Has 1UPT Completely Destroyed this Franchise?

[CD7]

1. Moving units has become a tedious PITA, and the "Go To" function has become not only useless, but actually dangerous to use.
   
2. To stop the inherent problem of units clogging the map, individual units have been made too expensive, powerful, and valuable. Meaning that a correctly used small army can conquer the whole world.
3. Because you can't stack units in cities for defence, the cities themselves have been made ridiculously powerful, making garrisoning redundant. A city with walls can easily hold off most AI armies. This makes it even easier to conquer the world, as there is no need to garrison your own or captured cities.
4. The AI in Civ4 wasn't exactly brilliant, but it knew how to build stacks and use them, and as such could be a formidable opponent, especially on higher levels. In contrast, the Civ6 AI is completely unable to execute either attack or defence with 1UPT, meaning that even when it starts a surprise war against you, with massive superiority, you can roll it like a cheap fag.
5. Because 1UTP is apparently incompatible with transports, land units have been given the ability to swim, whilst apparently retaining their strengths. This leads to epic infantry battles in the middle of the ocean, and effectively makes naval units redundant.
6. The lack of stacking makes anti-cavalry units pointless (if you'll excuse the pun) so they have to be given their own offensive strength which is nonsense.
   
7. Because you can't stack ranged units, they have been given stupendous range to enable them to fire from the hex behind. So you have ancient archers apparently able to hurl the arrows right over an entire city.
   But this in-turn creates line-of-sight problems, which in reality would never be an issue.
8. Because you can't stack them, barrage weapons have been given melee strength to enable them to stand alone. WTH?
9. I also blame 1UTP for the stupid situation with Builders. Presumably to stop your builders clogging the whole map, they now build things instantaneously, and repair improvements for free. But to limit their usefulness, they expire after 3 builds.
10. As a flow on from above, because Builders are now too valuable to waste building roads, roads just magically appear if you have a trade route (or if you are Rome) AND magically upgrade.

NB: The reason I ask "ruined the Franchise?" rather than "ruined the Game" was only meant to acknowledge that it was also present in Civ5.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

I agree with all of the above but the answer is no it hasn't destroyed the franchise, millions of people bought Civ VI despite the obvious flaws (myself included). I'm not sure I'll buy Civ 7 (or if I do it will be a $10 sale version) but I bet millions of people do.

 

[Forbiddentwo]

whilst apparently retaining their attributes

Wait, is that true?

 

[ThERat]

That is true, sadly. Land units are almost unsinkable in the Ocean. Whether intentional or simply lazy programming, one can just guess.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

Civ is certainly not dead, but yeah, your criticism is correct. Civ V and Civ VI both fall short of being great games, and 1UPT is the main culprit.

 

[Siptah]

As if there weren't already too much threads on this topic...

That is true, sadly. Land units are almost unsinkable in the Ocean. Whether intentional or simply lazy programming, one can just guess.

Yes, for some reason they are. However, they cannot attack and if you have a larger navy (for some reason) you can still easily kill them in the ocean. Your ships are not getting any damage for attacking embarked units. In the viking scenario 5 well positioned longships sink dozens of caballeri and knights. It's ok that they are not sinking with any attack, their transport ships are probably not the worst nutshells. However, I think some additional small malus (-5?) could apply for embarked units.

and on topic: you are right concerning the AI having troubles with 1UPT, however, that does only make this aspect of the game worse. In multiplayer, I don't see any disadvantages of 1UPT - it is, to me, outright preferable to stacks. And making a game 'worse' because the AI can't keep up with the rules is also not the best idea imho. Might be more fun to some (or even most), but not my cup of tea.

 

[MrRadar]

@OP
I agree with all your points, and with #1 in particular. Right now I am trying to complete a gotm game with domination victory condition and I'm bordering on hysteria. Like - why do I have to do this?

