1UPT and Scale

[Solo4114]

So, I've played maybe 3-4 hours of Civ 5 thus far, in two or three different starts. I admit that I've not gotten particularly far along in any of them (although I've hit the Medieval era twice?!). I've tried one war with 1UPT so far, on the TSL Standard or Large (can't remember which) map where I was playing as Rome, with Greece and Germany as next-door neighbors. I decide to go to war with Greece just to see how combat works (aside from barbarians, that is).

I have to say that I'm really NOT convinced that 1UPT works, given the scale of this game. The game world, to me, seems like it needs to be MUCH bigger to make 1UPT really function well. Maybe this changes in the later game with more powerful units, but I'm betting the power balances stay fairly constant. Anyway, here's what I noticed.

So, you have 1 unit per tile (1UPT for those who may be confused). Ok, fine and dandy. You've also got zones of control (there's a blast from the past...). Both factors limit maneuverability and prevent stacking. What this means, though, is that you can only field as many units at a time as you have SPACE to PLACE those units. If your enemy maneuvers effectively, you can basically be stopped dead in your tracks, or at least slowed down. I'm still not sure if you can have production halted (IE: can't have two infantry units in the same city at the same time due to 1UPT), but I AM sure that you can rapidly run out of space.

Given that cities are harder to take now (especially with their ability to bombard, and their inherent even-with-no-units defense) it strikes me that you could end up being unable to take a city merely because you don't have the land to stick troops on.

Thus, in order to field really large armies, you need an ENORMOUS map just to find the space to stick 'em. This leads me to question the SCALE of the game maps, and to find that it just doesn't seem to fit with 1UPT. As a game concept, 1UPT is interesting, but only if you assume far far smaller armies. This begs the question of just how strong you need your force to be to take a city (the game says "at least 4 units" -- but what if you don't even have the space on the board for those 4 units to threaten the city?). It also makes it seem that the scale of the land for OTHER purposes doesn't really "fit" with the scale of battle required in the game in order to be effective and the scale for armies.

In Civ 2 (and Civ 1? Can't remember now...), you had zones of control, which added an element of tactics to the game, but you could still stack units. If the concern was that "stacks o' doom" turned Civ 4 into too much of a question of "who can tank/axe rush first", it strikes me that there could've been better options than 1UPT (higher unit costs, ZOC, limiting armies to certain compositions -- IE: not more than 4-5 units per tile, and only of a certain mix, etc.). As it stands, I think 1UPT doesn't quite belong in a game of Civ's scale where each city occupies a tile.

Again, it seems to me that this is something the designers didn't really consider in terms of keeping the scale of the game even marginally consistent. Civ's never been a particular stickler for managing that level of consistency, but in the past, you could still stack units, so it was perhaps less obvious (at least to me). With 1UPT, it seems like the combat just doesn't really "fit" on the game board, at least at certain levels. Maybe this gets better on maps that are Large or Huge, but it still strikes me that 1UPT doesn't quite....fit, given the scale of the game.


That's not to say that I don't like the concept of it. It's actually one of the few things I find intriguing about Civ 5. I like how it can add an element of tactical decisionmaking that wasn't quite as relevant in previous games. But it seems like the REST of the game hasn't been adjusted to fit this new system. So you have a potentially cool system, but the rest of the game isn't scaled to fit it.

 

[lschnarch]

I have to say that I'm really NOT convinced that 1UPT works, given the scale of this game. The game world, to me, seems like it needs to be MUCH bigger to make 1UPT really function well. Maybe this changes in the later game with more powerful units, but I'm betting the power balances stay fairly constant. Anyway, here's what I noticed.

I can assure you that many share your feelings.
Unfortunately, this doesn't change with later eras.

The scale doesn't fit, regardless of era or mapsize.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

The scale has never fit.

 

[Solo4114]

It never fit, but in the past it wasn't quite as pronounced of an issue. Thus, it could be ignored to some degree. It can't be ignored anymore, though.

To me this strikes me as sloppy concept work. What exactly is a "unit" supposed to represent? What does a tile represent? Does anyone know? Did anyone bother to ask? Did anyone even care? Were the people who made the maps the same people who said "Yeah, 1UPT is a good idea"? It also strikes me as evidence that the emphasis was on certain discrete elements of the game without regard to the game as a whole. Mandates like "Make it prettier" and "We want fully animated leaders, and make them less cartoony" and "add this 1UPT" thing alongside "this is too complicated. Streamline it." And so on and so forth. I see a bunch of heavy lifting on discrete, siloed elements of the project, without regard to whether the siloed elements worked together as a whole, organic GAME.

