Psyringe
Scout
As I said in another thread, I do see many problems with a 1upt approach (most of those already mentioned by the OP, so I won't repeat them here). I can see that it may still lead to better gameplay (at least between human players) than a SOD mechanic, though personally I didn't see that much of a problem in the way Civ4 handled that. But supposing that SOD may have been annoying to players, I think I would have preferred fixing the stack mechanics with appropriate counters over taking the whole feature out.
I disagree that limited stacking would have been a good solution. It's still a hard cap. In my experience, limited stacking (which was a "feature" in old games that simply couldn't jandle unlimited stacks due to the way they managed the units and the map internally) leads to players looing for "killer combos" which fill all available slots and lead to a nearly unbeatable mini-stack. So instead of the unlimited stack of death in Civ4, or the single unit of death in Civ5, you'd have a mini-stack of death. It's still the same problem.
Imho, a good approach to solve the SOD problem would have been to offer better counters against it: More collateral damage, less reliability that the "best defender" is chosen when attacked, area-of-effect weapons that target all units in stack and thus can do a lot of damage in a single turn if the opponent built a huge stack), etc. There are dozens of possibilities, and they have been known for a long time.
One particularly interesting approach (imho) is found in Master of Orion, a 17-year old space strategy game. In this game, players could design their own spaceships. Possibilities ranged from having a single huge dreadnought with a ton of armor to having a fleet of thousands of tiny ships consisting of little more than a weapon attached to an engine. Let's view the single behemoth as a single unit and the fleet of tiny ships as a huge stack of units.
There were also weapons with very distinct effects. One weapon removed 20% of a ship's structure (hit points), but could only affect one ship at a time. Another weapon killed 25% of all ships in a single fleet. Obviously, the first weapon would be very effective against the dreadnought, doing a lot of damage with every shot, while being totally useless against the fleet (reducing 1 tiny ship's structure while leavin 999 others untouched isn't a huge gain). Conversely, the second weapon was totally ineffective against the dreadnought (removing 25% of ships in a fleet of 1 ship does nothing), but extremely effective against the fleet, destroying hundreds of ships with a single shot.
Hence, whether to use single units or stacks was a strategical decision. The game didn't simply forbid stacks (like Civ5), nor did it make them the ultimate weapon (like Civ4). It implemented stacks as a tactical option that was very useful in some situations and horribly bad in others, depending on the weaponry and equipment of the opponent. So, you had to study your opponent's ships and then decide how to best counter that with your own designs, and you then built either a dreadnought, or fleets of tiny ships, or something in between. And isn't that what strategy games are about - having options and trying to choose the right ones?
That's why I'm increasingly skeptical about 1upt in Civ5. In an attempt to solve the problem of overpowered stacks in previous games, they removed the option to build them instead of giving us more and better options to counter them.
I disagree that limited stacking would have been a good solution. It's still a hard cap. In my experience, limited stacking (which was a "feature" in old games that simply couldn't jandle unlimited stacks due to the way they managed the units and the map internally) leads to players looing for "killer combos" which fill all available slots and lead to a nearly unbeatable mini-stack. So instead of the unlimited stack of death in Civ4, or the single unit of death in Civ5, you'd have a mini-stack of death. It's still the same problem.
Imho, a good approach to solve the SOD problem would have been to offer better counters against it: More collateral damage, less reliability that the "best defender" is chosen when attacked, area-of-effect weapons that target all units in stack and thus can do a lot of damage in a single turn if the opponent built a huge stack), etc. There are dozens of possibilities, and they have been known for a long time.
One particularly interesting approach (imho) is found in Master of Orion, a 17-year old space strategy game. In this game, players could design their own spaceships. Possibilities ranged from having a single huge dreadnought with a ton of armor to having a fleet of thousands of tiny ships consisting of little more than a weapon attached to an engine. Let's view the single behemoth as a single unit and the fleet of tiny ships as a huge stack of units.
There were also weapons with very distinct effects. One weapon removed 20% of a ship's structure (hit points), but could only affect one ship at a time. Another weapon killed 25% of all ships in a single fleet. Obviously, the first weapon would be very effective against the dreadnought, doing a lot of damage with every shot, while being totally useless against the fleet (reducing 1 tiny ship's structure while leavin 999 others untouched isn't a huge gain). Conversely, the second weapon was totally ineffective against the dreadnought (removing 25% of ships in a fleet of 1 ship does nothing), but extremely effective against the fleet, destroying hundreds of ships with a single shot.
Hence, whether to use single units or stacks was a strategical decision. The game didn't simply forbid stacks (like Civ5), nor did it make them the ultimate weapon (like Civ4). It implemented stacks as a tactical option that was very useful in some situations and horribly bad in others, depending on the weaponry and equipment of the opponent. So, you had to study your opponent's ships and then decide how to best counter that with your own designs, and you then built either a dreadnought, or fleets of tiny ships, or something in between. And isn't that what strategy games are about - having options and trying to choose the right ones?
That's why I'm increasingly skeptical about 1upt in Civ5. In an attempt to solve the problem of overpowered stacks in previous games, they removed the option to build them instead of giving us more and better options to counter them.
: more precisely it's the way in which a stack of artilery pieces could red-line or even kills a whole stack of other units without any retaliation from enemy. Even if there was artillery pieces on target stack it didn't start a "counter-battery fire" - which was ridiculous IMHO !! 
