Boris Gudenuf
Deity
- Or a really different system for Civ VI, but we all know no one is going to bother working on that, don't we?
Some basic premises:
1. This discussion will not include individual Unit Types. You want to go into that, I already started a Thread at Unit Ideas for Civ VII with my thoughts.
2. The basis for what follows is the dis-satisfaction with both Civ VI's 1UPT and Humankind's detailed Battle Management. The first expands each battle and battlefield in time and space until they are ridiculous in any strategic 4X context, the second expands the game in time and micromanagement with every succeeding battle - and, not noticed as much by most gamers, is also very unrealistic in its depiction of battles, especially early battles where the actual 'control' by any leader or general was minimal.
Full Disclosure: I'm a military historian by profession and inclination, and I played miniature wargames almost exclusively for over 30 years, which are almost all tactical battle games: I like detailed battle management systems like that in Humankind, but I find the amount of control I have increasingly jarring the more I play the battles out, and in a game in which the shortest turn is 1 to 100 years, that amount of detail is Misplaced.
3. That said, we could simply abstract all battles: move X number of units into a tile with an opponent's X number of units, the computer tells you what happened in seconds. But what's the fun in that? I mean, really, what's the point of gathering resources and specialized Districts and/or buildings and researching Technologies to give you certain Units when the computer can evaporate them in a second and blandly tell you that the Battle Was Lost and all of that was Meaningless? So, realistic or not in terms of time and distance 'scale', the Battle resolution has to include some input from the gamer, and ideally some reason to put together armies that have some distant relationship to the composition of historical (our game model, after all) armies and forces. A stack of nothing but Heavy Knights might have the maximum number of Combat Factor Points for the Era, but such a force has serious drawbacks against a faster moving enemy, or an enemy force with a more balanced composition: go look up the IRL results of such a force versus the Scots at Bannockburn, or the Swiss at Morgarten, or the Mongols at Leipzig. Any Battle system should be able to take those things into account.
4. I've played boardgames, and it's time to remember the difference between computer games and boardgames. In boardgames, the gamer has to do all the figuring, chart-referring, odds figuring, etc. In a computer game, no matter ho complex the calculations of combat factors, movement, zones of control, special talents, time of day, air density, number of hangovers per unit, all that can be done near-instantly by the computer And We Don't Have To Mess With It in the game itself. Remember that, please, when you read about Posture Matrixes and the interactions between Units and types of Attack and Defense later on.
5. What follows is a basis for Discussion. I think a better Combat System lies somewhere between Civ VI's 1UPT and Humankind's Move Every Unit In The Army Yourself For Multiple Turns Within A Turn. At the moment, I think what follows is such a system, but that doesn't mean it can't be better, or that there isn't a better system out there.
A New Unit Distinction.
First, let's introduce a new distinction for our Combat Units. Civ has always differentiated Units strictly by their weaponry, their physical combat characteristics. We got Spearmen, Swordsmen, (Modern) Infantry, etc. This, of course, assumes and/or implies that all Spearmen, Swordsmen, and Infantry are basically identical except for a few Unique Types: every Spearman from the first bronze-weaponed Sumerians off the Vulture stele in 2500 BCE to the Select Fyrd of Saxon England in 1000 CE are identical on every battlefield. An infantryman with 8 weeks of basic training (in game terms, just tossed out of your Encampment) has all the same capabilities for moving and fighting as an Infantry unit that has been around for 20 years.
This is both unnecessarily Bland and very Wrong.
So, let's introduce a basic distinction: between Professional Units and Amateur Units.
For most of the game, Amateurs are people who show up where you want them (usually) with their own weapons and equipment, but expect to be able to go home and get back to useful work after a relatively short time. They don't cost you, the government, anything to equip, arm, or even, often, to pay, but you cannot keep them Away From Work for very long, or the rest of your Civ/Economy starts to suffer.
They also cannot be expected to use some types of weapons very well, because some weapons require a lot of time to be spent practicing with them, and these guys have to spend most of their time working for a living.
So, simply, Amateurs are those Units that can be 'raised' at the start of a war or, after about the Industrial Era, raised once you declare Mobilization (and take major Diplomatic Hits for doing so unless some neighbor already Mobilized) BUT every such Unit will remove population from your civilian economy, and keep them as military Units for too long and your Civ will start losing Production of all kinds: Gold, Industry, Food.
