1 unit per hex. Poll

[oldskald]

@ Ankh.

Thanks for your reply (and don't worry about the language barrier - you expressed yourself well).

First of all, both of our opinions are just that; opinions. Anyway, I understand what you mean when you write about tactical decisions. Having played a lot of wargames I understand the concept of 1UPH (even when the board/table didn't have tiles or hexes it was only possible to have one unit in one place at any one time), however I don't actually see much tactical difference between stacks and 1UPH (stay with me here!). Both systems require decisions to be made on the basis of a) offensive opportunity, b) tactical defence, and c) terrain and movement. 1UPH makes these decisions horizontal, whilst stacks make these decisions vertical.

Let me explain what I mean. You are correct when you state that you need to consider protecting units etc. This is also true of stacks. Now, some have written that a stack looks like; 15 trebs and 1 pike for stack defence. Possibly, however that one pikeman had better be the mother of all pikemen! Because that 1 pike is going to have to absorb a lot of punishment. In fact, I would expect that pikeman to be weakened quickly to the point where its defensive utility is zero, at which point the more valuable (in strategic terms) siege units will be defending themselves (poorly). This scenario forces me to carefully consider the composition of my stack - it effectively forces me into combined arms stacks with a variety of capabilities; defensive and offensive, with a balance between them.

In this respect there is no real difference, to me, between stacks and 1UPH - the tactical decisions will largely be the same.

However, I need to articulate my real problems with 1UPH. Firstly, let me state that it has nothing to do with the AI. My personal problems with 1UPH are;

1) Utility of movement; I have no problem with 1UPH combat. However I find moving units outside of combat in a 1UPH environment to be deeply tedious. Stacks are a perfect way to quickly move groups of units around a map.

2) Available space; even if, as you state, the carpet of doom is only encountered on higher levels I still see this as a deep conceptual problem (particularly for higher level players!). 1UPH can only work if the available space can never be completely covered by units, thus paralysing all movement. The mother of all wargames, chess, ensures that the maximum space taken by units in a 1UPS manner is 50% of the available space. It can never be more than this. Now, if we could somehow double the number of chess pieces, would we have as enjoyable a game? My answer is that it is doubtful that we would.

3) Civilization games are not wargames; 1UPH is fine for wargames. But the civ series are not solely wargames. They are empire building grand strategy games. If I want to play a wargame I'll play Cossacks or Total War, or even get the little painted men out again and set up a table top game, and in those games I will use 1UPH. But in those games my movement will be tactical, not strategic.

Now, my points 1 -3 are personal gripes. I'm glad for you that you like 1UPH, and I hope that you continue to have fun with ciV. My problem is that this mess will possibly continue with further editions of civ, and eventually those of us who have problems with 1UPH will be left behind by a series we have invested a lot of time in. The combat mechanics of the series have never been particularly good IMO, but then for me civ has never been about combat in particular. Unfortunately, I feel that ciV forces a tactical system on to a strategy game (to say nothing about the other problems with it - but that's for a different thread), and is schizophrenically attempting to be both a strategy game and a tactical wargame.

And for that reason my copy is back in its box and is unlikely to come out again.

 

[Ankh]

Good Post oldskald, you bring many valid points to the table and it was a pleasant read.

 

[blind biker]

Look at oldskald go! Good post, I concur.

 

[lschnarch]

Very good posting of Oldskald above.

Did he really mean that to have 1 COMBAT UNIT per tile innevitably meant the loss of the ability to stack workers - or was he commenting purely on the actual design decision of Civ5 which chose to implement 1UPT for workers as well as combat? For that matter is it really necessary to have worker units in the game at all? Or could the same effect be achieved by a "public works" mechanic so that I could invest production into the ability to start improving a certain number of tiles per turn?

Well, this is the typical approach of "1upt defenders".
Artificially, they implement a split between unit types into their argumentation.

What does "1upt" mean? It means "One Unit Per Tile (aka hex)".
It is obvious that this core idea did not work even for the developers. They did have to get rid of "1upt" for workers.
They did have to get rid of "1upt" for the General unit. This is already an insane way of implementing a military unit.
They did have to get rid of "1upt" in terms of cities. You can have a ship, a garrisoned unit and airplaines in the one and same city. And all of them can be used to defend said city.

Actually, due to the restrictions of the core idea, they had to create the most artificial exceptions to make it work somehow.

But that is not the whole picture.
Due to "1upt", a general may block a worker who may block a great person.
Due to "1upt", within my own borders a neutral unit sitting somewhere may block any of my units. And not only one unit, it may effectively block any traffic through a bottleneck or any improvement built - within my own borders. This is one of the most ridiculous design decisions ever made.

Now, it is a valid argument that workers could be substituted by a "public work" system like in CtP. Actually, I am tending to favorite such a substitution.
Yet, after such an assumed changed, for sure we are not talking about Civ5 anymore, as workers are a core element of said game. We even have a social policy for workers.

