Has 1UPT Completely Destroyed this Franchise?

There are similar games like "Master of Magic" (1994) from SimTex/Microprose or "Age of Wonders" where you use army stacks on worldmap but do combat in 1upt on a tactical battlefield.

 

I liked MoM but the miniboard kind of broke the gameplay up too much for me.

 

I don't believe it has "destroied the franchise" as much as "turned it into a different kind of game".
the fact that the AI was not up to snuff in this new game is an unrelated problem.

but hey, if so many people here don't like the 1UPT, why not go back to play civ4? There is still a small community of players gathering together to play it. I say, put your gaming time where your mouth is.

 

Also the whole scale argument has been rephrased and proven pointless before. It is not a single scale it's a sliding scale or your cities would be hundreds of km across.

The way units work in battle is a compromise you you do not have to have 2 maps, it's overlaying a tactical map with a strategic.

There is plenty of things just wrong with civ 6 at the moment but this is not one of them, this is down to your preference as to how you like your game played.

 

As I've said, you can make Stacks, no Stacks, it does not matter, as long as you balance it. As long as there is Counter-play

The old Stacks of Doom, with no counter other than your own Stacks of Doom, is just bad gameplay.

Adding a line or 2 of units that are basically "stack killers", IE, do less damage vs. a single unit, but significantly more damage to an enemy the more units are stacked up, would add more strategy and depth. Sure, you could spend 50 turns and thousands of production making a stack of doom, only to lose it to someone who spent 10 turns and hundreds of production, making a few "stack Killers" and wipe the stack. But that would be your fault for making a stack so appealing.

Strategy and counters, as long as you have them, it will not matter if there are stacks or 1UPT

 

I can only speak for myself.
I want to play a strategy game yes, but I want a bit of panzer general in there too.

 

Don't worry, that's what I do.

 

How old are you talking? I only recall the term being used with Civ 4, which did have counterplay: each attack with a siege unit would damage half a dozen or so units, and anytime cavalry survives an attack in the field it would damage every siege unit in the stack.

 

I didn't like those Civ 4 mechanism

I think for me the Civ 3 combat was just fine, once you could move 100 pieces of artillery with 1 click. (As far as I remember (16 years back) in vanilla Civ 3 it was not possible, it came with an addon.)

 

I guess some are, and I guess many more are done playing Civ for the time being.

 

Civ 4 did have collateral damage as a solid counter to stack combat (technically civ 2 had a primitive version of this also, stacking a lot outside of cities/forts carried extreme risk there). Civ 3 had the unfortunate aspect of siege in that it could deal damage w/o taking any, so truly massed siege could snowball fast. I might be mis-remembering something but IIRC civ 3 stacks were much more brute force oriented than 4.

From a design perspective 1 UPT has a tendency to slow down games but can be a functional model if you have enough damage in combat. The design choices made in 5 and 6 hinder the potential of 1 UPT, and the de-emphasis on a quality control/orders scheme in a game where you are necessarily going to increase the number of individual units moved is a head scratcher. From an objective standpoint these have not ruined the series, but they have damaged its potential.

Some of us have 1000's of hours in civ 4, don't necessarily mind 1 UPT, but want a functionally decent implementation of it. The civ franchise has yet to provide a complete, soundly-implemented 1 UPT experience. It's possible to do, Firaxis hasn't done it. It's a slugfest to play turns (I do not recall a time in civ's history where unit cycling worked well and the controls are broken in 5 and 6 even more so than 4, which also had broken controls...) and the unit tuning needs a lot of help with how upgrades/tech apply to them.

But it CAN be good, in principle.

 

well, if you want to go technical, it wasn't much of a counter to stacking as it was a way to ensure the victory for the attacking stack - everything else being equal, that is. Because stacking was still the only reasonable way to play in the vast majority of situations.
sending isolated units was a way to lose them - if you have an isolated unit, the opponent can attack it with a similar unit; 50% he wins, so he kills a unit for free, and even if he loses, it will damage your unit enough that the second unit will win almost for sure, so both sides lose a unit, but he gains xp. win-win scenario, made even better because he could just attack with a counter unit instead. sending a small group of different units to counter everything also does not work: let's say you send one knight, one mace and one pike, for example. no one unit can attack you with good odds, but you can attack with 5 knights; the first will have some 30% against the pike, the second will have 50% against the knight, and the others will have easy victory. So you're losing 1.5 knights to killl 3 units. Or you could attack with 4 crossbows, the first one will die against the knight, but it should damage it enough for the second to kill, and then it's easy game; statistically you lose 2 crossbows to killl 3 more expensive units. Or you could send a catapult and 4 knights.
Basically in civ4 the attacker always won, and so the only defence was to stay in your ground, where you were the only one who could use roads and therefore you could always attack first. Sometimes it worked to send horses in another place, or to send some embarked units to create a diversion, but generally did more harm than good; the only strategy was about how you move your stack, using hills and rivers for defence bonus, and especially knowing when you had enough to go in. At least for games with reduced front lines. maybe for some ffa where you had large borders it was better to spread your army.
anyway, the only real counter to stacks were nukes. two nukes completely killed a stack, and tactical weapons even had reduced chance of being intercepted. but, well, nukes killed pretty much about everything, including the usefulness of other units. the only defence was to go into your enemy's land, since he could not nuke himself (at least in vanilla). I once won a game like that, I had a fleet with marines inside enemy's land, and I nuked citiees before invading them; my opponent could only nuke me, but he could not raze my cities.

