1 unit per hex: failed experiment

[apotheoser]

The real solution that everyone is ignoring is that we need to stop having combat only on the strategic level and instead have more nuanced battles.

Call to Power, for all its other faults, had a really good mini-battle system for stacks: it was something like, ranged units would fire first, then certain units would attack first, then units would return fire, or something. And there were a couple units that could provide benefits but weren't really combat units, like slavers.

Or, there's Master of Magic, which switched to a dedicated battle screen where up to 9 units could be moved independently and had various ranges and speeds and attacks and defense.

Both of these games had good stack combat systems that wasn't "1upt" and yet there was no Stack of Doom.

I am so tired of ignorant people saying how broken stack of doom was, and therefore we should have 1upt. There are so many other alternatives.

 

[Teodosio]

Honestly, I really do agree the best solution is somewhere close to that. You probably know, but it's essentially how it worked in civ1.

Civ1 combat system had meaning in Civ1's time. This is because in Civ1 you only had 2 kinds of units, attackers and defenders, and you had no ranged combat and no moving after attacking.
If I attacked with my artillery I could not move it afterwards. So stacking was needed, else my artillery turn to scrap the very next turn. :suicide:

Civ5 is much more complicated because we have a rock-scissor-paper system, plus ranged combat.
If I have artillery in Civ5 and I want to bring it against my foe, my artillery needs to be very vulnerable. Because it is very powerful and cannot be defended against. I have to be smart and careful to keep my artillery alive; if my enemy is smarter and can outmanouver me he must be able to kill the arty easily.
If it could be possible to just stack a fortified infantry (on a hill?) with my artillery then tactics and manouvering would have no sense anymore.

I really have no issues with 1upt, except that it is slightly more difficult to move armies at long distances. This is not a great pain for me btw since I rely heavily on warships and (later) flying things for assaults.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Again why does everyone ignore the obvious solution: stacks, but only one defender in the stack, if that defender is killed the whole stack dies. How can you support 1upt, or any of the mad ideas expressed in this topic, when this obvious and easy solution exists and has been implemented before?

The logistical logjams created by the stacking cap would certainly go away if that was implemented, and you could then add back useful things like worker stacks building single improvements faster. I like it.

Longer term I like the option to transition from the strategic map to a tactical one to fight battles (with stacks on the strategic scale) - with an autoresolve option for the big picture folks. I suspect that would be a Civ 6 sort of thing, but it's worth planting the seed.

 

[Blackadar]

The logistical logjams created by the stacking cap would certainly go away if that was implemented, and you could then add back useful things like worker stacks building single improvements faster. I like it.

Longer term I like the option to transition from the strategic map to a tactical one to fight battles (with stacks on the strategic scale) - with an autoresolve option for the big picture folks. I suspect that would be a Civ 6 sort of thing, but it's worth planting the seed.

While I think that's not a bad option, I'm with swornabsent - I think much of your original premise is incorrect. Many of the problems that you attribute to 1UPT aren't faults of the system, but faults of the AI and/or programming. Let's take those points 1 by 1.

1) It makes the mechanics of moving clunky and the game run very slow

True, but this isn't a fault of the system. This is a programming issue.

2) Roads are not only rare by design (fine) but almost useless in practice because of the stacking limit. Single NPC units can perma-block roads in neutral territory, and frequently do.

Absolutely and thank goodness. Throughout history there are countless tales of battles won and lost because of logistics. I think that moving your army to the battlefield is a skill and things do get delayed when you try to move a massive army at once.

In one of my Civ games, I was able to use an isolated unit to occupy a neutral road to slow down an advance on a favored City-State without declaring war. This gave the City-State more time to prepare (and a couple more turns to get a couple of my units in their territory to gift them to help with the defense). I love having those kinds of options. Where you see a problem, I see an opportunity to use that gameplay mechanic that I can use to my advantage.

3) It distorts the rest of the game

I think I understand what you're saying here, but you're implying causation without any proof whatsoever. Furthermore, I don't find the peace game boring except due to the lack of good diplomacy AI, which has nothing to do with the combat system.

4) It is inappropriate for the scale of the game.

True, but this doesn't bother me. It's an abstraction, much like the road system.

4) It's prone to artificial tactics.

Most games are prone to artificial tactics, including every TBS game under the sun. Yes, some things may need to be improved, but those are tweaks to the system and not an overhaul of the system.

