Civ 5 - less units!?

[V. Soma]

I mean the number of units on the map...

see the Eurogamer interview:

Dennis Shirk:
Units take longer to build now, they're more expensive, and they're a lot more important to you, because you need to keep them alive. You can't just spam tons and tons of units. You could before, but we wanted to make it more interesting. So you have to make more decisions, advance in technology faster, and work towards building stronger units.

PLUS the IGN Preview:

There's also a limitation on resources discovered in the field. Previously, if you found horses, it was a bottomless well of horses (thankfully not literally) but now you find a specific number - and once you've used them to make cavalry units, they're gone. Just as artificial, maybe, but another limitation on your war machine.

 

[Chalks]

Certainly looks that way - but I think that's fairly predictable since the one unit per tile rule will mean you'll have limited space to put units anyway. If you were able to produce too many, you would completely clog up your empire.

 

[Newcomer24]

I mean the number of units on the map...

see the Eurogamer interview:

Dennis Shirk:
Units take longer to build now, they're more expensive, and they're a lot more important to you, because you need to keep them alive. You can't just spam tons and tons of units. You could before, but we wanted to make it more interesting. So you have to make more decisions, advance in technology faster, and work towards building stronger units.

PLUS the IGN Preview:

There's also a limitation on resources discovered in the field. Previously, if you found horses, it was a bottomless well of horses (thankfully not literally) but now you find a specific number - and once you've used them to make cavalry units, they're gone. Just as artificial, maybe, but another limitation on your war machine.

This is not surprising and I kinda expected it... imagine you have the same number of units as in Civ4 and deploy them one per tile... the whole map would be covered and it would look a mess.
It makes a lot more sense to have fewer, stronger and more expensive, units.

 

[V. Soma]

In fact, I lke it to have less number of units - no more clogging late game?

 

[pi-r8]

I'm sort of split on this one. On the one hand, I think the early game in Civ 4 is the most fun, and a big part of that is because you have so few units, so every unit is really important. On the other hand, bigger armies allow for a wider range of strategies, and they make the luck factor less ridiculous (nothing more annoying then losing your capital early on to a freak roll of the dice).

 

[V. Soma]

On the other hand, bigger armies allow for a wider range of strategies, and they make the luck factor less ridiculous (nothing more annoying then losing your capital early on to a freak roll of the dice).

Luck factor is interesting as what its effect:

pro: some excitement, games may have a sudden turn, not alwys the expected things

con: when you lose

 

[pi-r8]

Luck factor is interesting as what its effect:

pro: some excitement, games may have a sudden turn, not alwys the expected things

con: when you lose

Yeah I agree, it's necessary to have random elements in this game. You never know what's going to happen during the course of the war, so you have to constantly make adjustments to your strategy. I just hate it in the situations like:

you: CG2 archer fortified in 60% culture city
enemy: 1 barbarian warrior

warrior attacks at 0.5% odds... warrior wins! city destroyed.

 

[Chalks]

Well, that's what 0.5% odds means. If you do it 200 times, the warrior is likely to win once.

They have said that they've put things in place to prevent the whole spearman vs tank thing that is the poster child for this problem though - so perhaps outside of a certain threshold the outcome of battle is predetermined.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I was hoping for less units. It will make strategy and tactics more important than just dedicating two of your industrial cities in the late game to military production.
One of the biggest ills of Civ4 is that the AI just builds ridiculously large armies they couldn't even maintain without their stupid cheat economies and you're all but forecd to do the same if you don't want to look like an easy target.
It also means when Monty inevitably attacks you, you won't have to sit through three minutes of watching his neverending waves of chariots throwing themselves at your machine guns during the frst turn of the war.

 

[Danielos]

As long as you mean less number of units you build and not less number of different units, I´m all for it. Seeing AI-cities in Civ 4 with 60-70 fortfied defenders just hurts my eyes...

