Could unit diversity be simplified for CIV7?

[karakzorn]

Remove anti-air, medic, truck and military engineers.
All these units add more confusion to CIV6, when I’d say war in CIV6 is already quite complicated, and adding such niche specific one of a kind units only expands this problem.
Instead I’d like to suggest adding some new military related abilities to worker units:
Workers can construct sapper efforts when next to enemy cities, doing damage to the walls.
Workers can construct trenches, which reduce damage taken by units.
Workers can construct minefields, which work exactly like they do in Red death Preppers.
Workers can construct train rails.


Can urban defences be replaced?
The game currently has walls, medieval walls and renaissance walls and then for some reason magically cities gain Urban defences.

Considering cities are incredibly hard to take already, as cities have a ranged attack for some reason and deal considerable damage to melee units, I prefer to tweak some of this.

I’d like urban defences to be removed, and instead introduce a modern era wall upgrade “bomb bunkers”. And to clarify, there is no more seperate "wall health", building walls only increases the city combat strength.

Naturally this building only significantly increases the city combat strength against air-attack, but that’s the point. Instead the lategame introduces new ways for workers to add defenses to your main army. Just like in real life, the army forms the city defense on the frontline, no longer are armies held up inside walls.


Make airforce intercepting a toggle, not taking a unit action.
You have no way of telling if the enemy airforce is going to strike or if they are on interception. If you attack with your airforce, you can be punished for basically using them as an enemy then has an opening to attack back. This should not be the case.

Instead I suggest making it so interception is a toggleable option, meaning you can attack with your airforce as much as you want, and still intercept in the same turn.

Furthermore, when an air unit strikes a ground unit that is within range of a enemy air unit that has intercept toggled on, that ground unit will be unharmed, and instead the air units will fight one another.

You can still intercept while healing with your airforce. Also, the melee stat is used to determine how much damage the air unit and the ground unit exchange, this means without an airforce, your ranged ground units in particular are vulnerable to the enemy airforce, just like in reality.


Simplify the airforce to a single unit type: fighters, remove the bomber unit type.
This might sound a bit weird, but currently when building an airforce, things get very confusing very quickly, it becomes difficult to judge if you want to build fighters or bombers, as bombers work best against CIVS without an airforce, while fighters are NEEDED against a CIV with an airforce.

Furthermore, a bomber simply punishes other CIVS without an airforce even more by doubling down on abusing an airforce. While this is thematic it adds confusion and causes frustration. Simplification of the airforce and making it more user friendly both rewards players for building one, and makes it a lot easier to program with the AI.

As with my suggested changes, the AI only needs to understand to build a single type of airforce unit, deploy it close to the frontlines, have interception toggled on, and attack vulnerable units when it can.

 

[GeneralZift]

Having to bring workers to the front line is what's going to make the game confusing.
If we're talking about Civ6, I mean, I can agree that there's quite a lot of useless extra units, but that doesn't mean we need to literally bin everything.
Especially lost you at "Remove Bombers"

Improvements / changes to the wall system I'm fairly neutral on.

Make airforce intercepting a toggle, not taking a unit action.
You have no way of telling if the enemy airforce is going to strike or if they are on interception. If you attack with your airforce, you can be punished for basically using them as an enemy then has an opening to attack back. This should not be the case.

Instead I suggest making it so interception is a toggleable option, meaning you can attack with your airforce as much as you want, and still intercept in the same turn.

Furthermore, when an air unit strikes a ground unit that is within range of a enemy air unit that has intercept toggled on, that ground unit will be unharmed, and instead the air units will fight one another.

You can still intercept while healing with your airforce. Also, the melee stat is used to determine how much damage the air unit and the ground unit exchange, this means without an airforce, your ranged ground units in particular are vulnerable to the enemy airforce, just like in reality.