Again he says Civ5 combat, not 1UPT. Does that mean he believes no 1UPT game could have more enjoyable combat than Civ4's stacks or he simply doesn't think Civ5's combat is improved over civ4?

I cannot speak for Sullla, of course.
Yet, knowing quite some hex/1upt based wargames, I know that one thing is very important for 1upt to work properly: scale and movement.

In both aspects, Civ5 just falls short.
The use of a strategic earth map for tactical combat literally makes 95% of all map sections the same: a densely crowded area with some elevations.
Literally all fights are taking place in some kind of bushland.
Due to the coverage with "bushes" (for the tactical combat, at the same time being forests for the stratetegical aspect) unit movement is completely restricted. In at least many, if not most cases your units just move one hex per turn.
This is a big difference to real wargames, which have large plain areas as large forested/hill areas, too. Due to this, in a real wargame you can manouvre your units according to the tactical area. In Civ5, you almost can't. And if you do, you spend half of the entire medevial age to do so.
The scale in terms of map, speed and time does not work. And this seems to be very much an inherent problem of putting a tactical combat system onto a strategic map.

And I haven't even started talking about the mismatch between archer units and infantry units.

Again is he (or you for that matter) seriously suggesting that the ONLY way to limit the number of units on the map was the method Firaxis chose with Civ5 - crippling tile yields and making *buildings* vastly more expensive? That there is no other mechanic available which could "encourage" smaller armies while still allowing building production to reach Civ4 speeds?

This once again touches the area of scale.
Sure, we could make tile output more.
What would be the consequence? We build city improvement quicker.
Now, how plausible is it to need 20 turns for the creation of a cavalry unit, while a university takes only 5 turns (numbers are just examples)?
And if you are allowed to build city improvements faster, how drastically would you have to change the tech tree? How much more techs would be needed to allow for additional city improvements? After all, you want to have to do something in between.

Once again, we wouldn't be talking about Civ5 anymore. Which might not be a bad thing.

Nevertheless, we once again enter the area of plausibility then.
I shall be allowed to have a large and sprawling empire with big, productive cities, making money like hell, but all I can do is supporting like 10 units?
Having a country which would resemble the USA, but only 10 units?
This would turn units into armies, more likely into army groups.

But army groups don't figth tactically. Army groups fight strategically. Their units would figtht tactical combat. But units we don't have anymore.

Bottom line: I agree very much with Sullla's estimation that a "1upt" system does not fit to a Civilization-style game.

Compromises have to be made every now and then, leaving both aspects in a poor shape: it is a bad tactical warfare game AND it is a bad strategical empire-building game.

 

[boredatwork]

however I don't actually see much tactical difference between stacks and 1UPH (stay with me here!). Both systems require decisions to be made on the basis of a) offensive opportunity, b) tactical defence, and c) terrain and movement. 1UPH makes these decisions horizontal, whilst stacks make these decisions vertical.

There's actually a fairly large tactical difference between stacks and 1UPT as implemented in Civ - in 1UPT units fight 1vs1 and the match ups are controlled by *player positioning.* In stacks, as implemented in the Civ series, the units still fight 1vs1, but the match ups are controlled by the *rules the designers implemented to govern stacked behavior*.

Back to the hypothetical example of the 1 pikeman guarding 15 trebuchets - yes he won't last long against against a horde of knights but that doesn't change the fact the horde of knight are still charging the best defensive unit in the stack first istead of using their speed to pick the weak spots. Suppose I don't have a horde of knights, but rather just one? Those trebuchets might be "poorly" protectected but that one pikeman *always* happens to be in the right position in the line to prevent my knight from picking off one or two siege weapons?

Such mechanics skew the decision making process away from tactics and instead to a largely production/logistic combat model that, assuming my opponent has a balanced stack, what I charge with is less important than the fact I have at least 3x as much in order to wear him down.

1) Utility of movement; I have no problem with 1UPH combat. However I find moving units outside of combat in a 1UPH environment to be deeply tedious. Stacks are a perfect way to quickly move groups of units around a map.

One could say the same thing about the tediousness of moving ~10+ new units a turn to a collection point to (re)build a stack, or cycling through 100-200 units per turn.

2) Available space; even if, as you state, the carpet of doom is only encountered on higher levels I still see this as a deep conceptual problem (particularly for higher level players!).

That the developers took a lazy and innefective route of merely tweaking exisitng production mechanics does not mean there are not solutions that *could* have been implemented to tie army size indirectly to map size.

3) Civilization games are not wargames; 1UPH is fine for wargames. But the civ series are not solely wargames. They are empire building grand strategy games. If I want to play a wargame I'll play Cossacks or Total War, or even get the little painted men out again and set up a table top game, and in those games I will use 1UPH. But in those games my movement will be tactical, not strategic.