Here's the thing: the game now mixes tactics with strategy. Two different orders of magnitude.

Strategy is a larger-scale thing, and Civ was always a STRATEGIC game. You want tactical? Try Steel Panthers: World at War or the old Battleground games. THOSE games are tactical (and games that I dearly love). Previously, Civ was far more strategic. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I LIKED stacks o' doom. I always felt like combat was way too heavily favored in the Civ series, and that other elements of gameplay and empire management weren't fully developed (even in BTS, which improved things but didn't perfect them). Still, stacks 'o doom were a part of the game and you just got used to it.

With 1UPT, though, we're heavily mixing the tactical with the strategic, and the end result is a game board that doesn't quite work. At least from what I've seen and, I gather, from what others are experiencing. What I don't get is why this didn't become painfully obvious to the design team. I mean, hell, it took me a whopping 3 hours of play to figure it out. Actually, it took me less time than that, because those 3 hours include a few other games that didn't involve empire vs. empire combat (just beating up on barbarians). It took me ONE game of Rome vs. Greece on the actual earth map in proper starting locations to determine that 1UPT -- while a cool concept in general -- didn't "fit" this game.

Again, I think it's a great idea with real potential, but it incorporates an element of detail into the game that requires the REST of the game to be looked at through the same lens. That doesn't seem to have happened here, so the result is....flawed. I suppose you can "mod" your way out of this, but that too raises all manner of additional issues and considerations.

How do you address the way ranged units work? How do you deal with unit costs? Do you allow stacking again? Do you make the game world bigger? (I doubt the engine could handle that...) And once you basically get rid of 1UPT and go back to stacks o' doom....what exactly have we PAID for? A graphics overhaul? The social policy system? City-state money sinks? "Streamlining"? For that matter, when you're "streamlining" everything else, how exactly does one square the decision to do that with the decision to make combat FAR more micro-managed? Again, the "scale" of the undertaking doesn't match up.

 

[Smote]

The way to compensate for difficult terrain is Optics using the Amphibious upgrade. Fill the entire enemy territory with troops and unless they have a ton of aircraft or nukes, you will win the war.

In fact with amphibious you can attack directly from sea without penalty. Use this to help with 1upt.

If you surround a city, he probably can't even use a built soldier due to the double stacked unit thing.

 

[pi-r8]

I agree, this is a huge problem for civ V, and one which can't be fixed with patches. So far Alpaca's "play with me" mod offers the best solution that I've seen, by taking away upgrades and nerfing healing so that units will die a lot more often.

 

[Frozensky]

Well, I like it because it actually makes the terrain meaningful (ironically, terrain in regards to yields and domestic improvement has never been less meaningfull). Yeah, terrain had combat modifiers in previous Civ games, sure, but I like the strategic and tactical implications of the 1UPT combat system in regards to terrain.

Consider the resource system on normal. It's interesting because there just isn't enough resources to go around most of the time. If your starting city has 10 of every resource adjacent to it, the resource system becomes meaningless. It might as well not be limited at all.

It's a similar thing with 1UPT and available terrain. Because X city may only one viable approach to it, it becomes tactically and logistically important to get the units you need up this approach and to the city. Not just the nearest, but the best ones suited for the attack. I think that's a good thing.

The problem isn't scale or anything like that, it's that the AI does not understand how to operate in this battle system on any meaningful level.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

In a game where you can take 500+ years to send a ship around the world and maybe 200 or so to make a little bit of road, I just don't see 1upt as a gamebreaking issue. Now, how the AI uses it, sure. But there's always been considerable suspension of disbelief concerning the map as far as being a place to keep the units and make them fight, etc. The scales have never matched, never will, and were never supposed to.

Make the AI use it better and I don't think there's anything wrong with 1UPT that wasn't also wrong with the old ways of doing it.

 

[CivFanaticMan]

Civ5 is meant to be a raw strategy game. Scale doesn't matter.

 

[Solo4114]

Civ5 is meant to be a raw strategy game. Scale doesn't matter.

Then why is there a tactical element like 1UPT?

 

[JBConquests]

They just need to come up with a way to better limit the number of units so we don't end up with entire continents filled with units. While they are at it fix the AI to use the fewer units they have more intelligently.

Easier said than done though.

 

[DavidPBacon]

Well, I like it because it actually makes the terrain meaningful (ironically, terrain in regards to yields and domestic improvement has never been less meaningfull). Yeah, terrain had combat modifiers in previous Civ games, sure, but I like the strategic and tactical implications of the 1UPT combat system in regards to terrain.