This sounds like it would remove any nuance from late game military combat. For one, how are the jets at home being repaired and on the front lines intercepting enemy jets simultaneously?
For two, this would be totally unbalanced and comes down to "who has the most jets doing the attacking, intercepting, healing, backflips, doing taxes" all at the same time?
I think the entire point of having an "intercept" or "attack" action is to enable players to decide if they are playing aggressively or defensively (or healing is the third option)
This actually lets players with much less jets win the air game, because at least some choice and options are going on...

Also addendum; medics, drones, battering rams, whatever are pretty cool units (varying in usefulness), and the only unit I would rework or remove is the military engineer

 

[BuchiTaton]

Agree in the general idea.
I think there are too many units specially for the one unit per tile system. But I would rather make the militar units build their own infrastructure, this and other support abilities can be allowed by their proper Techs>Promotions. Also about the Bombers, I would keep them for sure.

 

[InsidiousMage]

All these units add more confusion to CIV6, when I’d say war in CIV6 is already quite complicated, and adding such niche specific one of a kind units only expands this problem.

There is nothing complicated about these units. Trucks give you extra movement, medics provide extra healing, Engineers build military infrastructure. Admittedly, Engineers are kind of useless outside of building railroads but there is nothing complicated about them and they do provide very strong benefits in the late game, especially Trucks.

Workers can construct sapper efforts when next to enemy cities, doing damage to the walls.
Workers can construct trenches, which reduce damage taken by units.
Workers can construct minefields, which work exactly like they do in Red death Preppers.
Workers can construct train rails.

Only the last thing on this list makes sense for workers to be able to do. The rest of it is generally stuff that soldiers would do and that's what military engineers are supposed to represent in-game. Giving these functions to Workers would just means they would never get used because there are better things to use your workers on. And giving these abilities to military units like infantry would result in the same thing since military units are better used to attack cities, not build improvements. Engineers serve a useful function, like it or not.

Naturally this building only significantly increases the city combat strength against air-attack, but that’s the point. Instead the lategame introduces new ways for workers to add defenses to your main army. Just like in real life, the army forms the city defense on the frontline, no longer are armies held up inside walls.

This also just a bad idea. Like, the game is based around a city having health and defense and changing that at the very end is just bad game design. It adds a lot more tedium to the game for no real gain outside of it being more "realistic," which should almost never trump gameplay considerations. If you are going to break an established patter in the game, there needs to be a good reason for it and these ideas are not good reasons.

Instead I suggest making it so interception is a toggleable option, meaning you can attack with your airforce as much as you want, and still intercept in the same turn.

This kind of breaks the way military units work. No other unit can attack and then defend other units. If you want to have all anti-aircraft functions be given to Fighters, then they can either attack or defend, not do both.

This might sound a bit weird, but currently when building an airforce, things get very confusing very quickly, it becomes difficult to judge if you want to build fighters or bombers, as bombers work best against CIVS without an airforce, while fighters are NEEDED against a CIV with an airforce.

No, its really simple. Bombers are for attacking enemies cities and infrastructure while Fighters are for attacking enemy units.

 

[karakzorn]

Those are good arguments, bombers don't need to changed.

And the ability to heal and still intercept is indeed pretty toxic, players will just keep their airforce healing forever.

However, I just want to point out that seeing the huge list of units, with units like “anti-air” and “medic” or “truck” just gets silly at some point.

And I don’t think planes should really get an effective counter, in modern war, an airforce is important. I think industrial age artillery, with 3 tile range should be powerful, but countered by biplanes. Introducing a late game rock-paper-scissors. Where ranged ground units become much more powerful, but also hard-countered by the enemy airforce.

And yeah, I don’t like how tanky cities are in the late game, especially considering it is rather unrealistic. Land units should get more methods of building defences such as minefields to act as the cities defensive perimeter. I thought workers to do that to add more complexity and creativity to them.


I personally think the drone should become the information era helicopter replacement.

