How can I deal with the massive amounts of enemy units?

[Dawnpromise]

I hit the early game supply cap pretty often nowadays. Once I go conquering, it stops being an issue, but in the Classical and maybe Medieval, it for sure matters I find.

And actually, in my last game I was at the cap even in the Atomic Era. But I only had five cities, and all four of my neighbors hated me and kept in constant multi-front warfare, literally DoWing me the turn the peace deal ended multiple times. Guess that's what happens when you use your UA to steal their best tiles. I think that's aberrational, altho I don't play tall often to be positive.

Well my idea of an effective attack force ranges from 5-15 units on a front. I'm not a fan of the 'carpet of units' approach the AI strive for.

 

[ashendashin]

Oh god, please don't make the the early unit cap so crippling. I'm up for trying some new late game constraints, but overall this isn't a huge problem until it starts nearing industrial. Harder constraints as you empire gets bigger would be more along the lines of a fix to this.

 

[Dawnpromise]

Oh god, please don't make the the early unit cap so crippling. I'm up for trying some new late game constraints, but overall this isn't a huge problem until it starts nearing industrial. Harder constraints as you empire gets bigger would be more along the lines of a fix to this.[/QUOTE

Yeah I'd agree with this as well. The war game is fun up until the beginnings of the industrial most games. It should be set up in a way that scales similarly to the happiness bonus: Being noticeable but weak early, but being a MASSIVE factor in the mid-late game.

Maybe penalizing military units starting at above 50% or so the cap, or wherever you want the size balance to lie at.

Also I'm of the mindset of preferring 'smarter' over 'harder' AI which is why I play on prince difficulty. So I'm against the AI getting a flat "Supply bonus". The AI is smart enough to be a challenge across the board, and even whenever I feel curious about playing on a higher difficulties I don't because the feeling of "well I'm just giving the AI permission to cheat" when instead I want the AI to play a touch smarter. But I feel that discussion is best suited to another time.

 

[pandasnail]

Well my idea of an effective attack force ranges from 5-15 units on a front. I'm not a fan of the 'carpet of units' approach the AI strive for.

I mean, I don't build carpets either, but can't take an AI capital with just four archers and two spearmen anymore either. When cities are still small, it doesn't take a carpet.

Oh god, please don't make the the early unit cap so crippling. I'm up for trying some new late game constraints, but overall this isn't a huge problem until it starts nearing industrial. Harder constraints as you empire gets bigger would be more along the lines of a fix to this.

Would it possible maybe for puppet population to count less for the supply cap? Not zero, but some smaller percentage. I've been finding them almost too good since the science change, and this would be some negative at least.

As to the other current topic, I find warfare fun until Artillery and its free Indirect Fire hits the board, it does become kinda boring with that unit tho. Quite like the new field gun unit that delays the Artillery.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

I'm loving the current combat, so imho there's no dire need to change the unit production costs or the unit supply caps for the AI or human. But if there were changes, I'd be in favour of slightly increasing the cap for human players, not reducing the AIs'.

 

[tu_79]

Mmm, that's troublesome. Some players want a manageable number of units to finish a game in a reasonable time (in which I account). Others don't mind to spend hours moving units, it must be a funny chore in itself. I think that's what huge maps were made for.
Puppet cities contributing much less to unit supply is interesting, but I wonder how to deal with AI not puppeting for the sake of having more units (so forcing the player to annex himself) and how will this affect Venice.

Is a hard limit really needed? I mean, if there is a soft limit based on population, where being under the limit costs B per unit, and being over the limit increases cost in 1 gold every new unit, I think it will be enough to contain huge unit numbers. Also, unit maintenance becomes cheaper as ages pass by, so I'd increase base cost based on Age.
Something like, UnitSupplyLimit = (1 every 5 pop in controlled cities) + (1 every 10 pop in puppet cities) + handicap base
Then, UnitMaintenanceCost = 1 gold scaling with Age (1,1,2,3,4,...) for units under UnitSuppyLimit; +1 extra gold scaling for units over UnitSupplyLimit.
So when gold is in abundance, units will cost much more (that's logical, they are more advanced units), and making more units than pop can handle is not impossible, but has a higher cost that you will pay in further underdevelopment.

 

[ashendashin]

Mmm, that's troublesome. Some players want a manageable number of units to finish a game in a reasonable time (in which I account). Others don't mind to spend hours moving units, it must be a funny chore in itself. I think that's what huge maps were made for.
Puppet cities contributing much less to unit supply is interesting, but I wonder how to deal with AI not puppeting for the sake of having more units (so forcing the player to annex himself) and how will this affect Venice.

