Has 1UPT Completely Destroyed this Franchise?

[c4c6]

Many of us are builders and prefer to build as few units as possible

'build as few units as possible' for me implies always 'build as many units as necessary'

 

[Solaxe]

No. I couldn't stand previous Civ games because of doomstacks. They killed any form of strategy

 

[filcon]

Interesting points, tho I still like 1UPT more compared to other styles.

 

[FurballRocker]

Many of us are builders and prefer to build as few units as possible - many of my most enjoysbles games have been OCC where my entire military for the whole game was the starting warrior ....

I think this is a very valid, honest and understandable point and i think there are a lot of people out who enjoy the empire development side and not really the military side of the game and i feel that is the real crux of many peoples hate of 1Upt, because when we had stacking the military side wasn't very involved and there was little need to be involved in it. You were like the modern leader of a nation who gives general guidance to the armed forces and leaves the finer points of it to your generals where as 1Upt is more like an old king who actually commands the army in battle and the success of your nation is as much about your military competence as it is about your empire management.
I feel it would be much more productive for the enhancement of the series if many of the people who don't like the shift to 1Upt were more honest about why they don't like the shift rather than trying to get the franchise to return to stacking by spuriously blaming everything that is wrong with the game on the introduction of 1Upt.

Now to a certain degree 1Upt has dramatically changed the style of game civ is and a lot of people aren't particularly 'comfortable' with the military side becoming more prominent which is possibly amplified by the way that as the military side has become more prominent the empire side has waned significantly compared to what it used to be, especially in civ 6 where i feel that cities have become almost nondescript entities.e.g. my capital never really feels any different to any other city, it's doesn't seem like the focus of my empire and often ends up feeling secondary to other cities. There are no more special cites such as holy cites or centers of production (or need to be as trade routes have become king of production) or centers of science. Thinking about it this is likely caused a great deal by another step backwards we seem to have made from civ 5 which is there are no national wonders

Again though i don't feel the waning of the empire side is a direct result of 1Upt as the franchise has been slowly moving in that direction since it began and there was still a well developed empire model in civ 5 but again all the hard work of developing civ 5 over the years seems to have been forgotten and wasted in civ 6.

Trying to have a reasonable conversation about it, would the people who like the hands on 1Upt style and also the people who prefer the much more hands off style of stacking feel they would enjoy a system which many games adopt where there is limited stacking which when armies meet you get a choice of either letting the AI play it out by itself or can switch to the 'tactical view' where you can control your units directly? Akin to Endless Legend and similar games where it seems to work very well?
Therefore achieving a reasonable middle ground which allow both types of players to enjoy it the way they prefer?
I picked Endless Legend as it doesn't actually take you to a different screen to fight battles but the units spread out and fight in the area of contact which i feel is more in line with the civ series.

 

[rschissler]

This has probably been talked about before, but I'm convinced that the high unit maintenance cost has been implemented to alleviate some of the flaws of 1UPT in this game. It's like, if units have a high maintenance cost, players won't build as many, and if there are fewer units on the map, there will be fewer frustrations with logjams. This bandaid approach makes the game more shallow, and contributes to the weak combat with the AI. The AI (not including the city-states) seems to have very few units, and probably doesn't upgrade because of the increased maintenance costs in doing so. So, combat with the AI is pretty easy. City-states always seem to have many more units, possibly because they don't have to use production on settlers and only need a couple builders, since they only have one city.

Here I am in a typical mid point in a game, where all the buildings in my districts have been built, my pop isn't at a level where I can build another district, and I have enough builders for now. I would like to build another unit, but a maintenance cost of 5gold seems too much to bear...

 

[WackenOpenAir]

No, but people who keep making new topics about it have destroyed the forums.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

No. I couldn't stand previous Civ games because of doomstacks. They killed any form of strategy

It's mysterious to see this, given that the strategies people talk about using with SoDs in play amounts to the kind of efficiency that gets a civ dumpstered by anybody with a little knowledge of the game and a pulse.

It was also very possible to over or underbuild, and harder to notice when you were doing that.

 

[UWHabs]

This has probably been talked about before, but I'm convinced that the high unit maintenance cost has been implemented to alleviate some of the flaws of 1UPT in this game. It's like, if units have a high maintenance cost, players won't build as many, and if there are fewer units on the map, there will be fewer frustrations with logjams. This bandaid approach makes the game more shallow, and contributes to the weak combat with the AI. The AI (not including the city-states) seems to have very few units, and probably doesn't upgrade because of the increased maintenance costs in doing so. So, combat with the AI is pretty easy. City-states always seem to have many more units, possibly because they don't have to use production on settlers and only need a couple builders, since they only have one city.

