CIV VI Realism and House rules

[UWHabs]

OK I’ll take a crack at Enhanced But Still Simple Combat Mechanics for Civ

I like most of the way combat works in Civ6 and I think it’s an appropriate level of detail but I have two issues with it.

First, the Carpet of Doom. Strict 1UPT means you have to basically solve a sliding tile puzzle every time you have an army larger than a few units. It’s not even remotely fun. Worse, it’s hilariously ahistorical, even for a game that is not trying to be a simulation

Second is ranged units and LOS. The 1UPT means that units have to have multi hex range to be effective. This just feels all sorts of wrong at the scale of Civ6. Adding LOS mechanics compounds the sliding tile problem and adds to frustration.

My attempt at fixing this is a simple mechanics change that would alleviate those problems while adding a lot of nuance to combat. Have a semi-1UPT where you can stack one of each class of unit in a hex, and then reduce the range of all ranged class units to one.

Bam. Unit congestion dramatically reduced and LOS head aches gone.

Combat follows the following rules:

Ranged units firing at a stack hit everyone there.

Ranged units cannot be attacked by non ranged units unless they are alone in the hex. They can only be bombarded by other ranged units

When a stack is attacked, the unit attacked follows the following priority list

Melee
Anti-Cav
Cavalry
Scout
Ranged

The Rock Paper Scissor bonuses and penalties still apply, and they apply to the whole hex. For example I have a melee unit stacked with an anti cav unit. It is attacked by cavalry. The cavalry bonus against melee is cancelled by the presence of the anti cav unit.

Finally, when you attack an enemy hex, you don’t get the “Combat Odds Preview” screen and the option to bail on the attack unless you have a scout adjacent to the hex.

The presence of an enemy unit in a hex puts the hex into “fog of war” unless you have a scout adjacent to the hex

The recon class now has a very important role.

Bam. Combined Arms with zero added complexity for the player.







Ya. That could work. The feedback effect of units healing at different rates will train the player as well



Oh My God. The Italian units needing extra water to boil their pasta bwa ha ha

I've advocated for a very similar system many times in the past, but I do understand that any stacks always have the issue of deciding who to "attack". So like if your swordsman on a tile is 1/100 hp, should it be able to tank all the damage from a horseman attack, or should your 100/100 archer also get some damage?

I would probably opt for a simpler system where perhaps all ranged and siege units are treated like the modern day "support" units in terms of attacking. So yeah, that would be a pain to lose your crossbowman because your 1/100 swordsman couldn't defend the tile, but otherwise you run into some real troubles with deciding who takes the combat and you start setting up too many ways to cheat the system. The other option is that when you stack units on a tile, there's some special formula that they all get attacked at once. So if you have a swordsman, spearman, and archer on a tile, and a horseman attacks, it basically is treated like 1/3 of a full battle against each enemy. But again, I'm sure there's ways to cheat that system too.

As for unit supply, I definitely think that's something that wouldn't be too hard to implement to a degree. I mean, we already have that already, where units heal 5hp in neutral or enemy territory, 10hp in friendly land, and 20hp in a friendly city. So adding in a "supply line" dynamic would simply take that system and extend it out more. Even simply changing it so that the default healing is 0, but medics and cities provide some level of area of effect. Ideally it should be based on roads - my medic probably shouldn't be able to heal across a mountain range, and probably should give more healing to a unit connected by a road. If you want it more complex, you could even have something where a medic/convoy loses some HP of its own when it heals a friendly unit, so that they have to be cycled back to a city to resupply. But that's probably more complex, and it might be simpler to simply treat them staticly with a support cost. In a perfect world, you would probably need to chain them together - so your medic would need to be within, say, 5 tiles of a friendly city or medic to provide healing, so that you would have to place them in a literal supply chain on the map for a long distance invasion, where the chain could be cut by opposing units. But again, it depends on how complex you want it to be.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Yea i dont hink it should be overly complexed, just add some more depth. We need the stacks of Doom Back lol

If we get Stack of Doom, we absolutly need some sort of supply line system. Then you have the historical tradeoff between massing your forces at the decisive point but still leaving enough to guard your flanks and your supply lines

Just derping everything into a doomstack and going kaplaa at the enemy capital should end in your stack mired in light cavalry zones of control and bleeding health every turn until the remnants painfully crawl back to friendly lines.

