CIV VII: 1UPT, Stack of Doom or Carpet of Doom. What's your prefs?

[civac]

One of the points of stacks is that you can move everything as a unit. Cuts out a lot of clicks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?

 

[aieeegrunt]

One of the points of stacks is that you can move everything as a unit. Cuts out a lot of clicks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?

Depends on how big the stack is.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I feel like carpet of doom and stacks of doom are two extremes on opposite sides of the spectrum. Both are bad.

The spectrum from carpet of doom to stacks of doom might look something like this:

Pure 1upt
1upt with no limit on number of units so you get carpet of doom
1upt with soft limit on number of total units on the map (you can exceed limit but suffer penalties)
1upt with hard limit on number of units on the map to prevent carpet of doom. You could make this limit very low but then make units harder to kill so they persist or you could make limit higher (but not carpet of doom levels) and make units easier to kill and you could quickly build replacement units.

Hybrid 1upt
1upt with 1 civilian attached unit
1upt with 1 military or civilian attached unit
1upt where you can merge identical unit types (like corps and armies in civ6).
1upt where you can merge different unit types to create hybrid units.

Stacks
Stacks with a hard limit to a small number (ex: 3 units per stack)
Stacks with hard limit to a bigger number (ex: 15 units per stack)
Stacks with soft limit (you can exceed limit but suffer penalties)
Stacks with no limit so you get stacks of doom

I also think that 1upt and stacks affect how battles would be done:

With pure 1upt, battles will likely be very simplified and tactical. Units will have combat stats and you move units around like a tactical game and each unit maybe damages or kills another unit. With carpet of doom, moving units around becomes very tedious. You get the sliding blocks puzzle problem where it can be tricky to figure out how to move a unit to make space for another unit to move. 1upt with low number of units would make moving units around much easier and if the units are harder to kill, each loss would be more impactful.

With hybrid 1upt, moving multiple units would be easier without going all the way to stacks. With attached units, there might be some micro with battles as you have to click to attach or detach units or select what unit you want to attack with. With merging units, you could have more advanced stats, like a swordsmen-catapult hybrid unit would have both a melee attack stat and a ranged attack stat with bonus to attacking walled cities. You would avoid the micro of attaching and detaching units and you could create specialized units for different military roles, like merging a melee unit with a settler unit to essentially create an armed settler unit.

With stacks, I feel like combat could really take a lot of different forms:
You could do simplified combat where the stack fights as one.
You could make stacked combat a bit more involved where each unit fights one by one in the stack like in civ4.
You could have a tactical combat screen where the player selects battle cards to influence the battle.
You could make each unit a "card" and fight games like a card game, selecting what unit to "play".
You could do a tactical board game style combat like the game Victory & Glory Napoleon where you put units in the left flank, center or right flank boxes and then attack with each unit trying to pierce through enemy lines.
You could do a turn based tactical "chess" type of combat like the game Fields of Glory.
You could do like the game Humankind where your stack spreads out on the map and fight the battles in 1upt format.
You could do a tactical combat screen that works like American football, where you select a formation for your stack and the attacker and defender would select "plays" to try to score damage and win the battle.
You could do like Ultimate General games where you have your units on tactical map and move them in real-time.
You could go full Total War and have a large 3D world where you move your units.

With any type of separate tactical combat you would need an option to auto-resolve for players who don't want to spend a lot of time fighting each battle. I do think one issue with tactical combat in civ is that it could detract from the main game. The focus should be strategic, building your empire, not spending time fighting a tactical battle. And if you do rely on the auto-resolve, then you have to make sure the battle results are fair and transparent to the player.

On of the points of stacks is that you can move everything as a unit. Cuts out a lot of clicks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?

Yes that is exactly one of the benefits of stacks. And the bigger the stack, the greater the benefit. If your stacks were only 2-3 units, the benefit might not be that big. But if we had big stacks of say 20 units, the benefit would be huge.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I'd prefer to see limited heterogenous stacks. Stack units of different types to create things like dragoons or mounted archers or Pike-n-Shot.

 

[Heinage]

Third idea: hexagons within hexagons

A single hexagon can fit seven small hexagons inside it

View attachment 693453
Make it possible to make armies of up to seven units occupying one Big Tile and travelling together in a formation, but when they face enemy the map zooms into the area of several neighboring Big Hexes being split into many Small Hexes, and this is the tactical map where two (or more) armies fight.

Benefits: preserves the feeling of fighting "1UPT" on the actual world map which reflects local terrain, but again makes armies much more pleasant to move, code AI for, and have more breathing room and maneuver during battles themselves. It would also enable really cool city sieges, where the entire city is one hex filled with garrison army with its boundaries being walls with defense bonuses invader has to climb - instead of the cities being killer cannons themselves.

