1upt No So Cool

[ohioastronomy]

In the game as it is, the tactics are trivial, and from multiplayer reports the system is poor for player vs. player too - because it just isn't well thought out. For example, whomever attacks first has a big edge; there are a bunch of hokey exploits which I suppose could be called tactics, but which certainly give an edge to gimmicks. (e.g. attack with horses and retreat to where the other side can't get you.) You simply lack the tools - like opportunity fire - that are essential to making an I go - you go system have game depth.

I don't just find this system poor with the current AI; I think it's just plain bad design. Switching to sometime on a tactical map (where "stacks" can duke it out) would really interest me, by contrast, and I think that it could be done well. The violence done to the game on the large scale just doesn't match the return from the new battle model, at least for me.

 

[Varanid]

using mounted, fast moving units to hit and retreat *is* part of tactical strategy and isn't exactly unheard of

 

[ohioastronomy]

using mounted, fast moving units to hit and retreat *is* part of tactical strategy and isn't exactly unheard of

Not when you couple it with the artificial "I move all of my pieces and attack, then you do the same" model. You just imbalance the game drastically towards such units if they can inflict damage without themselves being in danger.

After all, you do get to shoot at people charging at you across an open field before they get to you in real life. And you can chase them.

 

[polypheus]

Not when you couple it with the artificial "I move all of my pieces and attack, then you do the same" model. You just imbalance the game drastically towards such units if they can inflict damage without themselves being in danger.

After all, you do get to shoot at people charging at you across an open field before they get to you in real life. And you can chase them.

This I go you go (IGOUGO) problem is always present in all Civs. But it is really amplified in 1UPT system where the weakest units can be picked off easily and then retreated to safety and even fully healed! At least in the Civ4 SoD system, the strongest defender stands up to defend and has much more of a fighting chance.

I agree with you that the whole talk about how 1UPT is great due to ability to implement "tactics" seems silly in a IGOUGO system. It just so fully favors the initiator because the defender can't do anything but watch all his units get picked off until the initiator is finished with moving ALL his units. This doesn't in any way resemble anything like "tactics" because no enemy would just all sit there with ALL his units standing around in temporary suspended animation while all your units move in and attack the enemy units piecemeal.

So this is why I feel that CTP or similar type system is really the best. There it uses combined arms and when your army/stack attacks the enemy the entire enemy stack is also engaged against you and not just waiting idly by while you pick off each of his units one by one. There the initiator advantage is minimized and also all units are combined into one attack truly supporting each other.

 

[vandyr]

This I go you go (IGOUGO) problem is always present in all Civs. But it is really amplified in 1UPT system where the weakest units can be picked off easily and then retreated to safety and even fully healed! At least in the Civ4 SoD system, the strongest defender stands up to defend and has much more of a fighting chance.

I agree with you that the whole talk about how 1UPT is great due to ability to implement "tactics" seems silly in a IGOUGO system. It just so fully favors the initiator because the defender can't do anything but watch all his units get picked off until the initiator is finished with moving ALL his units. This doesn't in any way resemble anything like "tactics" because no enemy would just all sit there with ALL his units standing around in temporary suspended animation while all your units move in and attack the enemy units piecemeal.

So this is why I feel that CTP or similar type system is really the best. There it uses combined arms and when your army/stack attacks the enemy the entire enemy stack is also engaged against you and not just waiting idly by while you pick off each of his units one by one. There the initiator advantage is minimized and also all units are combined into one attack truly supporting each other.

This problem really only presents itself with highly mobile units and could easily be countered by implementing a system of opportunity fire. Still far superior to SoD.

 

[Grimberht]

Research before you buy. This 1upt was a major selling point. It is NOT going away in civ5.

And that's one of he reason why this game will remains boring at best... hopefully some mod will do some good job on this issue and demonstrate how bad a decision it was.

Dont get me wrong, I dont like the stack of doom either. It was probably worst than the 1upt idea. But the limit is way too excessive and simplify game play WAY to much.

You can developped a limited unit per tile system that will bring more deepness into the game than only spending your time moving toward good spot pre war.

Beside you can even implement penalties for stacking unit. But denying that 2 "units" can share a tile creates WAY too many problems to be correctly fix.

And before anyone mention the more tactical flavor, I concur its great... but you can have the same feeling by having a few or 2upt for exemple. It will only add deepness into the game and bit more decision making... then the none decision making currently everywhere in this game. It sad that what you dont do has a bigger impact on the game then what you're doing.

 

[Toulouse]

1 military unit per hex doesn't work in a game that covering the scope of recorded human history.

 

[Grimberht]

I enjoyed 1upt at first. It was fun to have a catapult, two archers, a couple of spearmen and a horseman and try to use "real" battlefield tactics. However, the AI is too stupid to actually make it any interesting.