Not to mention maybe the amount of different unit types should be simplified:

Scout (upgrades into rangers, spy, special forces, is invisible and ignores borders, can pillage tiles without causing war) (replaces spy mechanic, a way of making spies more map-oriented and giving scouts a later game purpose)

Melee infantry (warrior, spearmen, men at arms, musket men, line infantry, infantry, mech infantry)

Ranged infantry (slinger, archer, crossbowmen, cannon, field cannon, artillery, rocket artillery)
(artillery is introduced when airforces are introduced, having 3 range and fire when not having moved in the turn)

Cavalry (chariot, horsemen, knights, dragoons, landship, tank, helicopter)

Air (biplane, fighter, jet fighter)

Notice the absence of siege specific units, as they fulfil one single role and are quite frustrating to manage, as the game expects you to have siege units when you want to take cities or press the attack, making them both mandatory, but weakening your army while being extremely inflexible.

I also think everything should require strategic resources, but strategic resources shouldn’t be as rare, meaning everyone can get them, but some have more than others.

I understand that my suggestions are quite radical and they should be taken with a grain of salt, however I want to explore the possibility of intergrating certain unit types with one another to reduce the amount of unit type spam the game currently has. It becomes extremely difficult to estimate if a unit is from a previous, inferior era, or form the current superior era and I'd like all units to be one the same line and simplify the unit diversity. This should also help the AI better comprehend warfare.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Also addendum; medics, drones, battering rams, whatever are pretty cool units (varying in usefulness), and the only unit I would rework or remove is the military engineer

Giving the ability to build improvements to other units, like melee units, or even give this as a generic ability to Great Engineers, would be easier.

Ranged infantry (slinger, archer, crossbowmen, cannon, field cannon, artillery, rocket artillery)
(artillery is introduced when airforces are introduced, having 3 range and fire when not having moved in the turn)

Cavalry (chariot, horsemen, knights, dragoons, landship, tank, helicopter)

Air (biplane, fighter, jet fighter)

Notice the absence of siege specific units, as they fulfil one single role and are quite frustrating to manage, as the game expects you to have siege units when you want to take cities or press the attack, making them both mandatory, but weakening your army while being extremely inflexible.

If you personally want to combine ranged and siege, that's fine but why leave out the catapult? Is the Archer supposed to be the Classical Era unit?

 

[GeneralZift]

I'm really against to combining Siege and Ranged.
They're supposed to be totally different roles.

 

[BuchiTaton]

I would also keep Siege and Range as different combat units.
Any support unit would be promotion like for the stats and abilities of each army.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

You want simple? I'll give yez simple.

Been thinking about this since I played with the new Millennia game, which on the battlefield simply divides units into Line and Ranged.

So, I'm thinking use Army sized stacks on a battlefield display, and divide all combat units into three Classes only:
Ranged
Line
Mobile

Compared to current Civ VI, the breakdown of Unit Types might be something like this:
Ranged: Ranged, Siege
Line: Melee, Anti-Cav, Heavy Cav
Mobile: Recon, Light Cav

The Battlefield display would be divided into a Center and Flanks in three 'lines' - Front, Support, and Reserve, and where you can 'deploy' or place units at the start is based on the Class of the unit:

Normally, Line has to deploy in the Front Center
Mobile can deploy in Front Flanks or Reserve
Ranged deploys in the Support Line

Someone always has to deploy in Front, so if you have no Line units in your army/stack, Mobile or Ranged (in that order of priority) will have to deploy there. (And if Ranged are in the front line against anything else, they are not long for this world)

Any non-combat 'Support' has to deploy in Reserve.

Any unit 'special attributes' like Anti-Cav or special terrain movement will be applied by individual unit, not by Class. That allows much more flexibility in defining Unique Units and providing Promotions that actually reflect Gained Experience.

Some units, both 'regular' and 'unique' could adjust the Class. For instance, Horse Archers, though having a (short) ranged factor, could be defined as Moble because of their speed and deploy in Front to shoot and retire - the infamous 'Parthian Shot' built into the game. Alexander's Hetairoi, athough 'light cavalry' could be defined as Line because they were pure Shock Cavalry and always charged right in instead of maneuvering on the flank - ordinary Knights could have the same 'variable' Class distinction. Modern German Panzers (if a Unique Unit) could deploy as either Mobile or Line because of their tactical flexibilty - and so on.