Civ games are what ever the developers and fans want them to be. It's not a simulation therefore using tactical combat to resolve warfare is no more invalid than the decision to only allow Bishops to move on the diagonal in chess. If Civ games are strategic then why have tactical trappings at all? If you're going to fight in stacks then combat should be proper stack against stack, not cycling through subunits versus subunits.

Now, my points 1 -3 are personal gripes. I'm glad for you that you like 1UPH, and I hope that you continue to have fun with ciV. My problem is that this mess will possibly continue with further editions of civ, and eventually those of us who have problems with 1UPH will be left behind by a series we have invested a lot of time in. The combat mechanics of the series have never been particularly good IMO, but then for me civ has never been about combat in particular. Unfortunately, I feel that ciV forces a tactical system on to a strategy game (to say nothing about the other problems with it - but that's for a different thread), and is schizophrenically attempting to be both a strategy game and a tactical wargame.

I don't play the civ series for combat either but wars do happen and when they do they shouldn't drag the rest of the game down, which, IMO, was always the case in the Civ series, especially in Civ4 - you had a wonderful empire with nifty boarders and unstable neighbours, you had a variety of units, promotions, bonuses, nifty rivers and forests upon which you might have built defense lines, fortifications, you aren't refighting a predictable historical simulation with no consequences beyond the score screen but rather directly influencing the course of (your) world history, etc and the best the game could do was... have you throw hundreds of units at a city until one side or the other broke... yawn.

As I say repeatably lest anyone missunderstand my defense of 1UPT: I don't enjoy Civ5 either and haven't played in months now. I play Civ for the empire building side of it and don't enjoy the way it has been "streamlined" in this edition, but despite claims in this and other threads such a breaking of the builder side was not the innevitable result of 1UPT.

 

[oldskald]

@ Boredatwork

I don't think we disagree about much here! Maybe on some small points, but not really on the big things.

But, in the spirit of pedantic discussions, I do have some comments!

You mention that stacks force designers' tactical decisions on a player, whilst 1UPT gives the player greater tactical discretion (apologies for the para-phrase). I don't actually disagree much on this. But I do believe that there are tactical decisions that a player needs to make with stacks. These decisions are based on terrain (my Gallic army will keep to the hills, my jags to the forests, and I will be careful not to attack across water wherever possible), and promotions. But that is by the by really. I believe that for tactical combat resolution purposes 1UPT is perfectly logical - some sort of battle screen might resolve this, and still allow for stacked movement.

And to stacked movement... You rightly point out that moving lots of units individually around to create stacks can be tedious. But at least once the stacks are created they then move with one click of the mouse (alright, perhaps a click and drag!), whereas with 1UPT the utility of moving groups of units disappears. All unit movement must be done individually. Someone, somewhere can do a study of the relative time taken in cIV and ciV to move numbers of units (my life is too short for that, and my wife's temper would be sorely tested!), but for me the problem is that it feels like it's taking far longer to move units around in ciV.

Other than that we generally agree. There are enough intelligent folk around that we should be able to square the circle; the square being tactical combat, and the circle being grand strategy. One day perhaps we might.... here's hoping.

 

[boredatwork]

Very good posting of Oldskald above.
Well, this is the typical approach of "1upt defenders".
Artificially, they implement a split between unit types into their argumentation.

What does "1upt" mean? It means "One Unit Per Tile (aka hex)".
It is obvious that this core idea did not work even for the developers. They did have to get rid of "1upt" for workers.

Again symantics - no, 1UPT is a **combat system** and as such the only **relavent criteria** is that there is 1 **combat unit** per tile.

The point of the system is to eliminate the design decision inherent in any form of stacking as to how to resolve combat when multiple units are present in one or both tiles. As worker units and great general do not directly contribute either to attack or defense they don't count in as combat units and as such whether they stack or not with other units is irrelavent as far as a combat system goes.

Due to "1upt", a general may block a worker who may block a great person.
Due to "1upt", within my own borders a neutral unit sitting somewhere may block any of my units. And not only one unit, it may effectively block any traffic through a bottleneck or any improvement built - within my own borders. This is one of the most ridiculous design decisions ever made.

Yes but see you're confusing the actual requirements of a 1UPT combat system with the 1UPT firaxis actually designed. It was entirely possible to extend 1UPT to combat to achieve the new system there while continuing to allow everything else to stack. Likewise there is no reason that Firaxis couldn't have allowed your workers to continue to improve terrain beneath neutral units. Things are like this in Civ5 BECAUSE FIRAXIS CHOSE TO MAKE THEM THIS WAY, not because a 1UPT combat system demanded it.

