Downside of 1upt

[Commander Bello]

If someone has 2 oils tiles that might mean 2 battle ship and 4 tanks. If their rival has 4 oil tiles that would me something like 4 battle ships and 8 tanks. (I'm assuming 3 units per resource). The empire with the most resources has the upper hand hence the wars over oil late game.

It might mean pure dominance of the first one to discover and access oil as well.
Wouldn't that player be forced to secure as many oil resources as possible, and if only for the sake of keeping the others away?

The first tank would be used to sit on a not yet acquired oil resource, the rest of the army would help protecting it and in the meantime the home production creates more tanks, which will lead to more "secured" oil resources.

In Civ4, many people complained about "uber-units" (or suggestions which would have led to such units), while there still would have been the chance to counter them by mass attacks of weaker units.

The combination of 1upt and less units in total might make this much harder and therefore should require quite a sophisticated balancing.

 

[tom2050]

Okay perhaps I should again be forced into to be more specific, I just got told off for ignoring the differentiation of commerce & gold, now I am being told off for ignoring the difference between "importance of resource's." and "importance of more than 1 resource" even though I could argue I implied this with the plural "resource's" which can mean "more than 1 resource of the same type" as well as what you percieved me to say which was "obtaining a singular resource of every type".

I think the commerce thing, he was addressing everyone, including me. I kept calling commerce gold, because the only difference in game is the name.

So I will calirfy shall I, Thier is no such thing as "spare" resources in Civ5, if you have 1 Iron you will still want to gain more Iron resources, so even if you have 5 Iron resources, and your enemy has 5 Iron resources too, a particular Iron resource close to your borders belonging to an enemy, will certainly be more important to capture than it was ever previously.

I will give another example to further my point, Oil, is a very important late game resource, it allows you to build and use Destroyers/Battleships for example. In Civ4 an earlier unit, the inefficeint "Iron Clad" has a useful strategy described which was that you could sit it on an enemies Ocean Oil Tile, and that enemy would have no easy way to dispose of your Iron Clad because they wouldn't have Oil powered ships, nor would they ever have if this was thier only source of Oil. Eventually when you used an Oil of your own you could but destroyers on the tile and that Civ would severly be hampered due to not having anything better than an Iron Clad. This shows the importance of "preventing another Civ from obtaining 1 singular occurance of a type of resource", in Civ5, this will still exist, but not just this, even if they have a land based Oil source, placing naval units on thier Coastal Oil sources will severly limit the number of Oil based units they can build compared to if you let them have multiple sources of Oil, this prevention will lead to your dominance of late game seas even more than before in Civ4, because now not only is "complete prevention of enemies obtaining oil" important, but also preventing them from gaining additional sources of Oil.

I think I see where you are coming from now... resources are so important, that a civ cannot survive the game without them, and you will lose because they are actually too important to the point of badly unbalanced.

in the new post the German magazine GameStar confirms that in play testing late games often boils down into wars for oil. Clearly strategic resources are of much more importance. From the other thread:

If someone has 2 oils tiles that might mean 2 battle ship and 4 tanks. If their rival has 4 oil tiles that would me something like 4 battle ships and 8 tanks. (I'm assuming 3 units per resource). The empire with the most resources has the upper hand hence the wars over oil late game.

This shows precisely that resources are currently a very unbalanced mechanism. If late game testing has this happening now, it will likely still happen in some way 2 months from now.

It's going to be a warmongering-fest only for resources for uber units. An unbalanced broken system like that doesn't in my book mean that they are more important; because the whole game then relies solely on this 1 aspect; which means resources are not only more important, but they are so important, that they are Required (or you lose) and all other strategies in the game go down the toilet.

(Same could be said for Civ 4 though, if you have 0 of a resource, Civ 5 resources should be more common though, if you need 1 to make each unit).

Of course, it should have been expected that this would happen; I'm surprised that they actually needed to test the game to 'figure this out'. Are the dev's smoking something on the job?

Hopefully they put the special cigarettes away and fix it.

