1UPT - final verdict?

[SammyKhalifa]

Every one who preaches about how 1UPT is awesome and two Civ failures with it is just an accident ignore the fact that Aplha Centauri handled MUPT without stacks of doom.

Not sure why you'd want to re-create Alpha Centauri combat

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

I was just playing Civ V and god damn the combat is boring. Getting all the units in position without them tripping all over each and blocking the way is a chore, the city capturing is always the same game of a wave of melee units followed by a wave of ranged ones. The core combat never changes or grows more sophisticated - just the unit numbers increase and the models change.

Anyone whose saying Civ V 1UPT is more involved or complex needs to take a reality check, the strategic maximum of this system as implemented in Civ V can be mastered in an afternoon.

I had to fight Bismarck because he declared war on me. He had a carpet of landsknecht all over his tiny territory and three cities. With the units at my disposal and the tiny map size there's nothing to do but throw my waves at his waves until his units are all dead.
I don't count having a line of ranged units behind the melee ones as sophistication.

And you can't even enjoy the spoils of war with the global happiness mechanic. The better warlord you are the worse off your empire is.

By the time you get happiness under control and the cities up and running the AI can out tech and out produce you.

Warring in Civ V is simply tedious, and repetitive. Stacks can get tedious VS AI as well... but at least they're lightning quick. How anyone can find moving each and every unit, each and every turn fun is beyond me.

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

Not sure why you'd want to re-create Alpha Centauri combat

Why not? It had more tactical possibilities with the unit workshop and the various special traits than any Civ game. It solved the stack of doom problem. It had its flaws, mostly relating to the relationship between weapons and armor and how the attacker was generally favored, overwhelming strength of air support etc. But nothing that couldn't be tweaked.

 

[Truronian]

As a builder who is usually on the defensive in wars, 1UPT is much more fun. I've never gone for conquest in CiV; previous games completely put me off that victory type.

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

Lol of course 1UPT is more fun when you're on the defensive, you just sit there and annihilate the AI as they walk into range.

The combat system should be fun both ways and going on the offensive in Civ V is a chore, because you know you're going to win (merely looking at the battlefield is enough to know what will happen now that the game is even less random) but its going to take ten times as much time to do it.

Now that I think more about it, it would probably be worse if the AI could play the game. A competent defense in this system would turn any attack into a massive dozens of turns long grind.

What 1UPT in Civ V lacks is capacity for dynamic shifts. No unit is overwhelmingly strong against another unit type and they're all somewhat similar in power so each battle looks the same and there aren't any tactics you can use to win by being "clever". Not only that, there's no quick way to take a city - for all intents an purposes they're a static guard tower from an RTS game, you simply have to throw units at them until its destroyed.

 

[gyver]

One of my favorite games involved a defensive war against a more technologically advanced napoleon. I wouldn't have been able to setup the following defensive strategy with 1UPT.

 

[Pyramid Head]

As a builder who is usually on the defensive in wars, 1UPT is much more fun. I've never gone for conquest in CiV; previous games completely put me off that victory type.

Congratulations! Now it's the only way to play.
Turtling, turtling, exhausting insanely dumb AI armies and then winning without even attacking. CivV managed to be a perfect game for carebear players, lacking in variety, dynamism, fun and tactical aspect. CivV combat is a chore. BE simply multiplied what was already broken in CivV a hundred times.

Civ V popularity was assured only because it was the first game of Civ series being released and digitally destributed on Steam.

 

[Ghpstage]

We agree to disagree then I get your sentiment, because yes, 1UPT is limiting, but that's the point: since you are limited to employ one unit and one unit only per tile, you are forced to make choices and pick your batttles / scenarios.

I personally found war and the combat in Civ IV as downright tedious, if not boring. It was more of an industrial arms race of stack VS stack rather than any kind of meaningful military engagement. No maneuver, no positioning, only unit composition and arms race. Well, that, and lots of repetitive micromanagement with little to no decision involved :/

I think that the solution might be at a healthy middle point between the two options, like the one suggested by Civilization Revolution. Perhaps a maximum cap of 2 different units per tile coupled with heavy attack bonuses for surrounding stacks from several angles could be the answer to that.

About the bolded part, as TheMeInTeam mentioned in an earlier post, thinking that simply bigger stack/ better composition = win is a major misunderstanding of civ 4 combat.
A factor thats just as important is that of collateral initiative, defined by which stack attacks first. Collateral damage only when attacking gives the one who attacks a major advantage, big enough to overwhelm stacks a lot larger than your own in fact.
Gaining collateral initiative was achieved by guess what? maneuvering your troops!
On a similar note, two move, or multi move warfare using all mounted stacks or cargo ships played quite differently to 1 move siege stack warfare on a tactical level too, employing speed to evade, attack, threaten and fork enemy stacks and cities.

Tactics where there, and where used against the AI. Its just that the AI wasn't very good at employing, let alone countering them so it didn't require a great deal of thought. Much like civ 5 really, the differences being that stacking allowed the AI to pose a threat through its bonuses, and it could probably have been improved much more easily.


