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One Unit Per Tile: Yes, the largest change in Civilization 5 is ultimately its largest design flaw. This will be a controversial point, as I know a lot of people really enjoy the new combat system, but it has to be said: the One Unit Per Tile restriction is the core problem with Civ5's design. Everything is based around this restriction. Everything. It determines how city production works, it determines the pace of research, it explains why tile yields are so low. Civilization was completely rewritten from the ground up to make use of the One Unit Per Tile limit on gameplay. Luddite has written the best summary of how and why this system doesn't work, so I'm going to let him explain further before I continue:
"I believe that these problems stem directly from the decision to make civ V a one-unit-per-tile (1UPT) game. 1UPT allows a lot of flexibility in how you arrange your army; however, it only works if your army has empty space to move in. It requires an army smaller than the map. 1UPT led to small army sizes, which led to lower production and faster science, which led to the broken economy system that this game has now. The combat in civ V was based on panzer general, but that doesn't work well in a civ style game. I tried to explain why that is in this post: (In PG, England is about 500 hexes. That's enough room for very large armies to maneuver around in (and even so, things get pretty congested when you're fighting over london). In Civ V, England is only 6 hexes! What am I supposed to do there? That's not even enough room to build a proper city! The English channel is only 4 hexes and one hex wide, so you can shoot across it with archers. Poor Italy has it worst though- only 2 hexes for the Italian peninsula! And the mediterranean is only 1 tile wide! Now that's an earth map, but the same sort of problems happen on any map I play. Tight spaces, bottlenecks, absolutely no room to maneuver. Civ V warfare is just a traffic jam.)
Clearly this was a decision made early on, since it's such an important part of the game. At the same time, they wanted to keep the "civ" feel to the game, where you settle new cities, build improvements and city buildings, and go in to the city screen to adjust your citizens. Combined, this meant that they had to limit the total number of tiles in the game, and so they tried to force army sizes to be very small. A typical civ 4 army of ~50 units would be incredibly annoying to manage in the Civ V style, so they wanted to encourage armies of only 5~10 units. I hope this succession game showed how clunky warfare becomes in this game when the army sizes get large (I enjoy the early wars with small army sizes). The AI can't handle it, and the player doesn't enjoy it.
In order to do that, they had to limit production. You can see that in the decreased yields- production and food yield have been decreased compared to civ 4, whereas the food required to grow a city was greatly increased. The early units like warriors don't take very long to build, but the cost of units quickly increases. The high upkeep costs for units, buildings, and roads factor in to this as well (see my sig: Civ5 is the first Civ game that is about NOT building instead of building. Don't build troops since support is so high, don't build buildings because support is too high, don't build roads because.... yada yada yada). The idea was, I think, that every new military unit would take about 10~20 turns to build, just enough to replace your losses while you continually upgraded your original army. As a result, your army size would stay almost constant throughout the game.
Also, it's worth pointing out that there's two ways of effectively decreasing production. Either decrease hammer yields while increasing costs- which they did- or to make science go faster- which they also did. The beaker cost of techs decreased, great scientists became more powerful, and research agreements were added. All of these accelerated the tech pace, giving less time to build the units/buildings for each technology, which effectively decreased production.
So now the developers are stuck with a game that has greatly reduced production values. That's fine, except for one thing- what do they do in the early game? They can't expect us to just sit around clicking "next turn" for 40 turns waiting for our worker to finish, or 100 turns for a library to finish. It's bad enough that it already takes up to 15 turns to finish that first worker. So, they had to make the early stuff a bit cheaper. You can build a warrior in ~6 turns, and you can build a horseman or a library in ~10. Even a coloseum only takes ~20. The idea was that a small city was efficient enough to produce the early game stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and as the city grew, it would produce the later stuff in the same amount of time- keeping army size constant while the cities grew and built infrastructure. There would be no massive increases in the power of a city with its size (like civ 4 had) because if a city became really powerful, it could create huge armies which would break the 1UPT system. If large cities were only modestly more powerful than small cities, the army sizes would stay small. That's pretty much what I discovered when I tried a game limited to just 3 large cities.
What the developers overlooked was that we're not limited to just a few large cities- we can build as many small cities as we want! Granted, we're limited a bit by happiness, but there's a lot of ways to solve that little problem (like keeping the city size small). And since small cities are so efficient at building the early game stuff, and large cities never become vastly more powerful, the many small cities with their trading posts (even without any multipliers) will quickly outproduce the large cities with their mines, despite their forges and workshops.
The game is in an awkward situation where large cities can't be too good because it would imbalance the middle and late game, but small cities have to be good or else the early game would be boring. And of course science is shared between all cities, so the more cities you have, the faster science goes, without any corresponding increase in city production. The result is what we've got now- a large number of small, undeveloped cities can produce a collossal amount of gold and science, which allows us to outtech even a large deity AI, while producing anything we want.
I know a lot of people will suggest balance tweaks to fix this. But I don't think this can be solved adequately without somehow addressing the issue of 1UPT at civ scale. You can't give an incentive to make large, developed cities better because that will just make that late game even faster and more unit-clogged than it is now. You can't make small, undeveloped cities weaker because than the early game will just be excruciatingly slow and boring.
So what do we have now? Thanks to 1UPT, we've got a game that tries hard to limit production because large armies break the 1UPT system. To limit production as the game goes on, large cities increase their production very slowly relative to science. This means that small cities remain competative throughout the entire game. This, combined with the many loopholes in the happiness system, allow an empire of many small cities to massively outproduce and outtech an empire of a few large cities, so the 1UPT is broken anyway with a massive clog of advanced units, early in the game. In my opinion, this is not fixable without severe changes to the game, such as bringing back stacks or greatly increasing the minimum distance between cities."
