1UPT - final verdict?

[Louis XXIV]

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

Last I checked, simultaneous turns isn't the only way to play multiplayer.

 

[Ghpstage]

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.

The impacts that result from 1UPT are indeed widespread, but I do wonder how much of this is primarily due to the design philosophy of "Damn the Consequences!" rather than 1 UPT itself.
I mean, how much of it could have been avoided if they actually put some thought into what 1 UPT would actually mean, and actually made an effort to design around them?

Unfortunately that design philosophy was apparent all over civ 5. There really is no other explanation for things like, declaring that you intend to make tall civs competitive, and then releasing a game where ICS is not only the obvious optimal strategy, but a far more dominant one than going wide ever was in civ 4!
And it appears to be in use again with BE

 

[Chaos Blade]

I've been thinking, one way to make the 1upt more palatable would be to increase the movement points of all units, perhaps 100% AND reduce the map clutter: reduce the impassable terrain. with these two things you would cut into bottlenecks AND give enough mobility to avoid jams and make combat more dynamic.

Though I should say I am no fan of impassble terrain, I always though Civ's map/city resolution was above it.

 

[Drakarska]

I've been thinking, one way to make the 1upt more palatable would be to increase the movement points of all units, perhaps 100% AND reduce the map clutter: reduce the impassable terrain. with these two things you would cut into bottlenecks AND give enough mobility to avoid jams and make combat more dynamic.

Though I should say I am no fan of impassble terrain, I always though Civ's map/city resolution was above it.

Interesting idea. The counter point to this would be a promo/tech to allow units to move through impassable terrain. Seriously, you can send peeps to the stars but you can't blow a hole through a mountain to make a tunnel? Mag tube under a lake? hover craft? etc?

 

[piousflea84]

IMO:

On a fundamental level, 1UPT is way more interesting than stacks and should theoretically lead to more interesting strategies.

Stacks are a mathematical certainty; if your stack is better than the other guy's stack you will win, if they're roughly equal it'll be a stalemate, if you're much weaker you will lose. Self-defense is a matter of staying within a certain % of the other guy's army strength, there's not a whole lot of complexity there. In contrast, 1UPT forces you to think about terrain and chokepoints, and makes you position your units for tactical combat.

*******
The main problem with 1UPT in Civ 5 + BE isn't the 1UPT concept itself, or even the stupidity of the AI. Rather, the problem is that the tiles are too big, causing larger armies to take up so much space that they run into all sorts of problems.

Think of your standard issue RTS game: Starcraft, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, whatever. No matter how big your army is, it doesn't take up a large % of your total surface area. (ie, all the land in your main and your natural) While your army can be seriously held up in a chokepoint, as long as you stay away from a chokepoint you have plenty of room to maneuver. The vast majority of the map has enough wide-open space for a smaller army to be surrounded and destroyed by a larger army. This makes the player with the smaller army feel extremely unsafe - but he's not completely screwed because he can still mount a powerful defense using chokepoints.

In Civ5 and CivBE, the tiles are incredibly large. Most units can only move 2 tiles per turn (1 with hilly terrain). Limiting players to 1 unit in such a wide area is pretty crazy. It'd be the Starcraft equivalent of saying that you can only have 1 Zealot in an area the size of a Gateway.

Because the tiles are so large, any army strong enough to attack an equal-tech foe is forced to spread out over an insanely large area. When playing domination, it's perfectly reasonable to aim for 12 units mid-game... but 12 units require a minimum 4-tile-wide space. That's the distance between two cities! The sheer amount of space occupied by military units in Civ5/CivBE has no parallel in any strategy game I know of, and for a good reason. The bulkiness of a Civ army makes it incredibly annoying to move across the map, and incredibly easy to bog down in unfavorable terrain.

Of course, in a tile-based game, it's simply ridiculous to think of scaling down hexes so that you can fit more units into a 1UPT screen... Instead, I would suggest the much ridiculed "5UPT"/"XUPT" solution. Armies should occupy a finite amount of space, you shouldn't be able to stack 200 tanks into one tile, but it is equally nonsensical to only have a single soldier in a city-sized land area.

It would be very interesting to see how a 5UPT Civ would play. Not sure if it could be easily modded.

 

[Aeson]

If your intent is to increase the number of interesting choices/strategies, any hard cap is definitely working against that intent.