Let's take your cavalry example. Yes, they can hit and run - much like their tactics in real life. Perhaps the insta-heal promotion needs to go away. Perhaps they need to modify cavalry's attack power against melee troops. But those aren't system problems. As for things like opportunity fire, you can effectively make this so with the proper positioning of your units so that you do get to attack first. That's a decent abstract of the concept of opportunity fire IMO. YMMV.

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

This is an opinion, not a fact, and one with which I entirely disagree. I find this system far more interesting and friendly than the stack of doom from prior games. Even moderate stacking has issues (archer or spearmen - which one defends when knights attack?) and I'm not sure there's the perfect system out there. But I know I find this system far, far better than the old one.

I'm not saying there's not a better system out there. But every system has flaws. For example, transitioning from a strategic map to a tactical one has whole host of issues, many of which have been encountered in the Total War games. If you allow players directly to interact with the tactical map prior to combat, then you're looking at some major busywork and will likely bog down the entire game. If you're going the Total War route, then proper strategic positioning often means little to nothing on the tactical level.


And just to answer a couple of other comments I've read in this thread (not all by you, Ohio):

AI Gridlock isn't a product of the system, it's a failure of programming and/or game balance. But you know what? Historically, large armies often do get gridlocked!

If the AI has so many units their entire territory is locked, then that's a programming failure, not a system failure. It shouldn't be possible to do that in the game.

If you can't rush your swords to the front because your archers are blocking the way, then you've failed to position your units correctly. This isn't a flaw of the system, it's your failure as a general.

I like the mobilize/deploy suggestion made by teks and enfo. That helps solve some of the issues while still keeping the engaging combat system.

 

[tibbles]

Clunky and slow movement is sort of a programming issue, but picking an optimal move is a computationally intensive process, you're limited more by how good a player's hardware and patience is than by coding. More open space and fewer units should speed this up or allow better decisions in the same processing time.

Strategic road blocking is a strat I'd like to see kept alive, but the problem is roads are near worthless to attack down as is. A road is 1 unit wide, but even a player, who uses far less units than the AI, will probably be attacking with 4+. You don't want only 1 unit getting a movement bonus and the rest left behind.

There's not being able to get every unit in to attack every turn and then there's gridlock. There needs to be a way to swap the position of 2 units behind the lines without requiring using a 3rd open tile like one of those scramble puzzles.


I think some form of allowing stacking that does not provide combat bonuses is the way to go. I like the 1 defender per stack idea and maybe disallow stacking military units within an enemy zone of control.

I like Total War's system, I enjoy playing Total War, but I do not want Civ to become Total War.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Thanks Blackadder; interesting perspective. There certainly are matters of taste involved at some level. However, I think that the movement issues with no stacking fit the category of design flaw rather than bad programming. Take Tic-Tac-Toe as an example: competent play always results in a tie game; having a computer opponent who always ties the game is not bad AI.

If you allow stacking then the unit movement problem reduces to knowing where you have to go. If you don't, then the order that you move pieces in matters. If the way in front is blocked you need to decide if you have to go around or wait. Units have different movement, tiles have different costs, and so on. You've just created a massive programming headache, and that is a property of the system itself. How tough of a problem depends on scale, which is unfortunately cramped in Civ. I don't think that it can be overcome with better AI - it needs different rules or a comprehensive rescaling of the map size and unit movement.

As far as scale is concerned, gridlock is an important tactical feature, but is not usually something which matters when Italy is one or a few hexes. Thus the scale comment.

Re blocking roads: hampering supply lines is a great idea, but doesn't need to relate to the stacking at all: you could pillage roads. It isn't really a battle tactic as currently present: you can get blocked by a friend, and it hampers your own workers and leaders moving on your own roads in peacetime.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

Here's a possible solution, 7upt:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388540

 

[Jediron]

It all boils down to the scale of things, i think. While 1UPT could work under certain circumstances, with the scale of map as it is, it ruins the game for me. It is not a matter anymore of how good you are as a strategic commander; it's all about adapting your "strategy" into the landscape and hex system. Defending it's pretty straightforward i think, pikes/defenders in fornt, arty behind en cav on the flanks (if there is enough space (..eh, hex)) and behind for counter messures. That's why i think 1UPT is a bad idea, while there is hardly enough space to deploy decent tactics, well most of the time.

