And you don't seem to understand what tactics are either, considering Antilogic says there are not tactics in Civ games, only operations. (Or maybe he's wrong?)
Yup, he's wrong. At least about V - it represents every level of warfare, this is a very notable achievement, and a key reason why it's the most popular and played Civ, ever.
You have your strategy - let's say you want some resource you don't have, so you form a strategy: 'that civ has the oil I want, so I shall capture their city and steal it'.
You have your operations - this is the manner by which you'll capture their city: 'I see they have access to the coast, so I will send a fleet of x/y ships/carriers, and their city is n strength, so I will need at least x rangers to bring it low, and y melees to protect them, and probably a tank to swoop in and cap the city. You want interesting choices? In V there tends to be a strict limit to the units you utilize in any given scenario - in IV/AC it is always 'the more the merrier', in V/BE you need to decide what you need and what you don't, you'll have to make a trade-off when you take that artillery, you can't have it and infantry on the same tile, so you need to decide which one you need more - there's a degree of balance to be achieved, these are both interesting and meaningful choices - that artillery might well reduce the city quicker, but you could be left without the melee units to cap it.
And then you have your tactics - this is what happens when your strikeforce arrives at the target, you may have been thorough in your prep, but there's still work to do, you need to think about positioning: 'where can my rangers/artillery find a vantage to bombard the city? There are forests on the south side, so I'll have to approach from the north where there are hills I can use as a vantage, and since I don't want to let the city whittle my force down one-by-one I first encircle it so I can move all my units into the attack at the same time. You'll need to defeat any defenders, and may spend a number of turns shuffling your guys around out of range of defensive fire to rest them and bring in fresh reserves to continue the attack before the defenders can heal-up; you'll have to think carefully about how you attack - you may have a defender you want to kill, but you don't want to end-up in that tile because it's within range of the city, but you don't have enough ranged units to destroy it, so you soften it up first with a melee unit and finish it off with tacjets - or it might go the other way, you want your melee unit in that space so first you injure that defender severely and then finish him off with a melee and occupy the tile.
In MUPT that last paragraph really just doesn't come into play - you decide your strategy, make your army and send it off to war, then you roll a bunch of dice and it's all over bar the weeping.
Again (2), I'm not sure why the focus on artillery, that's only a small part of SMAX arsenal, and certainly not the only or even best way to deal with stacks that are too big. (It only gets useful IMHO when dealing with lots of units stacked in a base (or in rare situations when you see one - a bunker, I don't remember if self-destruct can affect that)).
It's just an example of the very substantial difference between combat systems, one that illustrates the more sophisticated choices on display in the 1UPT system.
Again (3), I'm still waiting for someone that is experienced with both SMAC/X and Civ:BE (ok, or Civ5, since they're pretty similar) to present any compelling argument why combat in Civ:BE is more tactical operational than in SMAC/X.
I think you're just not trying to hear it. I think it would be nice to be able to defend the 1UPT games as progressive and praiseworthy without being forced to dump on beloved classics... it's really not about "more this" and "better that", it's a case of "it is" or "it is not" - that MUPT games are less tactically-focused is not a bad thing that renders them irrelevant, it just is.
Again (4), one issue with Civ5/BE is that the scale is too small (especially in BE with the additional chokepoints coming from canyons). From what I've seen in my brief contact with wargames (and what other people in this thread said) it's that (1UPT) wargames tend generally have MUCH bigger maps than Civ5/BE. Therefore more units => more choices => less boring combat (of course that's far from being the only difference, wargames tend to have many more, and more complex systems like logistics).
Has anybody done an actual analysis of the supposed difference between Civ maps/space and other wargames? I ain't seeing it, not relatively to the games I highlighted as direct forebears of the 1UPT Civ games - Panzer General, Advance Wars, etc. So leaving aside the fact that Civ is not strictly a wargame, and that the majority of wargames are not nearly as dynamic or long-lasting as a Civ game, this 'less space' thing is dramatically overstated - I invite you to go watch a video of a Panzer General scenario, many will take place on maps considerably smaller than the average Civ map, with just as much cramping and funneling... 'chokepoints'. Sometimes in wargames you get a German invasion of the Caucasus with wide-open spaces and very few units, and others you get a US assault on some Pacific island with cramped space and too many units. It is what it is, there's no rule in Civ that every battle takes place in some ridiculous funnel - and it's dishonest to paint it as such; but when it does, that doesn't make anything less interesting, think of it as a test of your operational and tactical decision-making. Some days you gotta say "hang it" and accept that it's just a Bridge Too Far - I bet the men asked to assault Monte Cassino in WWII were a bit frustrated by those sneaky Germans and their 'chokepoint' too.
This is a ridiculous statement, micro-management is interesting only if those choices matter. See Sword of the Stars 2 as an example (though, admittedly, it has a worse issue of no effective tools to realize the choices that are interesting). Or what happens when in a long Civ game you end with 50+ cities. Or Civ:BE's building "quests".
Don't tell me this is just another "I played 'massive' with 15 civs and found it tedious" whinge? Couldn't even fit 50 total cities on my maps.
I mean, I totally agree with you about micro-management, I hate being made to make redundant choices and indulge in meaningless busywork - I just don't think that applies here - micro-managing your individual units in a battle is not meaningless, these choices matter, positioning, march route/order, mutual support, choosing to fire or move, to sacrifice a unit or save it; not only are the tactical choices consequential, but they
don't exist in previous Civ titles. And that's why 1UPT tactics > MUPT tactics.
