How does 1UPT effect if you will buy Civ 7

[Ita Bear]

I genuinely don’t understand how limited stacks wouldn’t just be 1UPT but with an extra few steps.

There would be far fewer units to move. The main complaint of 1UPT is that it is extremely tedious and the AI can't handle it. Limited stacks should alleviate both these problems to a degree.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

I think the only "problem" with 1UPT, is that it requires larger maps. Or at least, more granular maps. By destacking units, and later on destacking cities, while still keeping the map sizes decided from back during the initial playtesting playtesting of Civ1, it feels like portions of the game map that feel like they should take up the space of San Marino, instead feel like they take up the size of an entire continent

 

[aieeegrunt]

@Lexicus The sliding puzzle issue is considerably reduced when using any mod that increases base movement by +1.

Not only that, the game actually feels as if it were meant to be played with that +1 extra movement. I can't go back to default movement.

Limited stacking + extra movement improves the game so much it isn’t even a debate.

I won't be buying it on release, if it has 1UPT. Will wait a year or two and pick it up on sale. If it goes a sensible route and has a compromise - say 4 units per tile, would definitely be interested in getting it on release. I am one of those old crusties whose played since Civ 1 and though I don't hate 1UPT, I don't like what it does to the game. Perhaps if we call them "armies" instead of loaded terms like "doomstacks"? The problem I have is that 1UPT slows the game down. Causes blockages as you move just 4 or 5 units. And I dont think this qualifies as an "interesting decision"! Its busy work. And completely wrecks the scale. Civ has always been abstract, which is fine. But only have 1 unit of archers, say, in a tile which must be several miles across, is kind of absurd. And when they start firing over hills...

Games like Age of Wonders are fine with a limit (6 units per tile, I think). This works so much better than both unlimited doomstacks and 1UPT. What would need adding is determining the battle outcome, based on the composition of those stacks. And that, I guess, is the challenge (not the tedious 1v1 string of unit battles in older Civs) . Especially at the abstract distance and time scale.

It's good to see that many are not specifically attached to 1UPT, at least. I always had the idea that if they changed it, they would lose most of the newcomers to the series since Civ 5.

This will probably be my approach as well. The sliding tile puzzle is such torture that the rest of the game almost doesnt matter

It makes the AI incapable of warfare as well

I genuinely don’t understand how limited stacks wouldn’t just be 1UPT but with an extra few steps.

You avoid the sliding tile puzzle

 

[kaspergm]

I genuinely don’t understand how limited stacks wouldn’t just be 1UPT but with an extra few steps.

This is my concern wrt. limited stacking as well: It will in many ways amount to the same, except it will potentially eliminate the difference between the unit classes, because most systems that I have seen tend to favor mixing units of different types, which means your ministack ends up inheriting the attributes of all the units and the weaknesses of none. That is of course an oversimplification, but it's an issue to keep in mind.

Personally my go-to solution would be separate combat map, but I know I'm very much in the minority on this point, and I'll admit freely that Humankind didn't succeed particularly well with this system. I still have very fond memories of playing HoMaM in my childhood, but I know that's a completely different game series, and perhaps not where we want Civ to go.

I'm very much against unlimited stacking and didn't find that fun at all in Civ1-4. I like 1UPT fairly well, but acknowledge the AI's problems with handling it. As someone who's very much a builder rather than a competitive player, I don't have huge issues with this, and have no problem refraining from abusing the AI's limitations (too much), but I understand why competitive players might feel different on this question. As others have pointed out, increasing base movement of all units by 1 goes a long way with making up for the issues of 1UPT, I've used such a mod for ages, and I haven't looked back since installing it.

 

[aieeegrunt]

A seperate battle map is too much of a deviation from how Civ has worked so far to be a feature I’d expect or want to see happen

There is another facet to why 1UPT is terrible from a gameplay and historical roleplay perspective and that is because it makes ranged units OP.

1UPT effectively forces you to either make ranged units have multi hex range, have them be terribly vulnerable, or give them strong combat strength.

Civ6 went the first route, which means we have the absurdity of archers being by far the deadliest combat formations in ancient:classical times, something which would have amused the Romans etc to no end

I find that as long as you put your archers in high/rough terrain and have a minimum of screening units you can shoot your enemy to death with impunity, especially the AI. The low move allowances plus the “no fractional movement” rule means you can often get one or two barrages into enemy units as they close.

The multihex range allows you to focus fire and outright delete units as well

Perhaps the third alternative is the way to go. Remove ranged units altogether, merge the function of ranged/siege/melee units, and reduce pre-missile ranges to 1. Units can either shoot or assault as their combat action (I think Immortals work this way). Increase move allowances so units can freely “leapfrog” each other which takes care of the log jam/sliding tile puzzle

That gets rid of most of the 1UPT issues while allowing you to keep 1UPT and streamlining the combat system. It works from a historical role play perspective as well, since at the scale of Civ your unit types would be mixed in the hex anyways.

 

[civac]

I genuinely don’t understand how limited stacks wouldn’t just be 1UPT but with an extra few steps.

Obviously, the stacks would not all be of the same strength unlike 1upt (unless production yields would be too generous). Limited stacking emphasizes strategy (unit production) over tactics.