Now, it is a valid argument that workers could be substituted by a "public work" system like in CtP. Actually, I am tending to favorite such a substitution.
Yet, after such an assumed changed, for sure we are not talking about Civ5 anymore, as workers are a core element of said game. We even have a social policy for workers.

When you say "civ5" are you reffering to the actual Civ5 game or are you reffering to the civ series in general? If the former yes it is a big change but that is my point - not that the current Civ5 could be fixed, but rather that had Firaxis done their job right and be prepared to make these big changes when they were designing the game 1UPT could have worked.

If the later then the question is are workers a core element of the Civ series or is the concept of improving terrain at some finite limite at some cost in terms of production and/or gold the core element of the game? If you accept the latter then any bonuses/costs/penalties/etc that applied to workers can be replied to the new system - you're still achieve the same effect just without having to micromanage a bunch of mindless drones which 75% of the Civ fanbase probably stuck on auto anyways.

I cannot speak for Sullla, of course.
Yet, knowing quite some hex/1upt based wargames, I know that one thing is very important for 1upt to work properly: scale and movement.

In both aspects, Civ5 just falls short.

Again I fully agree with you that Civ5 falls short. My first post on this forum, back in march in defense of 1UPT I said as much:

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.

Obviously they did not share my concern - if anything the game got alot smaller as there's little incentive to have cities more that 3 hexes apart now. -(though given the absolutely atrocious job they did of optimising game performance I will conceed that is probably just as well.)

And I haven't even started talking about the mismatch between archer units and infantry units.

Again does 1UPT require having archery units outrange infantry units? No. Firaxis CHOSE to design it that way instead of doing something more rational like making melee range zero and Archer and infantry range 1 so Archer would be able to bombard ajacent melee units but have to endure return fire from infantry.

Stop blaming 1UPT for Firaxis' shoddy design!

This once again touches the area of scale.
Sure, we could make tile output more.
What would be the consequence? We build city improvement quicker.
Now, how plausible is it to need 20 turns for the creation of a cavalry unit, while a university takes only 5 turns (numbers are just examples)?

Once again, we wouldn't be talking about Civ5 anymore. Which might not be a bad thing.

See you're missing my point - I an NOT talking about Civ5 at all. It's you, Luddite and Sulla stuck on Civ5 implementation instead of considering completely different approaches. You're talking in terms of ajusting *values* making this more expensive or that cheaper. I'm talking in terms of adjusting *mechanics* - actually change how units are produced and how they are supported to establish both hard and soft caps - the maximum number you could have without clogging the game, and a reasonable number to have without being tedious and/or crippling your ecconomy.

 

[fed1943]

1UpT looks good for combat but bad for other things.
Solution looks easy: allow stacks, but forbid any military unit stacked with other to attack, and, if
attacked, the attacker can choose the military to be attacked.

 

[boredatwork]

@ Boredatwork

I don't think we disagree about much here! Maybe on some small points, but not really on the big things.

Agreed!

But I do believe that there are tactical decisions that a player needs to make with stacks.

As I mentioned somewhere up above I really have nothing against stacking in general, just Civ4's unlimited stacking.

Someone, somewhere can do a study of the relative time taken in cIV and ciV to move numbers of units (my life is too short for that, and my wife's temper would be sorely tested!), but for me the problem is that it feels like it's taking far longer to move units around in ciV.

I think it's probably not so much a question of "how long" it takes to move an army but rather on the perceived value of making such moves and thus the enjoyment derived from it.

I didn't like movement in Civ4 because all I was doing was moving 1 or 2 important units (the stacks) then shuffling around dozens of replacement cannon fodder from the home front. Stack movement, fortify until healed, and goto helped but it was still tedious.

While I thoroughly enjoyed moving large armies in PG I freely conceed that movement in Civ5 is tedious, largely because they didn't increase map size & space between cities to lower the density and actually give room to maneuver. In PG it was widely seperated battlegroups racing deep into enemy territory to prevent the defense from consolidating... in Civ5 it's one big wave of molassas, shuffling forward uniformly all along the front.

 

[lschnarch]

Now the whole discussion becomes a bit unreal.

Again symantics - no, 1UPT is a **combat system** and as such the only **relavent criteria** is that there is 1 **combat unit** per tile.

This is obviously *not* true.
"1upt" is a design which allows only 1 unit per tile (hex). Period.

It is you who artificially reduces this to combat only.
The fact that Firaxis (Shafer) had to create quite some exceptions from that rule does not invalidate the statement.
See my remark above about having ships, land units and airplanes in the one and same city.

The point of the system is to eliminate the design decision inherent in any form of stacking as to how to resolve combat when multiple units are present in one or both tiles. As worker units and great general do not directly contribute either to attack or defense they don't count in as combat units and as such whether they stack or not with other units is irrelavent as far as a combat system goes.

Well, the trebuchet in my third line of units doesn't contribute directly neither to attack nor defense, either. Does this make it a non-combat unit?

