1upt

[blightmoon]

Ive never understood why does one call 1UPT an addition or a feature. Its not an addition, it is just a limitation, and it is not a feature, but a simplification. So there was nothing added here... 1UPT is just a simplified version of SOD, where the stack limit is 1, you can play 1UPT in Civ4 as well, just edit an XML file or a script and set the limit to 1. You cant play SOD though in Civ5 because AI wouldnt understand it. So again, how on earth can this be a feature, and to that one of the best???? And in general, how removing something can be an addition or a feature....? Sorry for the big redundant post, but Im really surprised, that many people see it as a feature...

It's the huge difference in the gaming experience between the limit placed and the lack of the said limit that called/s for the view that it is a new feature. It's just a difference in perspective (in the language at that) so it's not relevant in discussing anything of significance to the game itself.

 

[blightmoon]

I was worried, I came from a Call of Duty forum, and an MMORPG forum so I am used to some sort of flaming and such

It's nice to know people are chill here

I suppose people who have the patience to play a game with a considerably slower pace, but more depth compared to others, would probably also have a more understanding attitude.

 

[Ex.plode]

I suppose people who have the patience to play a game with a considerably slower pace, but more depth compared to others, would probably also have a more understanding attitude.

You suck noob, rah rah rah no skill rah rah.


It's a good change of pace

 

[Ranos]

Ive never understood why does one call 1UPT an addition or a feature. Its not an addition, it is just a limitation, and it is not a feature, but a simplification. So there was nothing added here... 1UPT is just a simplified version of SOD, where the stack limit is 1, you can play 1UPT in Civ4 as well, just edit an XML file or a script and set the limit to 1. You cant play SOD though in Civ5 because AI wouldnt understand it. So again, how on earth can this be a feature, and to that one of the best???? And in general, how removing something can be an addition or a feature....? Sorry for the big redundant post, but Im really surprised, that many people see it as a feature...

Civ 4: Build units. Move them all onto the same tile. You now have your first SOD. Rampage around the map smashing your SOD into enemy SODs or cities while building more units to add to your SOD or create new SODs. Smash, smash, smash. That's all Civ 4 was when it came to combat. No real strategy, no tactics whatsoever.

Introduce 1UPT. You now have to plan where you are moving your units and when, made even more challenging by not being able to spam roads. You have to place your units in locations where they will be most useful. You can actually have battle lines and use terrain to your advantage. Enemy units can't just zip around your SOD to attack a city behind you, they have to go thru you.

Strategy and tactics are a must and the further in the game you go, the more your tactics and strategy evolve.

How is 1UPT not a feature when it adds so much to combat? How were SODs a feature when they were just moving one SOD into another and see what happens?

 

[guenzak]

Just went back and played some CIV4 with my girlfriend's brother. I hadn't played it in over a year.

Gotta say I was very surprised! I was really hard on CIV5 when it first came out (of course it miserably under-developed at the time) but after a few hours of CIV4, I find myself significantly more partial to CIV5 . Especially 1UPT!

Grouping and ungrouping SOD, choosing which unit to attack who with, and having 75 units attack a city one at a time against 50 other units......jesus it was time consuming and a lot more tedious than I thought it was! Not fun.

A year later, all doubt in my mind has been removed -- I prefer CIV5 1UPT for the tactics, the use of terrain, and the challenges presented by land features in relation to moving large numbers of armies.

^^^ I too pulled out Civ 4 a few weeks ago and decided to play a game. I liked CiV pretty much from release and more and more with each patch but I gotta say that playing 4 again made me appreciate it soooo much more. Don't get me wrong, 4 was a great game but the SOD???? OMG!!! one AI SOD pulled a sneak attack out of the fog on one of my outlying cities pretty early on in the game. Not sure how many were in the stack but by the time the 12th unit started to attack .....esc, exit to windows.

 

[Babri]

While it does add a tactical dimension to the game, it's one that's completely misaligned with the geographic scale, hence the problem of archers firing on targets 500 miles away. Also, I find the log jams of units much more frustrating than SODs ever were.

There were far better ways to deal with the SOD problem and even ways that would have increased the tactical depth of the game. All of those have been discussed to death, however. In fact, you'd best prepare for some flamage in response to creating the 457th separate thread on this issue.

Can you explain men taller than cities & buildings in cIV ? You must be kidding, this is not a real life simulator, it is just a game & the only purpose of the game is to be fun. Surely historical background & realism helps in immersion but there is no need to sacrifice fun for realism.

 

[bitula]

Civ 4: Build units. Move them all onto the same tile. You now have your first SOD. Rampage around the map smashing your SOD into enemy SODs or cities while building more units to add to your SOD or create new SODs. Smash, smash, smash. That's all Civ 4 was when it came to combat. No real strategy, no tactics whatsoever.