This is such a devastatingly effective critique of Civ5's problems, I just had to use it here. Very well said, luddite! As he said, Civ5 absolutely has to limit the number of units on the map, or else they begin to clump up together and form traffic jams, getting in one another's way uselessly. When this system breaks down in the lategame, or when playing on high difficulty level, the result is the infamous "Carpet of Doom" scenario (pictured at the top of this section), with a unit on every tile and 90% of them standing around in the back completely uselessly. So the game must limit production, therefore crippling tile yields compared to Civ4 and making all units/buildings vastly more expensive than in prior versions. But this isn't fun either, because it takes forever for the player to build anything, and anyone who is not going to war is going to be bored out of their minds. It also creates the problematic dynamic between small and large cities that luddite pointed out, with small cities much too good compared to large cities. The design team is trying to fix this with patches, but they aren't having more than modest success, because these problems are inherent to the design of Civ5's One Unit Per Tile restrictions.
Of course, I also need to make the obvious and most important criticism of the One Unit Per Tile system: the AI in Civ5 has absolutely no idea how to play the game under these rules. This sort of tactical combat requires more calculations on the AI's part in order to maneuver intelligently, and the combat AI has proven to be a dismal failure at meeting this test. Killing AI units at a rate of 10:1 is routine in Civ5, and I achieved a 37:0 kill ratio on one of my succession game turnsets (against Deity AIs!) Clearly, when the AI is unable to wage wars effectively and present a credible threat to the player, it undercuts the goals that Civ5 is trying to achieve. Game reviewer Tom Chick of 1UP (the only professional reviewer who had the balls to write on release that Civ5 had significant flaws) pointed to the game's AI in naming Civ5 as his most disappointing game of 2010: "This was the most disappointing game of the year because it brought to the Civilization series a really cool new feature -- tactical combat -- and then utterly neglected the AI needed to make it work. From there, the game fell apart entirely. Imagine a shooter where the AI enemies can't aim their guns or a racing game where the other drivers can't steer. The other questionable decisions -- watered down diplomacy, no religion, that strained policy tree -- all take a back seat to the very simple fact that Civilization V simply didn't work as it was designed."
That raises a very good question: why can't the AI handle this tactical combat system better? Yes, it's more involved that past Civ games, but it's not *THAT* much more complicated. I have read innumerable apologetics for the Civ5 AI, arguing that we shouldn't expect too much from it as it strides into this bold new frontier. However, that's simply not true! AI for tactical wargames has been around for decades; I remember some hexagon map PC games based around older tabletop board games that were released back in the 1980s. This system is supposed to be based around the Panzer General games, and the first one in that series was released back in 1994. Seriously, how hard can it be to program an AI that doesn't mindlessly walk its ranged units right into entrenched defenses? I saw better AI stuff in Advance Wars for the Gameboy Advance, and I'm not even kidding about that. This isn't a good system, but that's no excuse for how poorly the design team did.
The Civilzation series had to give up so many things to put the One Unit Per Tile system in place. It meant giving up the ability to stack workers, which was a staple of early game play and created many interesting decisions. (Do I pair up two workers together to get one improvement done faster, or split them up to improve two different cities at once?) It took away the question of stack composition, balancing melee against mounted against siege to get the proper proportions to take down an enemy city. (What units is the enemy building and can you counter them? Do you have enough spears to prevent flanking? And so on.) Speaker has argued that combat in Civ5 is significantly less intelligent than in Civ4, because in the former game all you have to worry about is what unit to put on each tile. In the latter game, with stacking, you have to consider how many units, and in what combination, to place on each tile. Personally, I don't think that Civ5 has improved combat at all over Civ4. Anyone who believes that Civ4 combat consists of "walking all of your units together in one big invincible stack" is a fool who has never played against other humans. Try reading this page on India's defense in the Pitboss #2 game to see just how shortsighted that opinion truly is.
Civ had to give up a lot to get One Unit Per Tile, and what did it get in return? An AI that can't play its own game. Crippled production and ridiculously long build times. Traffic jams and the Carpet of Doom phenomenon. Human-controlled units that never die. It's especially hilarious how the developers have tried to "solve" these problems in the patches. Horsemen too powerful, and the AI cannot use them effectively? They get nerfed into the ground. AI doesn't understand how to use Great Generals? Their bonus gets nerfed. AI can't use Flanking bonus? Nerfed. AI can't make use of Discipline combat bonus? Nerfed. AI can't defend its cities? They get their defenses massively boosted. For all of the talk about how Civ5 was going to bring us this awesome tactical combat system, it sure looks like the patches are doing everything possible to water down or remove those very tactical elements. Yeah, let's do everything possible to cripple the human player to make up for the fact that the AI has no f-ing clue how to play this game. Gee, that sure sounds like fun, doesn't it?
The fact of the matter is that Civ5 is trying to masquerade as a tactical combat game. But it isn't a tactical combat game; the Civilization games are empire-building games, and combat has never been more than one element among many. The designers of Civ5 tried to turn the game into something that it isn't, and they ended up breaking the game in the process. We ended up with a very mediocre wargame mashed together with a subpar empire-builder. I give them credit for trying - they had good intentions, and they were going for something genuinely new. It just didn't work, and we're left with a messy game that plays rather poorly. They would have done better to rework the stacking system than create the ugly blob of units pictured above.