The general unit may not fight itself, but for sure it influences the combat significantly. Otherwise anybody not burning them for golden ages would make something significantly wrong, no?

See you're missing my point - I an NOT talking about Civ5 at all. It's you, Luddite and Sulla stuck on Civ5 implementation instead of considering completely different approaches. You're talking in terms of ajusting *values* making this more expensive or that cheaper. I'm talking in terms of adjusting *mechanics* - actually change how units are produced and how they are supported to establish both hard and soft caps - the maximum number you could have without clogging the game, and a reasonable number to have without being tedious and/or crippling your ecconomy.

Well, it is hard to discuss if the other one's position is just "they could (should) have made it differently".

Tell us how they should have made it, and then we can try to find out if that other principle (collection of principles) would work.
Until you've done so, I will take the easy way, too and still hold my position that 1upt won't work for a Civilization game. But maybe you have some ideas which would make it work? Just let us know.

 

[MeatUnit2]

I think a stacking system is the way to go for a strategic game like Civ. There is a happy medium between the two extreme scenarios of limitless stacking “Stack of Doom” and one unit per hex “Carpet of Doom”.

I suggest a system where each unit is assigned a “Stacking Value” (SV). Hexes would have a maximum capacity not to be exceeded at the end of a turn. Units could be stacked in any combination so long as a stack's total SV did not exceed the maximum allowed per hex when a turn is completed.

Let's say the maximum capacity of any given clear terrain hex is 12 SV. Just throwing a number out there for the sake of illustrating the idea.

Great Generals, Missionaries, and other single person units would have SV = 0. (You could pile an infinite number of Missionaries in a single hex but you probably won't.)
Scouts, Explorers and like sized units would have SV = 1. (12 scout units could finish their turn in the same hex.) [They wouldn't be SV= 0 because they have defense value.]
Armed peasants, and archers would have SV = 2. (Up to 6 archer units per hex at the end of a turn, or 3 archers and 6 scouts.) And so forth.

There would be a lot of tinkering with combat strengths and arguments about what SV any given type of unit should have in order to strike a good balance. Personally I would enjoy that tinkering and those arguments, but that's just me.

Some of the advantages of this proposed system:
Units could pass through other units while moving, even stacks of units, as long as they did not end their turn with stacks that exceed the maximum allowed per hex.
Composition of stacks becomes an important tactical consideration since you wouldn't just have one giant stack.

Someone earlier in this thread argued that players would just stack the highest value units together, and that is true if you are using a system where a stack is defined as a fixed number of units, but with Stacking Values you might have armored units with SV = 6, so your big strong stack is only two units, and it might make more sense to use combined arms tactics and make a stack with one armored unit and a couple of lower SV units to support it. Again, it goes back to the tinkering with appropriate SV and combat strengths mentioned above. Additionally, real armies DO concentrate strong fast units (Blitzkrieg anyone?) so that is a viable option.

Another aspect of limited stacking is “What happens when stacking limits are exceeded at the end of a turn?” Easy: they take damage. Every turn they are stacked over the limit they take more damage.

It's an indication of their decreased effectiveness due to being overcrowded. No longer can a player (or the AI) stack gigantic armies inside their cities. (They can but their units will degrade every turn.) That makes sense. You can't jam a huge army into a city and expect it not to degrade.

What about ranged combat? That is one of the improvements I really like in Civ V, and I think it can be married to a limited stack system. I would not give the two hex ranged capability to archers, crossbowmen, or even early siege engines like catapults and trebuchets, but I would change the way they do combat slightly. Early ranged units would not move into the target square when the enemy vacates it through being destroyed. The idea of archers running out into the open, abandoning their cover in the nice forest, only to be overrun by the enemy's cavalry always bothered me. I'm sure it bothered the archers even more.

With the advent of cannon and artillery the Civ V style of ranged combat could come into play. It's too much fun not to use it. It also makes intuitive sense even on a strategic scale. Modern artillery has a long range.

I also like zones of control that stop units from advancing and the idea of terrain features that stop or slow movement. This gives a more tactical feel to the game and gives terrain features and unit positioning real importance.

The “Stack of Doom” had to be fixed, but 1UPT is not the answer; it's too extreme. The solution is in the middle, like so many solutions, and I really want to play a Civ game that has this system.

 

[boredatwork]

Now the whole discussion becomes a bit unreal.



This is obviously *not* true.
"1upt" is a design which allows only 1 unit per tile (hex). Period.

You have nothing better to argue than semantics?

"Ahahaha it's not 1UPT because there are two units on a tile! lololol"

Again the fact the game has multiple layers does not invalidate the fact that combat, which we are discussing here is dictated by 1UPT, not stacks.