1 UPT has greatly reduced the difficulty for the human player and made the question not "Can I win (at all)?", but "How fast will I win?". The game has become much less punishing, more accessible for larger number of players. Add nicer graphics to this and you have a franchise that has managed to expand its player base and whose commercial success rose to the levels probably never seen before. So it seems that the franchise fares quite well, so far.

 

[Victoria]

Moving units has become a tedious PITA, and the "Go To" function has become not only useless, but actually dangerous to use.
useless/Dangerous inflammatory remarks without quantification, pointless point unanswerable

To stop the inherent problem of units clogging the map, individual units have been made too expensive, powerful, and valuable. Meaning that a correctly used small army can conquer the whole world.
Yes, so? This is a game not reality

Because you can't stack units in cities for defence, the cities themselves have been made ridiculously powerful, making garrisoning redundant. A city with walls can easily hold off most AI armies. This makes it even easier to conquer the world, as there is no need to garrison your own or captured cities.
The Building of a city wall could also include the training of a Garrison. A non moving permanent force on the wall. Wpould anyone really leave a walled city defenseless?

The AI in Civ4 wasn't exactly brilliant, but it knew how to build stacks and use them, and as such could be a formidable opponent, especially on higher levels.
Its is 3 months since this product was no doubt rushed to be released. Give it a chance

In contrast, the Civ6 AI is completely unable to execute either attack or defence with 1UPT, meaning that even when it starts a surprise war against you, with massive superiority, you can roll it like a cheap fag.
Its is 3 months since this product was no doubt rushed to be released. Give it a chance

Because 1UTP is apparently incompatible with transports, land units have been given the ability to swim, whilst apparently retaining their strengths. This leads to epic infantry battles in the middle of the ocean, and effectively makes naval units redundant.
Infantry battles at sea?... do you understand the mechanics of Civ6?

The lack of stacking makes anti-cavalry units pointless (if you'll excuse the pun) so they have to be given their own offensive strength which is nonsense.
No, their promotions give them benefits against cavalry so they are not pointless. Nonsense? This is a game not reality

Because you can't stack ranged units, they have been given stupendous range to enable them to fire from the hex behind. So you have ancient archers apparently able to hurl the arrows right over an entire city. But this in-turn creates line-of-sight problems, which in reality would never be an issue.
Nothing is to scale, city districts are not 100-300 miles across. Civ overlays tactical combat on a strategic map to avoid 2 map maintenance and probably something that may be argues about play ability,

Because you can't stack them, barrage weapons have been given melee strength to enable them to stand alone. WTH?
Yes, so? This is a game not reality. A seige tower does not, their choice

 

[Wr4ith]

1. To stop the inherent problem of units clogging the map, individual units have been made too expensive, powerful, and valuable. Meaning that a correctly used small army can conquer the whole world.

well you can conquer every city with only 2 units, provided that enemy do nothing about your attacks has 0 army and no walls with bombard, but it will take ages... (literally)

 

[Siptah]

1 UPT has greatly reduced the difficulty for the human player and made the question not "Can I win (at all)?", but "How fast will I win?". The game has become much less punishing, more accessible for larger number of players. Add nicer graphics to this and you have a franchise that has managed to expand its player base and whose commercial success rose to the levels probably never seen before. So it seems that the franchise fares quite well, so far.

