Get rid of SODs

[Mizar]

Remember Civ 1 when all units died that sit on same tile? Bit severe but a solution to most annoying thing in Civ which is 100 units on same tile, referred as stack of doom.
What are your ideas and suggestions to avoid this? Siege that damage all and not just some defenders? "Unorganised" as feature of units sitting on same tile, reduced strength or such? Hard limit of units on same tile like planes in cities? Feel free to discuss solutions.

 

[Camikaze]

There are plenty of suggestions around to minimise the effectiveness of the dreaded SoD, such as what is said here. I agree that the power of the SoD needs to be diminished in the game, without completely eliminating it, but through a series of small changes, rather than any large-scale changes. Perhaps there could be a higher maintenance cost per unit, for higher number of units on a tile. Or perhaps siege units could do damage to a certain percentage of units on a tile, rather than a given number, so that they would do more damage to a big stack than to a small stack. These are only some of many ideas that could be implemented easily and successfully.

 

[Hail]

first devs can limit the number the of units of any tile.
second maybe reintroduce bombardment and increase it's accuracy with tile "crowding".

 

[Camikaze]

I don't think that there should be a limit of the number of units you could fit on one tile, but just disadvantages for doing so. I mean, realistically, a tile represents a large piece of land, on which it would be physically possible to fit tens of millions of people onto. An army is never going to big, however, so that limit wouldn't be reached. However, a greater unit density would mean greater collateral damage, realistically.

 

[Mizar]

Biggest problem with hard limit of units is that tech-lead would even more pronounced. I favour solution with some punishment for crowding.

 

[thecolorblue]

Should be some kind of 'surround bonus' based on how many units you have on the surrounding tiles of the one you're attacking. Wouldn't completely get rid of the problem but would provide incentive to not stack every single unit on one tile. Could end up being a giant game of GO, who knows!

 

[MosheLevi]

SoD’s should stay.
After all they represent a large army which is valid.

However, CIV 5 should encourage splitting one large SoD to several smaller stacks and allow for more strategies by doing so.

One simple way to achieve that is to increase the number of units that are affected by collateral damage (double or triple it) as well as increasing the collateral damage percentage across the board.

Another way is to calculate the number of units that are affected by collateral damage base on a percentage of the number of units in that stack.
For example, the minimum number of units that are affected by collateral damage can be 5 (as example), or 20% of the number of units in that stack (whichever is larger).
So a stack with 25 units will suffer collateral damage for 5 of its units while SoD with 100 units will suffer collateral damage for 20 of its units.

In additional to that certain units such as Bombers should have better promotions for collateral damage (more damage and inflicting damage on more units).

If bombers can inflict collateral damage on 20 units (with some promotions) in one run then it would make sense to split one huge SoD to smaller stacks (of 10 or less).

 

[rysmiel]

Scale how defendable they are.

Example; numbers off the top of my head;

Stack smaller than twenty units; if there's fewer than one dedicated defender for every dedicated attack/siege unit, the enemy picks which unit they attack.

Stack twenty to fifty units: if there are fewer than two defenders per siege unit, the enemy picks. And so on.

For defense against bombers make this only work for specific AA-capable units.

Now combine this with separate and suitably balanced attack and defence strengths, and make the useful attack/bombard units have negligible/zero defence.

Result; can't build a stack of twenty catapults to flatten an enemy city without sending twenty pikemen with them, or your catapults can get picked off trivially by even the weakest enemy military unit.

Make bombers into actual units which move like real units and have blitz capability, so that a bomber that could move sixteen squares can fly three squares to the enemy, destroy ten undefended siege units, and then fly back home that turn.

This works even better if individual unit support from home cities is reintroduced. (Not to replace the Civ 3/4 empire-wide system but in addition to it.) I don't want stacks of doom to be impossible, just vulnerable and very expensive.

 

[rysmiel]

first devs can limit the number the of units of any tile.

I'ms strongly opposed to hard unit limits of any kind; there should not be a problem with on putting a thousand units on a tile if you have a robust enough civilisation to build and support the thousand units in the first place.

 

[Camikaze]

How would you define 'defending' units?

 

[Shurdus]

I quite liked the idea represented in Galactic Civilizations II where you had a value called logistics.