Is a hard limit really needed? I mean, if there is a soft limit based on population, where being under the limit costs B per unit, and being over the limit increases cost in 1 gold every new unit, I think it will be enough to contain huge unit numbers. Also, unit maintenance becomes cheaper as ages pass by, so I'd increase base cost based on Age.
Something like, UnitSupplyLimit = (1 every 5 pop in controlled cities) + (1 every 10 pop in puppet cities) + handicap base
Then, UnitMaintenanceCost = 1 gold scaling with Age (1,1,2,3,4,...) for units under UnitSuppyLimit; +1 extra gold scaling for units over UnitSupplyLimit.
So when gold is in abundance, units will cost much more (that's logical, they are more advanced units), and making more units than pop can handle is not impossible, but has a higher cost that you will pay in further underdevelopment.

I like where you're going with this. The unit cap has always been pretty jarring for me. Going along with this theme, I'm wondering if units could be tied to growth. A way to simulate the need for supplies would feel infinitely more natural than continuing the hard unit cap.

 

[Gazebo]

It isn't a hard cap. It already scales with population.

This is a big change, and I'm not sure it is warranted. We'd need much more interest in it to justify the rework.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

I like the fact that civs that go the authority path/select the 1st policy on the right can field a substantially larger army than the civs that have opted for the more peaceful policies. Perhaps I'd be in favour of adding a similar effect to one of the policies in the imperialism tree and the autocracy ideology. By maintaining the current unit cap and by making the imperialism/autocracy more appealing cap-wise, I think it would offer a better (and more realistic) contrast between the peaceful SP trees/ideologies and the more warmongering ones.

But other than that, I like the current system. I like that if I'm choosing to have less&smaller cities and choosing more peaceful policies, that I'm being "punished" by having to really make each unit count and having to really be careful how to position cities so I can defend them with less units at my disposal, and having to be much better if I want to conquer other cities. That way I can't have my cake and eat it too (have peaceful policies and an army on par with the warmongers).

If we removed the "hardness" of the cap (i.e. allowed to build units well over the cap), we'd be tilting the scales significantly in favour of the civs that go the peaceful policies route, because the potential penalties for being over the cap (extra gold maintanance, slower production,...) would in the mid/long run be quite easily outweighed by 1.) the benefits of those peaceful social policies, 2.) the benefits of being able to conquer easier despite having the peaceful social policies and 3.) the relative benefits of denying/limiting the benefits that the warmonger civs have from picking warmongering policies - peaceful civs having more units would make it harder for the warmongers to conquer, bully, ....

 

[tu_79]

I like the fact that civs that go the authority path/select the 1st policy on the right can field a substantially larger army than the civs that have opted for the more peaceful policies. Perhaps I'd be in favour of adding a similar effect to one of the policies in the imperialism tree and the autocracy ideology. By maintaining the current unit cap and by making the imperialism/autocracy more appealing cap-wise, I think it would offer a better (and more realistic) contrast between the peaceful SP trees/ideologies and the more warmongering ones.

But other than that, I like the current system. I like that if I'm choosing to have less&smaller cities and choosing more peaceful policies, that I'm being "punished" by having to really make each unit count and having to really be careful how to position cities so I can defend them with less units at my disposal, and having to be much better if I want to conquer other cities. That way I can't have my cake and eat it too (have peaceful policies and an army on par with the warmongers).

If we removed the "hardness" of the cap (i.e. allowed to build units well over the cap), we'd be tilting the scales significantly in favour of the civs that go the peaceful policies route, because the potential penalties for being over the cap (extra gold maintanance, slower production,...) would in the mid/long run be quite easily outweighed by 1.) the benefits of those peaceful social policies, 2.) the benefits of being able to conquer easier despite having the peaceful social policies and 3.) the relative benefits of denying/limiting the benefits that the warmonger civs have from picking warmongering policies - peaceful civs having more units would make it harder for the warmongers to conquer, bully, ....

They can have as many units, but the gold cost will punish more pacific civs.

 

[pandasnail]

They can have as many units, but the gold cost will punish more pacific civs.

Eventually, there becomes more than enough gold to go around, for both Human and AI. If five units extra units made the difference for surviving to launch my spaceship, then of course I'd sacrifice the ability to buy buildings or whatever.

To make an analogy from your country, do you think Real Madrid and all their money would worry about a soft cap in their pursuit of a Champions League?

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

I think it would require quite a lot of balancing to make the extra costs punitive enough to offset the above-mentioned three types of benefits it would bring to more peaceful civs, and perhaps other benefits that it would lead to. If Gazebo and the community is willing to tackle this, then great, but I'd prefer keeping the hard-cap and perhaps (again, I think the system is very good as it is) introducing some more cap-increasing options throughout the game (adding cap-increase to certain social policies, technologies, buildings/wonders, WC resolutions,...).

 

[emdash]

Generally-speaking, how are you finding the AI's tactical behavior during war? I hope an improvement over vanilla!

G

It is exceptional.