That is literally Marcus Antonius’s parthian campaign in Civ6 terms. Lost a third of his army to supply attrition and the Parthians didn’t directly fight him once. Just ZOC’d him to death

 

[Vandlys]

I think your on to something please explain more. Possibly examples

Sphere of influence
Ancient era:
Let's say your capital city starts off with a sphere of influence in a circle, which is nine tiles in diameter. In other words, you have the city centre, and then 4 tiles up, down, left, and right, forming a circle. Inside this sphere of influence, units can move freely without getting damage. In this sphere, they can also heal. Outside of this sphere, units start losing HP at "X per turn". I'd suggest percentage based on max HP (although in Civ VI all max HP is the same?), with the percentage growing stronger the further they go out of the sphere, for example 10% of HP lost every turn for each tile outside of the sphere. Note, to heal they need to return to the sphere of influence.
Concrete example: if your scout moves outside of the sphere into a terrain with only hills by 1 tile, it loses 10/100 HP, so it's now got 90 HP left.
The next turn it moves another tile out (tile 2 outside of sphere), again on hills, and it loses 20 HP, so it now has 70 HP left.
If it moves another tile out (tile 3 outside of sphere), again on hills it will lose 30 more HP, putting it at 40 HP. If it then goes back, it would lose 20 HP for returning to tile 2, and again 10 HP for returning to tile 1. The scout would be on tile 1 (outside of the sphere) with 10 HP remaining.
Now the scout would need to move back into the sphere, and heal up before being able to explore more.

City borders:
City borders would always overrule the above rule of the sphere of influence, by extending the sphere of influence 1 tile beyond the city border limits. The sphere of influence will therefore only start off as a circle, but eventually could have an organic shape,

Further eras:
Of course, it wouldn't be fun if this stayed the same during the whole game, so this sphere of influence should be able to grow via the tech or civic tree.

Reach:
Hills, rivers, woods and other natural obstacles, would make it harder to explore, creating a defensive barrier and keeping the early game limited, leaving more to explore in later stages. Roads and trade networks would become more important, seeing as they upgrade the travel speed of your units.

Cities outside of the capital:
Settling a city other than the capital would create a smaller sphere of influence, say a diameter of 5 (2 tiles up, down, left and right). Again, this sphere would grow with the city borders.
Settling outside your sphere of influence would all of a sudden be very dangerous, and of course we'd have to address Settler hit point loss. I'd therefore suggest that Civilian units would not get damaged as long as they are linked to a military unit. This would still mean they can only reach a maximum amount of tiles away from the capital, but this maximum would of course grow throughout the ages.

Other Civilizations:
Borders from other civilizations would negate your sphere of influence. You wouldn't therefore be able to heal your units in the following example:
Your city border is directly connected to another Civ's borders. Your unit is over the border, but you only have open borders. You need another deal, for example "allow supplies to military units in open borders" or "friendship" or "ally" to be able to let your units heal inside other Civ's borders.

New units:
Supply units (civilian, until much later in the civ or tech tree, then they become military) could exist from the first era. These units would serve no other purpose than to supply other units with hit points, and be expended after one use. These units would lose hit points outside the sphere of influence at 50% the rate of a normal unit, thus lasting twice as long. The more HP they have when they are expended, the more they heal the other unit.

Consequences:
The real reason I always had this system in my head is to preserve exploration. It would make map trading viable all of a sudden, make the war game more interesting than just producing units and seeing who is stronger.
I think this system could also have interesting mechanics for different civs. Civs that have scouts that lose fewer hit points on hill tiles, melee units that can heal outside of your sphere of influence for the first three tiles, units that move faster when damaged, and I'm sure we can come up with many more things.

