(4-VT) Add a cost to unit healing

[fiskeboller]

Proposal:

• Add a gold cost to unit healing
• Proposal 1 gold per 2 hit points healed, scaling with era (Can be discussed, but should be somewhat less costly compared to buying a new unit).

Rationale:

The current game greatly favors unit rotation and healing, typically making wars long and tedious wars of attrition (that can actually still be greatly beneficial due to cutlure/science/faith bonuses)
Wars are often not about inflicting the most damage on the enemy army, but about sniping and annihilating single units.
Example: If you face to swordsman units (armies/corps) of 100 heath each, it is way better to destroy one of them, than inflicting 50 hit points damage to each. While in the real world, killing 400 soldiers of one corps and 400 of another is almost as bad for the enemy as loosing 800 in one (the entire corps).

Depth: A cost to healing would make battlefield decisions deeper and more complex (still it will be beneficial to annihilate single units, but not always if you could do way more damage in another way).
Realism: Taking damage in a battle has a cost in terms of men and material (in civ terms, should be either food/growth, production or gold, where gold is the simplest and could be compared to buying units)

Bonus benefit: This would counteract long drawn out late game battles where the battlefield is stacked with units (gold impact would force one player to sue for peace if they cant make progress)
Bonus benefit 2: Healing is an excellent gold sink, and would make gold more important and interesting
Bonus benefit 3: Shift the balance in favor of the computer AI (in the current game, healing and keeping single units alive is the most important reason why humans outperform AI). If the balance shifts in favor of the AI, we can have a similar challenge with fewer bonuses to the AI, which will make it more interesting and balanced

Note: I do not know whether this could be simply implemented in the game, which may ruin the proposal. But if it could it would greatly improve the gameplay.

 

[KlHannibal2]

In principal I like this idea. In civ 4, even waging a successful war was much more costly than keeping as big an army during peace time. As units always fought to death, you kept losing units even if you won wars. In civ 5 /VP, taking damage without losing units costs you basically nothing.

This could however have a huge impact on the game. I'm thinking a tradition player defending against a stronger AI using terrain and superior tactics. Being a tall empire with little gold, this change could ruin this kind of game.
It would probably favor large, snowballing empires and hurt small empires who put up a heroic defense.

My bottom line: why not test it as a modmod first?

 

[Stalker0]

This is way way WAY too big a change for the core mod. As a mod mod, sure I'd give it a shot, but no way this should be in the core game, it upends some of the fundamentals of combat.

 

[Slyceth]

This wouldn't work because the AI never has a problem making money magically appear out of nowhere. It often happens that I hold off on underprice-selling techs to the lowest AI on the scoreboard, because the next turn they magically got another +1000 gold..

Heck, you barely see the effects of pillaging an entire civ's territory. I propose a cooldown on freshly pillaged tiles, especially strategic, and harsher combat penalties for being negative in strategic resources for said units. This also should make units that have no strategic resource requirement have a harsher penalty when you're negative in gold income instead. (This implies that strategic resource units can depend on their resource while others depend on gold, another cool layer of strategy if you're broke)

It's very interactive and not rng based, which is important, as you can target/defend precious strategic resource tiles as "hot targets", and they might even be more important than the city next to it!

 

[Recursive]

Proposal vetoed.

Reason: Out of scope for the mod. Would take a ton of work to implement for the AI as well.