Once deployed and given a basic Way To Fight The Battle, the battle would be run automatically to keep the game from bogging down in interminable 'mini-games' - But, if you can't stand not having complete control, you could opt to run the units in individual battles.

Basically, I'm trying to come up with a combat system that combines the best elements I've found in Humankind (individual unit characteristics), Millennia (an 'automated' battle display with very basic unit types) and Civ (Non-Combat Support as part of the battle)

Still very much a conceptual Work In Progress . . .

 

[GeneralZift]

I heard a lot of complaints about Millenia's system, and I've yet to try it. Is it any good?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I heard a lot of complaints about Millenia's system, and I've yet to try it. Is it any good?

The combat system is bad. It gives you virtually no agency, nothing you can do to affect the battle after you stack up 3 - 4 units (in the early game) and send them off. The battle animation is so bad I thought it was a joke in the Demo, but it's real, it's in the base game, and it looks like a throw-back to the worst graphics of 25 years ago.

The game as a whole gives me the impression that the developers used up all their creativity on the Era/Age system, which is new and different, and just fell back on bare bones or very old systems for everything else.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I heard a lot of complaints about Millenia's system, and I've yet to try it. Is it any good?

It's not highly regarded, but some of our CFCers seem to be enjoying it

You can read more here

Millennia

A forum for the game "Millenia", published by Paradox games

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

You want simple? I'll give yez simple.

Been thinking about this since I played with the new Millennia game, which on the battlefield simply divides units into Line and Ranged.

So, I'm thinking use Army sized stacks on a battlefield display, and divide all combat units into three Classes only:
Ranged
Line
Mobile

Does this mean that there will be subclasses to describe capabilities further?
- Line will be 'Generic' (Spearmen, Footmen, Pikemen, Fusiliers, and Infantry) and 'Shock Troops' (like swordsmen and grenadiers)
- Mobile (Light and Heavy, Horse and Motorized)
- Ranged (Siege will be extra capabilties)
for Ranged line. what would you do with distinctions between 'Field Cannons' and 'Siege Cannons' ? or simply revert to Civ5 rules?

And what will unit lineups be? if there's three classes.
in Millenium. Arquebusiers (ranged) NEVER becomes Musketeers but pikemen do. In real life the two units converge. and so in Earlymodern even with stacked, pikemen will become Tercio instead? (Pike and Shotte, note that it can be graphically represented with Arquebusiers wearing early modern pikemen cuirass and morrion.. maybe?)

And Ranged lines. what will 'Medieval Archers' (if there's gonna be any. since I don't really agree that Crossbowmen should be here AT ALL since they're overlapping 'medieval archers' rather than replacings) be next? converge with Line class or becomes Cannon in 'Gunpowder Era' ?

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

In Humankind each unit has two "Unit Specialties" and a Unit Class. There are 21 Unit Classes, far more than in Civ, but they include things like "Animal" and "Spy" which might not even be units in Civ VII. There are over 60 Unit Specialties, but they include what Civ would term Unique Abilities only applied to Civ-Unique Units

I really like the Unit Specialties/Class system, because this is where you can differentiate between Anti-Cav, Shock, Mountain, Naval Unit Able to Ram, and other peculiarities of units without locking them into a set of Promotions that may not be appropriate: like 'promoting' Crossbowmen to Field Artillery because they are both ranged, thus disregarding both their real battlefield use and virtually everything about their weapons and equipment.

Exact lists of potential regular and Unique units and their Class/Specialty and overall list of Classes and Specialties are still WIP, and frankly not a big priority because, I suspect, it would be just a Thought Experiment now, since Civ VII doubtless already has the Combat/Unit system in development and they are not likely to scrap all their work for anything I come up with.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Considering cities are incredibly hard to take already, as cities have a ranged attack for some reason and deal considerable damage to melee units, I prefer to tweak some of this.

Cities should not be able to deal damage without units inside. Civ 3-4 model was the best. Civ 7 should go back to the 'I actually enjoy war campaigning' times...