Variants:
A cool variant could be that mountains, for example, stop the sphere of influence, pushing it down, up, left or right (on the map). So the amount of tiles of the starting sphere would be the same, but the shape could be determined by ocean tiles, mountains, and other impassable (at first) tiles.


Does all of this make a lick of sense? I'm just doing this from the top of my head, so it will probably have a lot of kinks to work out.

 

[shaglio]

Sphere of influence
Ancient era:
Let's say your capital city starts off with a sphere of influence in a circle, which is nine tiles in diameter. In other words, you have the city centre, and then 4 tiles up, down, left, and right, forming a circle. Inside this sphere of influence, units can move freely without getting damage. In this sphere, they can also heal. Outside of this sphere, units start losing HP at "X per turn". I'd suggest percentage based on max HP (although in Civ VI all max HP is the same?), with the percentage growing stronger the further they go out of the sphere, for example 10% of HP lost every turn for each tile outside of the sphere. Note, to heal they need to return to the sphere of influence.
Concrete example: if your scout moves outside of the sphere into a terrain with only hills by 1 tile, it loses 10/100 HP, so it's now got 90 HP left.
The next turn it moves another tile out (tile 2 outside of sphere), again on hills, and it loses 20 HP, so it now has 70 HP left.
If it moves another tile out (tile 3 outside of sphere), again on hills it will lose 30 more HP, putting it at 40 HP. If it then goes back, it would lose 20 HP for returning to tile 2, and again 10 HP for returning to tile 1. The scout would be on tile 1 (outside of the sphere) with 10 HP remaining.
Now the scout would need to move back into the sphere, and heal up before being able to explore more.

City borders:
City borders would always overrule the above rule of the sphere of influence, by extending the sphere of influence 1 tile beyond the city border limits. The sphere of influence will therefore only start off as a circle, but eventually could have an organic shape,

Further eras:
Of course, it wouldn't be fun if this stayed the same during the whole game, so this sphere of influence should be able to grow via the tech or civic tree.

Reach:
Hills, rivers, woods and other natural obstacles, would make it harder to explore, creating a defensive barrier and keeping the early game limited, leaving more to explore in later stages. Roads and trade networks would become more important, seeing as they upgrade the travel speed of your units.

Cities outside of the capital:
Settling a city other than the capital would create a smaller sphere of influence, say a diameter of 5 (2 tiles up, down, left and right). Again, this sphere would grow with the city borders.
Settling outside your sphere of influence would all of a sudden be very dangerous, and of course we'd have to address Settler hit point loss. I'd therefore suggest that Civilian units would not get damaged as long as they are linked to a military unit. This would still mean they can only reach a maximum amount of tiles away from the capital, but this maximum would of course grow throughout the ages.

Other Civilizations:
Borders from other civilizations would negate your sphere of influence. You wouldn't therefore be able to heal your units in the following example:
Your city border is directly connected to another Civ's borders. Your unit is over the border, but you only have open borders. You need another deal, for example "allow supplies to military units in open borders" or "friendship" or "ally" to be able to let your units heal inside other Civ's borders.

New units:
Supply units (civilian, until much later in the civ or tech tree, then they become military) could exist from the first era. These units would serve no other purpose than to supply other units with hit points, and be expended after one use. These units would lose hit points outside the sphere of influence at 50% the rate of a normal unit, thus lasting twice as long. The more HP they have when they are expended, the more they heal the other unit.

Consequences:
The real reason I always had this system in my head is to preserve exploration. It would make map trading viable all of a sudden, make the war game more interesting than just producing units and seeing who is stronger.
I think this system could also have interesting mechanics for different civs. Civs that have scouts that lose fewer hit points on hill tiles, melee units that can heal outside of your sphere of influence for the first three tiles, units that move faster when damaged, and I'm sure we can come up with many more things.

