A finer grain hex?

[eric_]

Heh.

I used to imagine one big super game that was basically Sim City, Rise of Nations, and Civilization. Turned-based on the strategy level, more real-time engagement when it comes to actual battle. Can you imagine? You position your troops strategically on the big map, then it switches to battle view when you decide to engage. The archers are firing volleys repeatedly throughout the battle (with a "reload" delay between each one), the catapults bombarding repeatedly with longer reload delays, and all the while your melee are down front clashing with other melee while cavalry try to outmaneuver the enemy flanks.

Awesome.

 

[toccoto]

The more I think on this the more I don't like it. It doesn't fit the game. If you allowed created armies on stacks, then you get rid of the allure of different terrain, chocke points, etc etc. And if you start making the inner tiles different terrains etc, all you're doing is just making the game grid smaller, which you can do... but it's not really much of a change.

 

[MuonConspiracy]

Heh.

I used to imagine one big super game that was basically Sim City, Rise of Nations, and Civilization. Turned-based on the strategy level, more real-time engagement when it comes to actual battle. Can you imagine? You position your troops strategically on the big map, then it switches to battle view when you decide to engage. The archers are firing volleys repeatedly throughout the battle (with a "reload" delay between each one), the catapults bombarding repeatedly with longer reload delays, and all the while your melee are down front clashing with other melee while cavalry try to outmaneuver the enemy flanks.

Awesome.

THAT sounds just ridiculously cool!

 

[ShuShu62]

The concept I'd worked on used fractal landscape generation for the tactical map. All it needed to know were the parameters for the current and all surrounding hexes, which would already be in memory. The rest would be generated using a known seed, then discarded when done. Since the seed was preserved, the tactical hex would be identically generated the next time you entered it.

Duh, that is so simple!

I have been working on 10x10, 10x10, 10x10 drillable maps since the first 10x10 grid pushed the limits of the machine. Never thought of randomly recalculating the most detail grid in a non random manner...

better keep my day job.

 

[eric_]

To clarify, the repeated volleys/bombardments wouldn't happen at random. You'd initiate each round, and perhaps have to start holding off or reposition ranged units as your melee troops penetrate deeper into the enemy ranks.

Likewise, melee battle would be automated, but if a unit started being overwhelmed, or if you saw a weak spot in the enemy formation, you could have them retreat or regroup and refocus.

Etc.

 

[Pooh]

This doesn't need to be a tiled hex system like the overland. It's just an added layer of strategy.

Set up like this, you could have 2 "frontline" units, as each edge has 2 subhexes in contact with an adjacent hex.

Natural flanking occurs because every subhex (except for the center) is in contact with two adjacent large hexes.

This.

Except it isn't necessary to explicitly provide a tactical grid. A similar effect could be achieved by instituting a 6UPT limit and developing a set of rules with respect to combat operations.

For the purposes of this discussion I'm defining three categories of units - melee (i.e. front line - swordsmen, pikemen, etc); cavalry; ranged fire. You can split it more finely, but for the purposes of conveying my ideas, this will work.

So here is the idea.

On defence:

1. If bombarded, check whether the defending tile has any artillery type units. If yes, then %chance of counterbattery fire. Max 1 counterfire per ranged attack. A defending unit may only counterfire once.

2. If attacked. First run the counter artillery fire check. Then assign a melee unit to that side of the hex. If no melee unit is available, then assign a cavalry unit to that side of the hex. If no cavalry unit is available, then assign a ranged unit to that side of the hex. Whatever unit ends up defending is now commited to that side of the hex. Any subsequent attacks on that side will be against that unit. The assigned unit will not be available to defend against attacks made on any other side of the hex.

On offence:

1. Bombarding units may choose whether to aim at front line or enemy artillery. Modern era bombarding units may have multitile range, but up until the modern era it would be kept to 1-tile range.

2. Attackers (cavalry and melee) are assigned to the corners of a hex - this allows up to two attacks to be made from the attacking hex against a single side (and therefore a single defender) of a defending hex. This preserves the ability to concentrate fire which is a key part of the 1UPT system.

Rationale:

Easier for the AI to handle. The AI is lousy at combat on 1UPT. It doesn't understand unit formations well at the tactical level (e.g. protect those archers!). Introducing a finer grain tactical map won't help with this. In fact, given the complexity of some of the ideas above, it may just make things worse with respect to AI pathfinding and formation forming. Shifting to a 6UPT system as above basically assumes optimal formation on each tile through the rules of engagement. The decision factor is simplified - instead of force composition AND formation, the AI only really needs to understand composition.

