Anyone else unhappy that they appear to be closing the unit gaps?

[Disgustipated]

I actually like the idea of filling the gaps. Playing on slow speeds.

Good mention about the speeds. For epic and marathon this will feel good. Also on faster speeds, this could help the AI more and allow them to keep their army more up to date. I actually think helping the AI is a big reason they are doing this.

 

[Sostratus]

It was an interesting idea, but i think the unit gaps by intentional design was a bad one, and I am glad they are filling in some of the trees. My fear, though, is that they will take the approach:
"Here is this unit ree that isn't working so great. Let's add some plugs based on how things work right now"
I would much prefer
"Here is the original design of the unit trees. Let's fill the gaps and stick to that design first, and balance after."

I am fairly convinced there is actually a cohesive design to the unit trees in Civ6, which i discovered when working on a thread called "The state of combat units (post spring 2018 patch)"
For those who don't want to look it up, behind all these wacky gaps etc, there is actually a very clear progression of combat strength that unit lines are modelled around:
Ancient-25
Classical-35
Medieval-45
Ren - 55
Ind - 65
Modern - 75
Atom/Info-85

Then there are some rules for the unit lines (there's a split pre and post industrial, so focusing on early game.) Melee units sit on the trend line. Ranged units all have -5 ranged and -10 defensive str from the trend. Heavy cav sits +3 over the trend. Light cav, at least 2/3 units, sit 3 str below the trend. Siege units before artillery sit on the line. In that post I also explained why warriors and archers deviate slightly. (The reason pikes suck is very much a part of being 4 str weaker than they should be. Why they won't fix them, but did fix the other Mtactics UUs to 45str is beyond me.)

But, whoever came up with this nice progression, either forgot or isn't the final balance team. Here's where i see issues arising:
Horse->Cavalry is too long. Let's add coursers in the medieval. How strong should they be? Well, the black army unit is 50 strength. 50 sits kinda between 36 and 62. Seems good, right? But wait a second- there are several other unit lines which would be severely messed up. First of all, no one would ever build knights when you can have a slightly stronger unit that upgrades from the superior horsemen over heavy chariots. Pikes can't counter knights now, they certainly wouldn't counter an even stronger unit in the same era. Crossbows would get run over even worse and swords can't counter that.
A medieval light cav unit should be 42-46 str based on what we have seen.
There are some clear tweaks here and there - how horses and swords ended up at 36, for one. But they should balance around the original design and ignore all the jury rigging that's already happened.

As to concerns about it, let's recall one important equation in civ: combat formula. If each era, units are gaining 10 str, that means every unit is hitting 50% harder than the one before it. There is still plenty of punch to be had. It would also be much better for early game warfare health. Right now, there's literally no reason to build spears beyond a few turns, because they lose the horseman and they get murdered by swords (which come one tech later.) Pikes that aren't impi don't counter anything and still lose to swords. So the issue is that these lines being balanced against each other as they are means that AT cannot be an era behind melee, ever. Which the gaps force in the classical. Then you get the same issue later, when its swords vs knights. There are no pikes because you never made spears and they are way too expensive to hard build. See the issue?
If you could lock the game into a single era and force people to war with the solely units available in that era, people would be more apt to see there are massive shortcomings in this system. As others have pointed out, it doesn't need to be every line a new unit every era, but certainly not this 1 for 3 stuff. Every UU can have its time to shine- that's more a problem of tech pacing than anything, which is unrelated to this.

 

[Haig]

" Now they just need to put a cuirassier between knights and tanks, push back the infantry, replace musketmen with a late medieval longsword (it would also work better with all the stranded unique melees in the middle ages) and get a fusilier at the beginning of the industrial. " - j51

^ what I think too.

Civ 5 made things ridiculous with Great war infantry (!) . That was bit too detailed.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I wonder if the new resource system might balance out the spear/pike problem a bit. Maybe they could cost nothing (and be cheaper if they allow that to happen). No ongoing or up-front resources for using a pointy stick.

 

[King of Prussia]

i never really enjoyed the large gaps for upgrades. it made certain units feel useless or severely weak for long periods of the game. pretty much had to sit them off in some safe area until they could be upgraded.

i am glad they are filling in the gaps.

as for horseman spam. if they make anti cav units better at handling them, and make the tech to get pikeman not as annoying to research, then they will be better balanced. i would even add some severe nerfs to cav when it comes to attacking cities.