But to be honest that already started with the stacks in III & IV, when you had stacks fighting didn't mean stacks fighting (like in Civ CTP or Age of Wonders III), but individual units from stacks attacking each others. It has the bonus over the mechanics of the aforementioned games, that sheer mass is less a factor. But it is still much more a factor than in Civ II, where stacks were very vulnerable and you would not make them too large, since they are killed quite fast. I preferred the mechanics from Civ CTP and Age of Wonders III, where all battles between stacks are fought until the end and a few strong units really make the difference (until heavily outnumbered, but both games have limits to stacking). In civ III/IV you just put a good mix of units in a large stack and that's it.
@OP: your opinion about anti-cav units seem to come from computer games and movies. A spearman, hoplite, pikeman, whatever was (historically speaking) not a defensive unit, nor an anti-cav unit only. They are designed quite useful in multiplayer and if the enemy uses lots of cavalry units in civ VI. I don't see why they are pointless - cheap to build units that counter production heavy units.
I agree that ranged units are op. But just play the viking scenario - there is a unit called Huskarl, that the barbarians east of Sweden spam. It has such a tremendous bonus against ranged attacks (from archers and cities alike), that you won't build a lot of ranged units at all. Maybe we need a unit like this in the normal game (and not just for Kongo) or a promotion for spearmen that gives that kind of tremendous anti-range bonus. The swordsman bonus that is already included isn't enough here.
It sounds perfectly reasonable to me that siege weapons come with a small defensive force and thus have (a very weak) melee strength. For artillery, it makes even more sense (grape shot, which is a horribly thing to attack against as a melee unit). I think that melee units should always one shot siege units when attacking them - just with a (heavy) loss of HP.

 

[teks]

It won't kill the franchise but the game has irreverably shifted from an immersive civilization sim / strategy game to a multiplayer-centric, arcadey strategy game. That will destroy it for many people, and improve it for others.

Either way, I think the issues related to 1upt have been here since civ 5 and as a result we can't just say give it time. The problems assosiated with them aren't going away any time soon. Maybe in the next iteration they will come up with a new system.

Regardling anti-cav. They are useless. Other posters have correctly pointed out that they are designed to be cheap anti-cav. The problem is that they aren't cheap. They are actually very expensive units. A pikeman has 41 strength and 2 movement for 200 production. A knight has 48 strength and 4 movement for 180 production. How is that a cheap anti-cav exactly?

 

[PsychoticSquid]

I think a lot of these criticisms are quite harsh, although of course you are entitled to them. The fact that you have them and that you are passionate about them means you care about the series, which I would not want to try and shoot down on any day of the week, but I think what I'd like to say is that I guess the risks involved with making any sequel is that people want more of the same but not too much more of the same, because that game with all the exact features and mechanics that you love has already been made. A graphical upgrade is not enough. For the most part, I like many of the changes and the game stands as a pretty solid entry in the series for me, with some differences that make it suitably new. 1UPT certainly bounces our old-school tactical decisions on its head but there are new strategies that can be built around it. I was resistant at first, but I'm happy with the 1UPT change to the series. I think being able to stack units made battlefields stagnate too much and made wars last too long, especially true when coupled with the war weariness system.

There are layers of "good against" combat calculations that help make many of these changes make sense. Perhaps they need to be further tweaked. I would like to see anti-cavalry units perform better against cavalry from the get-go rather than only really coming to light after promotion, and I'd certainly like to see bombard and ranged units be more vulnerable against dedicated melee units. I imagine that these superiority bonuses will be tweaked with time.

The one thing you stated that I find quite surprising is that land-based units retain their stats when in "boat form" on the ocean. While I don't particularly miss having dedicated transport units, I agree it should definitely be fixed if indeed it is the case to avoid devaluing naval units. I admit I've not seen it represented mechanically in-game but I was under the assumption that units suffered severe stat penalties on the water even if the unit information panel failed to modify the numbers. I imagine it's an oversight? A big one, though, I'll give you that. I feel I want to test this, I'm used to expecting land-based units to under-perform on water so I've only ever played with navy in mind and careful management and protection of my units across the sea.

 

[Victoria]

I think the issues related to 1upt have been here since civ 5 and as a result we can't just say give it time.

The give it a chance comment were at the specific lines below. 1 UPT is here and the game has changed, the issues with stacks of doom outweiged the issues with 1UPT and things were changed, arguments already covered in plenty of posts.

completely unable to execute either attack or defence with 1UPT
The AI in Civ4 wasn't exactly brilliant, but it knew how to build stacks and use them, and as such could be a formidable opponent

 

[Tech Osen]

As a player I like 1upt. But the AI can't handle it and that is a huge issue.
I do have a problem with line of sight and hills, hills (especially with resources and improvements) are sometimes hard to spot. This was less of an issue in civ 5.