I can't really accept any criticism on army micro-management in civ 4 from anyone who cannot see that civ 5 is far, far worse. To think that way is to show that you didn't know that rally points, stack grouping, different hotkeys for multiple city selection and build queue management existed.
I would be surprised if you could move build a 10 unit civ 5 army from one end of the continent to another with fewer clicks than it would take to build a 100-200+ unit army in civ 4, along with the transports to carry them, load them up and have them offload on another continent.

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

Its quite obvious that a great many people found Civ I - Civ IV micromanagment tedious and jumped on the opportunity to have something simpler. At the same time, Civ V appears to have been successful at drawing in new players who into strategy games who are put off by complexity.

I think there are two communities here that want two different games and the 1UPT vs MUPT argument is just a symbol of that.

 

[Ghpstage]

Its quite obvious that a great many people found Civ I - Civ IV micromanagment tedious and jumped on the opportunity to have something simpler. At the same time, Civ V appears to have been successful at drawing in new players who into strategy games who are put off by complexity.

I think there are two communities here that want two different games and the 1UPT vs MUPT argument is just a symbol of that.

There was indeed an immense reduction in the annoying parts of micro between 3 and 4 due to the introduction of overflow, better hotkeys, queues and city/unit selecting and grouping.

5 however doesn't really reduce the boring micro from 4, in fact in many ways it increases it!
It introduces a mindboggling amount of totally pointless clicking, like the extra click needed to enter a cities queue, reassign citizens, or the constant need to re-enter a units destination and also removes key UI improvements from 4 such as city rally points. The only possible reductions would come from massive downscaling of the world, fewer cities meaning fewer things to actually do.

Militarily, it took far less fiddling around to manage an army in 4, that was an order of magnitude larger, than one in 5.

 

[Pyramid Head]

Its quite obvious that a great many people found Civ I - Civ IV micromanagment tedious and jumped on the opportunity to have something simpler. At the same time, Civ V appears to have been successful at drawing in new players who into strategy games who are put off by complexity.

Its quite obvious that a great many people found Command & Conquer I - III micromanagment tedious and jumped on the opportunity to have something simpler. At the same time, Tiberium Twilight appears to have been successful at drawing in new players who into strategy games who are put off by complexity.

Moderator Action: Please make your point without mimicking others.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Senethro]

Its quite obvious that a great many people found Command & Conquer I - III micromanagment tedious and jumped on the opportunity to have something simpler. At the same time, Tiberium Twilight appears to have been successful at drawing in new players who into strategy games who are put off by complexity.

You need to say what you actually mean instead of making obscure analogies.

 

[glider1]

There was indeed an immense reduction in the annoying parts of micro between 3 and 4 due to the introduction of overflow, better hotkeys, queues and city/unit selecting and grouping.

5 however doesn't really reduce the boring micro from 4, in fact in many ways it increases it!
It introduces a mindboggling amount of totally pointless clicking, like the extra click needed to enter a cities queue, reassign citizens, or the constant need to re-enter a units destination and also removes key UI improvements from 4 such as city rally points. The only possible reductions would come from massive downscaling of the world, fewer cities meaning fewer things to actually do.

Militarily, it took far less fiddling around to manage an army in 4, that was an order of magnitude larger, than one in 5.

Thanks all I can say to each one of your posts is nothing but nod my head in agreement. I have had more hand, neck, arm strain playing Civ5 than Civ4 and I have played both extensively, because in 5, there is a lot more repetitive rapid clicking that doesn't achieve much. In Civ4, you could organise each one of your clicks to achieve a lot more per click because of queuing and organising armies by MUPT stacks.

Of course we know why Civ5 has been streamlined. Because every extra intelligent game feature costs the company money and reduces profits.

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

I meant overall game complexity. It took me a while to get into SMAC and then Civ IV, but I could jump into Civ V far quicker. The game is simply less complex, the tempo is slow and its much kinder to builders and turtling players, which also makes it easier to play.

I'm not thrilled with Civ V, it takes hours to play to get any in game "results" and the empire size and scale of warfare is small.

But that's probably what's keeping so many people in the game. Its got this solitaire like pace where you can probably play a game with your brain on autopilot and the UI seems to be designed for people who play Facebook browser games.

All the previous Civ games are far more similar to each other than to Civ V. Its a complete paradigm shift for Firaxis and I don't think they're going to backpedal in Civ VI

 

[misesfan]

I think the argument of 1UPT vs stacks is masking the true underlying design issues with Civ. Consider, if you were able to create a generic container unit to which you could funnel all produced units into, you would still have one unit per tile, although the unit itself would be quite large.

But since combat is one unit vs one unit (and it has been this way since Civ 1 - but surprisingly not in Civ Rev) you must either have stacking or 1UPT.

Given this, shouldnt the true question be - why cant the game emulate larger formations which consists of the units produced? For example, lets say your city produces one infantry 'division'. Why cant you produce three divisions, combine them together and create one infantry corps?

Civ revolves around combat, but the mechanics for combat are dull to the say the least (logistics anyone?) So, I am always surprised by this debate since the problem (to me at least) is fundamentally an issue with the combat mechanics and the inability of the game to allow the player to form large combat formations.