Introduce 1UPT. You now have to plan where you are moving your units and when, made even more challenging by not being able to spam roads. You have to place your units in locations where they will be most useful. You can actually have battle lines and use terrain to your advantage. Enemy units can't just zip around your SOD to attack a city behind you, they have to go thru you.

Strategy and tactics are a must and the further in the game you go, the more your tactics and strategy evolve.

How is 1UPT not a feature when it adds so much to combat? How were SODs a feature when they were just moving one SOD into another and see what happens?

There is difference between different game experience and features. Adding features is not the only way to change game experience. In Civ5 1UPT the game experience changed (in a negative direction - but thats just an oppinion) by removing a feature. This is a very cheap and unfair way to create a new game. And saying stuff like, 1UPT is the best feature simply encourages companies to create cheap games and hiding the fact of emptyness behing pseudo features that are no more than a very simple and small change (from a mechanical point of view, not from the point of view of gameplay experience).

 

[Pep]

I think 1upt is a good system, but it needs some tweaking to avoid "traffic jams":

• Allow great generals to be attached to military units. Having to move a military unit to a tile and then the great general to the same tile is unnecessary micromanagement and boring IMO.
• Allow the stacking of two units of different Civilizations when they not are at war. That way, you could always build improvements in your territory without having to wait a foreign wandering unit to leave.
• Allow the stacking of a submarine and enemy ships that can't detect it, even if both civs are at war.

 

[Becomedeath]

There is difference between different game experience and features. Adding features is not the only way to change game experience. In Civ5 1UPT the game experience changed (in a negative direction - but thats just an oppinion) by removing a feature. This is a very cheap and unfair way to create a new game. And saying stuff like, 1UPT is the best feature simply encourages companies to create cheap games and hiding the fact of emptyness behing pseudo features that are no more than a very simple and small change (from a mechanical point of view, not from the point of view of gameplay experience).

You can seriously say that 1upt is not an improvement?

Put the AI combat issues aside for a moment and say with a straight face that 1upt doesn't require you to actually think and not simply mass produce units before facerolling into wars?

1upt is THE game changer in Civ5, it brings combat and strategy into an entirely new level for the franchise. While it's got some kinks at the moment, once ironed out I'm at a loss to see how anyone can not consider this to be a massive leap forward in Civs development as a strategy game.

I'll agree that you can't focus on one aspect of a game and hail it as the alpha and omega, but as this thread is kinda focusing on that aspect it's not as if everyone is writing to Friaxis and saying "1upt is all we wanted your work here is done", far from it.

1upt has caused as many problems as it solved, but if you have even the tiniest amount of foresight you can see that as those problems are resolved and the concept improved upon the challenges presented from tactical turn based combat in Civ are both immense and exciting developments.

 

[bitula]

You can seriously say that 1upt is not an improvement?

Put the AI combat issues aside for a moment and say with a straight face that 1upt doesn't require you to actually think and not simply mass produce units before facerolling into wars?

1upt is THE game changer in Civ5, it brings combat and strategy into an entirely new level for the franchise. While it's got some kinks at the moment, once ironed out I'm at a loss to see how anyone can not consider this to be a massive leap forward in Civs development as a strategy game.

I'll agree that you can't focus on one aspect of a game and hail it as the alpha and omega, but as this thread is kinda focusing on that aspect it's not as if everyone is writing to Friaxis and saying "1upt is all we wanted your work here is done", far from it.

1upt has caused as many problems as it solved, but if you have even the tiniest amount of foresight you can see that as those problems are resolved and the concept improved upon the challenges presented from tactical turn based combat in Civ are both immense and exciting developments.

The point I am trying to make is that this is not a feature from a technical/software development point of view, it is just a cheap change, mostly based on simplification of SOD. Ofcourse, as a result, it does change the overall gameplay experience in a huge way - and in a very negative way for me: Civ shouldnt be a tactical game, it always was mostly a strategy/builder game. I liked it for what it was. There are much better tactical games on the market, and btw., if all I want is tactics, then I play chess. But okay, some tactical aspect wouldnt hurt, so, for example, they could have added a separate combat screen like in Homm so as strategy and tactics would be in a nice synergy. Now that would have been a real feature, because it requires extra effort and solves every problem assotiated with current 1UPT. But no, they just simply put a limit of 1 and thus create an ugly COD (Carpet of Doom) on the main map itself. Lame and cheap. And so I may also ask: Why would one seriously think that COD is better than SOD? COD has an aspect of boring, static and uncreative micromanagement while moving your units. You donot have this with SOD. With SOD you move all units at once, and you have to micromanage only the battle itself, which was fun.