The issue with embarked units seem to stem mostly from the naval anti-unit promotions are specificaly vs other naval units and embarked units aren't flagged as such. Which makes it easier to sink a battleship than a transport.

 

[Dale]

1upt has not destroyed the franchise. It's more popular than ever.

Personally I think ctp2 had the best setup. 12 units per tile and your stack fought together as many v many, not as 1 v 1 as Civ has always been. The ai in ctp2 could handle it great too.

 

[CD7]

I agree that "stacks of doom" were an issue, when an AI would basically devote ALL its production into units for a long time, then declare war on you with a stack of 60+ units poised on your boarders, and hurl them against your city. But, on the plus side, it forced you to consider your military, monitor your opponents, and not fall behind. AND it at least make the AI a Challenge. If you got caught napping, the AI would take your cities, and on the toughest settings you could actually lose a game (shock, horror.)
Surely there was some sensible way to limit that?
Limit the number of units in a stack? And program the AI to not build too many?

Besides, 1UPT hasn't actually "fixed" anything.
Some AIs will still spam units, they just can't use them effectively so its doubly pointless. Similarly a Human player can still build a massive army, its just more tedious to move around.

 

[Crawd]

For sure, the 1UPT is harder for the AI, because instead of having 1 efficient path to find for it stacked army, it needs to dig out in its decision tree for the best pathing for each and everyone of their unit, within a decent amount of time. This is where the problem starts. So basically, does the AI any different? Not at all, it's almost the same, except that one can stack the units and the other cannot. A huge difference.

I'll take AlphaGo (the Google AI that beat the world champion of Go last year), while go is a very simple game, to win it, you need a very strong strategy to win it. Now for an AI, it needs a database of 30 million of possible moves and it needs to find it really fast. Let's see the hardware to be able to beat him. It was a distributed computer with 64 search threads on 1920 CPU and 280 GPU. After seeing these specs, it's not surprising, it would be like every players of Go playing together against one person where they can talk of their strategies withing miliseconds.

Now, let's get back to Civ6, sure, it doesn't have a huge number of possible moves to apply like in Go, but it still has a lot and it's all depend on the unit order which could cause a few bad moves. Sadly, and it happened to me in my AI learning class, sometime developpers build their AI on super computer, allowing them to tweek their AI and get decent to great results. In their process, they usually use a tree-search method and they can dig their tree down in the 5th to 7th level deep, which is very good in some complexe games. However, when the same AI is applied on an average spec, the tree-search method is cut down by half and rarely reached the 4th level, causing it to do some weird stuffs. As I've said, it happened to me in my AI learning class where my AI was able to beat anyone on my laptop, but once it was running on a PC of my university, it was failing badly and doing very weird stuffs. I didn't understand why until I've did some research afterward.

That being said, it's easy to blame any decision on the development, but let's face it, it's a very complex universe. Surely that stacking unit would create better AI, I will not deny that, because the AI will not have to care about unit collision, just add 1UPT in CivIV and it will surely do even worst than today for that very own reason. It seems easier now, but it's because we're able to apply tactics based on the terrain without having to find "the faster way to get to my destination". And based on a few test I've did, the AI isn't doing badly when fighting 1 unit vs 1 unit.

With that in mind, sure it would create a better AI if there was no 1UPT, it would be undenyable, and I'm pretty sure if you remove the turn base and do Civ as an RTS, it would do very well too, since they will not have to recalculate their movement each turn, creating a flow of decision, instead of a decision based on a static moment.

Now, as a personal opinion, I will say that I prefer more the 1UPT. Sure the AI has more difficulties to get good results, but it brings more on the tactical level other than creating a "Stack of doom". There's more dangerous decision to do, like: "Should I walk my army back by 1 tile, allowing my cavalry to get a nice flank, or should I rush in, hoping the opponent won't have reinforcements behind his line?" With a "Stack of doom", it was mainly: "Am I confident enough in my stack?" Not much to think about...

