I like this solution to the gameplay vs realism issue with the observation balloon. (Aside from the name not making any sense once the graphic changes, "observation balloon" is a drone? Anyway they could use a more neutral name for it if they do the graphics change)
Combined Arms - RIP?
- Thread starter Lyoncet
- Start date
I like this solution to the gameplay vs realism issue with the observation balloon. (Aside from the name not making any sense once the graphic changes, "observation balloon" is a drone? Anyway they could use a more neutral name for it if they do the graphics change)
ThERat
Deity
I like this concept as it gives a lot more variety to warmongers like me. Civ 5 had nothing of that sort really.
My worry is whether the AI knows how to make use of such mechanics
My worry is whether the AI knows how to make use of such mechanics
Cheong Jia Sheng
Chieftain
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2016
- Messages
- 2
Observer?
MistyRonin
Warlord
I always build triplanes in Civ V, they are pretty useful.
On the observation balloon subject, although an upgrade to drone would be cool, I don't see the problem with them in the information era.
After all, nowadays you can find armed forces that use them widely, for instance the US in Iraq and Afghanistan use aerostats, which allow commanders to have permanent eyes in the sky.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/w...-spy-balloons-now-part-of-landscape.html?_r=0
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Se...lion-aerostat-support-contract/8671470146566/
http://cimsec.org/strategic-role-tactical-maritime-aerostats-ensuring-persistent-surveillance/26214
Russia too:
https://sputniknews.com/science/201606031040716862-russia-military-blimps-surveillance/
And China:
http://www.popsci.com/china-tests-its-largest-airship
On the observation balloon subject, although an upgrade to drone would be cool, I don't see the problem with them in the information era.
After all, nowadays you can find armed forces that use them widely, for instance the US in Iraq and Afghanistan use aerostats, which allow commanders to have permanent eyes in the sky.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/w...-spy-balloons-now-part-of-landscape.html?_r=0
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Se...lion-aerostat-support-contract/8671470146566/
http://cimsec.org/strategic-role-tactical-maritime-aerostats-ensuring-persistent-surveillance/26214
Russia too:
https://sputniknews.com/science/201606031040716862-russia-military-blimps-surveillance/
And China:
http://www.popsci.com/china-tests-its-largest-airship
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I don't think so, I think he was referring to what observation balloons should be at that point, rather than what's in the game. At least I've seen no AWACS anywhere but saw a few observation balloons tagging along in the information era..
jjkrause84
King
I think all of this is just shy of admitting the obvious: one way or another Civ needs stacking to work properly. The sooner the devs just accept that the sooner we can have a functional and smoothly-flowing game.
If you build a warrior you should be able to sally forth out of the city and attack a barbarian that same turn....regardless of the situation (for example).
If you build a warrior you should be able to sally forth out of the city and attack a barbarian that same turn....regardless of the situation (for example).
Hear hear!
We had reasonable, limited, interesting, and fully functional unit stacking in the 20th century (OK it was 1999) in Call to Power, which incidentally was from the same team that made Civ. The sooner we can get back to something closer to those lines, the better.
Olleus
Deity
The problem with limited stacking in either CtP or similar is that it is always optimal to stack maximally. Civ6 gets around that by making stacking very expensive (build 2 or 3 units) for a modest increase in strength. If each unit behaves independently and/or at full strength, there is no reason not to stack as many as you can. Concentrating power is in 99.999% of the time the best thing to do (unless you have rpg area of effects, which I think would feel at out of place in Civ and weren't enough to prevent stacks of doom in Civ4).
Say the only units you can build are warriors and slingers and the limit is 3 per tile. Unless you're army is a single unit or you are fighting such a weak opponent that you don't need to concentrate your forces (in which case the detailed rules of combat don't matter - you'll win massively anyway) then you want to hit that limit and so on a tile you can have
3 warriors
2 warriors and 1 slinger
1 warrior and 2 slingers
3 slingers
and you'll want to keep those units stacked almost always. As an example, look at how stacks of doom were by far and away the best strategy in Civ4. So you might as well consider each four combinations a single unit. By looking at relative strengths, we can call them
warrior
warrior-slinger
slinger-warrior
slinger
which is exactly the same system as in 1UPT except that we have two extra units. Now ask yourselves, would Civ6 be a better game if it was flooded with a ton of units per era like the warrior-slinger or the slinger-warrior? The answer is no, adding useless redundancy is just clutter that makes the game ugly and adds no strategy what so ever.
So if you want limited UpT you need a proper system rather than units behaving independently. The CtP system is even worse in this regard, adding more units in a stack of 9 made each unit fight better (being in a more ideal position on the battle line), so it encouraged the player to stick to full stacks even more. Which, as I've just shown, is identical to a system with 1UpT and tons of very similar units.
IIRC, Civ2 had an interesting system. Unlimited stacking, but if 1 unit died while defending, they would all die. This gives a strong incentive to not stack too much by making the effective defensive value of each unit very weak when stacked. The problem with that is it makes combat hugely random, a single bad dice roll can lose you the entire war even if you had a superior army. This probably isn't balanced, and definitely isn't fun. There's a reason Civ5 changed combat so that it didn't always result in a unit dying, it helps smooth out the luck.
Having limited stacking in a way which is strategically meaningful and fun is hard, and I haven't seen any good proposals for it on these forums or elsewhere.
