Are tiles/hexes fundamental to the civ series?

[SupremacyKing2]

How important are tiles/hexes to a civ game to be true to the civ format? Put differently, if civ6 used a map with regions like Europa Universalis, would that be considered heretical and un-civ?

The reason I ask, is because I see many advantages to a regions based map. First, it would fit the scale of civ better. when 1 turn = 10 years or more, it makes more sense for units to move from a region to another region than to only move from one hex to another. And regions would allow settlers to colonize a nearby region or for military units to conquer an adjacent region in a couple turns rather than units taking multiple turns (hundreds of years) just to move from a city to their target location. Regions would also allow more beautiful and more realistic maps since maps would no longer be a collection of geometrical hexes. You could have more natural looking maps that look like real Earth. You could also have more natural looking borders where your empire has continuous territory instead of the hodge podge of semi connected hexes in civ5. Regions would also for better AI pathfinding since it is easier to program the AI to move units from one region to the next rather than programming a specific hex to hex path.

 

[meatpardle]

How important are tiles/hexes to a civ game to be true to the civ format? Put differently, if civ6 used a map with regions like Europa Universalis, would that be considered heretical and un-civ?

Yes I think so. Taking it away would change the whole city management/development fundamentals.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Cities in Civ5 look like regions already anyway. The fact that the cultural radius grows tile by tile, and the emphasis on Tradition civs. So, your question is more about should we modify the way armies move ?

Now, we could see a change by making Civ5 cities into Civ6 regions, keeping the tile system (or not) so we could see more cities with slightly different roles than in the other Civs.

Considering armies moves, I think it would be cool if we have armies instead of units. Well, we could still have units, but generals would unite them into armies. Armies would behave slightly differently than units in that that the units in them would act in the same move. (1+1=3) But I don't think that devs will go that way, because that would kind of remove the whole 1UPT aspect (that devs said that they like a lot) and also reduce the all new hexagons relevancy.

For my part, I wouldn't mind if armies were like Civ5 spies, with maybe civ military promotions paths a la hack&slash, and of course a whole interface where you can control things. This would be particularly handy in multiplayer where moving units can be overwhelming some times.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Cities in Civ5 look like regions already anyway. The fact that the cultural radius grows tile by tile, and the emphasis on Tradition civs. So, your question is more about should we modify the way armies move ?

You are right that army movement is the crux of what I am getting at. If you had armies instead of single units and gave armies a lot of movement points but also zone of control, that could be interesting. Then, players could move armies a good distance. This would help reduce the problem of units taking too long to get anywhere or doing anything. And zone of control would prevent armies from moving too deep into your territory, right past your armies, and maybe even taking your core city in a single turn before you can react. If players had armies placed in natural choke points, it would force enemies to fight them before moving deeper into enemy territory.

Regions would allow for deeper economics perhaps. But I see no reason why the game could not apply the deeper economics to cities.

 

[Naokaukodem]

You are right that army movement is the crux of what I am getting at. If you had armies instead of single units and gave armies a lot of movement points but also zone of control, that could be interesting. Then, players could move armies a good distance. This would help reduce the problem of units taking too long to get anywhere or doing anything. And zone of control would prevent armies from moving too deep into your territory, right past your armies, and maybe even taking your core city in a single turn before you can react. If players had armies placed in natural choke points, it would force enemies to fight them before moving deeper into enemy territory.

This problem could be solved with Civ5-like spy system scout system. An army have scouts to inform it of the enemy's movement. They are so essential and omnipresent that it's kinda redundant to make them actual units. Enemy troops positions could be displayed as icons in the fog of war. From their moves, you would have to guess their destination.

Regions would allow for deeper economics perhaps. But I see no reason why the game could not apply the deeper economics to cities.

