Food yield limited unit stacks

[Shadowhal]

A usual disclaimer from the start: apologies if this has been posted before, though I don't think I have seen this particular idea around.

The core idea: technically allow unlimited army stacking, but implement a penalty if the unit count exceeds the maximum allow for a given tile.

• As a basis, the maximum per tile could be determined by the food yield plus one. So, an unimproved desert tile allows one unit without penalty, an unimproved grassland tile allows 3 and so on. It would apply to own as well as enemy tiles.
  
• These limits could be influenced by technology and policies. It is also thinkable to introduce dedicated supply units that allow you to field more units.
• If you have more units in your stack than allowed by the tile limit, then all units start taking damage, say 5% of full combat value per turn per unit over he limit.
• Within such a system I would favour a range of one for most ranged units (they could still attack without taking damage and be protected by melee units in the same tile) and potentially some form of collateral damage by certain units types like siege weapons, i.e. all units in the tile take some damage from attacks of specialist anti-stack units.

The problem this idea is trying to solve is that many players complain about tedious micro-management and geographic limitations in moving larger armies around with 1 UPT. This could give a logical and immersive explanation why you cannot have unlimited units in a tile, but still reduce the micro-aspect a bit by allowing some army building. (The immersion part is that in general armies need to be supplied, which is why in many times they were only assembled when it actually became necessary. And in some wars they effectively supplied themselves from the resources they found around the area they camped at.) It could also make tiles more strategically interesting, as the attacker would need to carefully think about his approach vector and the defender could consider destroying that farm next to his city to make life harder for the incoming enemy.

An important practical consideration is whether the AI would be able to handle such a system. This I don't know. I would say it does not sound like an overly complex system, but it does involve additional trade-offs to be programmed around exceeding tile limits occasionally or not, which tiles to use, how to compose stacks for maximum efficiency.

 

[Victoria]

Not keen on big stacks again in any form. I think the stacking they have in place is a fine compromise.

Searching for the word supply provides posts like below. It has been discussed a lot.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...problem-supply-and-attrition-mechanic.606289/

 

[Ryika]

So you're saying having tiles that can potentially have 5 units and tiles that can potentially have 1 unit does mean _less_ micromanagement? Are you sure that's a reasonable conclusion?
And that your system would "solve geographic limitations" by... well, how exactly? If I want to move through a hill, I'd have to unstack my units and then restack them on the grassland tile behind the hill if there's no easy way around? Or take massive damage?

This system sounds ridiculously overcomplicated to me, with no clear goals to be achieved, and it would also destroy the strategical elements of for example having to actually zone out enemies from your ranged units.
The current system of permanent stacking via armies is a lot more reasonable to me.

 

[Dicemechanic]

The current system of permanent stacking via armies is a lot more reasonable to me.

Agree. Though I'd like the option to unstack. But yes.

 

[Shadowhal]

Victoria: thank you for linking that post. It does indeed look like a quite similar idea, so I will take a detailed look. Obviously the idea wasn't a killer hit there either, but I thought it worth mentioning.

Ryika:
Well, in a system where there is fixed maximum of 1 unit per tile, a 1-2 tile bottleneck can make navigation quite difficult. At least having the option of passing through, at a cost, could be a useful alternative. And choices are a big part of strategy games. I think it would be fair to say that terrain played a big role in how armies have moved in the past and that taking the risk of moving through rough terrain to get a shortcut was successful at times. Hannibal's crossing the Alps or the Ardennes offensive come to mind. So, thinking about how terrain affects the way you attack or defend territory isn't necessarily a bad thing and can add a dimension to warfare. Certainly one could tinker around that over-stacking penalties are noticeable, but not crippling,

I fully take your point though that this comes with a different kind of micro-management. You could effectively no longer point and click an army to its goal and be sure it won't take damage on the way, which would be a problem. Maybe waypoint-based navigation as in some RTSs could mitigate? It would seem to me to be more interesting and meaningful micro than manually moving individual units around once you reach larger armies. There you already know what you want to do and it merely requires many clicks to implement it. The other one requires more player interaction, but with choices.

At any rate, it was an idea I wanted to share and I am grateful for all opinions, also critical ones. I for one have been able to live with both the stacking and 1UPT system, so I'm not super-invested in either. Civ 6 seemed to make some improvements to take care of the cluttering and that was definitely a simpler, though potentially less dynamic or immersive, approach than the one proposed here.

 

[TomKQT]

I agree with Ryika.
Plus it actually doesn't make any sense. I don't want to start with the nonsense of applying realism to a turn-based game, but IMHO everything should at least have some relation to reality, albeit with some modifications for better playability and game mechanics. But in this idea I cannot see anything justified. Or do you expect a marching army to harwest the crop they are standing on and make some food from it? It could make sense maybe especially with the ancient or classical era army (probably logistic wasn't so great back then) when you keep them standing on the tile for a long time, so they would be reliant on the local food sources. But they can take food with them (especially modern army with supply trucks) and very easily survive with no problems on lands with no food yield...

 

[Victoria]

People can maintain a huge army , gold is so prevalent it is irrelevant.