Variants:
A cool variant could be that mountains, for example, stop the sphere of influence, pushing it down, up, left or right (on the map). So the amount of tiles of the starting sphere would be the same, but the shape could be determined by ocean tiles, mountains, and other impassable (at first) tiles.


Does all of this make a lick of sense? I'm just doing this from the top of my head, so it will probably have a lot of kinks to work out.

This is an amazing idea for a total war game. But in terms of the Civilization series, there's no way I'd ever play this. It's far too complex for Civ's style of some war/some empire-building/some diplomacy.

 

[chrisgatt7]

Sphere of influence
Ancient era:
Let's say your capital city starts off with a sphere of influence in a circle, which is nine tiles in diameter. In other words, you have the city centre, and then 4 tiles up, down, left, and right, forming a circle. Inside this sphere of influence, units can move freely without getting damage. In this sphere, they can also heal. Outside of this sphere, units start losing HP at "X per turn". I'd suggest percentage based on max HP (although in Civ VI all max HP is the same?), with the percentage growing stronger the further they go out of the sphere, for example 10% of HP lost every turn for each tile outside of the sphere. Note, to heal they need to return to the sphere of influence.
Concrete example: if your scout moves outside of the sphere into a terrain with only hills by 1 tile, it loses 10/100 HP, so it's now got 90 HP left.
The next turn it moves another tile out (tile 2 outside of sphere), again on hills, and it loses 20 HP, so it now has 70 HP left.
If it moves another tile out (tile 3 outside of sphere), again on hills it will lose 30 more HP, putting it at 40 HP. If it then goes back, it would lose 20 HP for returning to tile 2, and again 10 HP for returning to tile 1. The scout would be on tile 1 (outside of the sphere) with 10 HP remaining.
Now the scout would need to move back into the sphere, and heal up before being able to explore more.

City borders:
City borders would always overrule the above rule of the sphere of influence, by extending the sphere of influence 1 tile beyond the city border limits. The sphere of influence will therefore only start off as a circle, but eventually could have an organic shape,

Further eras:
Of course, it wouldn't be fun if this stayed the same during the whole game, so this sphere of influence should be able to grow via the tech or civic tree.

Reach:
Hills, rivers, woods and other natural obstacles, would make it harder to explore, creating a defensive barrier and keeping the early game limited, leaving more to explore in later stages. Roads and trade networks would become more important, seeing as they upgrade the travel speed of your units.

Cities outside of the capital:
Settling a city other than the capital would create a smaller sphere of influence, say a diameter of 5 (2 tiles up, down, left and right). Again, this sphere would grow with the city borders.
Settling outside your sphere of influence would all of a sudden be very dangerous, and of course we'd have to address Settler hit point loss. I'd therefore suggest that Civilian units would not get damaged as long as they are linked to a military unit. This would still mean they can only reach a maximum amount of tiles away from the capital, but this maximum would of course grow throughout the ages.

Other Civilizations:
Borders from other civilizations would negate your sphere of influence. You wouldn't therefore be able to heal your units in the following example:
Your city border is directly connected to another Civ's borders. Your unit is over the border, but you only have open borders. You need another deal, for example "allow supplies to military units in open borders" or "friendship" or "ally" to be able to let your units heal inside other Civ's borders.

New units:
Supply units (civilian, until much later in the civ or tech tree, then they become military) could exist from the first era. These units would serve no other purpose than to supply other units with hit points, and be expended after one use. These units would lose hit points outside the sphere of influence at 50% the rate of a normal unit, thus lasting twice as long. The more HP they have when they are expended, the more they heal the other unit.

Consequences:
The real reason I always had this system in my head is to preserve exploration. It would make map trading viable all of a sudden, make the war game more interesting than just producing units and seeing who is stronger.
I think this system could also have interesting mechanics for different civs. Civs that have scouts that lose fewer hit points on hill tiles, melee units that can heal outside of your sphere of influence for the first three tiles, units that move faster when damaged, and I'm sure we can come up with many more things.