 

[el_hidalgo]

One big problem I see in this type of implementation is the manner in which the terrain at the finer, tactical hex level is generated. You don't want it to be terribly uniform throughout the tactical level, i.e. if the strategy level is plains you don't necessarily want every tactical level hex to be pancake flat, so there would need to be some variability there. So, would you have the fine scale hexes randomly generated each time a battle occurs with a strong weighting towards the large scale terrain type? Or would you save the fine scale hex terrain for each large scale hex so each time a battle is fought in that same hex, the tactical level hexes remain the same? Hope I've explained that well.

The latter would be preferred but it seems like that would be a lot of memory overhead.

It could depend on the surrounding tiles. If you are on a plains tile surrounded by other plains, then the tactical tiles would be pancake flat. If you are on a plains tile next to a hill tile, then you could have mostly plains with some hills in the direction of the hill tile.

Ideally, I would think the finer scale would be the same every time. Maybe, for example, every time you have a plains tile surrounded by other plains tiles except with a single hill tile to the north, the tactical map always looks the same. So there would be a smaller number of finer-grain maps rather than a huge number of randomly generated tactical maps that always have to be the same throughout the game, thus reducing memory overhead.

 

[UWHabs]

Or just have a civ map that's like 4X the size of the ones currently, and have it so that cities grow much faster to fill their space (so that they actually use all their tiles). It'd need a bit of balance work, for sure, but it would make expand the game to the size needed so it doesn't appear that archers are lobbing arrows across the English channel.

 

[Chiyochan]

If development time and cost and system requirements didn't come into it, I would love to see a Civ game where stacks are allowed at the strategy level, but when combat is initiated it switches to a tactical scale map with 1upt and sensible ranges for ranged units etc. Kind of like the Total War series but much better than their recent efforts.

But your idea would also work, and is probably a lot more practical than what I just said. If anyone ever makes a game like that I would be very interested to see how it plays.

EDIT:
Movement allowance would be measured as number of 'big hexes' per turn. E.g. a spearman can move 2 'big hexes' across open terrain in a turn, as long as the destination 'big hex' has at least one empty 'little hex/square/whatever' within it where the unit can go. Unlimited civilian units per 'big hex' and workers work on an entire 'big hex'. Once you have moved your military units into a 'big hex' you can re-arrange them into combat formation. Would it need some limit on how much re-arranging you can do per turn?

your style would actualy be much much less of a system hog. and I very much wanted this for civ 5, I know why it didn't get in and wont ever get in, Because of multi player.

This type of game play is great but only very conductive of multi player.

Or just have a civ map that's like 4X the size of the ones currently, and have it so that cities grow much faster to fill their space (so that they actually use all their tiles). It'd need a bit of balance work, for sure, but it would make expand the game to the size needed so it doesn't appear that archers are lobbing arrows across the English channel.

good luck running a map that big, fraxis isn't known for it's efficient coding and civ 5 tanks just like 4 did on even new systems.

Rationale:

Easier for the AI to handle. The AI is lousy at combat on 1UPT. It doesn't understand unit formations well at the tactical level (e.g. protect those archers!). Introducing a finer grain tactical map won't help with this. In fact, given the complexity of some of the ideas above, it may just make things worse with respect to AI pathfinding and formation forming. Shifting to a 6UPT system as above basically assumes optimal formation on each tile through the rules of engagement. The decision factor is simplified - instead of force composition AND formation, the AI only really needs to understand composition.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, as it seems to run the same type of problems as before that there was an effective science for how you should stack and attack. and almost no real room for variation and tactics to play a role. if this is essentialy eliminating that for automation, I don't see a point in ever having a UPT limit at all, just stack em together and mash because at the end of the day, tactics will never be an issue.

 

[V. Soma]

Nice thread.

Maybe things can also be done with 2UPT land units, see my idea here

 

[PieceOfMind]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas and Suggestions

 

[Camikaze]

Subdividing hexes (if I understand this idea correctly) is far too much of a tactical innovation. The idea of warfare in Civ should be strategic considerations, not tactical ones.

BTW, here's another thread with a near identical idea from quite recently.

 

[byzman13]

Hello fellow CivFanatics,

I've been coming here for tips for a while. The scale issue bothers me enough to finally make my first post.

While there are some good ideas in this thread I prefer the 1upt system. IMO stacking units is going to make drastic changes to total army size. If you can stack 6 units you would now need 18 units to make a 3 hex front line along a choke point in stead of 3 melee units and a ranged unit or 2. I also was originally hoping for a mini map tactical battlefield when I first heard Civ5 was coming. The only way I think that would work though is if they still had a quick combat (or automated combat) as some people aren't going to like spending that much time on battles (in my gaming experience letting the AI fight your battles for you isn't a good idea and the way the AI in Civ5 is, it's probably a very bad idea at this point).