I don't want it to become TW too, i love the city and city state idea and the development of things. But what bothers me the most at this point, are the barbarians behavior and how simple it is to destroy them. They hardly are a real treat, and consume time of the pleasure i could have playing the game. Sure, you can turn them off, but then you miss the extra gold en exp. bonus for your troops.

 

[guino27]

Brilliant. It's not a perfect analogy, but this immediately made me think of the Design Workshop - one of my favourite aspects of SMAC (Alpha Centauri) and never seen in Civ games. Yes, it's not a perfect analogy, because the units you brewed up in SMAC were map entities, and it didn't use a points system, units were more or less expensive to build depending on how high-spec/how many special abilities you loaded them with. Nonetheless, I like the idea of a roll-your-own army solution.

And, of course, you couldn't later dismantle the SMAC units into components, but some way of dismantling an army would be need here. This suggests the idea of accumulating 'Army Points' (or whatever), another form of currency - that could be traded, obtained from city states etc etc. Armies could be dismantled to give you their points back.

I suspect the idea has deep flaws I haven't spotted, but it sounds like something that could be fun.

Ever since SMAC, I've felt this was the way forward for Civ franchise. Create armies instead of units, thereby reducing the need to move tons of units around. I hate using historical parallels as they really aren't relevant to games like this, but I will violate this rule here. All armies from antiquity onwards were a mixture of different components, from archers/spearmen/light cavalry to infantry/armor/artillery/AA/etc. Why not represent this? I would expect this would make the AIs life easier as well as unit building could be scripted and movement calculations would be simpler.

As for OP, I think the 1upt is a brilliant idea, but will never work given the limitations of the map size, AI incompetence (1upt probably benefits the human more than SOD), and just the niggly annoyance of unit congestion.

 

[Agent327]

No offense, but Kael´s Legions mod (which allows stacking) was the first one up on the mod hub. Issue solved.

 

[tom2050]

Agreed, they took Panzer General combat model but made the scale small, and therefore the whole thing is messed up. Whole continents packed with AI units, gridlocked blobs of non-sense. Instead of wasting all their time on pointless graphics like the diplo, they should have spent it on gameplay; or making the graphics worse purposely so they could use larger maps to support the new combat model.

Now, they will likely slightly improve the AI eventually, but it won't be enough IMO to fix the problem.

 

[WuphonsReach]

Frankly, until they fix the scale issue - 1UPT is doomed to failure in Civ5.

They either need to double the # of tiles in each dimension (including city radius, making cities grow from 1 hex up to 7-12 hexes as they get larger, allowing cities to work anything within 5 tiles of a city tile, minimum distance between cities of 5 empty tiles, etc). This would make the whole map larger, reduce the scale of an individual hex, and allow more fluid movement of larger armies as the base movement could be changed to 3 or 4 hexes per turn instead of only 2 in open ground.

Or they need to allow limited stacking of 2-3 military units and unlimited stacking of non-combat units (but only 1 worker can improve the terrain).

Or they need to allow larger stacks, with battle resolution taking place on a more detailed, zoomed in, game field where you quickly arrange your units and then attack. Which is similar to how MOO2 worked. It's not ideal because you have to setup your lines quickly and there's no "get caught out in the field with your lines facing the wrong way", but it fixes the scale issue. On the upside, battles are much more then skirmishes and have a bit of "this is a major event" feel to them.

Since I doubt that they can change the scale of the map with a simple patch, and allowing cities to span anywhere from 1-12 tiles is complicated, option 2 or option 3 is probably the easiest way forward.

 

[db0]

@WuphonsReach: Actually the first option is the easiest to implement, even via mods and I've already done this in my Large Scale mod to an extent, where cities can use 4 hexes and have to be 6 tiles away form each other and units move 3 tiles by default.

The difficulties with the implementation are mostly in making the AI use the new rules and in the fact that larger maps and more units make an already slow late game even slower.

 

[Iberian]

Civ1 combat system had meaning in Civ1's time. This is because in Civ1 you only had 2 kinds of units, attackers and defenders, and you had no ranged combat and no moving after attacking.
If I attacked with my artillery I could not move it afterwards. So stacking was needed, else my artillery turn to scrap the very next turn. :suicide:

What version of Civilization were you playing? Best thing about Civilization was every unit had "blitz". My (V) Chariots would run arround the ancient world killing 2 units at a time. Only thing more fun was (V) Battleships with the 27 attack clearing all the coastal cities. More fun that is till you ran into a phalanx.