 

[pokiehl]

Obviously, the stacks would not all be of the same strength unlike 1upt (unless production yields would be too generous). Limited stacking emphasizes strategy (unit production) over tactics.

Huh? Limited stacking wouldn’t emphasize strategy at all. In fact, it’d reduce strategy.

Limited stacking, no matter what the limit ends up being in terms unit size or type composition, would have a definable and simple meta to maximize combat strength - just like producing a unit in 1UPT has.

This is patently obvious if we are talking about stacking units of the same type. If we’re talking about allowing 1
unit of each class, it’s still the case, and Kaspergm summarized it perfectly: limited stacking would just homogenize combat. In the end, it would be functionally the same as 1UPT.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I wonder if upping movement and possibly merging ranged units with melee would get rid of 1UPT’s downsides

 

[civac]

@pokiehl: There is no reason to give stacks a single combat strength value against everything, regardless of composition or composition of the opponent. But let's leave this aside for the moment.

Yes, if you had as many units as you'd like limited stacking would be just 1upt. But that's the point. You would often not have enough units to fill out each limited stack. The consequence is that units of the same type on the battlefield can have variable strength. Under 1upt you simply cannot make, say, individual crossbows as expensive as a full stack of (again as an example) 6 crossbows. The difference between having a unit and having no unit is too stark. Very expensive single units would also be no fun. This system then advantages mass over individual strong units. In Civ6 you can conceivably hold 10 crossbows with 4 of your own at some chokepoint. With the stacking system that would not be possible. There are other ways than limited staking to achieve this effect. You could for example invest manpower and training into some military formation, the King's Guard maybe. This unit would then be stronger than an opposing unit of the same type which did not get as many resources.

 

[AntSou]

Huh? Limited stacking wouldn’t emphasize strategy at all. In fact, it’d reduce strategy.

Limited stacking, no matter what the limit ends up being in terms unit size or type composition, would have a definable and simple meta to maximize combat strength - just like producing a unit in 1UPT has.

This is patently obvious if we are talking about stacking units of the same type. If we’re talking about allowing 1
unit of each class, it’s still the case, and Kaspergm summarized it perfectly: limited stacking would just homogenize combat. In the end, it would be functionally the same as 1UPT.

You could have different combinations of stackable units unlockable through cultural innovations. If Mongolia can stack 3 Cavalry units from the start, and everyone else needs to unlock an advanced civic for that, then these stacks aren't meaningless, nor are they just a matter of making unit movement easier (and I consider smoother unit movement and management a good enough reason to drop 1UPT). One could think of unit stacking as improved Corps/Armies and Fleets/Armadas, rather than just an improvement over 1UPT.

Stacks could have strategical implications if the type of army combinations you're aiming for are heavily dependent on your environment. You could have military innovations (doctrines) unlockable a bit like policies in Civ V, with approaches which are mutually exclusive. E.g. a doctrine which allows you to stack more tanks or mobile infantry than normal, or a doctrine which allows forts to stack +1 infantry unit than usual, or a doctrine which grants defensive bonuses to stacks composed exclusively of artillery and infantry, or a doctrine which grants bonus movement to stacks composed entirely of cavalry units, or a doctrine which grants extra +1 movement to all land melee stacks of exactly two units.

These are all basic and flawed ideas but I think there's plenty of space for proper designers to develop a better system than the Corps and Armies we currently have.

 

[UWHabs]

You could have different combinations of stackable units unlockable through cultural innovations. If Mongolia can stack 3 Cavalry units from the start, and everyone else needs to unlock an advanced civic for that, then these stacks aren't meaningless, nor are they just a matter of making unit movement easier (and I consider smoother unit movement and management a good enough reason to drop 1UPT). One could think of unit stacking as improved Corps/Armies and Fleets/Armadas, rather than just an improvement over 1UPT.

Stacks could have strategical implications if the type of army combinations you're aiming for are heavily dependent on your environment. You could have military innovations (doctrines) unlockable a bit like policies in Civ V, with approaches which are mutually exclusive. E.g. a doctrine which allows you to stack more tanks or mobile infantry than normal, or a doctrine which allows forts to stack +1 infantry unit than usual, or a doctrine which grants defensive bonuses to stacks composed exclusively of artillery and infantry, or a doctrine which grants bonus movement to stacks composed entirely of cavalry units, or a doctrine which grants extra +1 movement to all land melee stacks of exactly two units.

These are all basic and flawed ideas but I think there's plenty of space for proper designers to develop a better system than the Corps and Armies we currently have.

I guess it then just becomes a question of how exactly is it different than corps/armies? If you're allowed to stack 2 cavalry units from the start, it just feels like it turns into "let me stack 2 cavalry units and get their bonuses" kind of like what happens when you unlock corps, with the only real "benefit" being that you can unstack them and cycle them in.

I'm not saying it can't work, and maybe essentially allowing that from the start would solve some issues, but as pokiehl says, it feels like a system like that wouldn't really be functionally much different than 1upt. Sure, you would certainly gain a little freedom, especially in moving units around. And maybe even just a tiny amount of leeway in that would be enough to really fix a lot of the sliding tile issues we run into now.