 

That's normal. Warfare sucks in a game where defenders always come out ahead, or even just on average.

Even on the offense against the AI, there is a lot of value to be had in picking off defenders moving through territory -- which results in having units on many different tiles.

Yes, the AI could sweep out and pick off those smaller groups of units -- and if you've done it well, that's a very good thing, since you get to return the favor. Acceptable losses to draw enemy units out of their fortified position.

Yes, search through TMIT's posts, he has said a lot about that.

 

I'm talking about warfare among humans here. AI was generally too stupid to go about it efficiently; in my experience, the best way to deal with it was to stack your army into a fortified city and let AI lose everything while throwing its troops at your city a few every turn, then move your stack and camp it outside of enemy city and let AI attack it with a few units every turn.
Against humans, sending stragglers as bait was chancy at best. if the opponent played smart, he could just kill the last unit with a horse and moving it back, denying you the chance to retaliate. or attack with one unit at a time so that he'd have only one unit remaining in the tile afterwards; even if you could kill this unit, the balance would still be good for him. I've seen it done with success if one has a stack of catapults only - in vanilla, it was a legitimate defensive stack, as siege units could still kill back then. In that case, sacrificing some units to kill catas would increase the survivability of the stack. Or I've seen it done with success if the opponent noobed it, or if one had a distinct promotion advantage - say aggressive civ against nonaggressive

 

MP is attack-favored in own territory in civ 4, but only if you have enough local collateral initiative to do good damage or clear invading stack. If you don't you can easily get forked and whichever city or cities you can't reinforce without cutting through invading stack (say on hills or trees) are likely to burn. Same goes with naval units + transports --> unlike the AI humans can't afford to put defenders everywhere so the straggler principle gets pushed onto defending civilization's cities.

This also ignores tech timings or someone amassing a large force quickly enough (latter more so against opponents who aren't aware enough wrt demographics).

Civ 5 and 6 share this defender advantage and then some, because of the restrictions against move --> attack into defensive terrain and general less likelihood of moving into position and shooting when pressing the attack, coupled with the ridiculous siege-equaling city attacks in 5 and 6. Facing a good opponent at tech parity as the attacker is pretty rough if they're trying to defend at all, and worse still the proportionate amount of production the defender needs to survive an attack is less than that of stack combat, because defender can essentially fortify + have ranged behind it and create chokes or kill zones, while attacker is limited in how much damage he can bring at any one point.

 

Civ 6 is tilted towards the attacker. Bigly.

In every iteration of the game prior to this a big chunk of your infrastructure was inside your city making it essentially invulnerable until conquered. Civ 6 moved almost everything out onto the map and thus vulnerable. In the past it was definitely damaging and annoying to have your improvements plundered but holy hell is it aggravating now. You can really mess up a civilization without even taking a single city. Just run around killing units and plundering districts and you can easily stymie them to the point where you gain a whole era on them.

Civ 6 works so differently from prior versions that you really need to re-think approaches. Kick 'em in the nuts, take your protection money, and then come back in 30 turns and you'll likely have a tech advantage and a better army.

 

I do not agree that 6 favors attacker. 6 allows for multi-choke with the encampment district and city both being capable of firing, and ZoC proc from defensive terrain vs anything but horse units. You can easily out trade much larger forces at the border or force terrible pathing with a fraction of the troops.

If you slap your commercial/industrial district on the border of an enemy then they will likely get pillaged unless you invest to block that, but this is not enough to make it "bigly" attacker favored. It isn't attacker-favored at all, though it's less defender-favored than civ 5.

 

It could be due to my lack of playing MP and still trying to master King (I've beat Emperor but with cheesy civs). The AI doesn't do anything like that.

 

The AI has no real concept of defending, but it's a good strategy against them. When at an moderate army disadvantage, I often set up a defensive position near the border, declare war, and wait for the AI to suicide a large portion of their military. Unfortunately it's hard to tell how much is due to defender's advantage and how much is due to incompetent AI. But I can definitely win fights I would have easily lost if I just charged in directly.