 

[Roxlimn]

Ive never understood why does one call 1UPT an addition or a feature. Its not an addition, it is just a limitation, and it is not a feature, but a simplification. So there was nothing added here... 1UPT is just a simplified version of SOD, where the stack limit is 1, you can play 1UPT in Civ4 as well, just edit an XML file or a script and set the limit to 1. You cant play SOD though in Civ5 because AI wouldnt understand it. So again, how on earth can this be a feature, and to that one of the best???? And in general, how removing something can be an addition or a feature....? Sorry for the big redundant post, but Im really surprised, that many people see it as a feature...

You would need to play Panzer General to see the essential differences. Or a nice setup in Civ 5 would do as well, actually. If you stop trying to get the AI to do stupid things, you'd have a better game.

In particular, you can't separate Civ 4 combat from stack combat. You could do "1upt" in Civ 4 as well, but it wouldn't be the same whatsoever, on account of Cultural Defenses, no Ranged units, one movement per turn, collateral damage, and so on and do forth. It'd just be a royal mess.

1UPT is the basic difference between Civ 5 and every other Civ that came before it, but the combat features do not end there. The combat is built around 1UPT, and 1UPT allows us to actually have some semblance of tactics, and affects both strategy and planning. Terrain is MUCH more important in Civ 5 war than it is in Civ 4.

The "micromanagement" you do to place your forces on the field is an essential feature of 1UPT! It is in chess, it is in HOMM, it is in many of these games, even if you've never realized it. The fact that only one unit may occupy a tile and the movement restrictions imposed by terrain and structures and units is a vital part of playing the war game in Civ 5. If you can't manage your army placement, then you're failing at the war game. If you don't WANT to use placement to your own advantage, then you simply don't like the game; that doesn't make it a worse game, and certainly having a game to begin with is better for some than essentially nothing.


Helmling:

The "log jamming" that you're getting frustrated with is an essential part of the game. It is what allows a 300-style confrontation, where a single elite Hoplite really can hold out for a long time against a humongous Persian army, assuming that the terrain is favorable.

 

[bitula]

In particular, you can't separate Civ 4 combat from stack combat. You could do "1upt" in Civ 4 as well, but it wouldn't be the same whatsoever, on account of Cultural Defenses, no Ranged units, one movement per turn, collateral damage, and so on and do forth. It'd just be a royal mess.

Well one thing is that you had most of these in Civ4 as well, if not in BTS then in mods. The second thing is, that this is not 1UPT. For example, Ranged units I would concider a real feature. Although not a major one. There are no major features in Civ5 btw, just lots of small features, like ranged units, but since overall there are lots more of removal of major features and simplifications of previous features than addition of new small features, the game altogather is much-much less then Civ4. Ofcourse that AI is too dimb to utilize the 1UPT system doesnt help anything as well...

 

[TomMcV]

I agree with Bitula that the management of units outside of combat (moving your troops to the front line) is incredibly tedious. I abandoned a game recently that I was destined to win simply because I couldn't bear the idea of a global war and moving, retreating, healing 50+ units per turn. For 20 turns or however long it would have taken. ("Fortunately" the civ5 game end is so lacklustre and disappointing i don't really care about finishing games I know that I have effectively won).

But the tactical combat is cool. I like ranged units supporting my melee units, and I like having defensive lines on hill ranges.

Personally I think you should be able to form armies ala civ3. 3 units per army, has combined HP and strength (and even could have a mix of ranged and melee units for tactical flexibility). Specific bonuses (like pikes vs cavalry) would just modify the strength for that one contributing unit. You would have to disband the armies tho, to do upgrades later, and there would be an increased unit maintenace.

Would be well wicked, innit.

edit: 3 x siam elephants would be pretty ****ed though

 

[Becomedeath]

The movement of your troops outside of combat is also part of the strategic and tactical overhaul that Civ 5 has presented.

Arranging your units prior to combat can be the difference between victory and defeat.

It's a fundamental feature of the game that isn't going anywhere. Happy to help teach people how to use it to their advantage if they're having trouble getting to grips with it, not a lot to be done for people who've decided to dislike it.

I can even begin to explain how much better it is to be able to position artillery on hills to gain a better firing solution against a city, whilst positioning troops to feed into your seige zone and take over from damaged front line units who withdraw to forest next to a medic unit, whilst still keeping units available to protect your rear, damaged and ranged units.

How anyone can say that is worse than simply piling units on top of each other until they can simply stomp across the land is beyond me. You have to think about what you're doing, not just build and march.

If that's the style of combat you prefer then you're faced with either going back to Civ4 and leaving the rest of us to enjoy tactics or learning how to make the most of this element of the game.

The game changed. That's why they use a 5 now instead of a 4.

 

[Windsor]

The movement of your troops outside of combat is also part of the strategic and tactical overhaul that Civ 5 has presented.

