1upt No So Cool

[vandyr]

I guess everyone is wrong, then.

Micromanaging stacks is a PITA. And when a stack gets to the size where I don't care what is in it and I just keep piling units into it, well... that is just complete and utter silliness.

Everyone just needs to face the facts that people are going to have varying opinions on the subject. The only way to resolve it to make both camps happy is to meet in the middle.

Oh, yeah. And then convince Firaxis to implement it.

This is impossible. However, there is an easy solution. Those that want Civ 4 need to go play Civ 4.

 

[Jharii]

And Jharii, that's the funniest and hardest quest...

Convince Firaxis to do something right...

That's why all of this finger-pointing and condescension is useless. It serves no purpose. The ultimate responsibility falls on Firaxis, not on us beating each other up for no reason.

I've been thinking about returning to Elemental for this very reason. Their community is quite a bit more civil towards each other and Stardock is communicating with the community to explore ideas and concepts to fix what is broken. People are actually working together to try to find solutions rather than beating each other over the head with bricks because of differences of opinion.

There is plenty of civility here, to be sure. But you have to weed through so much hate and venom to get to it.

 

[JLoZeppeli]

what do you expect from people arguing of history on Wiki bases??....

There is a crowd of ranting people, and some faithfull blind followers... It is the price we must pay to a so important franchise, i suppose....

I'm sure of one thing, that it will quit after some times...

And i can say that if Firaxis has spoken an half of what Stardock do on their board, maybe that problem was halved as well....


Lacking in communication is something that many people feel like an evidance of abandonament... 2k greg is like Silent Bob and we are Jay a junkie freak bubbling dirty words... But without the funny comedy...

 

[TrailblazingScot]

I think communicating via threads where people are taking the mickey out of Deity...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=392873

Settings:

-Standard speed
-Pangea
-Greece
-Deity
-Must declare on all civs
-Must declare on all City states
-One city only

I won't spoil it by saying how well he did...but it is a reflection on how poorly the AI handles the current system.

Don't worry however, it is cool.

 

[Zachriel]

Yes we need fewer units in game! So Ai can't manage for sure even on deity the fury of four horsemen...

You're introducing extraneous issues. Horsemen are overpowered; their counter, the spearman is underpowered by comparision; and the AI doesn't produce or upgrade units in the first part of the game. These are all fixable issues.

Take, for example the +1 sight bonus. Why? Do people get suddenly "hawk-eyes" or something ?
Why not a far more realistic approach, like +1 sight for ALL units, when you research optics.

Because units can have individual characteristics, with leadership and soldiery that varies. One unit may become adept at one task, such as reconnaissance. This is very common in history.

 

[man-erg]

This is impossible. However, there is an easy solution. Those that want Civ 4 need to go play Civ 4.

I am doing that, but I don't believe SOD to be perfect, either. Stacks should be limited, not infinite. Combat should be resolved 'in one go', not units individually attacking etc. In CiV I'd like to see a unit limit based on tile type. Say, 6 units max on a plains hex. Put that in CiV, together with an AI that can use it to provide a *real* tactical challenge, make ranged attack 1 hex, not 2, add the ability to move a stack as one group and I would probably lay Civ 4 to rest and move to Civ 5.

Taste and preferences of gameplay are purely down to the individual. However, i do think that micromanagement and realism (even at abstract Civ level) can be more objective. In history, Big armies met "at the same place", on the same hill, on the same plain etc, not hundreds of miles apart. D-Day can't even remotely happen in CiV. Nor Waterloo. I can understand people happy with that for simplifying gameplay - but not for realism.

And how can CiV combat be more realistic when archers fire further than tanks? Over ranges of hills? And how can a tile big enough to hold only one unit, magically contain a city of 50,000+ inhabitants? It suggests that people are prepared to go to quite ridiculous lengths to justify the money spent on the game, rather than admit we all bought a bit of a dud.

On micromanagement, moving 6 or more units separately in CiV takes more micro than a stack. Seems to be even CiV fans complaining about that.

Trouble is that 1upt seems essential to the games core design. Production has been s-l-o-w-e-d to a grinding crawl to encourage tiny armies of 4 or 5 powerful units because nations fielding 20 or more units isn't practical. In 1, 2, 3 and 4 you just put them in a stack and simply moved them as 1.