Panzer General by your logic is not 1UPT either since you can have 1 air and 1 land unit stacked above each other. But it is widely considered a 1UPT game because there is only ever 1 attacking unit per tile versus 1 defending unit per tile. You will never have 2 air units stacked on the aircombat layer or 2 ground units stacked on the ground combat layer.

In effect you are playing Chess (land combat) on a glass board while simulataneously playing checkers (non-combat) on an identical board directly beneath it. The fact that when seen from above a chess piece appears to be in the same position as a checker piece on the board beneath it does not mean you're not playing chess at 1UPT, likewise does not mean that checkers, despite being played on an identical map needs to be governed by the same rules.

Well, it is hard to discuss if the other one's position is just "they could (should) have made it differently".

It is equally hard to discuss if your position is "since it didn't work the way they did it there is no possible way it could be done."

Tell us how they should have made it, and then we can try to find out if that other principle (collection of principles) would work. Until you've done so, I will take the easy way, too and still hold my position that 1upt won't work for a Civilization game. But maybe you have some ideas which would make it work? Just let us know.

Did you actually bother to read my posts before responding?

Here let me help you:

Again does 1UPT require having archery units outrange infantry units? No. Firaxis CHOSE to design it that way instead of doing something more rational like making melee range zero and Archer and infantry range 1 so Archer would be able to bombard ajacent melee units but have to endure return fire from infantry.

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 tie unit numbers to production penalties, happiness penelaties (people don't like being drafted afterall) harsher economic penalties, science penalties (money diverted from R&D to field forces), upgrade costs (huge infrastructure to change), experience costs, etc so that producing units would get progressively more expensive and lower trained the larger an army gets, but conversely as they were lost progressively easier to replace.

Likewise add unit repair costs so a player repairing a 1/10 unit takes nearly an equivalent hit as the AI who has to rebuild the same 0/10 unit because the AI will never be as good at unit preservation.

Do a search on my other 96 posts as well as I have already made numerous suggestions and see no need to do so again as neither you, nor I, nor Firaxis will invest the time and effort to rebuild Civ5 along lines I suggest... when it's closer to the time for Civ6 I will happily go over my ideas again in the hopes that next time around they do it right =P

 

[Zyxpsilon]

From Carpet of Doom to...
as recommended by those wishing for it; a new fix that allows yet another...
Carpet of Stacks (Limited or not) of Doom.
I'll take 1upT - but only within a wisely modified ZoC ruleset + Twelve (instead of default six) directions ability to move.
Anytime.

 

[lschnarch]

You have nothing better to argue than semantics?

"Ahahaha it's not 1UPT because there are two units on a tile! lololol"

We will come back to this later.

Again the fact the game has multiple layers does not invalidate the fact that combat, which we are discussing here is dictated by 1UPT, not stacks.

Panzer General by your logic is not 1UPT either since you can have 1 air and 1 land unit stacked above each other. But it is widely considered a 1UPT game because there is only ever 1 attacking unit per tile versus 1 defending unit per tile. You will never have 2 air units stacked on the aircombat layer or 2 ground units stacked on the ground combat layer.

For PG, this is correct.
But not for Shafer_5, where you can stack airplanes, too.

Again does 1UPT require having archery units outrange infantry units? No. Firaxis CHOSE to design it that way instead of doing something more rational like making melee range zero and Archer and infantry range 1 so Archer would be able to bombard ajacent melee units but have to endure return fire from infantry.

By this concept you would manouvre archers directly adjacent to melee units. About the following combat result we don't have to discuss, I think?

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.

Which requires the maps to be created in a different way, too.
Reason: the way, maps are currently covered with forests and plastered with hills makes them (from a tactical point of view) just some kind of densely covered bushland.
Furthermore the distribution of recources would have to be adjusted, as well as the expansion of the cultural borders would have to be changed.
A simple increase in cultural output would lead to a readjustment of the social policies.

IE tie unit numbers to production penalties, happiness penelaties (people don't like being drafted afterall) harsher economic penalties, science penalties (money diverted from R&D to field forces), upgrade costs (huge infrastructure to change), experience costs, etc so that producing units would get progressively more expensive and lower trained the larger an army gets, but conversely as they were lost progressively easier to replace.

Quite a vague statement.
Do you want to have any, just one or all of these things incorporated?

Likewise add unit repair costs so a player repairing a 1/10 unit takes nearly an equivalent hit as the AI who has to rebuild the same 0/10 unit because the AI will never be as good at unit preservation.

Which literally means that you want to get rid of the idea of having units survive combat?
As soon as my defending units have got redlined, it would be similar to have them just lost?
I am not very convinced that your idea would find many friends.

Do a search on my other 96 posts as well as I have already made numerous suggestions and see no need to do so again as neither you, nor I, nor Firaxis will invest the time and effort to rebuild Civ5 along lines I suggest... when it's closer to the time for Civ6 I will happily go over my ideas again in the hopes that next time around they do it right =P

Excuse me, but I am for sure not going to investigate now about all of your postings.