 

[AriochIV]

I think it's good that the larger gaps are being filled, but this can go too far, as it did in Civ V where there were just too many infantry versions for the length of the game. Civ VI is still a pretty fast-paced game, so it really doesn't need a lot of extra filler units crammed in.

 

[Stringer1313]

It's something that I think would be a good idea if the unit types had more defined roles/differences. Adding a new light cavalry unit would be great if there was more of a difference between heavy cavalry and light cavalry. For example, if they ditched horsemen, replaced them with horse archers (ala the Scythian units), and made the light cavalry line into a ranged lineup (with a range of one) then I think it'd be a great idea to have an upgrade in the early renaissance or late medieval era.

Scouts having an upgrade before rangers will be nice.

+1

 

[Sostratus]

I think it's good that the larger gaps are being filled, but this can go too far, as it did in Civ V where there were just too many infantry versions for the length of the game. Civ VI is still a pretty fast-paced game, so it really doesn't need a lot of extra filler units crammed in.

I think the chief complaint was longswordsman basically having a one tech lifetime - and of course, pikes being superior to swords due to tech placement and in combat generally. Of course, if each era is 2 tech tiers deep, maybe making sure units are separated by at least 2-3 tech tiers is the right pacing approach.

I don't think it was seriously to the detriment of the game though, at least not like what we have now is.
The problem is, without filling things in, there's really no way to make melee and anticav work together properly unless they have the same strength and come in the same era. Muskets/Pike&Shot, Infantry/AT crew are okay. But spear/sword and pike/sword is a failure.
I can't think of a way around it that doesn't include creating more units, unless you do some novel approaches like "give some units a small boost at a tech in their second era." So that would mean, spears get +X str in classical, swords get +X str in medieval, etc.

The flipside of this coin is that upgrading is extremely inexpensive, and if they took another pass at redoing unit costs and upgrade costs, then rebuilding your army every 1-2 eras wouldn't be so bad. Of course, if upgrade meta was reduced, then we'd be back to Magil's point that there's really no functional difference between light and heavy cav save for promotion trees. It's fast and it hits hard.

 

[j51]

Another problem with melee is that there are too many "stranded" unique units. Samurai, Berzerker, Khevshur, Gardes, and Redcoats all only have a 1 era period of relevance and are sometimes outside of the promotion line. Replacing Musketmen with Longswordmen in the late Middle Ages, and Fusiliers in the early Industrial (while pushing back Infantry to the later Modern) could help alleviate this. Then only the Conquistador would be "stranded," but this could easily be fixed by changing it for a Tercio that replaces the Pike and Shot that shares all the same abilities.

 

[Socrates99]

The only gap I really hated was Horsemen to Cavalry. Not because it was there but because it was too long. I liked the way knights and horse lose their steam for a bit, it gives opponents breathing space against warmongers and encourages diversity.

The medieval scout upgrade is a welcome addition though. No complaints there. Hate having my scouts one shotted by medieval unit barbs.

 

[bite]

I don't mind that they are filling in some of the larger unit gaps

 

[Sostratus]

Another problem with melee is that there are too many "stranded" unique units. Samurai, Berzerker, Khevshur, Gardes, and Redcoats

Why they don't allow you to upgrade into those units I don't understand. Okay, I can understand how it may be part of how unit upgrades are coded, but conceptually I don't get it.

If the idea behind the gaps was to encourage diversity of your military and also give UUs more time to shine, it probably should have been better meshed with the concept of the unit classes interaction on the battlefield as well as the off battlefield cost stats.
The one I usually harp on is that since melee gets an inherent +10 vs anticav, any time melee is ahead of anticav, it becomes +20 or more, which is obviously untenable.
But, we should also see that the non battlefield stats of production and maintenance were designed on a different system:
Any unit of a certain era has the same maintenance cost, and the production cost is determined by where the unit appears on the tech tree. So if Rangers come the tech after Field Cannons, even though on the battlefield the game design is that they represent peer units, rangers must cost more than cannons. This is also true of buildings, which is a little silly since it's a hard sell that a library (80), amphitheater(150), and workshop (175) have radically different benefits when they all yield +2.