 

[man-erg]

Try to make some experiments. In GameDefines.xmal is filed, that specifies how many units can stay on one plot.
From what I have seen, changing value to 3UPT for example, there are some pros:- roadblock happen less frequently
- AI is more efficient in offense, as each of your units can be attacked theoretically by up to 9 units, while positioning still counts. Human player loses his advantage with almost invincible high xp units. This also means, 6 units is not sufficient to crush AI.
- you have to think how to compose those 3-units stack (this could be even more important with few units tweaks)

Thanks for that, I may just try it!! Making the AI better on offence would be a real bonus. My doubt would be that the AI could manage an economy to produce the larger numbers of units required..But hey, I'll give it a go.

I enjoy 1upt. It makes the game more chess-like and less "Mongolian horde of destruction"-like.

You've pinpointed exactly the problem to me. The problem being that the "Mongolian horde of destruction" is a historical reality. Chess is about as far removed from a war game as oh, tic-tac-toe. I enjoy chess - and Panzer General! - but I just can't see the connection between CiV and these games? Does anyone *really* spend more than 3 seconds pondering the moves in CiV? I think CiV combat is far closer to "Rush Hour" and those puzzles where you make a picture by sliding tiles, and not at all like PG or chess.

 

[vandyr]

I am doing that, but I don't believe SOD to be perfect, either. Stacks should be limited, not infinite. Combat should be resolved 'in one go', not units individually attacking etc. In CiV I'd like to see a unit limit based on tile type. Say, 6 units max on a plains hex. Put that in CiV, together with an AI that can use it to provide a *real* tactical challenge, make ranged attack 1 hex, not 2, add the ability to move a stack as one group and I would probably lay Civ 4 to rest and move to Civ 5.

Taste and preferences of gameplay are purely down to the individual. However, i do think that micromanagement and realism (even at abstract Civ level) can be more objective. In history, Big armies met "at the same place", on the same hill, on the same plain etc, not hundreds of miles apart. D-Day can't even remotely happen in CiV. Nor Waterloo. I can understand people happy with that for simplifying gameplay - but not for realism.

And how can CiV combat be more realistic when archers fire further than tanks? Over ranges of hills? It suggests that people are prepared to go to quite ridiculous lengths to justify the money spent on the game, rather than admit we all bought a bit of a dud.

On micromanagement, moving 6 or more units separately in CiV takes more micro than a stack. Seems to be even CiV fans complaining about that.

Trouble is that 1upt seems essential to the games core design. Production has been s-l-o-w-e-d to a grinding crawl to encourage tiny armies of 4 or 5 powerful units because nations fielding 20 or more units isn't practical. In 1, 2, 3 and 4 you just put them in a stack and simply moved them as 1.

I agree about gunpowder weapons having melee range, that's something that needs to be adjusted, although not for early gunpowder units. As far as micromanaging units, doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I much prefer doing that to piling tons of units into a stack. Then again, I"ve always micromanaged my workers, so its nothing new to me. Stack warfare just plain sucked, and completely removed any form of strategic or realistic combat aspect from the game. So, despite the flaws associated with 1upt, I still prefer it over stack warfare any day.

 

[polypheus]

Again I completely understand that SoD combat was flawed. But 1UPT, it seems to even people that like it, has some really serious flaws major ones being that it requires an impractical number of hexes to work and that AI will never be able to handle it well. At least with SoD, AIs could more or less manage it and it fit better the scale of Civ. IMHO, the flaws of 1UPT outweigh the flaws of SoD overall.

But the discussion of SoD vs 1UPT is a false dichotomy. A CTP or MoM type system would have been the best. It would still allow units to stack on the strategic level map but still provide some level of tactical control on a combat resolution mini-map.

 

[polypheus]

You're introducing extraneous issues. Horsemen are overpowered; their counter, the spearman is underpowered by comparision; and the AI doesn't produce or upgrade units in the first part of the game. These are all fixable issues.