Logistics was a hard cap on how many units you could put together in a single fleet. Once this fleet was merged the fleet attacked and defended as one. Individual units could still be destroyed and such, weakening the stack, but attacking siege first and such and attacking with individual units was not possible any more. Some technologies gave you bonus to logistics so after you teched that tech you could field larger fleets.

What made this so appealing is that you can still mass armies any way you want. The army however could not be merged into one huge stack because the logistics to do this would not be sufficient. The solution would be to make lots of small stacks. You could have defending stacks that you could send in front, stacking stacks that could wipe out planetary defenses, etc. It required you to think about what units to put together because the enemy could more carefully choose what group it wanted to attack.

I think this works better than in civ because in civ you just put everything you have together. It reduces the strategic in depth of the entire warring game. Never mind the questionif it is realistically possible to get a million soldier in one tile physically, in reality it would be hard to organise this with medieval logistics.

So I would very much welcome a hard cap, as long as it is implemented well and as long as it adds to the variety in strategies you can use in warfare.

 

[r_rolo1]

I am strongly against hard caps and sincerely I would prefer a exponential maintenance system of any kind than a hard cap.

 

[Shurdus]

I am strongly against hard caps and sincerely I would prefer a exponential maintenance system of any kind than a hard cap.

While I agree that hard caps are not a good idea in general I do not see how a maintenace cap would help. Exponential maintenance makes it so that it is harder to field more units, but the topic at hand is that is how to make it more attractive to place units on different tiles to prevent forming of the stack of doom.

Getting exponential mainenance only to split stacks seems like something that can hardly be justified. Even if the cap was implemented like this, in most games you already need to maintain large and expensive armies. By the time you get in that situation your economy though can maintain these armies so well that you need not think twice about the maintenance because you can carry it just fine. Maintenance can therefore not really split up stacks.

I think we should look for a solution in either combat mechanics such as disadvantages in some form for stacks or in caps. It seems intirely plausible to me to make it so that units become less effective in stacks so that every one loses a proportion of its strength if the stack exceeds a certain number. This should represent the disorganisation that would be present in a medieval army of sufficient size because it would be very hard for the general to spread orders around in a battle.

If this penalty could be proportional to the era so that late game large armies are more easely maintained than in the early era's this would be a good system in my book.

 

[Lord Tirian]

When I thought about that, I had the following idea - make stacks have diminishing returns in terms of defence AND attack - right now, only defence suffers from a large stack size (i.e. collateral damage).

Now, imagine if you move two units of the same type into one square, they would automatically form a group - and could only attack and defend as such. If the stats don't add linearly, stack sizes of the same unit type will go down, for example:

One infantry has power 10
-> two have power 15
-> three have power 17.5
-> four have power 18.75
-> five have... and so forth

This would limit stacks of the same unit type to sizes around 4-5ish, at the maximum, plus they would still keep having 100 HP in total (on splitting up, all units get that value again). So if you want to get the most of your units, you will have smallish stacks, moving independently.

A nice side effect is also that it encourages combined arms, as these stacks will stack up better, simply by having their full hp per unit/group, making them much more resilient in terms of attack AND defence - which would nicely represent the fact that combined arms allow you more flexibility, i.e. you "last longer in unexpected situations".

Cheers, LT.

 

[Camikaze]

While I agree that hard caps are not a good idea in general I do not see how a maintenace cap would help. Exponential maintenance makes it so that it is harder to field more units, but the topic at hand is that is how to make it more attractive to place units on different tiles to prevent forming of the stack of doom.

Getting exponential mainenance only to split stacks seems like something that can hardly be justified. Even if the cap was implemented like this, in most games you already need to maintain large and expensive armies. By the time you get in that situation your economy though can maintain these armies so well that you need not think twice about the maintenance because you can carry it just fine. Maintenance can therefore not really split up stacks.

I think we should look for a solution in either combat mechanics such as disadvantages in some form for stacks or in caps. It seems intirely plausible to me to make it so that units become less effective in stacks so that every one loses a proportion of its strength if the stack exceeds a certain number. This should represent the disorganisation that would be present in a medieval army of sufficient size because it would be very hard for the general to spread orders around in a battle.

If this penalty could be proportional to the era so that late game large armies are more easely maintained than in the early era's this would be a good system in my book.

I think that it would have quite a big effect on its own, yet alone combined with other factors. I'd against hard caps, like r_rolo1, due to the fact that they are arbitrary, and unrealistic. However, when you combine all of the smaller tweaks, like exponential maintenance, higher collateral damage, perhaps even a lower retreat rate, the power of the SoD is severely reduced, without eliminating the possibility of it in the game.