The TLDR here is that heavy cav is basically balanced to be the top dog on the field, but the separate off the field cost system makes them equal (or better!) to other units there, so there's literally no reason to not just build all cav all the time since they get movement and strength advantages but have no cost drawback. I foresee right now that the changes with strategic resources will dissuade infinite spam of these units, but it will not be enough to actually stop you from building up a critical mass.

So adding more units to cav lines but neglecting the other issues in the other lines (especially spear->pike and sword->musket) may be very not good for the men on foot. I am happy they are going away from the gaps philosophy a bit but cautious of the unintended consequences.

 

[rattatatouille]

The only real unit gaps that needed fixing IME were Knight > Tank, Horseman > Cavalry, and Scout > Ranger, all of which look to be getting rectified by Gathering Storm. A 1.5 to 2 era gap works given the smaller tech tree.

My proposal has to do more with rebalancing the unit types. Heavy cav is too strong and anti-cav can't compete.

I made a mod (ha) that made the following changes:

* Increased unit upgrade cost coefficient from 75 to 125, which means upgrading units is much more expensive (Archer to Crossbowman, frex, is now 310 Gold, which is a princely sum at that point)
* Heavy Cavalry base movement nerfed to 3, but get +1 move if starting on flat terrain.
* Reduced build and maintenance costs for anti-cavalry line, and made the AT Team/Modern AT 1 range units. IRL spearmen were cheaper and easier to train than swordsmen, and thus made the bulk of pre-gunpowder armies; pikemen saw use well into the gunpowder era as well until the invention of the bayonet.
* Military Tactics is no longer a leaf tech thus making Pikemen not superfluous (amazing how Pikemen were amazing in Civ V then horrendous in VI. Firaxis, subtlety is not thy name)

Also with the latest Steel and Thunder mod cavalry get a disadvantage when attacking cities, IIRC.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

* Military Tactics is no longer a leaf tech thus making Pikemen not superfluous (amazing how Pikemen were amazing in Civ V then horrendous in VI. Firaxis, subtlety is not thy name).

Historically, a well trained pike unit was a deadly foe. A bunch of guys with long pointy sticks, much less so.

Never thought of this until now, but Pikemen would have been a good candidate to be on the Civics tree. There's no new technology behind the medieval pikemen, it was a social evolution. Having it on the Civics tree would have changed the whole Knights vs Counter argument entirely.

Too late now, what with Military Tactics staying with the Research Tree but at least no longer being a leaf.

 

[acluewithout]

@Sostratus Agree. I really hope FXS read your posts.

Filling in unit gaps is fine in principle, provided it’s well implemented. The current gaps do give different unit lines an ebb and flow. I’d like to keep that, but I don’t see filling gaps couldn’t work with that - you just have to be careful not to fill in every gap.

Overall, I don’t think unit rebalancing is this particularly complex problem. It’s more just ... fiddly. The basic design is solid, it’s just that a few things are off.

First, anti-cav need to be cheaper.

Second, anti-cav don’t really need to be stronger across the board (I think they’re actually designed to be a little weaker given they’re defensive and don’t need resources), but they maybe need to be situationally stronger. Like, their -10 defence v melee is only when they Attack or is ignored when fortified.

Third, anti-cav - and Seige Units - need to be better against ranged.

Fourth, Rams need to be either nerfed or got rid of.

Fifth, light Cav need to stop being good at taking cities - a -17 vs cities would work.

Sixth, Heavy Cav don’t need to be “nerfed” but they do need to be much harder to get. Building them should have a big opportunity costs - so if you build HC but your Attack is repelled your economy should lag as a result.

Seventh, and this is the most important, FXS should read all of @Sostratus ’s posts and or hire him as a consultant. Come on FXS. He’s basically done all the hard work for you!

It’s fine if you can’t upgrade into Beserkers etc. But then they need to be worth the hassle of building them. On that, I’d like Beserkers to get +1 movement at sea, Samurai get +1 movement in all situations (so they’re more like cav), and Kveshur get bonuses for Forrests and Hills.

I think Hoplites also need a boost - they just don’t feel powerful enough for what they’re meant to represent.