Arranging your units prior to combat can be the difference between victory and defeat.

Once you have decided where to move all your units in a given turn the actual job of clicking on the units and moving them is not a strategical, logistical, tactical or any decision at all.

A better interface with help tools such as selecting several units (on different tiles), making escorts (settler/general/worker always moving together with the military unit) would not harm the combat model in any way. It would just help carrying out what the player has already decided to do.

 

[bitula]

The movement of your troops outside of combat is also part of the strategic and tactical overhaul that Civ 5 has presented.

Arranging your units prior to combat can be the difference between victory and defeat.

I was talking about moving units to the combat place, not arranging them immediately before combat.

How anyone can say that is worse than simply piling units on top of each other until they can simply stomp across the land is beyond me. You have to think about what you're doing, not just build and march.

Oh no, you completly misunderstand this, the topic was about moving units to battle, not the battle itself or prebattle preparation.

If that's the style of combat you prefer then you're faced with either going back to Civ4 and leaving the rest of us to enjoy tactics or learning how to make the most of this element of the game.

Im not against tactics in general (I like it in Homm5 for example), all I said is that the implementation of 1UPT in Civ5 is cheap and lame (worst of any imaginable alternate variations). This is also due to COD, dumb AI etc. But you are right in the sense, that I donot insist tactics having a major role in Civ, and yeah for me its quite OK if the game would have little or just no tactical elements if you actually mean that Civ4 has no tactical element - because if it doesnt, it seems it never bothered me.

The game changed. That's why they use a 5 now instead of a 4.

It should have then changed its name as well not just the version. I would propose "Civilization Tactics 1". That would be more fair and wouldnt trick lots of old Civ fans into buying it as well.

 

[Becomedeath]

It would just help carrying out what the player has already decided to do.

I've decieded to win. Do I have to play at all?

Okay, apologies for the over abundant sarcasm there, but the point is, when is enough enough? You are responsible for moving your units each turn, or for providing them with routes to follow for however many turns.

How is that not part of the game? The decisions made in moving those troops from A to B and keeping them in a formation or moving them and then arranging a formation has a direct effect on their vulnerability in transit. How to handle a choke point, do you risk embarking, do you let the artillery wander through farmed grassland or keep them in the forests so they don't have as much heal time etc.

There's plenty to think about while you make your way to your enemies funeral, and if you don't think about it, perhaps they'll be attending yours.

 

[Trias]

There is difference between different game experience and features. Adding features is not the only way to change game experience. In Civ5 1UPT the game experience changed (in a negative direction - but thats just an oppinion) by removing a feature. This is a very cheap and unfair way to create a new game. And saying stuff like, 1UPT is the best feature simply encourages companies to create cheap games and hiding the fact of emptyness behing pseudo features that are no more than a very simple and small change (from a mechanical point of view, not from the point of view of gameplay experience).

Your just arguing pointless semantics. You can say that 1UPT removed the option of having more units in a tile. You can also phrase it as that it added the ability to units to exclude the presence of other units.

Your point about 1UPT being a cheap feature. Really? ROFL. This was probably one of the more expensive (gameplay) changes they made to the game in terms of coding (AI!), testing, and balancing. (The other one being the removal of the tax slider)

 

[bitula]

Your just arguing pointless semantics. You can say that 1UPT removed the option of having more units in a tile. You can also phrase it as that it added the ability to units to exclude the presence of other units.)

[/QUOTE]
I was tlaking about the effort of doing a feature, and not what happened with the game element itself.

Your point about 1UPT being a cheap feature. Really? ROFL. This was probably one of the more expensive (gameplay) changes they made to the game in terms of coding (AI!), testing, and balancing. (The other one being the removal of the tax slider)

ROFL! Now you said it yourself: REMOVAL. And balancig AI? It is a well known issue, that they were not successful in this. Even Civ5 fans admit this. So then why not instead add something and stick to things which work.

 

[bitula]

I've decieded to win. Do I have to play at all?

Okay, apologies for the over abundant sarcasm there, but the point is, when is enough enough? You are responsible for moving your units each turn, or for providing them with routes to follow for however many turns.

How is that not part of the game? The decisions made in moving those troops from A to B and keeping them in a formation or moving them and then arranging a formation has a direct effect on their vulnerability in transit. How to handle a choke point, do you risk embarking, do you let the artillery wander through farmed grassland or keep them in the forests so they don't have as much heal time etc.

There's plenty to think about while you make your way to your enemies funeral, and if you don't think about it, perhaps they'll be attending yours.

Ok but you cannot be serious that you enjoy this part (micromanaging inbetween A-B)... If you enjoy this, then we are probably from different planets... Also keeping the formation requires no creativity, just memory - static and boring.