 

[12agnar0k]

Well I wouldnt call it unbalanced, not without playing the game myself.
If the "spread" of resources is more even in civ5 than it was in civ4, where they could go anywhere and if you were unlucky you would be in a boat without any paddles. Then we could be okay, it has been confirmed somewhere that resources will be more plentiful due to needing more of them. So each civ should be able to aquire them, though thier will probably still be some element of luck, and it probably will be a matter of, "they are so important, that they are required (or you lose)." But this isn't that different to civ4, where if in the early game you were unfortunate enough not to get Iron/Horse or Copper (its happend to me ;/) then your game is over unless you can make peace with everyone till rifles come along. So I don't think all that much has changed other than the fact that "having more than 1 resource of a type" becomes important, so does trying to gather as much resources as possible, so does trying to limit another civs resources as much as possible even if not entirely. It should keep things from stagnating, you know in civ4 if both you and another Civ both had iron/horses, you would be less likely to wage war with them as they are on par to your resourceable units, i.e they have swords/axes/horses, you may consider picking on a civ that lacks one aspect of strategic resource instead, now you might consider taking the harder option because if you win, you add all those lovely resources to your ever growing stock pile.

 

[YoHo]

I wonder if City-States will have resources? I assume so, and I further assume they will be likely to trade.

I really don't see how wars for resources unbalances the game. To me, going to war for resources makes it make that much more sense. As I said in the other thread. Japan grabbed Indochina in WW2 for Oil. Germany grabbed oil fields to maintain the war effort.

This is part of why wars are fought. And it also means that diplomacy may become that much more important as you HAVE to trade for strategic resources.

 

[Calouste]

Well I wouldnt call it unbalanced, not without playing the game myself.
If the "spread" of resources is more even in civ5 than it was in civ4, where they could go anywhere and if you were unlucky you would be in a boat without any paddles. Then we could be okay, it has been confirmed somewhere that resources will be more plentiful due to needing more of them. So each civ should be able to aquire them, though thier will probably still be some element of luck, and it probably will be a matter of, "they are so important, that they are required (or you lose)." But this isn't that different to civ4, where if in the early game you were unfortunate enough not to get Iron/Horse or Copper (its happend to me ;/) then your game is over unless you can make peace with everyone till rifles come along. So I don't think all that much has changed other than the fact that "having more than 1 resource of a type" becomes important, so does trying to gather as much resources as possible, so does trying to limit another civs resources as much as possible even if not entirely. It should keep things from stagnating, you know in civ4 if both you and another Civ both had iron/horses, you would be less likely to wage war with them as they are on par to your resourceable units, i.e they have swords/axes/horses, you may consider picking on a civ that lacks one aspect of strategic resource instead, now you might consider taking the harder option because if you win, you add all those lovely resources to your ever growing stock pile.

In Civ4, if you didn't have metals in the early game you were pretty much stuffed, because Archers just didn't cut it. By the looks of it, in Civ5, you are more likely to have at least a little metal, so that you can build a few strong units that you can then put in good defensive positions, backed up by ranged units. The limitation of having only a few strategic resources would be that you can't wage an aggressive war, but you would still stand a decent chance on the defense.

 

[Schuesseled]

a army of horse archers and archers can defend a city well enough, of course ahving access to all the resources was always helpful.

 

[12agnar0k]

I wonder if City-States will have resources? I assume so, and I further assume they will be likely to trade.

I really don't see how wars for resources unbalances the game. To me, going to war for resources makes it make that much more sense. As I said in the other thread. Japan grabbed Indochina in WW2 for Oil. Germany grabbed oil fields to maintain the war effort.

This is part of why wars are fought. And it also means that diplomacy may become that much more important as you HAVE to trade for strategic resources.

City states dont have the "diplomacy" screen like the civ's, so no you can't go ask them for the Iron resource they have within thier boundaries for X gold, but I do believe I read somewhere that if you get ALLY status with them, they share all thier resources with you as well as thier normal bonuses. Not sure If I did indeed hear this or if I dreamed it

 

[Schuesseled]

yes they did say that.

 

[YoHo]

I'll admit I haven't been reading every thread and pouring over every detail released, but does "not having the "diplomacy" screen like the civ's" really equal not being able to trade, or grant resources?

I suppose that if every city state eventually becomes aligned with one Civ or another, then it isn't needed, but man that kind of gimps the city state. It would be nice if there was an ability or reason for them to remain independent.

 

[Calouste]

I'll admit I haven't been reading every thread and pouring over every detail released, but does "not having the "diplomacy" screen like the civ's" really equal not being able to trade, or grant resources?