What I see, though, is that your suggestions so far just open other cans of worms.

 

[boredatwork]

For PG, this is correct.
But not for Shafer_5, where you can stack airplanes, too.

You can stack airplanes in PG's sequal Pacific General too. And in a later sequel, People's General, air support isn't handled by any units on tiles at all. That such exceptions exist however doesn't mean that either weren't 1UPT games.

You're still being too pendantic.

You seem to view the fact that if *any* exceptions to a basic concept exist are somehow evidence that the concept itself is broken.

Tell me - how many strategy or wargames have you played where air units have followed *exactly* the same rules as their terrestrial brethern? I've played probably over 100 at this point including Civ2-5, SMAC, 7 of SSI's general series, some HPS sims, matrix games, TOAW series, Talonsoft's series, board games, table top games, etc and I can't think of any.

Air units by the very nature of what airplanes are, are exceptional compared to the 99% of terrestrial units used throughout human history. Therefore it stands to reason that the rules that govern them will be exceptional in some way.

By this concept you would manouvre archers directly adjacent to melee units. About the following combat result we don't have to discuss, I think?

If you had looked into my post history as I suggested and found the full context of that suggestion you would see that this is not my concept, but rather a concept that was used successfully in several other wargames, including Fantasy General - PG's sword and sorcery sequal.

You would also be able to place that suggestion in the context of my comments that, though inspired by PG, Civ5's combat system is in fact a very dumbed down version of the original, with numerous key features arbitrarily removed, such as supporting fire, suppression (morale), retreating, the CHOICE to fire before or after moving, entrenchment, initiative, supply - all of which contributes to the viability of range 1 archers. That of course leads me back to my comments earlier in this thread that to incorporate a concept from one game to another requires actual design effort to ensure proper intergration as a whole... not just copy/pasting the "cool bits" like Firaxis did with Civ 5.

Which requires the maps to be created in a different way, too.
Reason: the way, maps are currently covered with forests and plastered with hills makes them (from a tactical point of view) just some kind of densely covered bushland.
Furthermore the distribution of recources would have to be adjusted, as well as the expansion of the cultural borders would have to be changed.
A simple increase in cultural output would lead to a readjustment of the social policies.

I'll just point that you're essentially talking about mundane issues - terrain type (minor), resource placement(minor), cultural output (minor), social policies (minor).

I was hoping instead you would have spoted and commented on the major hurdle that has to be overcome with any suggestion of doubling the map dimensions for a given number of cities to give 1UPT space, forgetting terrain types for the moment...





-> How do you get a given number of cities to spread out to fill a map 400% the size of the one they filled in Civ4 so there are now 8 tiles on average bwtween them instead of 4, and what do you do with the 4 tiles of space between cities thus created if you're not filling it with city?


Compared to the issues you brought up the implications of the above serve to illustrate that "simple solutions" if you want to do them right usually aren't very simple.

Of course I wouldn't have made the suggestion if I hadn't put some thought into how it could be done, my solution would involves expanding the Cottage/hamlet/town improvement of Civ4 into something resembling a cross between an improvement/a city state/ and the resource colonies of SMAC, which not only solve the above mentioned problems, but provide the mechanics by which civ borders are not controlled by culture but rather by posession. But as I doubt they could be explained without writting a 20 page essay, which we both know no one would bother to read anyways, I'll just say yes it would involve more work than the obvious and lazy "value orientated approach" of simply doubling the city radius... which I'm sure anyone who can count hexagons would quickly realize why a much more creative solution would be required

Quite a vague statement.
Do you want to have any, just one or all of these things incorporated?

Obviously it is a vague statement - posting those particular suggestions was not intended to present a solution, merely refute the notion advanced in Luddite's and Sulla's article that the *only* way to do it was by fudging production values as Firaxis did and because that didn't work it couldn't be done.

Given the huge variety of mechanisms used by strategy and wargames over the years I find it a bit incredulous to seriously believe there isn't something out there that would work for Civ.

While I have no incentive to invest time to work out the actual solution - not being a Firaxis employee and not being paid for it, and not believing that fixing this particular problem would salvage Civ5 anyways, I will say the solution will not be a simple matter of linking the number of units to any one single restraining variable. So capping army size directly as a function of population or number of cities alone won't work because both are explotable. Likewise a purely production approach wouldn't work either - the goal must be to limit total numbers of units but to do so in a way that doesn't makes them impossible to replace. Lastly, once an ideal number of units a player should have is decided - the mechanics need to make him feel like he's being rewarded for wanting to keep below it, not punished for wanting to exceed it.

Which literally means that you want to get rid of the idea of having units survive combat?