Variants:
A cool variant could be that mountains, for example, stop the sphere of influence, pushing it down, up, left or right (on the map). So the amount of tiles of the starting sphere would be the same, but the shape could be determined by ocean tiles, mountains, and other impassable (at first) tiles.


Does all of this make a lick of sense? I'm just doing this from the top of my head, so it will probably have a lot of kinks to work out.

I love it !!! tell me more lol

 

[chrisgatt7]

This is an amazing idea for a total war game. But in terms of the Civilization series, there's no way I'd ever play this. It's far too complex for Civ's style of some war/some empire-building/some diplomacy.

I do not understand this logic among a certain part of the civ community. Like the devs have introduced many systems which can be turned on and off, why not further the complexity and allow the user to determine what they want. Just look at all these new game modes that were introduced all add a differnt level of complexity to the game. I want to be challenged. Don't get me started on the AI lol

 

[Zaarin]

Like the devs have introduced many systems which can be turned on and off, why not further the complexity and allow the user to determine what they want. Just look at all these new game modes that were introduced all add a differnt level of complexity to the game.

There's already a problem that systems don't work together or interact. If systems are modular, they're only going to be more isolated and disconnected. Modular systems was one among many horrible ideas in NFP, saved only by the fact that they were glorified mods anyway.

 

[Vandlys]

This is an amazing idea for a total war game. But in terms of the Civilization series, there's no way I'd ever play this. It's far too complex for Civ's style of some war/some empire-building/some diplomacy.

Is this much more complex than loyalty? I don't really see it. Plus, seeing as Health is quite visible in the game, it's more transparant than loyalty I would say.

 

[Linklite]

I do not understand this logic among a certain part of the civ community. Like the devs have introduced many systems which can be turned on and off, why not further the complexity and allow the user to determine what they want. Just look at all these new game modes that were introduced all add a differnt level of complexity to the game.

Did you notice how many of those systems broke the game? I'm not referring to personal opinion of how it affected game balance, but things like if you turn on M&Cs, the AI stops improving luxuries.

Then we can move on to things I've game balance. The game is designed to be balanced without those features - adding them as optional extras really makes things messy and difficult to balance.

I want to be challenged. Don't get me started on the AI lol

You should speak to aieeegrunt. These extra bells and whistles are what kills the AI. If you play vanilla, the AI does much better (according to aieegrunt, and to my memory as well, though it's been years since I've played vanilla).

Modular really screws the AI. It's extremely expensive to build decent AI for these kinds of games. You'd have to build an AI for each configuration to know how to use the various features properly. We're not going to get that in a Civ game due to costs, so you'll get one AI that plays the base game, and really struggles to use the modular features. Hence why the AI doesn't use the Hero's powers in Heroes & Legends mode. The AI isn't bad, it just doesn't know how to deal with all the extra stuff that Firaxis has thrown at it, so it just...dies.

If you want a good game with a good AI, lobby Firaxis to scrap modular gaming. They don't have the funds to do it well, so you'll end up with another broken AI and features that sound great but don't quite pull it together.

 

[Alaindor]

I'm not sure we want to go along the broken AI path again, but although I'll agree that modular has killed the AI entirely, I'm absolutely not convinced at all it could not have been taken care of better, even in GS. Look at the improvements @Infixo has brought with his Real Strategy AI mod, trying to compensate for elementary flaws - and that's without access to many of the core game components. No, I'm convinced the dev's have not put in the resources, the time or the competence to build a better AI. In fact, it's probably not even that, but rather that for their management, it's not even a thing to care about. Although I love the game, that AI incompetence is killing it, for a strategy game I want some sort of acceptable challenge. Worse still, all the bugs and balance issues introduced with that infamous NFP series, without any remote sign of a hope for a potential imaginary future patch, is...(I can't find a word acceptable to this forum, sorry)

 

[aieeegrunt]

Did you notice how many of those systems broke the game? I'm not referring to personal opinion of how it affected game balance, but things like if you turn on M&Cs, the AI stops improving luxuries.