 

[drewisfat]

The biggest problem with 1UPT is not the military aspect. It's that to avoid traffic jams the game has to somehow limit the player to ~10 units. So units have to be really expensive. From there virtually everything falls apart, from tile yields, to production / technology being out of whack, to boring infrastructure, to having to spend gold to upgrade units, etc.

Many people have brought this up, but I rarely see anyone try to directly defend it, or especially defend the result in ciV. Instead they go on the offense and attack stack of dooms, or defend how fun it is to play defensive wars in 1UPT.
Much can be said on either side about this, but if you can't debate or acknowledge the issue of production being out of whack and the negative side effects, you're either admitting that ciV is very broken or you weren't good enough at past iterations of civ / similar games to see the problem.

This is why the debate is usually so hostile -- it's mostly serious gamers belittling softcore gamers for enjoying something they know is flawed.


*Edit to reply to the poster above me. Very good point I was going to add but didn't want to get off track. The main issue with combat is that it is only one unit vs one unit. In fact the problem with civ iv combat, isn't really about stacks of doom.

The inherent problem is 1 unit fighting 1 unit. So it's a rock paper scissors game -- but the defender chooses who defends. So your rock will attack a paper, your scissors will attack a rock, and your paper will attack a scissors, which is completely not how balanced armies would fight at all.
One melee unit and one archer unit should be stronger than 2 archers or 2 melee units.

ciV tries to solve for this by having ranged units line up behind melee units. Unfortunately the tactical map is just too small to really portray battle lines / dynamic in a realistic or super strategic sense.

cIV doesn't really try to solve the problem, but rather makes the game more playable as is. Collateral damage breaks the otherwise giant defensive advantage. Of course suicide catapults are obviously not realistic. They're so good to the point where actually stacks of doom are not good play at all in human vs human play (which is why the criticism for boring multiplayer is insanely off base).
There's actually a good amount of tactical thinking involved in gaining collateral initiative, using two-movers to fork weak cities, etc. The biggest problem is that it's not extremely realistic, and that the AI just wouldn't be able to play on that level. So instead the AI makes big stacks and follows a relatively simple pattern. The human doesn't think too much only because the AI is thinking even less, not because the system is inherently simple.
Still the main result is the AI is good at fighting, usually outnumbers with handicaps the human army by say ~40% which presents a relatively fair fight.

 

[Acken]

I get a little tired in these conversations when someone makes the assumption that people preffering MUPT are hardcore and the rest softcore. Ive seen that a couple of time.
That's sterile for the debate and wrong, there's both categories of players in both games.

 

[Fr33lanc3r]

I think the argument of 1UPT vs stacks is masking the true underlying design issues with Civ. Consider, if you were able to create a generic container unit to which you could funnel all produced units into, you would still have one unit per tile, although the unit itself would be quite large.

But since combat is one unit vs one unit (and it has been this way since Civ 1 - but surprisingly not in Civ Rev) you must either have stacking or 1UPT.

Given this, shouldnt the true question be - why cant the game emulate larger formations which consists of the units produced? For example, lets say your city produces one infantry 'division'. Why cant you produce three divisions, combine them together and create one infantry corps?

Civ revolves around combat, but the mechanics for combat are dull to the say the least (logistics anyone?) So, I am always surprised by this debate since the problem (to me at least) is fundamentally an issue with the combat mechanics and the inability of the game to allow the player to form large combat formations.

Exactly, 1UPT and MUPT are both technically on the same level of complexity with each unit being independant, and the more I sit and think about it, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the code for the AI for 1UPT and MUPT are extremely similar.

I would love to see something similar to batalions from HOI or another combined arms type tactics.

I also think a major way to increase AI comprehension is to discretize decisions and create a decision "priority queue". I haven't looked at the code directly, so I'm having to go off what others have said about it, and it sounds like a faux-queue is already used, but they're kinda crap-on-toast if the decisions aren't atomic allowing for stronger use of the current state for the decision tree. The other part of a good priority queue is good goal functions, which drive the decision path, which is really only derived from gameboard observations.

We try to emulate this causal decisioning with Neural Maps and Networks, but honestly a well built state machine with atomic states and good goal functions will do nearly as well, at much less cost.

 

[Biz_]

practically, 1 UPT is terrible for single player since firaxis doesn't know how to write an AI

1 UPT (and ranged combat) is also terrible for multiplayer since the game becomes about whoever clicks first

last time I checked, single player + multiplayer adds up to 100% of the game

game design is just theory
how games function in practice is far more important

 

[stoferb]

Having tried it now in BE 1UPT wasn't as bad as I expected. But I still find it a bit annoying, especially that you cannot stack workers to get improvements done faster. I find it ok for the military units although not ideal. It's nice to have less units to keep track of but a bit silly how they cannot move into supposedly hundreds of square miles if there's another unit there. What I think really should be done is keeping 1UPT but with the ability to merge 2-3 units into one more useful unit, Want a faster worker - merge two workers, you want an explorer that doesn't die if the aliens are hostile - merge a soldier and an explorer, you want to protect trade - build a gunboat that when assigned to this task automatically merges with your trade vessel and gives it a gunboats defensive stats e.t.c.