Well the issue really is that for 1UPT to work you need a low #units/#tiles ratio. But that itself, as pi-8r mentions introduces itself a lot of issues of its own. As we cannot increase the number of tiles, then we have to nerf production. Well that in and of itself introduces a lot of issues. Also you have the problem that with fewer units and harder to produce, battles become life and death all or nothing affairs. You wipe out the AIs small attacking force and you steamroll it from then on. With SoD at least, this didn't quite happen like that. My SoD would also suffer losses when attacking AI SoD and the AI usually still kept stacks in cities to defend and counterattack.

 

[Zachriel]

Well the issue really is that for 1UPT to work you need a low #units/#tiles ratio. But that itself, as pi-8r mentions introduces itself a lot of issues of its own. As we cannot increase the number of tiles, then we have to nerf production. Well that in and of itself introduces a lot of issues. Also you have the problem that with fewer units and harder to produce, battles become life and death all or nothing affairs. You wipe out the AIs small attacking force and you steamroll it from then on. With SoD at least, this didn't quite happen like that. My SoD would also suffer losses when attacking AI SoD and the AI usually still kept stacks in cities to defend and counterattack.

Yes, for 1upt to work, you need low #units/#tiles. That's the whole idea, of course. Fewer units overall.

Also you have the problem that with fewer units and harder to produce, battles become life and death all or nothing affairs.

Imagine battles being life and death all or nothing affairs.

You wipe out the AIs small attacking force and you steamroll it from then on. With SoD at least, this didn't quite happen like that. My SoD would also suffer losses when attacking AI SoD and the AI usually still kept stacks in cities to defend and counterattack.

Yes, there should be the possibility of an exchange, where both sides suffer great losses, and the victor is nonetheless crippled. Also, there should be time to rally forces in the rest of the civilization and still mount a credible defense.

Our only point is that the game can be fun and challenging as it is, and that 1upt is not in-and-of-itself unworkable. The view of 1upt (as with ics) seems to depend on playing style, as much as anything.

 

[Jharii]

Imagine battles being life and death all or nothing affairs.

ROFLMAO.

LOL.

I can't stop laughing...

STOP!

 

[polypheus]

Imagine battles being life and death all or nothing affairs.

Perhaps I did not explain myself well and of course this quote does sounds strange as battles is about "life and death" after all. But what I meant, as I explained further, is that for 1UPT to work, you need a low #units/#tiles ratio. If you have low number of units and low production, battles become disproportionately "decisive" as each unit become really really valuable. In this kind of situation, humans will usually kill the AI as you can always better maneuver and coordinate your few units to defeat his few units. The only way AI can really make up for this is to allow it to make more units which then destroys the whole 1UPT system as it becomes a "carpets of doom" system now.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

1 unit per tile is great. The combat system is so much more fun than prior versions. Even though V still has some ai problems and balance issue to work out, going back to playing civ 4 unit stacking and idiotic suicide catupults is unthinkable to me.

1 UPT is the future, and is here to stay.

I haven't seen one person who has suggested going back to Civ4's mechanics. Stacking, armies or army combat is not necessarily the same thing as Civ4 SoD.

1UPT is the past, it goes back to the first board wargames of the 1950s. It works for tactical games where the area is so small that it was a physical impossibility to squeeze people any closer together. For every other scale it is a fail. For a game on the scale of Civ it is a massive fail. In my opinion of course.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

ROFLMAO.

LOL.

I can't stop laughing...

STOP!

Laugh away, but battles were very rarely life and death affairs for the states that engaged in them. That's why we remember those that were actually decisive. How many battles were make or break in WW1, WW2, the Korean War, The American Civil War, The Napoleonic Wars, The Seven Years War, The War of Spanish Succession, The War of Austrian Succession, the 30 Years War, The 100 Years War, etc. etc. ad nauseum?

The answer is very few.

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

..... Stack warfare just plain sucked, and completely removed any form of strategic or realistic combat aspect from the game. So, despite the flaws associated with 1upt, I still prefer it over stack warfare any day.