So, I wouldn't mind to wait a little more during the AI turn's process, in order to reach a good level in their decision tree, instead of asking the developpers to reduce in the AI turn's process... Asking for both is, in fact, impossible without affecting the AI...

 

[kamex]

Heres my take:

1. Moving units has become a tedious PITA, and the "Go To" function has become not only useless, but actually dangerous to use.
   Agree that the Go To is dangerous due to its unreliability. Its understandable though given all of the 'traffic jams' that occur. I imagine relying on Go To all the time must be like how the AI plan long distance wars which may give insight to how badly it performs.
   
   
2. To stop the inherent problem of units clogging the map, individual units have been made too expensive, powerful, and valuable. Meaning that a correctly used small army can conquer the whole world.
   I have no real problem with an 'Elite Units' concept but the production times apart from Classical Agoge feel too long. By the time I've built my medieval army its obsolete. Varies with game speed settings of course.
   
   
3. Because you can't stack units in cities for defence, the cities themselves have been made ridiculously powerful, making garrisoning redundant. A city with walls can easily hold off most AI armies. This makes it even easier to conquer the world, as there is no need to garrison your own or captured cities.
   A settler is theoretically one of the most powerful military units in the game for this reason. Not quite as bad as Civ V though, at least you now need walls early and mid game in order to fire. AI struggles to conquer cities but you still want units to protect your districts and their insane rebuild times.
   
   
4. The AI in Civ4 wasn't exactly brilliant, but it knew how to build stacks and use them, and as such could be a formidable opponent, especially on higher levels. In contrast, the Civ6 AI is completely unable to execute either attack or defence with 1UPT, meaning that even when it starts a surprise war against you, with massive superiority, you can roll it like a cheap fag.
   I strongly agree that the AI is less competent at using military than in Civ IV. Please watch your language.
   
   
   
5. Because 1UTP is apparently incompatible with transports, land units have been given the ability to swim, whilst apparently retaining their strengths. This leads to epic infantry battles in the middle of the ocean, and effectively makes naval units redundant.
   I thought naval units instantly destroyed embarked units by moving on top of them, like military units and AI Apostles. Might be mistaken though.
   
   
6. The lack of stacking makes anti-cavalry units pointless (if you'll excuse the pun) so they have to be given their own offensive strength which is nonsense.
   No more useless than catapults...
   
   
7. Because you can't stack ranged units, they have been given stupendous range to enable them to fire from the hex behind. So you have ancient archers apparently able to hurl the arrows right over an entire city.
   Sense of scale is completely destroyed by 1UPT and I can't express how much I hate this. Depending on game speed setting, it can take troops hundreds of years to march the same range that archers can fire. This is what happen when you put tactical battle mode on a battlefield that's supposed to represent the whole planet.
   

In conclusion I don't understand why we can't have best of both? Stacks with a cap of 12 units or something with bonuses for mix and matching units, hence designing 'tactical stacks'. Should improve the AI too.

 

[Kwami]

Did we really need another topic about 1UPT? What could possibly be said here that hasn't been said in the last 8,000 or so topics about it?

 

[FurballRocker]

1. Moving units has become a tedious PITA, and the "Go To" function has become not only useless, but actually dangerous to use.
   
2. To stop the inherent problem of units clogging the map, individual units have been made too expensive, powerful, and valuable. Meaning that a correctly used small army can conquer the whole world.
3. Because you can't stack units in cities for defence, the cities themselves have been made ridiculously powerful, making garrisoning redundant. A city with walls can easily hold off most AI armies. This makes it even easier to conquer the world, as there is no need to garrison your own or captured cities.
4. The AI in Civ4 wasn't exactly brilliant, but it knew how to build stacks and use them, and as such could be a formidable opponent, especially on higher levels. In contrast, the Civ6 AI is completely unable to execute either attack or defence with 1UPT, meaning that even when it starts a surprise war against you, with massive superiority, you can roll it like a cheap fag.
5. Because 1UTP is apparently incompatible with transports, land units have been given the ability to swim, whilst apparently retaining their strengths. This leads to epic infantry battles in the middle of the ocean, and effectively makes naval units redundant.
6. The lack of stacking makes anti-cavalry units pointless (if you'll excuse the pun) so they have to be given their own offensive strength which is nonsense.
   