Professionals are people who fight other people for a living. They are Permanent Units, which means someone else has to work to support them. That makes them very, very expensive to Maintain and it usually means they are also very expensive to equip and arm. They may be the result of Civic/Social Policy Choices: Comitatus was the idea of a Sworn Bodyguard for the leader of a Civ, which appears to date back to the Neolithic or even earlier. That means every Civ Leader whose Civ adopted Comitatus Civic gets a Professional Unit - but also has to pay constantly to keep them. A Warrior Aristocracy will also get you Professional Units, but you will have to pay them with (possibly) political control over parts of your land and its output in Industry, Gold, and/or Food.
Professional Units then, are expensive but permanent, and that in turn means they can get Promotions and become more and more proficient at this Battle Stuff over time - they don't go home after the fight and forget everything, the way Amateurs do.
Some weapons and equipment take so much practice to use well that only Profssionals can use them. Swords are probably the first example that appears in the game: an army composed of a majority of Swordsmen Units will be Professional, and Expensive: keeping 50 Legions of swordsmen around nearly bankrupted the Roman Empire in the end, and no other Empire (Persia, China, etc) even tried to rely on Swordsmen. Cavalry is another example: unless people have a civilian job that requires them to ride a lot, learning to ride a horse and use weapons effectively from horseback takes a lot of time and practice: Pastoral civs, in which every adult, male and female, rides everywhere and the males mostly have to defend their families and flocks and herds from horseback, can provide lots of horsemen easily. People who live in cities, not so much.
So, when determining the 'Factors' of a unit, whether they are Professional or Amateur is usually almost as important as whether they are armed with Spears or Axes, with Slings or Bows.
Armies and Units.
A single tile on the game map represents a lot of ground. The size of a City Center on it is exaggerated so we can tell what type of Palace or Monument is in there, but the tile represents at least several hundred square kilometers. That means that a single Unit wandering through the tile does not put a lot of stress on the neighborhood unless it is trying to: individual Units are not Armies, and shouldn't be treated the same way for movement, maintenance, and supply.
They will, however, be treated nearly identical for Battle, which is defined as Entering the Same Tile as the enemy. Even today, two forces a hundred or more kilometers apart are rarely in battle and in 2000 or 1000 BCE they might as well be on different continents. So, the 'battle mechanic' is the same: you enter the same tile, a battle is resolved, and maybe the Unit disappears, or keeps moving, or moves back to the tile it moved into battle from - or, as the patriotic historians will say later:
"Retreated triumphantly before a demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter confusion"
An Army is two or more Units. How many more depends on the Technology, Social/Civic Structure, and infrastructure available to support it. Armies have to be fed. Later, they also need near-continuous supplies of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, publicity officers, etc. That means you cannot simply stack up everybody in your Civ with a spear into a single Stack and roll forward: the maximum number that can move - and stay alive - in the stack will vary from start of game on, and will be especially restricted by the type of terrain in the tile. Try to move an army through the Desert in 2000 BCE, and Kiss Those Units Goodbye, 'cause there is nothing to eat there, and no technology available at the time to get food to them, unless the desert is on the coast and you have a Fleet. Try moving through Tundra, and even a Fleet won't save them, because the coast is Frozen. Basically, some terrain will not be fought over by anything bigger than a single Unit for a good part of the early game.
I suggest that the basic 'stacking limit' or Army Size should start at 4 Units. That gives you enough choices to include Heavy Infantry, a Ranged Unit, maybe a Scout or Horseman - a 'balanced' force if you so desire. Later, with better mechanisms for Command and Control, supply wagons, pack camels, Roads, etc the maximum size will go up. In fact, by the Modern Era, if there is a railroad through the tile leading back to a number of your cities, it may be quite large, BUT it will never be Infinite.
Modern Armies are huge compared to armies of antiquity, but they also cover much more space per warrior/soldier. Dupuy Institute's calculations were that a Classical host of 100,000 men covered about 1 square kilometer. A 100,000 man force in World War Two covered 3000 square kilometers, and even in the Napoleonic Wars (early gunpowder), 100,000 soldiers covered about 20 square kilometers.
So, no matter how you figure it, you cannot cram too many Units into a single tile and still expect them to fight with the weapons they have at the time. This is actually very handy for us gamers, because it means the Stack of Doom is automatically Excluded from discussion: it is impossible after a certain size of Stack, for each given Era.
One thing that Humankind almost got right, was that increases in Army Size were tied to Technologies, not to Eras. On the other hand, because that game (like too many games of all kinds) didn't model the 'soft factors' of command and control, communications, chain of command organization, etc at all, many of the increases were tied to the wrong things. We can do better, and specific 'triggers' for Army Size increase and Supply Factors will be discussed at length later.
For now, suffice to say that you will start being able to put 4 Units into an Army, and put Armies into most tiles with some exceptions of tiles that simply won't support any large group of people: desert and tundra for two of the more obvious examples.