The AI could (and probably will) be greatly improved. But my biggest concern is what happens later in the game. There are units everywhere, blocking eachother. What concerns me is that Firaxis don't seem to have put a lot of thought into this: A few examples:

- Finally, roads costs maintainance, so that they cannot be spammed everywhere. This would have worked perfectly with the old combat system, but when almost every tile of your empire is covered with units, it doesn't make sense at all.

- The did a great job on making the maps look more realistic... Beautiful farms and fewer roads... Many of the early screenshots showed us a Civ paradise. In reality, of course, the maps never look that way. The player spams ugly circus tents in every available tile and covers them with units.

- One of those things I hated with Civ I is back: A single warrior can prevent the expansion of a great empire. The only way to deal with this is by starting a war. I thought it was absolutely brilliant that Civ IV let units from different Civs share a tile.

How they should have done it

- Let the player stack his units (wait, I'm not finished!). This would make the empire look nicer during peacetime and would make it a lot let tedious to move the troops around.

- Change the rules of combat. Make stacks extremely vulnerable. Let the attacker pick the weakest defender and cause collateral damage to all units in that tile. Let the defender gain bonuses from having units in nearby tiles. Let archers and catapults autmatically fire at attacking forces.

- Increase the unit upkeep. Make it really expensive to have a big army, especially one that is in enemy territory.

Conclusion: 1upt is a weak attempt to solve a problem that could have been solved in much more interesting ways. Instead of forcing the player to spread out the units, they could simply remove the advantages of stacking. Let the Civ IV player build his SoD's and watch them get annihilated, until he realises that stacking isn't a very good idea.

100% with you!!!




p.s: Could this forward implement the infamous Like button?? So I wouldnt have to do this kind of posting anymore

 

[Lone Wolf]

1upt did with warfare what all the Civ games did with time. In all Civ games, the time that is required to sail across the ocean takes years even in the later game. Clearly, the different scales of "time" as in "moving armies scale" and "time" as in "technological progress" were united in one in all the Civs.

Though the fact that Civ5 units don't always die after battle implies that Civ5 units are "larger" then the ones previous Civs had.

I don't really understand all that "how could they include tactics in strategy!!!" outcry. SOD had its tactical elements, too. Every strategy game, unless abstracted to the ridiculous degree, has tactics. Tic-tacs.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

I wonder how it would have worked if units could stack on the main map but when a battle occurs the scale of the map changes to a map that is the approximation of that larger hex. On this new map the units are then restricted to 1UPT. Anyone know of any games that have tried this? I think Pirates did something like this for city attacks.

I dont think we need to look any further then Civ for an answer for 1upt! Lets just take the civ 2 model, you can stack units and if the stack is attacked the strongest unit in it will fight but if it loses the WHOLE stack is destroyed.

Both of these systems would be vastly superior to 1UPT. Many people reflexively knock stacks because of their revulsion for stacks as implemented in Civ4. The biggest problem with the stacks in Civ4 was the combat mechanic where armies stood by and fought a series of single unit duels with one another. Not only was this a crime against realism, but it made for terrible gameplay. Armies fight together at every level of warfare more advanced than that between groups of hunter gatherers.

A tactical subgame (where battles take place in one hex on the strategic map, but are resolved on a tactical / operational map) would be more realistic and would improve both tactical play as well as strategic play. Gone would be the problems with movement / deployment on the strategic map. AI could focus on battles with no thought wasted on noncombatants or any of the other distractions that the huge and necessarily complicated strategic map entail. Movement could be made more realistic on both scales so that you could actually move an army from one side of your empire to the other within a decade on the strategic map, while your units movement cross country could be realistically scaled on the tactical map.

I have to agree with the poster who said that the designers of this game seem to be amateurs, with no feeling for either realism or good game mechanics. If a game like this had been released as a board game in the 1970s it would have been laughed out of the hobby store.

 

[vandyr]

About the only really good argument against 1upt so far is people complaining about having to move multiple units. Not that I agree with it, but its about the only sensible argument.

Mobile units need to be addressed, but that seems like an easy enough fix, and gunpowder units should probably have a one hex range, but anyone bringing up scale needs to check that at the door. Nothing has ever been to scale in Civ games, not time, not units, not distance. Why harp on it now?

So really, I still haven't seen anything convincing aside from "1upt sucks". The AI is a seperate issue. The AI sucked with SoD too, its not like there was any challenge from it there either.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

1upt did with warfare what all the Civ games did with time. In all Civ games, the time that is required to sail across the ocean takes years even in the later game. Clearly, the different scales of "time" as in "moving armies scale" and "time" as in "technological progress" were united in one in all the Civs.

Though the fact that Civ5 units don't always die after battle implies that Civ5 units are "larger" then the ones previous Civs had.