Soft caps with tradeoffs, fine granularity, and complex interactions with other game mechanics (terrain, government/policy, tech) are the way to go. Modifiers for stacking like reduced abilities or increased risk (collateral damage) from stacking. Then you have interesting tradeoffs to consider rather than just being forced by game mechanics into a specific tactical layout.

 

[bhavv]

WTB Call to Power's limited stacks.

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

If they could increase map size (to stop congestion) and improve game speed (to get around the tedium) while allowing 1UPT units to move in a locked formation (so that I don't have to move each and every one, every single time) it would be much more tolerable. But its impossible, with a larger map, simple things like marching an army would take three times as much time, thereby actually slowing the game down even more. By the time you'd get to an enemy, better troops would be available for building.

Of all the problems 1UPT has introduced I find the slowing down of the game the absolute worst. Yesterday I won a game of Civ V with a science victory and I swear the match took twice or even three times as long as Civ IV.

Also, what's the point of giving the player fancy 1UPT armies if you make it impossible for him to use them - the penalty for global happiness for everything except razing cities is terrible until way down to the middle of the game. In my game, Japan was expanding like a plague, swallowing up cities and civs left and right - but he could never attack me as my troops, science, economy were always a light year away... With 6 cities overall. By the end of the game I had tanks and mechanized infantry, bombers and nukes and he still had great war infantry and cannons.

Its ridiculous that once you start the conquest road, its a mad race to kill everyone before you end up completely behind. If the point of 1UPT was to make war more interesting, why is actual warring is so severely penalized in Civ V?

 

[nimling]

1upt just sucks.
I didn't see anything wrong with AC's handling of unit stacks.
I didn't like Civ4's stack of doom concept.

Realistically, the game should pit army against army, rather than unit vs. unit - that is where the greatest annoyance of civ4's SoD comes from.

Worse than 1upt is how ranged units completely unbalance the game and are just conceptually absurd (so, uh, archers can shoot over hundreds of miles, but infantry can not?). I would like Civ5 much better if ranged/siege units were completely reworked (as in essentially removed), but I would like it even better if 1upt were not a thing, and ranged/siege were part of an army stack.

The AI's terrible ability to handle 1upt is just another can of worms, but even in MP it sucks.

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

If ranged units were removed 1UPT would lose the single thing that it has going for it

 

[kirbdog]

I've been thinking, one way to make the 1upt more palatable would be to increase the movement points of all units, perhaps 100% AND reduce the map clutter: reduce the impassable terrain. with these two things you would cut into bottlenecks AND give enough mobility to avoid jams and make combat more dynamic.

Though I should say I am no fan of impassble terrain, I always though Civ's map/city resolution was above it.

I completely agree with this 100% and one day I'd like to see a mod with just that. The melee units especially should be faster, to increase the importance of shielding ranged and potential for poking holes in undefended ranged. A futuristic game like Beyond Earth is just begging for us to throw out old rules like movement penalties based on terrain or rivers, also. Nixing canyon and mountain may sting for a bit but then we'd realized we never loved them in the first place...

Top it off with some +3 range basic siege weapons, additional range bonuses and speed bonuses, spreading out cities more... pretty soon you'll have a battlefield begging to be dynamic and carpeted, which is sort of the point of using 1UPT.

 

[The_Reckoning]

+1 Chaos Blade, kirbdog

Canyons and mountains don't seem to add anything interesting to the game when it is already starved for space. It just increases the defender advantage so much even in human vs. human. Taken together with the AI's terrible management of units, you're basically invulnerable.

Another thing I would like to see is reducing the vulnerability of ships, and units being transported by sea. The sea should be a scary thing over which enemy units can cross safely, unless you control the waves with ships. Ships are already very good at bombarding cities, but they're total glass cannons to other ships, and transports are a 1-hit-kill at the moment.

 

[Senethro]

Isn't ships being glass cannons an actual bug though? Aren't they defending with the wrong value or something?

 

[Lucius_]

IF stacking was brought back it'd have to be limited in a few ways...

1. Only similar unit types can stack. No guarding catapults with swordsmen.

2. Stacks would have to be limited to 2-3 units each.

3. Only one unit from a stack may attack on the same turn. If you want every unit to attack, you have to unstack them, obviously requiring space to do so.

4. Damage to the stack applies to all units in the stack.

Basically, stacking should be for maneuvering purposes ONLY. Keeping stacked units in combat should be the least optimal choice. You can't use a stack to protect certain units.

