous advantages to the offense (since the defender can't react and withdraw wounded units.)

This seems more like an issue with the turn-based nature of Civ. You have the exact same problem with stacking. I don't see an easy way around this without abandoning the sequential turn-based nature of Civ.

 

[mike_cf]

While to some extant that was a deliberate counter to the disadvantages of the IGO UGO turn structure, it also means that the only viable tactic it to defeat an opponent is mass superior numbers against him.

If available you can soften up with some siege. If you are playing with RoM, just use archer's ranged attack for softening

 

[pi-r8]

Obviously they didn't agree with me and made empires MUCH smaller.

The result is a given number of units is compressed into a much smaller amount of terrain with less room to maneuver and ultimately results in the the type of failings you list.

Cramming 20 units forward on a less than 10 hex front against 1 city at a time in sequential fashion with subsequent cities being only 3 hexes away has killed the operational depth of the game and resulted in the tediousness of having to "shuffle" units around which places a premium on the AI. Because roads are so short there is little point in trying to use them for movement as the "end" will quickly become cluttered.

Yeah I agree completely with this. I guess that's why 1UPT works OK early in the game, and at lower levels- the map is much less cluttered. But as the game goes on, or as you bump up the difficulty, you quickly reach the point of saturation where every single tile on the front is covered with a unit, and no maneuver is possible. Or for the AI, every single tile in their empire gets covered.

 

[AlpsStranger]

I still like and cling to hope for 1upT, but I could accept a return to SoD. However, for me to accept it gladly, I would demand one or more of the following.

1) Allow collateral damage to work in an unlimited manner. It may still be limited to getting the stack down to 20% health, but it damages the *entire* stack. Even if the stack is huge.

2) Only allow a medic to service a fixed number of units.

3) Still try to limit numbers. I actually like the higher hammer costs, etc. So the "Neo-SoD" would be 10 units instead of 55.

4) Even with SoD throw the old annihilation combat overboard. Single combats shouldn't guarantee death for one side. This would allow a Civ5-like dynamic where keeping units around mattered a lot more than just building more.

5) Cities should defend themselves and have garrisons just like now, even if those garrisons are so much larger. I never realized how awesome it would be to actually *see* my city, and not some jackass Godzilla Archer.

6) Super medic was lame. Get rid of it.

 

[boredatwork]

The Civ4 mod Fall From Heavens 2 had a very interesting take on this : a promotion, that made it so that a unit would attack the WEAKEST unit in a stack, rather than the strongest. Made for a big change in the strategic decisions in the game.

I think that would only reverse the problem, not eliminate it.

If I have a single chariot against a stack of 5 pikemen and 1 axeman it doesn't seem anymore right that it can ignore the pikemen and charge the axeman than it did when it was facing 5 axemen and 1 pikeman that the 1 pikeman would always be in the position to meet the charge.