I'm going to split this here, because the next part is the core of the New Battle System.
Some basic premises:
1. This discussion will not include individual Unit Types. You want to go into that, I already started a Thread at Unit Ideas for Civ VII with my thoughts.
2. The basis for what follows is the dis-satisfaction with both Civ VI's 1UPT and Humankind's detailed Battle Management. The first expands each battle and battlefield in time and space until they are ridiculous in any strategic 4X context, the second expands the game in time and micromanagement with every succeeding battle - and, not noticed as much by most gamers, is also very unrealistic in its depiction of battles, especially early battles where the actual 'control' by any leader or general was minimal.
Full Disclosure: I'm a military historian by profession and inclination, and I played miniature wargames almost exclusively for over 30 years, which are almost all tactical battle games: I like detailed battle management systems like that in Humankind, but I find the amount of control I have increasingly jarring the more I play the battles out, and in a game in which the shortest turn is 1 to 100 years, that amount of detail is Misplaced.
3. That said, we could simply abstract all battles: move X number of units into a tile with an opponent's X number of units, the computer tells you what happened in seconds. But what's the fun in that? I mean, really, what's the point of gathering resources and specialized Districts and/or buildings and researching Technologies to give you certain Units when the computer can evaporate them in a second and blandly tell you that the Battle Was Lost and all of that was Meaningless? So, realistic or not in terms of time and distance 'scale', the Battle resolution has to include some input from the gamer, and ideally some reason to put together armies that have some distant relationship to the composition of historical (our game model, after all) armies and forces. A stack of nothing but Heavy Knights might have the maximum number of Combat Factor Points for the Era, but such a force has serious drawbacks against a faster moving enemy, or an enemy force with a more balanced composition: go look up the IRL results of such a force versus the Scots at Bannockburn, or the Swiss at Morgarten, or the Mongols at Leipzig. Any Battle system should be able to take those things into account.
4. I've played boardgames, and it's time to remember the difference between computer games and boardgames. In boardgames, the gamer has to do all the figuring, chart-referring, odds figuring, etc. In a computer game, no matter ho complex the calculations of combat factors, movement, zones of control, special talents, time of day, air density, number of hangovers per unit, all that can be done near-instantly by the computer And We Don't Have To Mess With It in the game itself. Remember that, please, when you read about Posture Matrixes and the interactions between Units and types of Attack and Defense later on.
5. What follows is a basis for Discussion. I think a better Combat System lies somewhere between Civ VI's 1UPT and Humankind's Move Every Unit In The Army Yourself For Multiple Turns Within A Turn. At the moment, I think what follows is such a system, but that doesn't mean it can't be better, or that there isn't a better system out there.
A New Unit Distinction.
First, let's introduce a new distinction for our Combat Units. Civ has always differentiated Units strictly by their weaponry, their physical combat characteristics. We got Spearmen, Swordsmen, (Modern) Infantry, etc. This, of course, assumes and/or implies that all Spearmen, Swordsmen, and Infantry are basically identical except for a few Unique Types: every Spearman from the first bronze-weaponed Sumerians off the Vulture stele in 2500 BCE to the Select Fyrd of Saxon England in 1000 CE are identical on every battlefield. An infantryman with 8 weeks of basic training (in game terms, just tossed out of your Encampment) has all the same capabilities for moving and fighting as an Infantry unit that has been around for 20 years.
This is both unnecessarily Bland and very Wrong.
So, let's introduce a basic distinction: between Professional Units and Amateur Units.
For most of the game, Amateurs are people who show up where you want them (usually) with their own weapons and equipment, but expect to be able to go home and get back to useful work after a relatively short time. They don't cost you, the government, anything to equip, arm, or even, often, to pay, but you cannot keep them Away From Work for very long, or the rest of your Civ/Economy starts to suffer.
They also cannot be expected to use some types of weapons very well, because some weapons require a lot of time to be spent practicing with them, and these guys have to spend most of their time working for a living.
So, simply, Amateurs are those Units that can be 'raised' at the start of a war or, after about the Industrial Era, raised once you declare Mobilization (and take major Diplomatic Hits for doing so unless some neighbor already Mobilized) BUT every such Unit will remove population from your civilian economy, and keep them as military Units for too long and your Civ will start losing Production of all kinds: Gold, Industry, Food.
Professionals are people who fight other people for a living. They are Permanent Units, which means someone else has to work to support them. That makes them very, very expensive to Maintain and it usually means they are also very expensive to equip and arm. They may be the result of Civic/Social Policy Choices: Comitatus was the idea of a Sworn Bodyguard for the leader of a Civ, which appears to date back to the Neolithic or even earlier. That means every Civ Leader whose Civ adopted Comitatus Civic gets a Professional Unit - but also has to pay constantly to keep them. A Warrior Aristocracy will also get you Professional Units, but you will have to pay them with (possibly) political control over parts of your land and its output in Industry, Gold, and/or Food.
