- And, to be honest, their experience with the Throne Room/Palace in earlier Civs and other games' 'tactical battle maps' give them good cause to take that stance.
Yeah, I am a firm believer that everything should be on the main map. So there should be no separate maps for cities or battles.
Once upon a time I was a firm believer that the tactical battle map was the way to go to get the 'combat' experience in a Civ-style Grand Strategic game. I still like it in theory, but in practice (Humankind, Millenia, CtP among others) it has never lived up to expectations - and it is a massive distraction from the primary focus of a 4X game: planning, building and maintaining a sprawling 'Empire' with the other 3 Xs.
It is interesting how a tactical battle map sounds good in theory but nobody has done it correctly. And I agree, it becomes a big distraction. And yes, civ needs to stay focused on empire building and strategy. Civ should not be a tactical game. That is one criticism I have about 1upt and unpacking cities. I feel like the devs are making civ more tactical, and it is losing the empire strategy part.
Always looking for alternatives, though, because no matter how you slice it, 1UPT is simply grossly out of scale in time and map at Civ-style time periods (even a small battle in Antiquity can take over a century of 'game time'!).
Agree.
I am particularly looking forward to how EU5 handles combat/battles: the older EU games very rightly put battles into a sort of 'black box' - you fed in your army with no more input than adding leaders and all the combat factors you could mass, and all the enemy factors, terrain, disposition, bonuses, maneuvers, et al were figured and the results presented to you. I think with more gamer input (pre-battle dispositions, a table of 'battle plans'?) so that the entire experience doesn't become another mini-Crisis where Strange Things happen out of sight, and some more gamer control over the result ( Pursue them to the death!, Fall back on the Triarii!) some kind of one-turn battle resolution could be made to work and still give (most) gamers enough of a feeling that they were in control (however wrong they turn out to be: the German Troop Leadership manual of 1933 very rightly stated that "Battle is the province of Uncertainty").
I think we are completely on the same page. As I mentioned above, civ should be an empire strategy game. I think battles should be more abstract. So I would be fine with battles being 1 turn affairs between stacks. But I agree battles should not be black boxes. So yes, giving players pre-battle info to help them know the chances of winning is important. And also, giving players some control, like picking a battle plan, would be important.
My vision would be this: The player chooses what units to build and forms them into stacks of "armies". There should be limits on how big an army can be based on population support, tech level, civics, government etc... to avoid "stacks of doom" issues. The player can choose what promotion to give units when they level up. The player can also assign a general to each army. Generals could have special bonuses. Generals could get promotions to make them better. Civs could unlock "great generals" that would act like super generals but would expire after a certain number of turns. Players decide the overall war strategy by moving armies to certain tiles, to attack certain cities, prevent the enemy army from controling a certain area etc... When two armies clash, you get a pre-battle summary that tells you the composition of each army, terrain modifiers, morale, overall army strength, generals, etc... with odds of winning. You pick a battle stance (retreat, hold your ground, advance cautiously, encircle, outflank, frontal assault, all out attack). The game would tell you clearly what effect each stance might have on battle odds. Then the game resolves the battle and gives you a post-battle summary with casualties, how each unit did, what your strongest unit was, your weakest unit etc... This would give the player useful info to shape the war plan going forward.
I think that could work in a civ game. It gives the player lots of strategic control over wars while not bogging down with tactical battles. And hopefully, if you give the player enough info and explanation, then the battle results will make sense and won't feel like a black box. I think it is also important that battles not feel frustrating. So I think the battle rules that affect winning odds should be clear to the player. You want to avoid situations where the player has a 50% of winning and they lose their entire stack in a single turn. That would seem very unfair to the player.