I always thougth terrain meaningful, especially because wars were won "not dying for your country, but making the other son of a gun dying for his country".
This means that you win if you lose less units than the enemy, proportionally and absolutely, while pumping the max units you can. If you simply disregard terrain, you lose more units than you should, this is sloppy, even if you can do it. This in CIV IV. In V you can win the game with good management of your units, not losing any of them through most wars.

 

[UWHabs]

I like it. Sure, you can't field huge armies, but why does that matter? It makes chokepoints very tough to take, which is good. In past games, you try to take a 1-tile peninsula city and it's not hard. Like up your stack outside and take it like every other city. Now, you need to manoever, set up. Depending on era and techs, you might even HAVE to have some naval support to take it out.

 

[CivFanaticMan]

Then why is there a tactical element like 1UPT?

If scale mattered then hexes would have been smaller so that there could be more room for units. But since Civ5 is about raw strategy your suposed to forget that map doesn't scale with tactical combat and just play.

 

[Solo4114]

If scale mattered then hexes would have been smaller so that there could be more room for units. But since Civ5 is about raw strategy your suposed to forget that map doesn't scale with tactical combat and just play.

Seriously, though, the point I'm making is that everything else in the game is strategic-scale, whereas the combat is now on a tactical scale. Your counter argument seems to be that the combat is not tactical because the map is on a strategic scale, ergo the combat is strategic. Moreover, you seem to be arguing that, if they'd intended it to be tactical combat, they wouldn't have used a strategic map, ergo combat is strategic. I think you may be missing my point.

Let me be a bit more precise.

First: I consider "tactical" games to be games where things like how you maneuver and place troops on a small scale is important if not critical. For example, you position your units behind a hill because they will not take direct fire from the enemy and can surprise the enemy. Similarly, tactical games tend to be smaller scale. Each unit represents a relatively small number of men or equipment. A single tank, a regiment, etc. Not an entire army. I consider "strategic" games to be those games where such attention to detail is a lot less important. You only need to worry in a general sense about where troops go, and your units are typically larger scale units (say, 1000 men or upwards). Europa Universalis III is a good example of a game where combat is strategic rather than tactical.

Second: Civ has always been a bit fuzzy on matters of scale, and I recognize this. It's never been entirely clear if a hex or square represented any fixed amount of space, nor has it been clear as to what scale a "unit" represented. You've got a phalanx unit but is it 100 men? 1000? A single guy? A company? A regiment? The game never really bothered to define this. It also didn't REALLY matter a ton. Maneuver still mattered some, since you got terrain bonuses in later games from being in this or that terrain, and since in earlier games you had zones of control (ZOCs). But you could also stack and build stacks-o-doom to represent large armies. At any rate, the lack of precision in how much space the land tiles represented fit pretty well with the lack of precision AND lack of restrictions with respect to your troops.

Not so with Civ 5. We've suddenly -- in one area alone -- gotten WAY more precise. Sort of.

In Civ 5, I agree with you that the map itself is on a strategic scale. The precise scale still isn't really defined, but generally speaking, a single tile is taking up a LOT of land on the planet. Now, maybe the game could have been scaled to a tactical scale, although I'm not sure it could have been done with the graphics we have. Maybe with Civ 2 or 3 era graphics, though... But that's beside the point. The problem comes into play with how the units operate.

Consider the following. Each hex can only hold a single combat unit. Given the relative strength of units vs. cities, you need many multiple units to take a city. You cannot, for example, simply "axe rush" with two or three powerful units to grab a city. As with previous Civ games, you need additional types of units to soften enemy defenses, and to protect your units. The end result is that you need a LOT of units on the board to do any kind of warmongering, because each unit is relatively weak and ineffective on its own.

Compare this to, for example, Battleground: Prelude to Waterloo or Steel Panthers: World at War. In those games, units represent groups of men as small as a single platoon (in Steel Panthers) up to a regiment of foot, horse, or artillery (in Battleground). Each individual unit must be carefully maneuvered in precise ways to be effective in combat. Each individual unit is also relatively weak on its own, and derives its strength from combined arms. Those games are tactical games involving smaller scale encounters.

By adding the simple "one unit per tile" rule, the game suddenly transformed is loosey-goosey approach to scale to a much more precise (again, sort of) approach. Suddenly combat is now tactical. The precise positioning of your troops on the board counts. You have GOT to put your archers in the back, and you want your cavalry on the flanks and maybe in the back too, with your shock troops up front. That, my friend, is tactical. Despite what "real time strategy" games call "strategy", what they practice is TACTICAL gaming. When you're worrying about precise formation, you're getting into tactics. You now have to worry about that. why? Simple. 1UPT. You can't fit your archers on the same tile as your legionnaires or your chariots. With that in mind, you HAVE to lay them out on the board in ways where they can be effectively used. What good is a spearman stuck behind a line of archers who themselves will get slaughtered by enemy warriors?



