Easy way to make Civ 7 good in 7 easy steps (Doctors hate it)

[HorseshoeHermit]

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Civ IV fans huffing pure copium
It's not about being dumb and lazy, it's because the Devs want the game to be intuitive for new players... It's not that deep. How hard is it for you to just move one unit onto one tile, you know, the same way most turn based tile based strategies play...

They didn't literally mean "solve" the puzzle. They mean that's what you're moving around.
The trouble is that the dynamics of a tactics turn-based game , with unit production, cannot go outside of a narrow manner of designing the resource flows, growth, and terrain balance; and within that band, the flow of the game is one that subtracts from all the other systems for *Civ* trying to matter. When you put 1upt, the unit/city production system becomes a tactics game, with everything either having that gameplay, or being a bad tactics game.

I want there to be army sizes. One unit is "the quantity of power needed to militarily enforce zone control", given the actual rule that a unit will fight to keep others out of a tile. But then I always wondered, if a then damaged unit can still enforce this over another turn, why am I not able to produce a "wounded unit" to front forces quicker , at a lesser cost ? As in, send fewer soldiers in the first place, because I need -something- there -now-.

 

[DeckerdJames]

I think if you wanted it to be like a game of chess (or better yet, like the board game Stratego, for those that remember that game), you might limit the number of units that can be on the board, and perhaps even only allow 1 to 3 of each type. Then you could eliminate the types of promotions that change the role of a unit and instead increase the diversity of unit types. Instead of only spearmen, you might end up with spearmen, pikemen, and other kinds of polearms that become available when the technology is available, but they are all useable for their specific roles until you progress to a level of military tech that makes them obsolete, like more advanced gunpowder units. At that time, all units become ranged so melee units that used swords, polearms, etc would start taking damage earlier than gunpowder units. Things like artillery, limited to 1 to 3 in Civ 6, would instead have much longer range. If gunpowder is 2 tiles, then artillery should probably be like 6 tiles.

Maybe you could still have a promotion tree, but instead of the tree defining a subtype like it does in Civ 6 in many cases, like the difference between a sentry type of recon unit and a guerrilla/ambush recon unit, which would fill completely different roles, the promotions make them better somehow at their intended purpose. The sentry recon unit might become available when you research better optics technology and ambush units might become available with applicable technology. Camouflage comes to mind, but I don't know what technologies might precede it. I can't say for sure. That would take game designing, which I am not attempting here.

Maybe it is possible to make a fun and complex tactical game by improving 1upt, but numerical limits would gamify it even more. Nobody plays chess because it realistically depicts military combat, but it is fun for people who like that kind of tactical puzzle game.

I played civ 4. I was an average player and I when i started wanted to play it like 1upt. I wanted to put down machine gun nests in strategic locations. That doesn't really work in civ 4 that well. Yes, you could stack machine guns, but you can't prepare that well because you don't know what size of a stack might come along. If you only care about defending the city tile, you could put very large stacks in your vulnerable perimeter cities. What more needs be done? Those stacks are basically a lookout and garrison. If you are attacked, you move and produce units accordingly. Maybe there is more to it for an advanced civ 4 veteran. Is 1upt different from stacks in that respect?

 

[DeckerdJames]

Civ 6 seems to have taken the 1upt route but with limited stacking. Forming corps and armies is stacking via type. So, you can essentially have a stack of 3 of a type. Instead, I guess they could have allowed the combining of any type of unit and the result would be an army. In civ 6 fashion, you can't sperate them after they are combined. They become a new unit. You could increase its melee power and add up the number of ranged strikes, but the ranged strikes don't get more powerful. It gets more expensive per unit, so it is meant to be more costly, and it moves 1 tile at a time. The army is designed for tile capture and domination.

When it gets damaged, it doesn't lose health, it loses strength, which can be improved by adding more units.

What about that for unit stacking in a civ 6 style?