So you think that managing the movement of tactical units (representing one type of troop in numbers so vast that they preclude the entry of other units into an area of several hundred or even thousand square kilometers) in battles that last decades and take place over thousands of kilometers (even in the ancient era where there was no radio communications) is more realistic than battles that take place between armies (made up of the various troop types that actually constituted armies historically), in an area small enough that the commanders could actually observe and control their troops (as was done historically for the same reasons), and in a time scale that allows troops to actually fight one battle before they are forced to retire from old age?

How many games have you played that had "stack combat"? If your entire experience with the phenomenon is Civ4, then I can see why you didn't like it. But as bad as Civ4's mechanics were, they were the most realistic of any in the Civ series, as sad as that is. Civ5s are clearly the least realistic. I'm glad you are having fun with them, but they simulate historical combat far worse than most fantasy RPG games. Really.

 

[Jharii]

Laugh away, but battles were very rarely life and death affairs for the states that engaged in them. That's why we remember those that were actually decisive. How many battles were make or break in WW1, WW2, the Korean War, The American Civil War, The Napoleonic Wars, The Seven Years War, The War of Spanish Succession, The War of Austrian Succession, the 30 Years War, The 100 Years War, etc. etc. ad nauseum?

The answer is very few.

Oh, stop being so serious. If you don't see the humor in it, so sorry for you. Fact is, most battles run the risk of that very outcome, whether they actually turned out that way or not. My apologies for offending your sense of historical awareness and accuracy.

 

[polypheus]

Fact is, most battles run the risk of that very outcome, whether they actually turned out that way or not.

The point though is that 1UPT only works with very few units per #hexes and that being the case, almost all battles would be decisive and disproportionately so. Battles of course have the risk of being decisive but in Civ5 1UPT with fewer units, it would almost always be the case whereas in reality that would not be so. And that is what we are seeing now with 1UPT battles against the AI when there are fewer units where human controlled "four horseman" can take over the world, almost literally. As flawed as SoD system was, this could never happen in the SoD system.

 

[Zogar]

There are some questions I would like to ask again to the defenders of 1 upt :

- Do you realize that a deity AI has, for example, one unit in every tile of his territory in late game ?
- Do you realize that in those conditions, The AI cannot use all its potential in a war, and that most of its units are useless ?
- Do you realize that it is impossible for the AI to manoeuvre its units in a tactical way since it cannot move its units where he wants because of a lack of space ?
- Do you realize that, even if the AI can be improved for the early game, it is an impossible task to make a good AI in late game because of these reasons ?

I took the example of a game in Deity, but I saw all this in a game 'only in emperor', a civ with a whole continent and 30+ cities, I was able to snipe its capital city because all its units were dispersed and units kept blocking each other (not that it is the fault of the AI, I wouldn't have done any better in its place).

This is the main reproach I have against 1 upt, I would like to know what the defenders of the 1 upt think about those problems, they are so game breaking I don't know how anyone can defend 1 upt (I don't necessarily want SoD back, but I don't see how 1upt is the solution).

 

[Jharii]

There are some questions I would like to ask again to the defenders of 1 upt :

- Do you realize that a deity AI has, for example, one unit in every tile of his territory in late game ?
- Do you realize that in those conditions, The AI cannot use all its potential in a war, and that most of its units are useless ?
- Do you realize that it is impossible for the AI to manoeuvre its units in a tactical way since it cannot move its units where he wants because of a lack of space ?
- Do you realize that, even if the AI can be improved for the early game, it is an impossible task to make a good AI in late game because of these reasons ?

I took the example of a game in Deity, but I saw all this in a game 'only in emperor', a civ with a whole continent and 30+ cities, I was able to snipe its capital city because all its units were dispersed and units kept blocking each other (not that it is the fault of the AI, I wouldn't have done any better in its place).

This is the main reproach I have against 1 upt, I would like to know what the defenders of the 1 upt think about those problems, they are so game breaking I don't know how anyone can defend 1 upt (I don't necessarily want SoD back, but I don't see how 1upt is the solution).

Ah. AI and imbalanced deity issues directed at 1upt. I see. You could make this same argument about so many things throughout the course of the Civiliation series.

The problem is that the Civ series has this unfortunate habit of difficulty level being related to resource cheats instead of smarter opponents. Inferior AI and imba difficulty levels does not mean that 1upt is broken.