Because cities are limited in number ingame. It could be better if their number could be realistic (several major cities per region, plus a plethore of villages). But, granted, just for the sake of realism and immersion. (plus it could be the occasion to tie mechanics to them)

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Another possibility is that you could have both regions and hexes like Endless legend does it. Units would still move from hex to hex. But the map would designate a group of hexes as a region. When you settle a city inside a region, the entire region would become yours. The borders would shift to include the whole region. This would really help solve the border problem that civ5 has. Regions would also be used to determine what special resources the city has access to. Regions would serve as a nice way of showing a city's sphere of influence.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

What I would like to see is to have armies act like aircraft.

ie, they have a 'range' and can perform missions in that range... including intercepting an invading army.

Of course the 'range' would be a certain number of movement points, and so it would be irregular, and could probably be altered (a "fortified" army would have reduced range for combat bonus)

You could also (similar to air units) restrict them to bases in cities/forts in your territory... (just give the units a good range)
so say a scout has a long range, but can't leave a city, it would eliminate the "scout" that slowly wanders to one end of the world and back. (instead the scout stays in your city and expands your visible tiles .... hopefully not getting intercepted by barbarians)

Or perhaps they could 'base' outside of cities/forts but would take damage every turn doing so.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

What I would like to see is to have armies act like aircraft.

ie, they have a 'range' and can perform missions in that range... including intercepting an invading army.

Of course the 'range' would be a certain number of movement points, and so it would be irregular, and could probably be altered (a "fortified" army would have reduced range for combat bonus)

That is a very interesting way of solving the timescale issue. If I am understanding you correctly, if an enemy city were in range of your army then you could perform a "attack city" mission with your army, similar to how aircraft work. Your army would then move to that city and attack it and any defenders present. I am also thinking that the player could build forts to extend the range of their armies. You could build a fort and then do a "move army to fort" mission like rebasing your aircarfts. This would move your army to the fort and allow it to reach more enemy locations. It would also make attacking forts more important since your would want to knock out the enemy's ability to reach you.

 

[Naokaukodem]

Yeah, that's basically what I suggested once. Having range for armies, the example I took was the one of a Roman emperor that had to defend both opposed parts of the empire, his troops made the distance in one year, which is one turn only in the worst case. Considering the Roman Empire was one of the widest in History, I think the scale would fit well. It could even stay too slow for modern times, with fast travels. (need to split turns by 10 for wars ?)

 

[Windsor]

How important are tiles/hexes to a civ game to be true to the civ format?.

Civ5 placed tile management in a sub-menu in the city screen and "better automated workers"(or removing them) is a highly requested feature.

So no, tiles are no longer essential to the game (except nostalgia). I would certainly scrap them. There's just so many drawbacks of tiles.

 

[epicivfreak]

Civ has always been a tile-based, turn-based, empire management game. Change whatever you like outside of that, and it's still Civ. Change any one of those three fundamental pillars, and IMHO, it's not Civ anymore.

As for how armies/units move, I've always hated the tedium of pushing a hundred units around the map every turn in Civ. It's one of those "fundamental" flaws in the design of the game that's been there since Civ 1, that I've been railing about on this site for years (thus my sig). Civ 5 has made this so much worse with 1UPT, because now the damn go-to function is pretty much useless, and I have no choice but to move units tile-by-excruciating-tile across the map to their destination to ensure they actually make it to the destination point, exactly the way I want them to. With that said, I also don't want to go back to the Stacks-of-Doom of previous incarnations of Civ - Civ 5 killed that, and it needs to stay dead. This is one area of Civ that needs some real innovation.

As far as I'm concerned, things can stay exactly as they are now in Civ 5 for Civ 6, but with the addition of player interface tools:

Armies/Fleets: You can bundle as many units as you like into an Army on land, Fleet at Sea, and then move that army/fleet from point A to point B as if it were a single unit (well, there probably should be some limit, but it should be high). However, these things have "Influence Ranges" of a number of tiles (early in the game it might be 3, late in the game it might grow higher), and when the IR's of two at-war armies or fleets collide, both sides cease movement and must disembark each individual unit from the army/fleet and engage on the 1UPT format, so that, when two at-war armies pass each other, once you hit 6 tiles of distance between them, each army's IR of 3 tiles is touching, the armies would disembark and fight 1UPT in that area of the map.