Although that being said, you could also add other things which would potentially make that optimal setup prohibitive. For example, if unit support was like 20 gold per unit instead of 2 per unit, then maybe you could simply allow larger stacks knowing that a civ couldn't really afford that many units. Maybe in some ways that's always been the biggest problem in the game - the actual cost of fielding a stack of doom or carpet of doom just isn't something you worry about.

 

[AntSou]

Coincidently, just watched a video in a different thread about Ara gameplay with this:

Glad someone else is doing it. We'll be able to see a variation of such a system in practice in advance.

I was a real fan of the idea of combat like Endless Legend in Civ. When I saw it in Humankind I really enjoyed it at first... but it quickly got tiresome, and I lost interest in seeing such a system in Civ. So this could have the same effect.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

I want warfare to be represented abstractly. Military unit maintenance should be greatly increased. Games should involve much fewer military units. The 1UPT debate should not even exist. We should not be able to support enough units so that the number of tiles on the map even remotely becomes an issue. I am not playing civilisations for tactical combat.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I always thought that if you could have many more tiles representing a much smaller area, the issue goes away. Cities and features (& districts if they still exist) take up more than one and units take one with some sort of ZOC. System requirements might be an issue, not sure.

 

[UWHabs]

I always thought that if you could have many more tiles representing a much smaller area, the issue goes away. Cities and features (& districts if they still exist) take up more than one and units take one with some sort of ZOC. System requirements might be an issue, not sure.

Yeah, I would absolutely love it if the map was like massively larger. But even if the 2x the height and width, and 2x the movement, that does way more than 2x the calculations. Your map is 4x bigger than before, suddenly a unit can reach like 60 tiles instead of 18, and if you need to pairwise compare options for like adjacencies and stuff, things just explode up. I do think it would make for a better game if they could make it work - the map especially in the modern era gets super crowded. Even if they just made things a little bigger, gave one more tile for cities to work, and forced you to space cities out a little more, you could actually still have large farming clusters, or have more untouched terrain too, and the map would look a lot more organic.

 

[Prester John 2]

I wouldn't mind reintroducing stacks. The Civ4 mod Realism Invictus did it just fine, from a 10 unit stack onwards you get penalties, 20+ more penalties etc. The point is that moving units around on a 1upt is really hindering the AI to threaten you. This, and the increased building costs later in the game when the AI gets very passive with building units and using them.

 

[Urlance Woolsbane]

FWIW, one idea I came up with a while back, as an alternative to 1UPT, is a system in which the units in a stack, instead of acting separately, behave as a coherent army: When combat is initiated between two stacks, each side determines the order it wants its units to fight in, and then the unit at the front of one army engages the unit at the front of the opposing army, and the victor proceeds to engage the next enemy unit and so on until it's defeated, at which point its nearest comrade takes its place. A ranged unit would be able to fire preemptively, doing ambient damage to an attacking enemy from as many rows behind the front-line as its range allows. Doing all this one-dimensionally could get tedious, so there might well be multiple rows to an army (the dimensions of an army could of course be determined by terrain, technology, etc)

I wouldn't mind reintroducing stacks. The Civ4 mod Realism Invictus did it just fine, from a 10 unit stack onwards you get penalties, 20+ more penalties etc.

Interestingly, Soren Johnson was really gunning for something sort of like this during Old World's development, specifically damage done to a stack was inflicted on all of the units in it, but apparently 1UPT just playtested better

 

[AntSou]

I always thought that if you could have many more tiles representing a much smaller area, the issue goes away. Cities and features (& districts if they still exist) take up more than one and units take one with some sort of ZOC. System requirements might be an issue, not sure.

I don't think it will because combat is still going to coalesce towards specific areas and so you're back at sliding units. Plus the amount of units itself to manage later in the game (Corps and Armies doesn't really fix it) forces too much time spent on the combat aspect of the game.

If I have a handful of armies max, and armies are an actual thing woven into the game's systems, rather than just another unit with inflated stats, I could get done with combat in a fraction of the time it takes me currently.

 

[ViterboKnight]

A flying thought....
1UTP, stack of doom, each civ installment has tried something different. Perhaps, it's time to try something like "master of magic": limited stacks that have actually to fight one against the other.
If the number of fights is too high, this risks to become unhandy. But in Master of Magic (and Caster of Magic), it works very nice, handling very well the special abilities of each unit.
We are trying a lot of stuff... why not trying if this works?

 

[AntSou]

A flying thought....
1UTP, stack of doom, each civ installment has tried something different. Perhaps, it's time to try something like "master of magic": limited stacks that have actually to fight one against the other.
If the number of fights is too high, this risks to become unhandy. But in Master of Magic (and Caster of Magic), it works very nice, handling very well the special abilities of each unit.
We are trying a lot of stuff... why not trying if this works?

I don't quite understand the system you're suggesting. Limited stacking has already been suggested, and Humankind sets combat between stacks to a limit of three turns iirc.

What does "it risks to become unhandy" mean? And also what does it mean when you say "stacks that have actually to fight one against the other"?