</end pontification>
Say the only units you can build are warriors and slingers and the limit is 3 per tile. Unless you're army is a single unit or you are fighting such a weak opponent that you don't need to concentrate your forces (in which case the detailed rules of combat don't matter - you'll win massively anyway) then you want to hit that limit and so on a tile you can have
3 warriors
2 warriors and 1 slinger
1 warrior and 2 slingers
3 slingers
and you'll want to keep those units stacked almost always. As an example, look at how stacks of doom were by far and away the best strategy in Civ4. So you might as well consider each four combinations a single unit. By looking at relative strengths, we can call them
warrior
warrior-slinger
slinger-warrior
slinger
which is exactly the same system as in 1UPT except that we have two extra units. Now ask yourselves, would Civ6 be a better game if it was flooded with a ton of units per era like the warrior-slinger or the slinger-warrior? The answer is no, adding useless redundancy is just clutter that makes the game ugly and adds no strategy what so ever.
So if you want limited UpT you need a proper system rather than units behaving independently. The CtP system is even worse in this regard, adding more units in a stack of 9 made each unit fight better (being in a more ideal position on the battle line), so it encouraged the player to stick to full stacks even more. Which, as I've just shown, is identical to a system with 1UpT and tons of very similar units.
IIRC, Civ2 had an interesting system. Unlimited stacking, but if 1 unit died while defending, they would all die. This gives a strong incentive to not stack too much by making the effective defensive value of each unit very weak when stacked. The problem with that is it makes combat hugely random, a single bad dice roll can lose you the entire war even if you had a superior army. This probably isn't balanced, and definitely isn't fun. There's a reason Civ5 changed combat so that it didn't always result in a unit dying, it helps smooth out the luck.
Having limited stacking in a way which is strategically meaningful and fun is hard, and I haven't seen any good proposals for it on these forums or elsewhere.
</end pontification>
I'm certainly not saying "We should take a 17-year-old system and put it into a blockbuster 4X game." My point is that we've seen the stacks-vs-carpet line towed previously, and such a system can handily solve some of the major problems of both.
That said, I don't know if it's a problem if 1 stack of N units is better than N stacks of 1. My main issue 1UPT in Civ is that it doesn't scale up well as the game progresses, especially on high difficulties. If you can stack up to, say 5 units, gated by tech, and that stack of 5 is better than 5 stacks of 1, I think that's great. In the early game, you're roaming with your single-warrior unit backed by single-archer unit. Once you're in the lategame and rocking 20 cities, your stacks have collapsed in on themselves a bit so you're not managing 20 times as many units crammed onto the gamespace. I'm fine with a stack being better than a carpet, as long as stacks work in an interesting way and don't detract from gameplay (like they do in Civ III and IV). Granted, that's the direction Civ VI is moving in with support units, Corps, and Armies. I just don't expect that to be enough to counter the carpet of doom slogfest of V, especially on higher difficulties. And from the outside, a straight +strength seems less interesting to me than having units working in tandem in some way.
Completely agreed on Civ II, though! That and and Alpha Centauri's "nuke the stack on loss" system was pretty good, if perhaps a little extreme.
Olleus
Deity
Sounds like the problem you mention is best solved by hugely increasing the production cost of later units, so the number of units on the battlefield stays roughly constant. Civ6 appears to be doing this (pikeman is 180 hammers to a swordsman 45 iirc). Combined with corps and armies, this should keep the number of independent units on the battlefield down.
Ahh, that's interesting. I knew the cost increase was more marked but I didn't realize it was that steep. Perhaps you're right!
I'll love to see how balance works out between that and what looks like shifting to a logarithmic scale for combat strength.
maurcus
Warlord
- Joined
- May 24, 2012
- Messages
- 245
If you are looking for an interesting way to do stacking, I would suggest you look at the board game 'Russian Front'. The gist of it is that infinite units may stack; but only one battle may be fought on any given tile per turn, and if one unit in the stack is forced to withdraw then all of that sides combatants must withdraw. Coupling that with roughly 1/3 of a battles odds causing a side to retreat, and time being an uber important resource produced a system where you need to break up your forces to stop them from being stopped by an unlucky roll, while still encouraging a limited amount of stacking to stop your units being cut down piecemeal. (There were other reasons to separate your troops; such as supply lines and zones of control).
Though it wouldn't work perfectly in a game like civilization, it is a good system to allow stacking, without making it optimal.
Though it wouldn't work perfectly in a game like civilization, it is a good system to allow stacking, without making it optimal.
Add a supply and front lines mechanism and then maximum stacking on one tile is no more the best choice in all case as you'll have to maintain a front line to prevent your supply lines to get cut.
MistyRonin
Warlord
Check the 4x game Oriental Empires, it allows you something similar.
Personally I think that 1UT with slight modifications is the best way. And seems that Civ VI got close to the perfect formula.
jjkrause84
King
You're vastly over-complicating this.
Yes, being more powerful is always preferable....so? Units cost money, and must be produced. They are a natural trade-off.
War is rarely won by tactical brilliance (certainly not in the modern age). It is won by whomever brings the most stuff and dukes it out the longest. In Civ the lack of stacking means not only pointless traffic jams, but kills any sense of scale and scope. Four legions should not be able to take over the world.
Players will still have to spread out to take advantage of ZOC and also to simply bring more units to the fray than the stacking limit allows. Having stacking start small (2-4 units maybe) and grow over time also helps reflect the larger armies of later periods of history. There is actual GROWTH and development, something almost totally absent from Civ 5.
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