 

[da dick]

i thought suicidal catapults already do a decent job of controlling stacks. but the AI never brings enough of them when i use a giant stack. the only time the AI(Prince level and below) beats my stacks, is when they out research me.

 

[Shurdus]

I think that it would have quite a big effect on its own, yet alone combined with other factors. I'd against hard caps, like r_rolo1, due to the fact that they are arbitrary, and unrealistic. However, when you combine all of the smaller tweaks, like exponential maintenance, higher collateral damage, perhaps even a lower retreat rate, the power of the SoD is severely reduced, without eliminating the possibility of it in the game.

Uhuh, even though I liked the logistics rule in GalCivII I do not really think it should be in Civ. I just wanted to point out that a system to eliminate large stacks has been done in a game before, and that it really worked quite well. It did however require a different approach in order to wage a succesfull war.

Whatever may be of that, I agree that a solutions should be found in the combat mechanics. I am unsure at this moment if the proposed solutions are really what combat should be like so I am hesitant to agree to a proposed solution.

I disagree about hard caps being arbitrary or unrealistic. In real life there would also be a limit to the number of units that can be commanded in a battle as one army. In medieval times armies were not as large as they were today. Even if there were some armies that were absolutely huge I seriously doubt that this would be what we could consider to be one massive army of a collection of several armies under one banner. It is not farfetched to say that these massive medieval armies should be represented on the map as two stacks. The lines of communications in medieval and earlier era's would be too long to allow huge armies to function as one. Even this day it is not quite possible to field hundreds of thousands of soldiers at once in a battle. Even in the world wars there were quite large armies, but they were not focussed in single spots.

So all in all I would see a hard cap as making sense yet I understand the rationale that prevents you to agree. I think a soft cap would be a better solution because it still allows you freedom of choice while a hard cap does not.

 

[r_rolo1]

The chinese and the romans comanded armies far bigger than the medieval ones under one banner, so I don't see why medieval armies should be obligatory spitted ( for your reasoning, classical age armies should be even more hard capped than medieval ones, right? ). In the end the size of a individual army ( SoD, for what we are discussing ) is a function of the sustaining ability of the empire ( foraging vs supply lines and that jazz ), and that is why I suggested a exponential increase of maintenance for stacks for every unit it has on it.

 

[Shurdus]

Exceptions can of course always be found, but even to this day it is recognised that the level of organisation in the Roman empire was quite remarkable. And who is to say that the Romans could not get a higher high cap as a unique ability or a leader trait or something similar? That way a preatorian would not be stronger than a regular unit but it would allow you to field more of them in one army.

I agree that the ability of an empire to sustain an army should be limited - that is what maintenance is for - yet this does not really represent why armies should be should get higher maintenance for having a stack rather that two smaller separate stacks. The disadvantages - or difficulties or whatever we choose to call it - lies not in the fact that it is expensive to field huge armies but in the fact that without proper communications large armies could not exist. Armies would be expensive either way, be all of the soldiers or one or two seperate fronts. In fact, having two seperate fronts would require two supply lines so making large stacks more expensive that two smaller stacks would even be counter-intuitive.

Of course now I am being pedantic. My point is that having a huge army is difficult not because of the costs but because a general would not be able to control an army that is too large to oversee. With modern communication it is of course easier to get orders across large distances, but at some point adding more soldiers does not really do as much.

I would like to see a system where warring would rely more on clever manoeuvring (sp?) and a small stack chess-like game than on 'mwuahahahaha fear my stack' kinda system.

 

[Hail]

I'ms strongly opposed to hard unit limits of any kind; there should not be a problem with on putting a thousand units on a tile if you have a robust enough civilisation to build and support the thousand units in the first place.

if understanding "hard-limit" literally (as in only 5 units per tile ), then i am against too.
the "hard-limit" i was thinking is about is something like assigning each unit type some value to indicate how much space of a tile they take up. any tile will have a cap (a "hard-limit" on how much space it has). the stack get very large, but still will force the player to split SoD's and create war fronts, which i think will add to gameplay. discuss??

I am strongly against hard caps and sincerely I would prefer a exponential maintenance system of any kind than a hard cap.

99% the same result as a "hard-limit".