7. Because you can't stack ranged units, they have been given stupendous range to enable them to fire from the hex behind. So you have ancient archers apparently able to hurl the arrows right over an entire city.
   But this in-turn creates line-of-sight problems, which in reality would never be an issue.
8. Because you can't stack them, barrage weapons have been given melee strength to enable them to stand alone. WTH?
9. I also blame 1UTP for the stupid situation with Builders. Presumably to stop your builders clogging the whole map, they now build things instantaneously, and repair improvements for free. But to limit their usefulness, they expire after 3 builds.
10. As a flow on from above, because Builders are now too valuable to waste building roads, roads just magically appear if you have a trade route (or if you are Rome) AND magically upgrade.

1Upt has made this game the game i dreamed it would be every time a new one was released.

1. Like everything it is not perfect and can be improved certainly but there have been improvements from civ V to civ VI.

2. For the first part I find units quite cheap and expendable in civ VI in particular. There are advantages to having a well trained unit but much less so than in civ V where highly promoted units often became OP elite units. For the second part this is always the case. Look at Alexander the Great, the Romans, Genghis Khan or the British Empire all of which created large empires using a small highly trained military while often vastly outnumbered and even modern battle examples such as the Falklands war, the Battle of Britain or the Italian attack on North Africa in WWII where 30k British troops defeated 150k Italians and taking over 130K Italian prisoners.

3. Seem to be making the same old mistake of mistaking one problem for another. There is definitely an issue with the way the AI is currently attacking cities but that can't be said to be down to 1Upt as the AI could certainly capture cities in civ V, including my own cities. The AI would often conquer most of the world in civ V and was quite capable of going for a domination victory. If the AI would actually attack cities when it gets to them and surrounds them it could take cities now also. In some of my early games i should have lost many cities to AI attacks but the AI just doesn't attack the city at all which as i said is a programming issue, not a 1Upt issue.

4. Many problems would certainly be easier to fix with unit stacking but that doesn't make it a better system and as already mentioned in (3) there is obviously a problem with the combat AI in civ VI which is probably amplified by 1Upt but 1Upt isn't the cause.

5.This is a balance issue, not a 1Upt issue and really would be solved by having the original vanilla system from civ V where embarked units had no combat strength which would fit well with the new escort system.

6. How is this nonsense? Pikemen have often been used for offensive purposes because their long reach made them difficult to fight against and up to modern times we have tank destroyers from WWII which can be good in offensive situations due to their heavy armour and powerful armament. Anti tank rockets where you don't just sit an wait, especially these days where the missiles can go long distances so you actively seek targets and attack them.
On the contrary 1Upt actually makes cavalry units useful and in a more realistic way where you can use their speed and maneuverability.

7. Do we really want to go into the scale factor issue again...it is a game, a representation not a simulation. From a game play perspective 1Upt greatly improves the game play when it is balanced properly. Again there are current issues with civ VI but again this is not a 1Upt problem it is a poor implementation problem.

8. Archers and crossbowmen usually carried a melee weapon to defend themselves from close quarters attack. Siege type units usually have a defensive garrison unit attached to protect them from direct attack as well having basic arms for themselves.

9. I think you are just trying to blame 1Upt for everything. I would much rather have a unit which expires so i have to think more about how i use it rather than unit which eventually becomes a bore to deal with.

10. You do know that most roads were created organically rather than created?! People went from A to B a lot and just wore a track in the ground so their creation in civ VI is probably the most accurate representation yet which brings us back to it is a game, a representation not a simulation. Was really a fun and interesting mechanic to have to send all your workers to upgrade all your roads?