Here I am in a typical mid point in a game, where all the buildings in my districts have been built, my pop isn't at a level where I can build another district, and I have enough builders for now. I would like to build another unit, but a maintenance cost of 5gold seems too much to bear...

If you have nothing to build, you work on a project instead. And the unit maintenance definitely has a certain effect - you can't simply keep units around forever. But in some ways, I don't think the maintenance is really high enough relative to the costs. I mean, say a sub costs me 5 gold per turn to maintain. But to buy a new one is going to cost me probably 1800 gold, so he'd have to sit around for 360 turns doing nothing to have it worth it to disband and rebuild/rebuy. And that's not even counting the fact that I may not keep the cash around to rush him if needed, or if he has any promotions built in. Or if it's already upgraded to a fleet, then he's even more valuable yet not any more expensive to maintain.

They would probably need to double or more the maintenance of units while halving their cost to build new to really have it worthwhile to disband and rebuild units. Either that or have the military policy discounts also apply to unit purchasing, or do something like free maintenance if garrisoned or drastically reduced maintenance costs if they're within your borders, so that people can keep a standing defensive army around, but it costs a lot to go on offense (you'd also have to change it so that unit cost in occupied territory was still high)

 

[Fippy]

Lots of talk for no gain..

..we have 1 side, gamers who did not dive into the highly valuable strategy depths that earlier Civ versions offered, and so never realized what a great & complicated concept doomstacks can be. Especially on higher difficulties, i dare everybody who says "doomstacks are just build that stack and go" to play Civ4 immortal & esp. deity and try that.

And another side, those who did and really miss strategy in Civ.
Casual vs. "fanatics", old school vs. smartphone generation, i could make dozens of comparisons here but they all have the same result:
pointless discussions between totally different players.

 

[Lexicus]

So I haven't read the 169 messages in this thread, but I think the problem isn't 1-upt per se, it's shoehorning 1-upt onto a strategic map that is supposed to represent the whole world.

 

[Victoria]

IDC about 1 UPT, I do care about moving differing units about in some form of tactical fight, whether shoehorned onto the map or separate. Call it micromanagement or call it more fun.... I'm certainly happy its not stacks anymore.

 

[TaxCorp]

1UPT just makes no sense in the game with the scale it represents, or with the way AI uses it. Currently it is only ever fun in multiplayer. What are these doomstacks people refer to? I played civ 4 with aggresive ai on immortal and all I saw were tactical stacks, not one big stack. If there was one big stack you simply would catapult/artillery/bomb/nuke it. The AI was much smarter than that. Sounds like players who were not very good at the game and got scared of a stack of 20swordsmen think that was some kind of gamebreaker. To me that is like a proper ancient era battle where 2 armies fought (you should have had your own similar stacks). Civ4 dealt with stacks by upping the ante on the bombardment as the eras moved up. So if someone really turned up with a doomstack in the modern era, it would die quite promptly, or you hold it up with defensive units and go around the side and take out half of their empire.

 

[Lexicus]

1UPT just makes no sense in the game with the scale it represents, or with the way AI uses it. Currently it is only ever fun in multiplayer. What are these doomstacks people refer to? I played civ 4 with aggresive ai on immortal and all I saw were tactical stacks, not one big stack. If there was one big stack you simply would catapult/artillery/bomb/nuke it. The AI was much smarter than that. Sounds like players who were not very good at the game and got scared of a stack of 20swordsmen think that was some kind of gamebreaker. To me that is like a proper ancient era battle where 2 armies fought (you should have had your own similar stacks). Civ4 dealt with stacks by upping the ante on the bombardment as the eras moved up. So if someone really turned up with a doomstack in the modern era, it would die quite promptly, or you hold it up with defensive units and go around the side and take out half of their empire.

One funny wrinkle: the same people who denounce doom stacks as gamebreaking would defend the -50 happiness drop in Civ V upon reaching the industrial age and ideologies with "you didn't plan for it, you deserve it!"

 

[FurballRocker]

..we have 1 side, gamers who did not dive into the highly valuable strategy depths that earlier Civ versions offered, and so never realized what a great & complicated concept doomstacks can be. Especially on higher difficulties, i dare everybody who says "doomstacks are just build that stack and go" to play Civ4 immortal & esp. deity and try that.

No need to take the dare as i already did.
I have always played civ on immortal and diety and up to and including 4 i always used to try out various tactics outside of building a stack of doom just to try an make the combat side interesting and i always resorted to just grouping my units into one big stack and obliterating the enemies stack because doing anything else was just wasting time, firstly in the sense of having to move more than one stack around at a time and secondly in the sense my individual stacks would take proportionally more damage each and thus have to wait around more for damaged units to heal or risk losing more units overall and having to build more to keep my stack strength up. It is similar to the economy of scale.

