...and probably get flak from both sides of the fence; the rest of the UI does not inspire me to believe they'd have a good UI for managing stacks!
They don't have a good UI for 1 UPT either, in fact it's pathetic. Civ 4 UI had flaws but managed to do a lot of things well. It really cut down on number of raw inputs to complete a turn.
Civ 5 and 6 abandoned any meaningful care for UI quality. It's hard to evaluate the viability of 1UPT with unit cycling perma-broken, civ 5's forced delays-after-actions, next turn =/= next turn, unnecessary unit layer sharing (apostles), pathetic trade UI slugfest, extremely limited city interaction UI, and movement rules shackling unit movements and choking the weakest unit classes in the game. Maybe 1UPT would be more fun if the developers didn't leave UI in pre-beta while releasing the game. The controls are pretty important in a game, quite a few games in history would have been pretty solid if not for broken controls.
In principle, if you could make decisions fast enough you could average unit move per second (or less if you've RTS background or something, but let's go with 1s/unit/turn). That would mean even on large maps with two front wars and 30-35ish units (10-15 military per front, occasionally builders/trade interaction, if trade interactions were competent) turns could take as short as 30-45 seconds to a player interested in getting through them. Factoring early turns with far less turns this would mean even a large map would be a ~3.5 hour game if playing fast with 400 turns. Standard would be closer to 2-3 hours on normal speeds to reach 400 turns.
Most games don't go anywhere near 400 turns. If you finish in 300 or less you cut time proportionately. This starts to approach civ 4 times I had of 90 minutes to 3.5 hours depending on settings.
1 UPT removed some tactical consideration and added others. The developers are apparently content with ranged units being broken sadly. However utter neglect of UI + poor priority on game performance in general make the series a slow slog.
Add to the slow slog with poor balancing/scaling of tech/units and over-arching strategies/diplomacy and
you have a game with few interesting choices and a lot of tedious inputs between them. There are two ways to help that: 1) make interesting choices more frequent and 2) greatly reduce the number of tedious inputs and meaningless (doesn't contribute to outcome significantly) decisions heaped on the player.
1 can be challenging. 2 is an area civ 6 is pathetically inadequate. It can be improved in both, and it will be more fun if it is. 2 is a lower hanging fruit.
I still honestly find it unbelievable that some people actually like stacks of doom more than 1UPT. I mean yeah okay, the AI is more challenging like that, but that is literally only because the system is terrible. There is almost no strategy or tactics whatsoever involved with stacks. All you need to do is to have enough units and of the right type. It turns the whole combat part of Civ into a game solely consisting of macro, but no micro whatsoever.
Players who thought this way in civ 4 MP were dead players. Like civ 5, civ 4 AI was actually pretty downright awful at tactics.
You might find that guerrilla 2 longbows camping your strat resources and forking cities, or getting 2/3 of your coastal cities burned to be a problem in civ 4, but the AI will never do that sort of thing.
I still haven't been told why my experiences with older Civ. games is apparently irrelevant. Instead of condescendingly recommending I play a singular incarnation of the series (I have actually played III, like I said) which for all I know could be the outlier of the series, I would appreciate actual counterarguments to the points I raised.
3 and 4 both had serious divergence from each other and from 1 and 2. Stacking in 3 is not relevant to 4, where being in a stack was a liability due to collateral initiative (you could, if you got whaled on by a stack, get it eliminated over the course of 2 turns by a significantly smaller force with no realistic counter-reaction between them in civ 4). The reason is the change to how siege worked in 4 compared to 3. Civ 2 was similarly very different...losing EVERYTHING when you lose once on defense is a pretty crushing disincentive unto itself and might have been a good model with more modern UI controls.
The frustrating thing for me, reading through threads like this, is that players make wrong assumptions about every model. 1UPT is "slow" in civ 5 and 6, but this is not the fault of 1UPT. It's a serious fault of the design teams for those games, but there is nothing in principle dictating 1 UPT has to be slow, that ranged/mounted has to dominate it to alpha-strat degrees, or that city management has to be an input-laden chore. The civ 6 design team left it that way, but blaming 1UPT for that doesn't give it a fair shake.
Movement rules, # movements per unit class, temp stacking similar to when a new unit is produced in a city with a garrison, production rate, relative strength per era/city, functional cycling, accurate displays, accessible information...these are things that can be incorporated into a 1 UPT model. The support unit/other layer concept with attaches is reasonable too. 1 UPT can be made tactically deep and viable. So can stacking or limited stacking.
If the game doesn't do it, doesn't offer interesting choices frequently, doesn't care about rote inputs, then yes it will feel slow...and the difficulty introduced by hidden rules is the kind of fake difficulty that has no place in this franchise.