One note though. 1 unit IS an army, likely representing an entire platoon. Some people here apparently think a swordsman is only representing 10 guys or something.

 

[PhilBowles]

Its quite obvious that a great many people found Civ I - Civ IV micromanagment tedious and jumped on the opportunity to have something simpler.

Or perhaps, more to the point, something less tedious. Micromanagement is an important component of strategy games - when it advances your gameplay. City-scale micromanagement that involves doing the same thing over and over in an increasing number of cities was, indeed, tedious, and only seemed more complex to people who equate 'micromanagement', per se, with depth. Nor did it have any pay-off in terms of advancing game position - if you build a hospital or kill off a few slaves to manage health in your third city, then congratulations you've temporarily overcome an arbitrary penalty the game imposes on you. But you haven't done anything to get closer to winning the game by doing so, and you haven't engaged in any meaningful trade-offs beyond trading one way of managing that arbitrary penalty against another way of managing that arbitrary penalty.

It's easily shown to be a false equivalence - things like the Total War series have as much more more province management as Civ, but are very railroaded and simple on the strategy lair in terms of what you can meaningfully do other than tread water.

I didn't get on especially with either Civ III or Civ IV for this reason - in admittedly rose-tinted recollection, Civs I and II (which had far fewer features, and consequently less micromanagement of this sort), were far superior at making your management decisions relevant to gameplay. While I think that - even in its final form - Civ V went too far in reducing the importance of single-city management, it's always felt closer to me to the original Civ ideal of a game where your decision-making matters and micromanagement isn't overdone purely for the sake of giving the player tasks to keep them occupied between turns.

Designers need to ask themselves when creating these sorts of games "Does forcing the player to build health buildings in each city at population point X advance the game state meaningfully?" All too often, the answer is "no".

 

[santoo]

Of course, in a tile-based game, it's simply ridiculous to think of scaling down hexes so that you can fit more units into a 1UPT screen... Instead, I would suggest the much ridiculed "5UPT"/"XUPT" solution. Armies should occupy a finite amount of space, you shouldn't be able to stack 200 tanks into one tile, but it is equally nonsensical to only have a single soldier in a city-sized land area.

It would be very interesting to see how a 5UPT Civ would play. Not sure if it could be easily modded.

I agree with most of your points and would also like to see XUPT in a sandbox/mod (it's been a long time since CTP, but I think I liked armies well enough).

A question for the people who understand AI better than me:
Are there any fundamental reasons, why an AI would do better/worse in e.g. 5UPT vs the 1UPT and infinteUPT-cases? Moving would obviously be quicker/easier, and having more than one unit per tile would open up more combat options (and probably make positioning-mistakes by the AI more forgivable) - but would an exponentially increase search-space not only make it that much harder for the AI? My intuitive analogy: chess as a XUPT-game

 

[Drowsy Emperor]

Or perhaps, more to the point, something less tedious. Micromanagement is an important component of strategy games - when it advances your gameplay. City-scale micromanagement that involves doing the same thing over and over in an increasing number of cities was, indeed, tedious, and only seemed more complex to people who equate 'micromanagement', per se, with depth. Nor did it have any pay-off in terms of advancing game position - if you build a hospital or kill off a few slaves to manage health in your third city, then congratulations you've temporarily overcome an arbitrary penalty the game imposes on you. But you haven't done anything to get closer to winning the game by doing so, and you haven't engaged in any meaningful trade-offs beyond trading one way of managing that arbitrary penalty against another way of managing that arbitrary penalty.

It's easily shown to be a false equivalence - things like the Total War series have as much more more province management as Civ, but are very railroaded and simple on the strategy lair in terms of what you can meaningfully do other than tread water.

I didn't get on especially with either Civ III or Civ IV for this reason - in admittedly rose-tinted recollection, Civs I and II (which had far fewer features, and consequently less micromanagement of this sort), were far superior at making your management decisions relevant to gameplay. While I think that - even in its final form - Civ V went too far in reducing the importance of single-city management, it's always felt closer to me to the original Civ ideal of a game where your decision-making matters and micromanagement isn't overdone purely for the sake of giving the player tasks to keep them occupied between turns.

Designers need to ask themselves when creating these sorts of games "Does forcing the player to build health buildings in each city at population point X advance the game state meaningfully?" All too often, the answer is "no".