The only time i ever found it more efficient to actually split my main stack was once i had annihilated the enemy stack and then i could separate them into smaller city killer stacks knowing how many units would be needed to take a city and thus making stacks of that size so i could mop up more quickly.

Collateral damage was the main design mechanic which tried to fix that and encourage people to break up their stacks but all that really did was ensure you attacked first so you did massive collateral damage on the enemy stack before they could attack you (if your attack didn't destroy them) so that if they did attack in return they would just kill themselves against your stack.
Part of the reason they moved to an enforced 1Upt system is because the only way to break up stack of doom was to enforce it because it was so dominant over splitting up your stack.

Winning militarily was effectively just a race to ensure you had a bigger stack and use it to attack the enemy stack first. You could use some force multipliers to aid you if you weren't quite at the optimum size such as ensuring when you attacked the enemy stack you were in defensive terrain to make their counter attack was even more deadly to them but what little military tactics there were are transferred over to 1Upt with many more added on top.

Now maybe some people found it harder and more complicated than that but i never did, no matter how much i really wanted it to be and i really really wanted it to be more complicated and more interesting and used to pour over all the pre release material and previews with them harping on about how they had added this and that, which meant stacks of doom no longer ruled and i was always disappointed that it ended up just being the same.

 

[Horizons]

Lazy cash-in sequels ruined the franchise. Firaxis no longer makes any effort to release decent games, it rushes them out the door. For example, 'Let's release a premium-priced game without a functioning AI and then see how people play the game before partially fixing it while at the same time milking those suckers with constant DLC packs.'

 

[Lexicus]

No need to take the dare as i already did.

For all the problems with SoD (which I don't think are really problems at all because it's a strategy game, not a tactical wargame) at least the AI could handle the system. I don't think dancing through the AI's carpet without taking any losses is a great improvement on the SoD, personally, but *shrugs* to each his/her own, I guess.

 

[agonistes]

I enjoy 1 upt. But as fun as it is, its like a neat concept that is cool to use as a breakaway from the norm for a bit, then you realize that as cool as it is, the problems that go along with the cool factor are a bigger negative than the cool factor is a positive.

Do I *enjoy* marching an army from France or Russia down to Kongo on a giant Yeta map? Hell no. Hell. No.

Once time, on giant Yeta with TSL, Civ V, I was Greece. Marched from Greece to Germany, to France, back to Russia, down to Persia. Jeez.

There is almost no game that goes by without me having to march 50+ units from Europe or Russia down to Africa to liberate someone. And with VI, the way the cursor is draggy when its over water makes going over or around the Med. a nightmare. Ha! Try moving 30 knights and cannons from France around Spain, over the water, while Spain has about 60 chariots making a vast red cloud around Iberia.

No, I think 'stack's or single unit (upgradeable) armies are the way to go. Something like 1 unit per city per X size, and the unit is an army, and you spend shields to upgrade it (like adding archers, cav., and so forth) and heal it. The components of each individual army are up to you, provided you have the techs.

OR... units are stackable, but units IN a stack CANNOT attack. Right? Marching formation, 1 upt for combat and sieges.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

The only time i ever found it more efficient to actually split my main stack

The point isn't about splitting the stack the tactics are in the composition - types of units, promotions and the size - too small and you risk defeat, too large and you've wasted time and allowed the AI to build up it's defences.

 

[miaasma]

i've always found this to be such a weird thing to complain about. i played civ 3 and 4 and doom stacks weren't a big issue for me, but i also had no trouble transitioning to 1upt in civ 5 and now 6. they don't dramatically change how i play, only how i approach war. i've seen people type essays defending one or the other on here and none of it ever seems compelling to me; in the end, i think all you're doing is defending your preference and griping about the games that don't cater to them, as well as projecting these preferences onto tons of people who, as far as you know, have no issue whatsoever with the current unit system. how many threads about this does this forum go through on a per month basis? per year? does some conclusion present itself at the end or do people just withdraw into their corresponding echo chambers about either the glory days of civ 4 or the new and improved civ 5/6? should this discussion get put to rest finally?

it doesn't seem to me like anyone with one preference is going to convince the other side that theirs is better for whatever gameplay-related reason, and regardless of where you stand on the issue, there's a game that works best for you

 

[c4c6]

regardless of where you stand on the issue, there's a game that works best for you

well, liking both has the advantage that "there are 2 games that works best for you". also without projecting all the time specific problems of each incarnation monocausally onto 1upt or sod helps to overcome the problems easier.