I don't really understand all that "how could they include tactics in strategy!!!" outcry. SOD had its tactical elements, too. Every strategy game, unless abstracted to the ridiculous degree, has tactics. Tic-tacs.

Tactics need not be included in a strategy game, there are many strategy games where combat is resolved at a strategic or operational level that are fantastic games.

Including tactics in a strategy game is in fact the abstraction. Every Civ game has suffered from this mismatch in scale as you point out, and more so than necessary because they've constantly insisted on using one map and one time scale, but units that fit neither. Why this is the case is a question I've been asking since Civ1. It's not like the problem hadn't been addressed in countless wargames produced decades before Civ1 was released.

I'm not against strategy games having a tactical element, I love many games (Total War, MOO2, Master of Magic, HOMM etc.) that do this. What I cannot abide is that the Civ series has always done this poorly, and now they've released the worst implementation of movement / stacking / combat in the series with Civ5.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

About the only really good argument against 1upt so far is people complaining about having to move multiple units. Not that I agree with it, but its about the only sensible argument.

Feel free to demolish all those nonsensical arguments point by point with your brilliance. Once all those bogus arguments are disposed of you won't have to waste your time dismissing them, which looks rather cowardly and distracts from all the love that surely will flow to Civ5 once the "haters" are put in their place.

Conversely you can simply decide that other people have different tastes in games. You like 1UPT, they don't. I don't reply to posts that say "I like 1UPT and prefer it to everything else", there's really no argument to be made. Neither do I denigrate statements like that by dismissing it as a bad argument, or not sensible as you do with your blanket assertions about every argument critical of 1UPT above.

Mobile units need to be addressed, but that seems like an easy enough fix, and gunpowder units should probably have a one hex range, but anyone bringing up scale needs to check that at the door. Nothing has ever been to scale in Civ games, not time, not units, not distance. Why harp on it now?

Because it's never been addressed and has in fact been exacerbated by this iteration of the Civ series. Should people should quit objecting when you kick them in the groin because you have always kicked them in the groin? I find this unconvincing.

So really, I still haven't seen anything convincing aside from "1upt sucks"....

You find that convincing?

 

[Lone Wolf]

What I cannot abide is that the Civ series has always done this poorly, and now they've released the worst implementation of movement / stacking / combat in the series with Civ5.

Possibly. What I'm saying that objecting to UPT solely because it's tactical isn't a valid argument. I am not a furious UPT defender (I actually didn't play Civ5 it all, since my 6-year-old comp can't run it).

 

[Camikaze]

Possibly. What I'm saying that objecting to UPT solely because it's tactical isn't a valid argument. I am not a furious UPT defender (I actually didn't play Civ5 it all, since my 6-year-old comp can't run it).

Objecting too it solely because it's tactical is perhaps not a valid argument, but objecting too it because it is tactical, in combination with its other faults and drawbacks, certainly is. Because being a tactical innovation is a drawback for a strategic game. That consideration does have to be thrown in the mix for consideration.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Because being a tactical innovation is a drawback for a strategic game.

I don't see how. As said, many strategy games include tactics that would be strictly unnecessary (the classic Master of Magic, for example).

 

[Camikaze]

I don't see how. As said, many strategy games include tactics that would be strictly unnecessary (the classic Master of Magic, for example).

Civ is a strategy game. Turn based strategy, to be precise. So you should be able to dominate the game by having the best strategy. When you bring tactical elements into that, you are required to bring tactical gameplay into it. This takes away from the strategic focus of the game, because brilliant strategy will not be enough to win the game for you. So it warps the focus of the game. Now, sometimes this is justifiable, because this consideration is merely one 'con', which might be up against a whole host of 'pros', but it is a 'con' nonetheless, and a valid complaint.

 

[Lone Wolf]

So MoM would be better without tactical battles (with auto-combat turned on)? I dislike the chess parallels, but is the fact that chess combines both strategy and tactics a flaw in that game?

 

[fed1943]

I would like the 1UPT (as I liked the SoD, too) if two things were corrected:

a) Poor AI;

b) Player could give names to units (or is it possible and I just didn't discover how?).

 

[Camikaze]

So MoM would be better without tactical battles (with auto-combat turned on)? I dislike the chess parallels, but is the fact that chess combines both strategy and tactics a flaw in that game?

Dunno. Never played it (Civ is the only computer game I own).

The question is, is Civ a game that is meant to be focused on strategy? Is Civ meant to be a game that is focused on tactical warfare? Yes and no.

I personally think that a FIFA style feature (where you could have your own football league and play out football games) would be absolutely awesome, but it doesn't mean that it should be in Civ. Being a good feature is different to being a good feature for Civ. Anything that is overly tactical is not a good feature for Civ, regardless of how good a feature it is in general.