The one thing I would say is that they aren't as aggressive/suicidal as they could be. I've not played an immortal game yet, relatively new to the mod. It seems like if you are set up well, you can hold them off with a few units, assuming you know where they are coming from. They don't seem to want to take any deaths, and you can sit back with fortified units and shoot bows over them. You might lose a couple, but they generally are not good at breaking through a formation. The way they support w/ ranged is great, though, and the way they kite with skirmishers.

They don't seem to pillage, either. It'd be cool to see them do some in-and-outs with pillaging on other cities.

The unit level is fine. I usually play on sparse resources or stratbalance. The one thing I've seen is if they have ivory, at a certain point in the game, they will build so-many war elephants. I might look at a limit to the amount of them you can build (isn't there one?) per ivory. It might be interesting to tie units into resources in general, after longswords.

It makes the AI formidable to send in that many units, but it does seem kind of cheesy. It's like the police chases in Blues Brothers, they have more units than they can really use in a lot of cases, and they don't take losses to break through the line of sometimes inferior units.

 

[ashendashin]

I think it would open up the balancing potential immensely. As to the possibility of peaceful civs fielding just as large armies, the idea behind a softer cap is to make it punishing to have a massive standing army. Having a soft cap that centers around things like mounting gold, growth, and production, could open better balance between peaceful and warmonger civs. Peaceful civs can raise a good enough defense, but would have harsh punishments for constant warmongering (which isn't even much of a problem right now on later Tradition). Warmongers could have policy changes to more easily support a large standing army, with more balancing options beyond simply messing around with pop/city cap.
Anyone think the supply simulation would be worth its own thread?

 

[Gazebo]

I think it would open up the balancing potential immensely. As to the possibility of peaceful civs fielding just as large armies, the idea behind a softer cap is to make it punishing to have a massive standing army. Having a soft cap that centers around things like mounting gold, growth, and production, could open better balance between peaceful and warmonger civs. Peaceful civs can raise a good enough defense, but would have harsh punishments for constant warmongering (which isn't even much of a problem right now on later Tradition). Warmongers could have policy changes to more easily support a large standing army, with more balancing options beyond simply messing around with pop/city cap.
Anyone think the supply simulation would be worth its own thread?

Perhaps, yeah. If enough users find the late-game combat to be somewhat mind-numbing, it might be worth considering a change.

 

[pandasnail]

Perhaps, yeah. If enough users find the late-game combat to be somewhat mind-numbing, it might be worth considering a change.

I do find late game warfare less fun, but I don't think its the unit cap by itself, I think its just that as long as I have Oil and Iron, I can build an impenetrable fortress of planes and artillery that can all attack any tile at will. And AAGs if the enemy has enough planes to be a problem. Its only if the AI has lots of AAGs do I bother with things like tanks. And they can move from front to front very quickly with railroads or just rebasing. I don't see anyway around all that either. Hence why I play Marathon or Epic most of the time and have the game at least mostly decided by all this. (This opinion is fairly small sample and less experienced than Medieval warfare I should be sure to clarify.)

 

[CrazyG]

You can count me as someone who would like to see something done to make late game wars more exciting.

Supply cap is one option, but I also find late game units pretty cheap. Its generally a pretty big deal to build spearmen or archers instead of buildings. Late game, especially after factories, the opportunity cost of building military seems much smaller.

 

[tu_79]

Anyone think the supply simulation would be worth its own thread?

Yes, better give this a little more visibility.

 

[Dawnpromise]

You can count me as someone who would like to see something done to make late game wars more exciting.

Supply cap is one option, but I also find late game units pretty cheap. Its generally a pretty big deal to build spearmen or archers instead of buildings. Late game, especially after factories, the opportunity cost of building military seems much smaller.

My issue in practice is less with how many units are in play at once as it is how fast they roll out. I don't mind wars involving 100+ units every now and then, I hate how civs can produce units faster then they lose them in most cases. It's usually frustrating trying to get a decisive edge in a war when both sides aren't taking enough damage to slow down. Basically until you take cities the enemy doesn't take damage aside from being distracted producing more units...which you yourself ad distracted producing units so war turns into a no progress system unless one side can blitz the other.

 

[CrazyG]

My issue in practice is less with how many units are in play at once as it is how fast they roll out. I don't mind wars involving 100+ units every now and then, I hate how civs can produce units faster then they lose them in most cases. It's usually frustrating trying to get a decisive edge in a war when both sides aren't taking enough damage to slow down. Basically until you take cities the enemy doesn't take damage aside from being distracted producing more units...which you yourself ad distracted producing units so war turns into a no progress system unless one side can blitz the other.

If the problem is units are produced faster than they are destroyed, then it seems to me that you either

-makes units die faster
-make units cost more to produce

And I'd vote for the second option. The last game I played into the modern era my capital was just short or producing an artillery a turn (so the first took 2, but after that I could produce every turn for a long time) and my per turn gold was enough to buy another unit every turn. The only thing that kills units fast enough to actually grind that down would be nukes.