 

[David7]

I'd certainly hope that with 1upt we wouldn't keep the same number of troops as there were in the SOD's.

 

[Shiggs713]

That was fun though. Remember all the excitement when Genghis plops his 67 unit doomstack on your borders? Maybe some people didn't think that was fun, but I did. Honestly unless they've had some major AI break though, I think it'll be even easier to manipulate now. The AI can't possibly be better than a human in tactics, so sheer numbers was all they had.

 

[Gamemaster77]

I actually love the whole thing. Although when i first started playing civ i would just reload whenever i lost a battle . Then one day im like, im going to stop, thats cheating.

 

[bonafide11]

That was fun though. Remember all the excitement when Genghis plops his 67 unit doomstack on your borders? Maybe some people didn't think that was fun, but I did. Honestly unless they've had some major AI break though, I think it'll be even easier to manipulate now. The AI can't possibly be better than a human in tactics, so sheer numbers was all they had.

If you read the recent IGN article, you'll see there is definitely some AI breakthrough. The AI is much more complex and has a much better strategy now.

I'm certainly glad there is less units. Stacks of Doom consisted of way too many units and took too long to shuffle them and organize them, and it was monotonous. I look forward to much more exciting warfare in Civ V.

 

[Shiggs713]

Yea, I read it, but I won't assume anything for now, till I see the AI in action for myself. They said similar things about the AI for civ4, and it was pretty bad until BTS + Better AI.

 

[pi-r8]

Well, that's what 0.5% odds means. If you do it 200 times, the warrior is likely to win once.

They have said that they've put things in place to prevent the whole spearman vs tank thing that is the poster child for this problem though - so perhaps outside of a certain threshold the outcome of battle is predetermined.

Spearmen beats tank isn't a problem at all. I mean, if you've got tanks and they're fighting with spearmen, you're going to win no matter what. The situation I mentioned is a problem because that one bad dice roll can completely ruin your game. I don't mind when unlikely events occur, i just mind when the whole game depends on them. That happens a lot more when you've only got a few units.

 

[Ribannah]

If it takes far longer to build a unit, then hopefully a partially completed unit can already help defend your city.

 

[Chalks]

Spearmen beats tank isn't a problem at all. I mean, if you've got tanks and they're fighting with spearmen, you're going to win no matter what. The situation I mentioned is a problem because that one bad dice roll can completely ruin your game. I don't mind when unlikely events occur, i just mind when the whole game depends on them. That happens a lot more when you've only got a few units.

True, if the combat style of the earlier games remains the same in V then it could be an issue, but I don't think it will. Combat will likely be drawn out, with even melee units needing to be attacked multiple times before being destroyed - even if they lose every time.

If this was not the case, a single front line battle could easily wipe out an entire army in just a few turns. In a game that will apparently be significantly more expensive and slower to produce units, this could easily allow the winning army to simply sweep through your empire, or at least take out a good portion of it before you have had time to restore your forces.

A longer front line battle over multiple turns would allow for re-enforcements and more tactical choices to be made rather than the pac man style unit eats unit combat of earlier games.

 

[DigitalBoy]

Like pi-r8, I have my worries about less units cranking up the luck factor. If units are fewer, what's to keep one unlucky roll of the dice from completely squashing your army? See also: law of large numbers.

Previously, spamming units was the name of the game. How do you make a chariot rush work in CivIV? By having four times as many units as the defender does. How is "less numerous, more expensive units that you need to keep alive" going to reconcile itself with Civ's traditionally "quantity is quality" style of warfare?

I can't help but think that if the devs try too hard to make warfare tactical, it'll become Civilization: Total War.

 

[Cilpot]

I like the idea of less units.

From some mods, like FFH, the concept of "national units" emerged. This meant that some (quite powerful) units were limited to four per nation. One had to think more on the use of these units, it was not a good idea to just send all to the front unprotected. I really enjoyed this concept of the mod, and it added another level of strategic thinking to the battlefield.