Then we can move on to things I've game balance. The game is designed to be balanced without those features - adding them as optional extras really makes things messy and difficult to balance.


You should speak to aieeegrunt. These extra bells and whistles are what kills the AI. If you play vanilla, the AI does much better (according to aieegrunt, and to my memory as well, though it's been years since I've played vanilla).

Modular really screws the AI. It's extremely expensive to build decent AI for these kinds of games. You'd have to build an AI for each configuration to know how to use the various features properly. We're not going to get that in a Civ game due to costs, so you'll get one AI that plays the base game, and really struggles to use the modular features. Hence why the AI doesn't use the Hero's powers in Heroes & Legends mode. The AI isn't bad, it just doesn't know how to deal with all the extra stuff that Firaxis has thrown at it, so it just...dies.

If you want a good game with a good AI, lobby Firaxis to scrap modular gaming. They don't have the funds to do it well, so you'll end up with another broken AI and features that sound great but don't quite pull it together.

The AI 110% does so much better in the base game. Era Score, Loyalty, Dramatic Ages, pretty much every single add on and expansion is a Win Harder condition for the human player.

All of these things are trivially easy to game for the human player, since they are pretty simple board game mechanics, provided you can force yourself to do the (to me) incredibly tedious min maxing and rules lawyering. It usually boils down to some fairly trivial and tedious math.

The AI can’t deal with it, at all.

I have managed to make Civ6 an actual traditional 4X again using the following game settings

And I am on xbone, so that is without mods.

Basic Game, for the reasons listed above

As many civs as the game lets you pick. On xbone this is about double the default number.

Map size doesnt matter, although I usually play on small maps so the end game tedium isn’t as bad

Terra Map. This intensifies the crowding effect of all those civs. It also leads to a “colonizing race” to help spice up the deathly tedium that starts to set in mid game.

Low sea levels, since most of that ocean is useless wasted hexes

Legendary starts. With a map this crowded you might only get one or two city sites to settle. A garbage start is a death sentance. It’s a good levelling technique for the AI too

What does this all mean? The intense competition for living space mean you get actual wars a lot more often, both against you and each other. The crippling 150% science bug doesnt completely ruin the AI, since most civs will only have a handful of cities, will quickly spam campus, and then go back to doing non stupid things.

The “Alsace Lorraine Mechanic” in this game, where somebody attacks you, you take one of their cities, and suddenly you are the warmonger actually makes sense and is a good anti snowball technique, since taking a city is a BIG power swing.

The Terra map setting means when you start to unlock the ability to cross oceans there is a powerful incentive to colonize and have a second wave of expansions and wars, especially since often key resources might end up spawning on the “empty” continent

The only things keeping this from vaulting Civ6 to my favorite civ game is the awkwardness of 1UPT and how stupidly OP walls are. If I had this on PC and had a mod that nerfed walls, and something like the ARS movement/stacking mod this would be my favorite Civ game

 

[AA-Ritz]

Is this much more complex than loyalty? I don't really see it. Plus, seeing as Health is quite visible in the game, it's more transparent than loyalty I would say.

I think it would be interesting to see this implemented as "attrition". Rise of Nations had this where if you didn't have a supply truck in the vicinity then your units lost health at a certain rate while in enemy territory. Russia then had higher attrition rates and bonuses. Implementing a similar mechanic could solve the healing in certain location concerns while making supply and medic units not just viable but necessary.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I worry more about how pillaging crops brings a unit to full strength.

Better get your whole grain.
You better eat your Wheaties!

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I just saw a cool program on the effect the Beatles had on the Soviet Union... and that “trade” was certainly not government organised.

As if they weren't working for MI6.

 

[Victoria]

As if they weren't working for MI6.

Unless you saw the program you probably could not appreciate what they did, certainly the MI6 could not have conceived it.