This is what I was thinking too. Move units in limited stacks across the map, but battles take place in a more zoomed in local view, taking surrounding terrain features into account so that we don't lose the tactical element of using pinch-points.
Similar to but not exactly the same as Humankind.

 

[1SDANi]

Stacks
Stacks with a hard limit to a small number (ex: 3 units per stack)
Stacks with hard limit to a bigger number (ex: 15 units per stack)
Stacks with soft limit (you can exceed limit but suffer penalties)
Stacks with no limit so you get stacks of doom

You can also do stacks with a unit type that hard counters them so you don't get stacks of doom like Civ 4 did

 

[Core Imposter]

I always wondered why, since civ is strategic level, why you couldn't do a combat system like the old board and die cut counter wargames?

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

i like the combined arms approach of todays armies. 1 unit of each type and we have to research how to do it better , maybe even tie it to a building like military academy to add flying units etc

 

[Patine]

Stack size and mechanics should be based on a combination of terrain, unit types, tech level, key rearched techs, and great generals. A one-size-fits all is platically arbitrary, and an artificially low number ignore the global scope of the map.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

I think civ 7 should have 1 army per tile, rather than 1 unit per tile. Civ 6 made a baby step in that direction with corps and it's own (disappointing) version of armies, it seems logical civ 7 goes further and allows more units into an army, and especially different units.
Combat between those "combined arms" armies could then be handled a few different ways

• The simple (lame) way. Army moves as one unit, each unit attacks with their own attack (ranged would get one shot before melee like Civ5 Impis), divide damage and apply each defender's defense. Not very interesting but can already lead to some choices (should i go full melee for toughest units, put some ranged units for an alpha strike, include cavalry for higher dmg but lower defense). I'm afraid if they go the army route they would implement combat that way but it would probably still be better than either carpets or stacks of doom.
• Tile subdivision. 1UPT works very well for tactical combat but the scale of Civ maps is good for strategic gameplay, not tactical. This could be solved by "zooming" on the map, subdividing the tiles and "unstacking" the army at the start of the combat, allowing each unit to move individually. No need to go full Age of Wonders style with an entire new map and 1/2h long combats but separating the tactical and strategic parts of the game could solve most issues with 1UPT (the devs would still need to properly teach the AI how to move their units but this should be easier on a smaller "arena")
• Tactical "cards". Each unit could be slotted a tactical "card" which would determine their behavior (charge at the enemy, flank the frontline and go for the support units, try to intercept cavalry charges ...) Basically those would be orders to tell each individual unit what you want them to do and rather than move each unit when the combat start, they would follow your orders as best as they can (i've seen this in a space game, maybe Endless Space but not sure, might have been another one). This would solve most of the AI issues at the cost of removing last-minute tactical choices from the player but since Civ is a strategy game rather than a tactical game, that's not necessarily such a big issue. It would also lead to faster combats wich wouldn't be a bad thing in most cases.

 

[Patine]

I think civ 7 should have 1 army per tile, rather than 1 unit per tile. Civ 6 made a baby step in that direction with corps and it's own (disappointing) version of armies, it seems logical civ 7 goes further and allows more units into an army, and especially different units.
Combat between those "combined arms" armies could then be handled a few different ways

• The simple (lame) way. Army moves as one unit, each unit attacks with their own attack (ranged would get one shot before melee like Civ5 Impis), divide damage and apply each defender's defense. Not very interesting but can already lead to some choices (should i go full melee for toughest units, put some ranged units for an alpha strike, include cavalry for higher dmg but lower defense). I'm afraid if they go the army route they would implement combat that way but it would probably still be better than either carpets or stacks of doom.
• Tile subdivision. 1UPT works very well for tactical combat but the scale of Civ maps is good for strategic gameplay, not tactical. This could be solved by "zooming" on the map, subdividing the tiles and "unstacking" the army at the start of the combat, allowing each unit to move individually. No need to go full Age of Wonders style with an entire new map and 1/2h long combats but separating the tactical and strategic parts of the game could solve most issues with 1UPT (the devs would still need to properly teach the AI how to move their units but this should be easier on a smaller "arena")
• Tactical "cards". Each unit could be slotted a tactical "card" which would determine their behavior (charge at the enemy, flank the frontline and go for the support units, try to intercept cavalry charges ...) Basically those would be orders to tell each individual unit what you want them to do and rather than move each unit when the combat start, they would follow your orders as best as they can (i've seen this in a space game, maybe Endless Space but not sure, might have been another one). This would solve most of the AI issues at the cost of removing last-minute tactical choices from the player but since Civ is a strategy game rather than a tactical game, that's not necessarily such a big issue. It would also lead to faster combats wich wouldn't be a bad thing in most cases.