The trouble is...as you rightly pointed out, the MAP is still on a loosey-goosey strategic (a.k.a. "big") scale. A city is a single tile. Ok, fine. A mountain is a tile. Still fine. A forest or hill is a tile. No problem. A unit is a tile. Sure no pro--waaaaait a second. What? A unit is a tile, but we can only fit one of them on each tile and we have to arrange them just-so in order to make them actually function effectively? And we need HOW many to take out an enemy city or enemy units? Well how the heck are we supposed to do THAT when we only have this much space to do it in?!

To this, Firaxis gives an apathetic shrug. Or simply says "It's a feature!" Well, sure, it's a feature...just not a particularly well-thought-out feature. Compare this to, say, Europa Universalis 3. There, the map is pretty much to scale with the troops and how you use them. Each "unit" is 1000 men. You can stack them to form armies (although there are penalties for doing so, such as loss of men in an attempt to simulate disease in camp and such). Each "tile" is actually a separate province. Positioning in terms of faster routes and/or utilizing friendly agreements regarding military access to an ally's territory does matter, but it's not like "Oh, you have to put your cavalry on the flanks, and you'd better make sure that your men at arms screen your crossbowmen" and such. It's a straight-up strategy game. Civ's always been a "mostly" strategy game with some fun hybrid bits that didn't pay a ton of attention to scale....up until now.

Now, suddenly, scale matters. It REALLY matters. Check out the Earth map. Caesar can't exactly cross the Rubicon with his many legions. Why? Because he only has one or two tiles to do it, and with the alps to the north, you can really only fit a Legionnaire, a horse archer, and a catapult until you run out of room or find your army stretching clear to Albania!


Suddenly, we're Gulliver fighting on a Lilliputian map. How exactly does that work? In my opinion, it doesn't, really.

 

[duddyz_dad]

Somehow you need to introduce two scales. The city scale would allow stacking while an upclose 'battle' scale would spread the stacks out across the hexes. When two stacks engage in battle, the game zooms to a battle scale which would better accomodate 1UPT. This would make for more realistic battle setting (so you don't have archers being able to shoot over forests or channels). Plus, a battle scale would make more sense from a timeline standpoint so that you don't wait 40 years for your warriors to retalliate against the archers that fired at them. I realize that this would change the dynamics of CIV from empire building to Total War but I don't see how you make 1UPT more realistic unless you accomodate two different scales.

 

[Solo4114]

Somehow you need to introduce two scales. The city scale would allow stacking while an upclose 'battle' scale would spread the stacks out across the hexes. When two stacks engage in battle, the game zooms to a battle scale which would better accomodate 1UPT. This would make for more realistic battle setting (so you don't have archers being able to shoot over forests or channels). Plus, a battle scale would make more sense from a timeline standpoint so that you don't wait 40 years for your warriors to retalliate against the archers that fired at them. I realize that this would change the dynamics of CIV from empire building to Total War but I don't see how you make 1UPT more realistic unless you accomodate two different scales.

No argument there. Again, on time, Civ has always had some "issues" with scale. WWII could've taken 1000 years by "Civ" time. I think even the WWII scenario in Civ 2 frequently ended up stretching into the 1950s.

But it's just another element of old Civ's loosey-goosey approach to matters of scale, all of which was forgivable when the game as a whole operating on the same logic. Now, though, you have a half-implemented hybrid system a la Total War like you describe, except without the "Battle View" and with not enough space on a map to use an effective army.

 

[Nares]

As a game concept, 1UPT is interesting, but only if you assume far far smaller armies. This begs the question of just how strong you need your force to be to take a city.

This begs the question of why they didn't implement a more engaging unit supply system in order to keep unit counts down.

As for your concern, you can bombard a city using other methods, such as with a navy or an airforce, so that even a city with just one adjacent land tile can be taken.

 

[Rusty Edge]

I prefer my civ strategic, where you have military, diplomatic and espionage options, as well as cultural, religious, economic and scientific ones.

I don't feel like I have many options in V, but if they're going tactical on us, can't we have a tactical map, and more tactical gameplay, such as unit facing to determine flanking attacks and so forth?

 

[Duuk]

Personally, of all the civ-games I felt that CTP2 had the best army stacking system.

12 units per tile max. Zones of Control. And stacking different types of units helped you succeed.

I'd pay big money for a Call to Power 3.