I suppose that if every city state eventually becomes aligned with one Civ or another, then it isn't needed, but man that kind of gimps the city state. It would be nice if there was an ability or reason for them to remain independent.

Civs get influence with city states via gifts or doing quests for them, like exterminating barbarians. That influence diminishes over time, so if the major civs don't have any gold to gift to city states because they need it to upgrade their units to go to war with each other, the city states will remain or return to being independent.

 

[12agnar0k]

What I want to know, as I know more than one civ can be granted the bonus of a city state by purchasing influence, does "who gets the ALLY status" simply depend on which player has the highest influence rate with the city state, because then it will become a matter of if you want to ALLY with as many city states as possible then you have to continually be in a bidding war for thier favour.

Will this happen, or is it the less practical and less desireable, first one to get ALLY status keeps it?

 

[StStutter]

Regarding strategic resource caps, I disagree that the endgame will always require a world war to win. As has been stated, the standard units that don't require resources, and the few resources you have will probably be enough to defend yourself against invading forces, and thus win a scientific or cultural victory. Warmongering for resources will only be necessary if one wants to in turn warmonger and invade other nations.

To get this thread back on track, I read in the german report that the AI was NOT always perfect and would sometimes place artillery on the front line. This is a pretty glaring issue. Since 1upt provides so many more tactical options to the player, if the AI cannot even line up his troops properly, we will almost definitely be able to abuse the new system.

I'm a little shocked that the AI was this deficient though. There are so many games with 1upt where the AI is quite good (see Panzer General, Battle for Wesnoth, even, in a way, Heroes of Might and Magic).

You are the one who should be trying to offer a constructive reply to many posts made here which you certainly did not read (or didn't care to understand) instead of repeating things already refuted.

In making a point, I ensured readers knew which angle I was coming from. There are so many contradicting opinions that its hard to tell who thinks what unless it is stated.

Maybe I should consider adding as much to this thread as you do?

 

[qwerty25]

Resources should probably be more common than before since in Civ 4 when you got iron every city could use it. They will probably spread the strategic tiles around the map so everyone can at least build a couple military units.

 

[12agnar0k]

Resources should probably be more common than before since in Civ 4 when you got iron every city could use it. They will probably spread the strategic tiles around the map so everyone can at least build a couple military units.

They will 1. Be more common per civ, and 2. just a lot more common in general given that we will have 23 civs and 23 or over city states all on the maximum size map, and each civ will need lots of resources and the city states will take some up too.

 

[Calouste]

To get this thread back on track, I read in the german report that the AI was NOT always perfect and would sometimes place artillery on the front line. This is a pretty glaring issue. Since 1upt provides so many more tactical options to the player, if the AI cannot even line up his troops properly, we will almost definitely be able to abuse the new system.

We don't know the level the reviewer was playing at. Even if the tactical AI was perfect, you might hope that at lower levels it is programmed to make mistakes, otherwise it wouldn't be much fun to play against for less skilled players.

 

[qwerty25]

This is a bit off topic but I'm wondering about when units die do they don't "reborn"? I heard about that in the beginning but I haven't heard about it since.

 

[12agnar0k]

Yeah I think that was a misunderstanding or misassumption, the whole "reborn thing" I think may be that well a longswordman for example dies, as it used 1 iron unit to build, when it dies you get the 1 Iron unit back in your stockpile and you can "rebuild" the unit. That would be my best guess.

 

[Babri]

Warmongering for resources will only be necessary if one wants to in turn warmonger and invade other nations.

I disagree with your idea. It is not necessary that only huge invaders would start a war later on. Suppose that you're a bit advanced & you can see that your aggressive neighbour has a lot of oil & once he is able to build tanks & aircraft, he'll probably overwhelm you with his forces. So the better option would be to take him down before he's able to take advantage of his natural resources. That does happen in real world too. See US attacking here & there to grab more oil.

 

[12agnar0k]

Thats not a warmonger?

Infact that is the precise definition of warmongering

warmongering - a policy of advocating war

"Face Palm"

 

[Babri]

Thats not a warmonger?

Infact that is the precise definition of warmongering

warmongering - a policy of advocating war

"Face Palm"

Whatever but in this case you are not going towards a domination or conquest victory. You opt another victory way but in order to keep yourself the strongest you fought a small war. Simple isn't it