Field Armies and Combined Armies Doctrine are recent, relatively speaking. Big, massive armies are not. Plus, this scheme still ignores the global, strategic scale of a Civ game map.

 

[Gorbles]

Voted for "none of the above". Poll options are very . . . uh, charged?

Anyhow I like VI's move to separating religion out to its own layer. It's not like we haven't had precedence for this in civilian units.

I don't think that's enough though. Handling the movement of large amounts of units needs to be better handled, but I don't have any smart suggestions. Corps and Armies were a step forward but they come into play too late in the game imo.

Age of Empire, AOE in shorts, has made new iteration of its game, without overhauling the core rules.
The fanbase it's there. The game keeps evolving but it is still in the old isometric view.

If it's not broken, don't change it.

Fun fact, from someone quite invested in the AoE scene (and AoE IV specifically): you wouldn't believe how hostile some fans have been to the newest iteration and how it's modernised a franchise whose last mainstream non-remastered offering was in 2005.

In short, it evolved quite a few things. I'm not saying everything worked out, there's plenty of fair criticism. But it did change things, and people still responded positively on the whole, despite the minority.

 

[Patine]

i like the combined arms approach of todays armies. 1 unit of each type and we have to research how to do it better , maybe even tie it to a building like military academy to add flying units etc

This is a very recent doctrine, relatively speaking. What about the majority of the timeline?

 

[Markstar]

I would tie the amount of units per tile to the rank of the unit:

• Private: 1 unit
• Sergeant: 2 units,
• ...
• General: 6 units or so

Additionally, there could be a bonus system for units that have fought together that gets reset whenever you add/remove units.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

I really don't want to see a return to stacks (and I'd be amazed if we did see them return) but there are big problems with the current 1UPT setup too, so I hope they find a middle ground that works. I like a few of the ideas posited in the thread already.

 

[Leyrann]

Hexagons within hexagons don't tessellate.

As a matter of fact, one of the big problems with hexagons is precisely that you can't subdivide them in smaller tiles, preventing Firaxis to explore that path to improve units move in general. You have no problem to divide a square in 4, 9 or 16 smaller squares, but you can't do so with hexagons. It's not the only problem about hexagons for what it's worth.

But hexagons do subdivide into triangles, which then do tessellate.

That's my proposed way of handling things - put six triangles inside every hexagon. You can place a maximum of 6 units on a hexagon (less if there are triangles you can't traverse, e.g. mountains or water), and you also integrate the triangles in other game mechanics. As a rule of thumb, the player interacts with hexagons, but the function of each hexagon depends on it's triangles.

For example, units move from hexagon to hexagon, and if there's combat between two hexagons, all units on both hexagons are involved, but - as mentioned - the unit cap is based on triangles.

Similarly, terrain is divided into the triangles, but your city's worker works a hexagon, where the yield of that hexagon is based on the combined yields of the six triangles. A city is founded on a hexagon, but starts at one (or two or three?) triangles of that hexagon. As the city grows, builds buildings/districts or builds wonders, it starts taking up more individual triangles, and starts to grow towards triangles in adjacent hexagons. Whether this should be an automatic process or the player should get to decide what triangle to build on is to be decided; I'm thinking the former might be nice but it would mean doing away with adjacency bonuses and requirements like Civ VI has them, which are a fun mechanic.

Rivers are no longer 1-dimensional (lines), but have actual width; usually this is just one triangle of width (note that it is not possible for a hexagon to contain triangles on both sides of such a river, so it doesn't complicate movement rules), but large rivers or deltas may be wider than this. Obviously, this means they are also navigable. You could also go with a hybrid mechanic, where small rivers run straight through triangles and either don't or only slightly impair movement, while only larger rivers occupy entire triangles.

Mountains now contain valleys, and are a complex web of traversable and un-traversable terrain, where you constantly have to deal with lower unit limits on tiles, and squeeze through passes at slow pacing until you reach more modern roads, railways and the like. They are also exquisite defensive terrain; for example, you might have five units on a hexagon while the attacking hexagon can only support three units at the same time.

Improvements are partially automatic (farms, pastures, etc naturally 'grow' on triangles that you've claimed and are using, with ways to prioritize certain directions depending on your preferred yields), but you can build 'central' improvements on tiles manually, such as cottages (which, like in Civ 4, grow into hamlets, villages and finally towns), lumbermills, etc. These interact with the passive improvements on their hexagon (e.g. a lumbermill synergizes with a forester/lumberjack, a town synergizes with a farm, etc), or even steer what improvements are built in the first place, and do not remove features on their tile (we can finally have a hamlet inside a forest!).

