1 unit per hex. Poll

[afa2000]

I like it at wars, but I HATE it when moving everything else (troops, civilians) at peace times. Seems like a lot of micromanagement. I'm also worried about the points showed here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=387544

 

[Jediron]

Yes at the current state of the AI, the game sucks. But it isn't because it is 1UPT, it is because the AI is subpar. As a mechanic 1UPT is fine. Once the AI is improved I think that it will be a very interesting system. It is silly to blame "the first person shooter" mechanic just because one shooter plays badly; just as blaming 1upt because one AI cant handle it well.

Rat

I do not agree, and here you can read why i think that way.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9757102&postcount=344

Once the AI is improved, is a hollow frase in my mind. Forget it, that ain't gonna happen.
I surely wish they could, but after seeing dumb CIV ai's (or any other battle ai) over the last 20 years i have a hard time believing this is gonna happen in the near future. A good AI goes futher then a simple move or strike. A good AI (take CHess AI for example) have to calculate TURNS AHEAD, calculate any given Situation. Calculation, takes time. The more there needs to be calculated, the longer it takes for you to wait for a next turn. People hate waiting, so that's another reason why i believe AI's never come close to "a bit smarter", more so in CIV's; where alot of the envirement is dynamic.

 

[Jediron]

I like it at wars, but I HATE it when moving everything else (troops, civilians) at peace times. Seems like a lot of micromanagement. I'm also worried about the points showed here:

And moving back and fort, healing, strike again isn't ?
I hated the moving around of alot of stuff in CIV 3 and 4 also, but i don't blame SOD for that. I blame the developers, which were incapable to do it more efficiently. Look at Total War: Rome or the like; managing many units is a piece of cake in that game ? Why ? Because the mechanisc are much better to do so....

 

[lschnarch]

Yes at the current state of the AI, the game sucks. But it isn't because it is 1UPT, it is because the AI is subpar. As a mechanic 1UPT is fine. Once the AI is improved I think that it will be a very interesting system. It is silly to blame "the first person shooter" mechanic just because one shooter plays badly; just as blaming 1upt because one AI cant handle it well.

Rat

The AI will ever fail in 1upt. In Civ even worse compared to other games because of the limited speed of units, which will block each other inevitably.
Add the malus to be in open terrain, which makes the AI to march through rough terrain (making it to move by only 1 hex per turn) and the result is clear: combat will s**k in exactly the same way as at the moment.

P.S.: Mr Shafer said he was inspired by Panzer General. It that's true, I have to state that he has not understood why it worked there and won't in Civ: speed, scale and retaliation fire. None of that is given in Civ - so it will fail.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

1upt wrecks immersion due to being stupidly unrealistic / out of scale, and it wrecks the AI to boot. A terrible design decision.

 

[moscaverde]

I would rather choose the generals instead of conducting every battle.

 

[DireAussie]

I really like it. So much better than stacks. For those AI haters here - even in its 'broken' state I've seen the AI in Civ 5 take over more civilizations than I've ever seen in my entire time of playing civ 4! AI can certainly handle it, looking forward to fixes coming in.

 

[Generals3]

I really like it. So much better than stacks. For those AI haters here - even in its 'broken' state I've seen the AI in Civ 5 take over more civilizations than I've ever seen in my entire time of playing civ 4! AI can certainly handle it, looking forward to fixes coming in.

Wrong conclusion is wrong. Yes the premise is correct the AI tends to eat more civs but thats because they're all warmongering nutcases . And when it's AI vs AI its intelligence won't matter because its fighting an equally stupid opponent.

 

[Xzylvador]

I'm FOR the 1UPT...
I'm AGAINST the lousy pathfinding, micro-management near any kind of obstacle or bottleneck, the AI not being able to form a decent attack/defense with 1upt.

For those AI haters here - even in its 'broken' state I've seen the AI in Civ 5 take over more civilizations than I've ever seen in my entire time of playing civ 4! AI can certainly handle it, looking forward to fixes coming in.

AI vs. AI, sure it can conquer; because the AI defense is even worse than its offense. That doesn't make it good. An AI outnumbering and more advanced than a human player still can't mount a decent attack against a human city. And a human with a weak and less advanced army can still easily conquer a more powerful AI city after city because the AI can't form a decent defense.

 

[man-erg]

A good AI (take CHess AI for example) have to calculate TURNS AHEAD, calculate any given Situation. Calculation, takes time. The more there needs to be calculated, the longer it takes for you to wait for a next turn.

There have been good chess AI's for over 20 years now. In Civ5, wars consist of such a small number of units, I can't believe it isn't possible to do a decent job of it on modern dual-cores that are a zillion times more powerful than the old 486. With the typical 10 or so units per side, I reckon the processor should be able to process every feasable future state for 2 or 3 turns.