Civ V is full of that as well. Half the time you're building base improvements that do nothing but raise your happiness in an effort to outpace the inevitable decline with a growing population. Its sub-optimal to settle anywhere that doesn't have a luxury resource you don't have - its probably the most restrictive Civ game regarding city settling. And worst of all, global happiness essentially ruins the fun of war and conquest, the better you do at it the worse you're off. At times, managing happiness is more important than anything else and the player gets nothing out of it except a reprieve from a harsh penalty.

That said, Civ V is less taxing to play overall, which would be much more fun and relaxing if the tempo of the game wasn't slowed down so much to adapt it to 1UPT. Yes there might be less micromanagment, but there's a whole lot more of "next turning" and waiting for something to happen.

By the way, I play gods and kings - I don't have BNW, so take that for what its worth.

 

[santoo]

IF stacking was brought back it'd have to be limited in a few ways...

1. Only similar unit types can stack. No guarding catapults with swordsmen.

2. Stacks would have to be limited to 2-3 units each.

3. Only one unit from a stack may attack on the same turn. If you want every unit to attack, you have to unstack them, obviously requiring space to do so.

4. Damage to the stack applies to all units in the stack.

Basically, stacking should be for maneuvering purposes ONLY. Keeping stacked units in combat should be the least optimal choice. You can't use a stack to protect certain units.

One note though. 1 unit IS an army, likely representing an entire platoon. Some people here apparently think a swordsman is only representing 10 guys or something.

@1: why? if you allow only same-type-stacks, you remove the element of stack-composition, which I feel can make MUPT more strategic than 1UPT. What do you gain in exchange?
@3: why? as far as I can see, this has no additional benefits, but 2 disadvantages: the more generic: it unnecessarily restricts/limits you. the more concrete: it slows down fighting (and therefore the whole game). If I want to e.g. take a city and can only attack it once from each of the *bestcase* 6 fields around it (ignoring ranged/air for the moment), it will take longer than necessary to conquer - even if you have more than enough armies. how realistic is it for armies to wait outside of the battlefield, just because there is not enough room? how "fun" is it in a gameplay sense?

both 1 and 3 seem to make no sense to me - both from a playing point of view, as well as historically/realistically.

 

[mnf]

Realistically, you have a limited front against any enemy. Even if you are able to fit in 4 divisions, the terrain is often such that you can at most have 1 division or even only part of that division at the front. If you want all 4 divisions to engage at the same time, you need to surround that enemy from other directions, which translates to attacking from other adjacent tiles.

If one wants stack composition, I would rather prefer how Heart of Iron 3 does it. Each unit (division) consists of 4 brigades. Two types of brigades exist: combat brigades and support brigades. One would think that 4 combat brigades would give you the strongest division, but not so.

Each battle has a limited frontage. This can change depending on terrain, on target size, on whether you are surrounded or whether you are flanking. On a wide frontage, you can send the whole division to the line. On a narrow frontage, however, a division with say an artillery brigade will actually provide far higher firepower because the support brigade does not need to be on the line.

Also, realistically it takes time to rotate divisions off the line. Once on the line, they need time to do their work, meaning when a division is in combat, you cannot rotate the next division up. It's not an assembly line. Engaged divisions also cannot be rotated off the line because it creates chaos. This is why it is unrealistic to let every stacked unit attack in the same turn.

With the brigade concept, each division is in effect a stack of 4 brigades, and they work in unison just like how a stack of catapults plus swords plus archers would. The difference being that you have to micromanage a stack, but not a division.

If one really wants to talk about realistic combat, check out Hearts of Iron series. MUPT as it was in Civ IV is as unrealistic as it gets.

 

[Lucius_]

1. Because 'soft' units need to be squishy. If you can stack glass canons with defensive units, they aren't glass canons anymore. The whole point of 1upt is to make positioning important. You allow stacks different types and it is no longer tactical but instead simply brute force.

3. Moving in (lets assume 3 per stack) 24-48 units attacking in the same turn, city strength would have to be extremely inflated. Cities would need 2000 hp to survive a single turn. Inflating everything serves no purpose.

My thoughts with Mupt would be for the purpose of maneuverability only. It will be easier to arrange 3 siege units if they are moved in at the same time, but does not inflate combat. Tactical positioning would still be required. Brute force tactics would be minimized but possible if done in waves.