 

[man-erg]

Create armies instead of units, thereby reducing the need to move tons of units around. I hate using historical parallels as they really aren't relevant to games like this, but I will violate this rule here. All armies from antiquity onwards were a mixture of different components, from archers/spearmen/light cavalry to infantry/armor/artillery/AA/etc. Why not represent this?

Yes, I think this is the way is should go. Just a simple "Merge Units" option in previous Civ's would have got rid of the micromanagement. Instead of Units, you build armies. However, this would be uninspiring with a simple "strength" attribute that added up. Something like ratings for attack, defence (like the old days!), ranged attack would be considered separately.

I agree with those saying the current system is not good. It messes up the scale so much, I can't believe the decision got passed the first design meeting! If you could take your units onto a separate tactical map (like Heroes of Might & Magic), it would make sense. I've enjoyed Panzer General before, but generally hex wargaming is a totally inappropriate concept to the world building high level strategy of God games like Civ.

Hexes don't make the game worse - but after a few games, I don't think they are adding anything of value either. There's a reason hex-games have dwindled to a small cult following... Hexes started as a board game mechanism before we had computers that could crunch a galaxies worth of numbers in a millisecond. On original Civ 1 and Civ 2, 486 processors with 32M RAM and 100Meg hard drives(!), tiling was a necessary abstraction. If anything, with quad cores, 4 gig RAMS and terrabit HD's, it's disappointing that we need any tiles at all.

Maybe the next step forward for Total War is to introduce hexes.....

 

[Schlomoe99]

Agreed, they took Panzer General combat model but made the scale small, and therefore the whole thing is messed up. Whole continents packed with AI units, gridlocked blobs of non-sense. Instead of wasting all their time on pointless graphics like the diplo, they should have spent it on gameplay; or making the graphics worse purposely so they could use larger maps to support the new combat model.

Now, they will likely slightly improve the AI eventually, but it won't be enough IMO to fix the problem.

I agree. Panzer General 1 was played at the Operational level of warfare. Almost every Strategic level game (like ciV) that is hex-based has some sort of stacking mechanism to compensate for unrealistic crowding that would otherwise occur with 1UPT rules. Consider the scale of an individual hex. Can you honestly tell me that in an area about a hundred miles across there are only four scouts? Surely they can accomadate a few (thousand) troops alongside. If 2K really wants to fix this under the existing framework, they can implement stacking on a limited scale; say, based on the presence of a great general. Localized stacking in these limited circumstaces could represent combined arms coordination possible through the organization only an experienced leader could effectively provide. Another option would be enabling stacking through a unit promotion (call it "Combined Arms") where units with that promotion could stack up to three high.

Had ciV been an operational level game, 1upt would have worked as well as it did (air units aside) for Panzer General in 1994. Strategic level games are a different animal, however, and require different rules to remain practical.

 

[dexters]

I'm for relaxing rules on 1UPT, especially for ranged so they can have defender on the same tile.

But I want to emphasize that this is an exciting new battle system that I want improved and see more of. Stacking is old news. Processor speed have easily quadrupled or more since Civ4, and CPUs today can compute easily 10-20x faster than when civ3 was out.

If they could make tactical unit AI 10-20x better than Civ3 units w/ stacking they would. But the diminishing returns of all the extra processing is obvious in a rules oriented AI.

They took a big risk applying that extra processing to a hexa map system. It's a risk I am going to support, because it's a fantastic sytem that can only improve as processors speed up (1st XP will likely drop a lot of lower specced single core CPUs) and they get better at coding it.

 

[skallben]

I suggest this:

1. Allow ocean stacking for embarked units and military vessels.

2. Allow stacking your army with allied civilians.

Reasoning behind suggestions are in this thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=388480

 

[vandyr]

Most of what's in the OP sounds like realism at work in game. If any form of military unit stacking is brought back in Civ 5 I'll be done with it. As many others have commented, 1upt and the hex map are the two best additions to the series by far. Allowing stacking of military units of any kind is a huge step backwards in my opinion.

 

[mrt144]

Most of what's in the OP sounds like realism at work in game. If any form of military unit stacking is brought back in Civ 5 I'll be done with it. As many others have commented, 1upt and the hex map are the two best additions to the series by far. Allowing stacking of military units of any kind is a huge step backwards in my opinion.

Dont you see the problems with it though?