Professional Units then, are expensive but permanent, and that in turn means they can get Promotions and become more and more proficient at this Battle Stuff over time - they don't go home after the fight and forget everything, the way Amateurs do.
Some weapons and equipment take so much practice to use well that only Profssionals can use them. Swords are probably the first example that appears in the game: an army composed of a majority of Swordsmen Units will be Professional, and Expensive: keeping 50 Legions of swordsmen around nearly bankrupted the Roman Empire in the end, and no other Empire (Persia, China, etc) even tried to rely on Swordsmen. Cavalry is another example: unless people have a civilian job that requires them to ride a lot, learning to ride a horse and use weapons effectively from horseback takes a lot of time and practice: Pastoral civs, in which every adult, male and female, rides everywhere and the males mostly have to defend their families and flocks and herds from horseback, can provide lots of horsemen easily. People who live in cities, not so much.
So, when determining the 'Factors' of a unit, whether they are Professional or Amateur is usually almost as important as whether they are armed with Spears or Axes, with Slings or Bows.
Armies and Units.
A single tile on the game map represents a lot of ground. The size of a City Center on it is exaggerated so we can tell what type of Palace or Monument is in there, but the tile represents at least several hundred square kilometers. That means that a single Unit wandering through the tile does not put a lot of stress on the neighborhood unless it is trying to: individual Units are not Armies, and shouldn't be treated the same way for movement, maintenance, and supply.
They will, however, be treated nearly identical for Battle, which is defined as Entering the Same Tile as the enemy. Even today, two forces a hundred or more kilometers apart are rarely in battle and in 2000 or 1000 BCE they might as well be on different continents. So, the 'battle mechanic' is the same: you enter the same tile, a battle is resolved, and maybe the Unit disappears, or keeps moving, or moves back to the tile it moved into battle from - or, as the patriotic historians will say later:
"Retreated triumphantly before a demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter confusion"
An Army is two or more Units. How many more depends on the Technology, Social/Civic Structure, and infrastructure available to support it. Armies have to be fed. Later, they also need near-continuous supplies of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, publicity officers, etc. That means you cannot simply stack up everybody in your Civ with a spear into a single Stack and roll forward: the maximum number that can move - and stay alive - in the stack will vary from start of game on, and will be especially restricted by the type of terrain in the tile. Try to move an army through the Desert in 2000 BCE, and Kiss Those Units Goodbye, 'cause there is nothing to eat there, and no technology available at the time to get food to them, unless the desert is on the coast and you have a Fleet. Try moving through Tundra, and even a Fleet won't save them, because the coast is Frozen. Basically, some terrain will not be fought over by anything bigger than a single Unit for a good part of the early game.
I suggest that the basic 'stacking limit' or Army Size should start at 4 Units. That gives you enough choices to include Heavy Infantry, a Ranged Unit, maybe a Scout or Horseman - a 'balanced' force if you so desire. Later, with better mechanisms for Command and Control, supply wagons, pack camels, Roads, etc the maximum size will go up. In fact, by the Modern Era, if there is a railroad through the tile leading back to a number of your cities, it may be quite large, BUT it will never be Infinite.
Modern Armies are huge compared to armies of antiquity, but they also cover much more space per warrior/soldier. Dupuy Institute's calculations were that a Classical host of 100,000 men covered about 1 square kilometer. A 100,000 man force in World War Two covered 3000 square kilometers, and even in the Napoleonic Wars (early gunpowder), 100,000 soldiers covered about 20 square kilometers.
So, no matter how you figure it, you cannot cram too many Units into a single tile and still expect them to fight with the weapons they have at the time. This is actually very handy for us gamers, because it means the Stack of Doom is automatically Excluded from discussion: it is impossible after a certain size of Stack, for each given Era.
One thing that Humankind almost got right, was that increases in Army Size were tied to Technologies, not to Eras. On the other hand, because that game (like too many games of all kinds) didn't model the 'soft factors' of command and control, communications, chain of command organization, etc at all, many of the increases were tied to the wrong things. We can do better, and specific 'triggers' for Army Size increase and Supply Factors will be discussed at length later.
For now, suffice to say that you will start being able to put 4 Units into an Army, and put Armies into most tiles with some exceptions of tiles that simply won't support any large group of people: desert and tundra for two of the more obvious examples.
I'm going to split this here, because the next part is the core of the New Battle System.
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