Please re-read carefully my suggestion was "literally" nothing of the sort.

As soon as my defending units have got redlined, it would be similar to have them just lost?
I am not very convinced that your idea would find many friends.

It's about fundamental strategy game balance.

When Shafer copied and pasted the idea of more survivable units from the PG inspiration he didn't also copy the concept of paying a repair cost to effect repairs *during a scenario*. This is another one of those fundamental things which makes strategy games work. Not just 1UPT but any truly viable strategy game: You don't put in place mechanics (in this case by removal of the mechanic which fixed it) which reward the winner *twice* for winning, and punish the defender *twice* for losing. Doing so only causes a snowball effect where once one side starts winning there is no chance for the defeated side to recover.

Civ 4 at least had quasi repair costs build into it's mechanics because combat was not about units, it was between stacks. Repairing a unit might be free, but because they died so freely, repairing a stack cost production effort.

Consider 2 opposing stacks of 10 tanks in Civ 4. They fight each other and one side narrowly wins out. Side A has lost 9 tanks and Side B all 10. To rebuild the stacks back to 10 tanks Side A must produce 9 replacement tanks and Side B must produce 10 tanks. In both cases the cost of a replacement tank is equal and so it costs SideA 90% of production to rebuild his stack as side B. The speed at which they can be produced and the experience they have when produced is a function of the relative industrial strength and civic choices of the two civs as well as the position of the battle relative to the center of production but the *cost* on a per subunit basis is identical.

Assuming equal industrial strength and distance when the war resumes 10 side A tanks including 1 veteran will face off against 9 side B tanks - an advantage to Side A *proportional* to the scale of his earlier victory.


Now consider Civ 5 - the stacks have been replaced by 2 single strength 10 units. Side A just barely wins by killing side B's tank, and is now 1/10 strength.

The loss was a close one, yet Side B is being punished twice for losing - To replace his tank Side B has to pay the production cost of the tank, and then take the time to move the completed unit to the front. He also loses any experience above and beyond what new built units receive. Side A on the otherhand, not only is he *not* paying production costs to rebuild almost as much (9/10th) of a tank unit and therefore has the ability to devote his production to producing something more valuable - like a second tank unit, but also retains his experience and promotions in the bargan, AND is close to the front and so can make an immediate contribution once repaired.

In this case, again assuming equal industrial capacity, when the war resumes, despite narrowly loosing a close first matchup Side B's new green tank is now facing 2 Side A tanks, one of which retains veteran status and thereby guaranteeing Side B will continue to lose. In otherwords Side A gained a disproportionate advantage from it's earlier close victory.


BTW this is an example of one of the many reasons why Civ5's AI is not competitve - it's not purely about the inherant defficiencies of an AI tactically maneuvering in a 1UPT situation - it's the crappy design of Civ 5 rewards players for things humans are inherently good at (unit preservation) while simultaneously marginalising things to which an AI bonus could be applied (repair/replacement effort)

 

[moscaverde]

Actually if the Civ 5 maps were bigger (really bigger) 1UPT would be much better. Units would need to move farther too.

 

[CivFanaticMan]

Actually if the Civ 5 maps were bigger (really bigger) 1UPT would be much better. Units would need to move farther too.

If Civ5 maps were bigger, my computer would burn. 1UPT problems stem deeper than map size. I would rather improved stacks than 1UPT.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

BTW this is an example of one of the many reasons why Civ5's AI is not competitve - it's not purely about the inherant defficiencies of an AI tactically maneuvering in a 1UPT situation - it's the crappy design of Civ 5 rewards players for things humans are inherently good at (unit preservation) while simultaneously marginalising things to which an AI bonus could be applied (repair/replacement effort)

Some interesting thoughts.

Theory_Solution(s)? Promotions & Empire wide Supply Lines & Depleting strategic Resources.
Nuked = Some Uranium GONE, forever.
Re-Fueled('ing) Tanks, ready to go or static target for a swift retaliation attack from nearby enemy troops.
And, so, on.

 

[Scocou]

Bottom line, 1UPT would be better served with larger maps and more refined AI capabilities. In particular, larger maps would help mitigate Civ's biggest (IMO) design flaw - widely varied scaling of different elements - the world, units, cities, resources, improvements, everything really, are each a different scale. This is certainly destined to introduce some strange dynamics at some point, SoD and CoD are good examples of this. The AI needs work but remember how sh!tty consumer videogame AI was back in the day ('80-'90s)? Sometimes we forget how far games have actually progressed... Time should see both develop further, I'm gonna' be patient and see if it helps.

 

[moscaverde]

If Civ5 maps were bigger, my computer would burn. 1UPT problems stem deeper than map size. I would rather improved stacks than 1UPT.

And I totally agree with you.
I guess my improvement of stacks would be one of the millions of sugestions that Civfanatics have or the Call to Power one.