That being said, I like V.Soma's idea but I would pare it down even further to only being able to stack an archer/crossbow/longbow with a melee unit. I would also change the range for archers type units to 1 hex (maybe 2 hexs for longbow on hills). This gets rid of the scale issue with archers while allowing archers to have some protection with the shorter range. I think splitting the hex in half, where if an attacker hits the front 3 sides he attacks the melee unit and the back 3 sides allow them to attack the archer directly would work fine and still allow for flanking manuevers.

I'm not a coder/modder so I have no idea how much that entails but the only real issue I see is you would now need to be able to spin the unit to the way you would like them to face (which should not require movement points). And you need to associate 3 sides of the hex to each unit.

 

[Pooh]

Hi again. Reading through other posts on this and thinking it through for a couple of days, I've come up with a theory on why SOD were such a problem. I don't think it was the SOD per se, so much as the fact that all units in the SOD were combat effective. That is, all the units in a SOD could attack along any front without any kind of combat penalty. Effectively this assumes an infinite front along each edge of a tile.

The 1UPT system deals with this by only allowing 1 unit on each tile. 1 unit = 1 attack from that tile (notwithstanding cavalry who can cycle to and from a tile in a given turn).

In either approach, there is an implicit balance between offense and defence in that: (1) Under the SOD system, unlimited attacks may be met by unlimited defenders; (2) Under the 1UPT system, 1 attack per tile is defended against by 1 unit per tile.

I think the important thing here is not the number of units on a tile, but that offensive output (notwithstanding ability to concentrate fire) is counterbalanced by defensive capacity. In other words, defenders cannot be artificially overwhelmed. Therein lies the balance that needs to be maintained in a move to a >1UPT system.

So here is what I propose:

Raise the limit of UPT. Under the hex system, natural UPT limits in my mind seem to be 2, 3, or 6. For what they're worth, I've described my ideas for 6UPT above. I think 2UPT may be better though (good thinking Soma), so I've set out my thoughts on implementing 2UPT below.

2UPT

Spoiler :

OFFENSE:
Melee - maximum 1 attack in any give direction. i.e. If there are two melee attackers on a tile, each may attack, but the second one attacking may not attack in the same direction as the first.

Ranged - ranged attacks have no restrictions on number of attacks in a given direction (i.e. tw ranged units on the same tile could both fire in the same direction). Range attack distance would generally be reduced to 1 tile except for modern artillery.

Cavalry - may attack in the same direction as a melee unit with which is it sharing a tile.

DEFENSE:
Ranged - capable of counterbattery fire or defensive support fire (as appropriate) based on a % chance. % chance and # of counterfire could be modified with promotions.

Front Line Defender (FLD) - Basically what will happen here is that tiles will be divided in half, with each defender taking responsibility for three contiguous edges. Rules of engagement would be along the following lines:

On the first attack against a tile, the best FLD is selected to defend that edge of the tile. That FLD (FLD1) is now commited to that edge and must meet any subsequent attack on that edge. This becomes one of the three edges that FLD1 may defend, without prejudice to whether it be the central edge or one of the outer ones.

If another edge is attacked, the defender is chosen based on what the companion unit is on the tile. If it is another FLD, then FLD2 defends and commits to that edge. If it is a ranged unit, then FLD1 will defend if the attack occurs on an edge that is within the limit described above.

For the purpose of exposition, assume a straight battle-line - let's say three hexes long. Depending on the orientation of the line on the grid, in the 1UPT system the minimum (maximum) concentrated assault by melee units on 1 defensive unit would be 2 (3). In the 2UPT system I've devised, the minimum (maximum) concentrated assault on 1 defensive unit by melee units units is also 2 (3). There are similar parallels with respect to concentration of force with respect to arty and cavalry.

Like a lot of people in the ideas forum, I'm not a modder. But it would be great to see someone implement or use some of these ideas (or some improvement on them).

 

[V. Soma]

I like what you wrote, Pooh, I take notes (copy to word, save)

 

[Pooh]

I like what you wrote, Pooh, I take notes (copy to word, save)

Thanks - it's nice to get positive feedback.

 

[Neomega]

I would have bougth civ V in a heartbeat if I saw the battle system was implemented this way. this is something I would want to try. I mean the 7 upt formation thing, with a central position and 6 flank positions. Maybe the central reserved for command/king/elite guard type units, and maybe having their defeat leading to the surrender of all the other units on the tile or something like that.