 

[kaspergm]

With any type of separate tactical combat you would need an option to auto-resolve for players who don't want to spend a lot of time fighting each battle. I do think one issue with tactical combat in civ is that it could detract from the main game. The focus should be strategic, building your empire, not spending time fighting a tactical battle. And if you do rely on the auto-resolve, then you have to make sure the battle results are fair and transparent to the player.

I see this argument a lot when people argue against separate combat map/battlefield, and I'm not bringing this up because I'm religiously for such a feature, but I don't quite understand this argument, at least not when it's supposed to argue why separate combat map would be worse than current 1UPT. I mean, in current 1UPT, you already have to "spend a lot of time fighting each battle", which may or may not detract from the main game. With 1UPT, you need to do exactly all that you will need to do with a separate combat map: You need to decide which unit moves where, which units attacks which, etc. The main differences are that with 1UPT you a) only get one "combat turn" each game turn, whereas with separate combat map, you can get multiple combat turns each game turn, and b) with 1UPT you need to manage the movement of all the units individually also when they are not engaged in combat, whereas with separate combat field, you move the units as one when not engaged in combat.

I'll acknowledge that with regard to a), yes, depending on how many combat turns you have per game turn (Humankind has 3, which feels suitable, HoMaM has infinite, which definitely shifts balance heavily), each individual battle may feel like it takes up more time, but the overall point I think should be to have fewer and larger battles (small 1 vs. 1 unit skimishes obviously could and should be auto-resolved which will make it work like currently). On the other hand, I think that b) will mean a lot of time is saved from moving around armies, so I don't think it's a given that time overall will be that much different than with current 1UPT.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I see this argument a lot when people argue against separate combat map/battlefield, and I'm not bringing this up because I'm religiously for such a feature, but I don't quite understand this argument, at least not when it's supposed to argue why separate combat map would be worse than current 1UPT. I mean, in current 1UPT, you already have to "spend a lot of time fighting each battle", which may or may not detract from the main game. With 1UPT, you need to do exactly all that you will need to do with a separate combat map: You need to decide which unit moves where, which units attacks which, etc. The main differences are that with 1UPT you a) only get one "combat turn" each game turn, whereas with separate combat map, you can get multiple combat turns each game turn, and b) with 1UPT you need to manage the movement of all the units individually also when they are not engaged in combat, whereas with separate combat field, you move the units as one when not engaged in combat.

I'll acknowledge that with regard to a), yes, depending on how many combat turns you have per game turn (Humankind has 3, which feels suitable, HoMaM has infinite, which definitely shifts balance heavily), each individual battle may feel like it takes up more time, but the overall point I think should be to have fewer and larger battles (small 1 vs. 1 unit skimishes obviously could and should be auto-resolved which will make it work like currently). On the other hand, I think that b) will mean a lot of time is saved from moving around armies, so I don't think it's a given that time overall will be that much different than with current 1UPT.

Certainly, in terms of number of turns, it might be the same as 1upt. I actually like Humankind's combat system quite a bit and would not mind it in civ7. But it also has an auto-resolve option. I am just saying there should be an auto-resolve option for players who don't want to directly fight the battles and just want to get on with the rest of the game. In many ways, stacks that unfold into a separate 1upt tactical combat screen with an auto-resolve option is the best of both worlds because it gives players who like stacks, the benefit of less micro, it gives players who like 1upt, the ability to still do the tactical combat that they like and it gives players who don't want to mess with any of it the option to skip the tactical combat entirely.

 

[Uberfrog]

I truly hope that, after what will be 15 years since Civ V’s controversial release, we have neither form of Doom, and instead a creative solution to combat that feels fresh and works better. I would really like to think that Firaxis have been working quite hard on redesigning combat in a way that avoids the problems of either Civ IV, Civ V, or Humankind.

 

[UWHabs]

I really don't want to see a return to stacks (and I'd be amazed if we did see them return) but there are big problems with the current 1UPT setup too, so I hope they find a middle ground that works. I like a few of the ideas posited in the thread already.

Yeah, I'm in a similar boat. I would kind of hate if they came back with unlimited stacking, while it was fine back in the day and i wouldn't boycott the game or anything, I just think adding in that strategic balance you get by having to coordinate your armies now just adds an extra layer rather than just making enough pikemen to make sure opponent cavalry can't get to your stack of cannons.

IMO, I think the answer is basically "one unit type per tile". You get one melee unit, one cavalry unit, one siege unit, and one ranged unit per tile (plus one civilian unit, one religious unit, etc...). Obviously can be debate about which classes combine or not - range+siege together or not? Heavy+Light Cavalry? Melee+Anti-Cav? It will take some battle logic - do you attack the entire stack at once, or just one v one. But I think something like that would solve a large portion of the sliding tile puzzle, since each type of unit shouldn't have too many copies of them in the area.