Military Advisor: You have the code for the AI to play Greece all on it's own, so why, if I'm playing Greece, can't I simply direct that AI code to automate things I don't want to do? If the AI civs can fight wars and conquer cities - why don't I, as the player, have the ability to simply call up my MA, and issue it an order of Capture City X, or Pillage Civ Y, Blockade City Z, or any number of other objectives common to the game? I'd love to be able to offload that tedium onto my own personal MA AI. With this in Civ 6, I wouldn't even need the Army/Fleet thing unless I choose to fight out a war manually (which would rarely happen for me), and there's absolutely no excuse for not including such a tool for players in future versions of Civ. I want to be able to fight a war with the click of a few buttons, not the incessant movement of hundreds of units and tedious turn-after-turn of attacking.

 

[Matthew.]

I personally wouldn't mind if there was a move to regions, though I doubt it would happen. The tile has become symbolic with Civ, and there would need to be a damn good reason to change that.

\\\

 

[nimling]

I don't see tiles as being necessary. They're a hard habit to break if you want something familiar to past entries in the series, but of all the series only the second Civ is one I'd really want to come back to fully.

Using a system of organized plots for city management, while uncoupling units from tiles, would seem to be an ideal solution. On some level "tiles" of a sort are unavoidable, unless you do away with geography entirely (not going to happen) or use fixed regions (which wouldn't work in this game). You can, however, do away with the notion of a unit occupying a given tile, instead you could say "you have this many troops mustered at this location, here is where they can move this turn" - or, "you have a city centered around this latitude and longitude, extending out so far" - or, "there is a mountain range located in the marked area, traversing this region on land is inadvisable". There are still points of data that are akin to tiles, but they are only used by the game's internal logic.

The stack of doom "problem" isn't really a problem. Against a human opponent, stacks of doom are quite overrated. It is a workaround for the AI, which isn't too keen on grand strategy or tactics, but the AI in Civ4 is still tactically pathetic and easy to manipulate. The original AI for the game tried to do more with pillaging, which is supposed to simulate how a human would play, but wound up getting their cavalry shredded and failing to mount the threat to cities a human would. Civ4 AI is still way better than the mess in Civ5, but the bigger problem for Civ5 is that it simply cannot be a sound strategic game, AI or human.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

Turns imply tiles. Civ is turn based.

QED.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Turns imply tiles. Civ is turn based.

QED.

Uh?! It is possible to have a game be turn based and not have tiles. Rise of nations had a turn based strategic mode where the map was divided into regions and did not have tiles.

 

[Kid R]

No, tiles aren't IMO fundamental.

Full sweep of human history, advancing technology, some economic management, some military combat, the whole thing turn based. I would say they're the absolute essentials for it to credibly be "Civilization", although it has always been tiles and it would be a huge commercial risk to change that.

Also the military combat would need an utterly drastic redesign (maybe no bad thing) if there weren't tiles. It's really hard to organize coordinated troop movements in a turn based (time quanta) game without tiles (space quanta). For human and AI both. Not saying it's impossible - and I'd love to see the attempt

 

[Rusty Edge]

Civ has always been a tile-based, turn-based, empire management game. Change whatever you like outside of that, and it's still Civ. Change any one of those three fundamental pillars, and IMHO, it's not Civ anymore.

What the man said.

In one of the multitude of editions ( Civ IV game of the year, maybe? ) they included an interview, and I think it was Soren Johnson who said that he would argue that even more than a turn based strategy game, Civ as a series is a tile based game. He learned that through a dead-end development that got away from tiles. Everybody said it wasn't Civ.

In Civ we're used to glancing at a tile and being able to classify it. We know what sort of travel, defense, or production bonuses it has, and we plan and act accordingly. Change that, and you change the nature of the game. For better or worse, it won't be civ any more.