The question is: "do we want to use that processing power for flashy graphics? Or AI processing?" The problem with the later is that if the AI gets too good, most people will drop the game because losing all the time gets boring. Most people do not have the motivation to study a game for years to learn it (like chess). They want to feel smart for beating an AI. So we get the flashy graphics.
Thinking about it, surely it can't be too difficult to add the concept of 'range' in to the units movement? ie "do not move into the range of an enemy without a chance of getting the first shot". There's no opportunity fire like there is in real hex war games. No supply. The current combat design is actually *very* simply and I reckon it will just take a little time for them to patch it in. And if they were wise enough to build the new version based on the previous one instead of starting from scratch each time, they could refine the previous AI. It's capabilities that are changing each year, not AI needs.

So many of the changes in Civ5, especially the emphasis on presentation over content, seem to be for marketing reasons, not technical reasons.

 

[man-erg]

P.S.: Mr Shafer said he was inspired by Panzer General. It that's true, I have to state that he has not understood why it worked there and won't in Civ: speed, scale and retaliation fire. None of that is given in Civ - so it will fail.

QFT
That's my worry about Civ5. That the hex/1UpT is so fundamental to it's design, and so wrong at this level, that the game will always be seriously limited even when they have improved the AI. Even with HAL 3000 AI, the combat design is closer to tic-tac-toe than chess.

 

[da_Vinci]

I really like it. So much better than stacks. For those AI haters here - even in its 'broken' state I've seen the AI in Civ 5 take over more civilizations than I've ever seen in my entire time of playing civ 4! AI can certainly handle it, looking forward to fixes coming in.

I would agree that I have seen AI going after each other (and sometimes the city states) quite often in Civ V ... I think the greater success at elimination of AI by AI two-fold: War flavored civs taking out non-war flavored civs early in V, and nothing to match the protective longbow in a hill city for the AI to mount a defense with.

In Civ IV you had to spend siege to take out hit points (but not the defense bonus) In Civ V, seige can take out HP for free, and units with a decisive victory take out more city HP at trivial cost. If the AI can't fight a pre-emptive offensive battle in its own land, then it can't hold cities.

dV

 

[Bob1475]

The irony of more agressive AI vs AI warfare is that it makes a domination win that much easier. I found that after I conquered my continent the other continent was already controlled by only one AI. So I focus everything on an attack on the capital city and......I win the game as soon as I take their capital.

Remember, you only have to have the last original capital, you don't have to conquer each one yourself.

 

[civnoob13]

I voted for, but more specifically I am for 1 unit per hex per civ

 

[andrewlt]

I voted for. The results speak for themselves.

Just because some people are loud doesn't mean they are right.

 

[Bad Brett]

At first I loved it, but... I've changed my mind. Honestly, it just seems like another restriction. Civ V is all about restrictions, not about exploring possibilities.

I dislike SoD's as well. Neither do I enjoy ICS. There are many ways to prevent this, but Firaxis chose the easy part and just added restrictions. Building that extra city causes the entire nation to stop working properly. A scout is enough to hold off an entire invasion of another Civ. I don't like restrictions like this, because, what they basically are saying is "We don't want you to play like that, so we are just going to stop you from doing it."

But my belief is that Civ should be about possibilities, not restrictions. Make a well developed city far superior to a small one. Let small cities that are not connected to the capital face a huge corruption that may lead to riots and revolutions. But also add governments/civics, buildings, techs etc. Put these techs on a different branch than the military techs. Suddenly, the player has the ability to expand quickly, but on the other hand he will not have military power to protect his cities. Let the militaristic player solve this issues by controlling the riots with military units. Make it hard as hell... but make it possible, and make it possible in many different ways.

Same thing with 1upt. Let the attacker chose which unit in the stack he will face. Add some collateral damage. Problem solved. Suddenly, stacking a bunch of knights and crossbowmen wouldn't be such a good idea... The player would be able to stack his units while not at war, when passing a choke point or an enemy scout, but it would mean suicide to put the units in a SoD when entering the enemy territory.

In other words, these "restrictions" are just a way of solving these gameplay issues in most plain way there is. A project like Civ should mean years of planning. But the feeling I get is that Shafer got some basic ideas about 1upt, hexes and global happiness and then they said "let's say where this takes us", without doing any brainstorming at all.

 

[SerialK]

It's funny that some people always bring the "Chess AI" in this kind of discussion.

FYI, Chess software "AI" has very little to do with AI and a lot with database. Basically, a chess program is nothing more than a gigantic database of know positions, openings and so on, coupled with a brute force program that test every possible moves for the X next turns. Compared to this, any wargame AI looks like a genius.

Anyway, such system simply cannot apply to Civ5 (or any other turn based wargame) because of the randomness of the terrain, combat results and units in play.

 

[Mzrokks]

Better than the Stack o' Doom, right?

 

[Ciproflox]

It's not only the AI (as the AI-player) but also the pathfinding of automated go-to-units that make me vote no. In general it's a great idea, except maybe for garrisons in cities.

 

[eric_]

Wow...I figured "For" would be winning, but not at the rate of 5:1! That's good to see. I would be super bummed if 1UPT isn't the norm going forward.