Huge stacks

make no mistake, I think Rise of mankind is one of the best and most ambitious mods ever!
but there are still balancing problems, especially in modern and future era. I'm using version 2.502beta.


huge stacks:

Even on monarch difficulty, a computer controlled civ with about 15 cities has way too much units in modern age (epic speed).

One stack for example:
26 Modern Marine
10 Antitank
39 Mech Infantery
45 Modern Armor
56 Humvee
40 Gunship and
11 Rocket artilleries

If I wouldn't have those really strong (overpowered?) AH 64 helis and if the cpu wouldn't move the stack only one square per turn, there would be no hold. Even so it is a really silly and boring fight, a battle of material.

Ok, I could build manhattan project and use nukes, but then every other civ will soon have hundreds of them, which is like suicide.

So why is it possible to build one modern unit per turn in every city on epic speed, even ICBMs? = huge armies in notime.
Why is the maintenance of modern units so cheap? You can support hundreds of them an still getting tons of gold per turn.

Bug:
after completing the manhattan project I'm not able to build bomb shelters in my cities. I don't know why.

 

The military buildup choice depends largely on the AI.....there is very little ROM can do about it.

And insofar the building speed goes, I believe Zappara has toned everything down a bit, so cities would have less hammers.

It is, however, a great idea to increase cost for having military, so that unless someone has civics like vassalage, supporting a gigantic stack would drain economy to the extreme.

BTW, if you play the latest version, with the limited religion mod and revolution mod, you will realize that it is VERY difficult to have a large surplus of money with or without a huge army....so it makes the game much chanlleging.

 

My strategy of filling the capital with 15 great prophets, and every wonder with +% gold, or national building begs to differ

 

I've been toying with the idea of adding extra gold cost for modern and future era units (except conscript units) so that the more advanced unit you want to build the more it would cost also in gold besides the hammers. I'm not yet making that kind of changes to v2.6 as this would need some discussion so that I can see what people think about this kind of "feature".

 

Personally i think its a great idea!

 

Very good idea! Everything that reduces the huge AI stacks is welcome. On the other hand, perhaps the AI would still build large stacks but spend less on research, so it would be too slow economically and technologically--
appending the lack of efficient blitzkrieg tactics...

I guess a population/army relation factor would help a bit, of course it wouldn't tell the AI where to use its (then) limited troops, as it tends to even fortify cities in the middle of its empire with much too much troops, at least in late game.

 

I second the idea of reducing huge army stacks.

Huge stacks are very unrealistic and make it VERY hard work to wage a war especially towards the end game. It takes out a lot of the enjoyment of the game, at least for me.

From a reality point of view, you cannot have 35+ units in just one square. So any bigger stacks should be split around more than one squares.

Secondly, you cannot support these great armies unless you have enough resources. I made a post in another thread about the number of jeeps, tanks, helicopters, etc. should DEPEND on the OUTPUT of oil products of each civilization. If you have only one oil refinery built in your cities then you cannot support more than a number of oil-dependent units. Build more refineries, BUT AGAIN, the number of oil refineries should DEPEND on the number of oil sources. Ultimately, this scheme would produce a limit to how many oil-dependent units you can own. The same should hold for vulcinised rubber and all other army-related resources. This will also make trading a lot more exciting, as owning more oil (or rubber or metal) sources would be very important. At the moment just one oil source and one oil refinery is enough to support huge armies.

Perhaps there should also be air missions, in which bombers can destroy oil refineries or steel factories in cities. If factories are destroyed, armies would loose their support and the game would become more interesting and strategically challenging.

Lastly, smaller armies would make the game much faster, like in the early stages. When it comes to me, even if the game at the later stages is playable, the lack of speed and the huge army stacks take out some (and sometimes much) of the enjoyment.

 

Big point. I absolutely agree with styfken about this. Rather having a population/army proportion factor let it be a ressource/army proportion factor;
nevertheless: balancing both would be the smartest solution I guess ;-)

 

The population/army, ressource/army, etc. factor still not a solution. It reduce the total number of (military?) units, but not block then creation of a huge stack. With this just loose the virtually unlimited stack possibility, sill can do a huge stack.

I suggest that after reaching a size (unit number) on a title, the stack suffers colleteral damage (even when the attacking unit has no colleteral damage ability).

BTW I favor to make unit limiting factor(s) too.

 

total realism mod had feature that if there were more than 15 units on stack all would get a crowded promotion which lowered units strength alot..

but if i remember right, AI didn't understand that..

 

whatever you do here, AI is not going to swallow it and will unbalance the gameplay even more than having X units on a tile. If you can find a way to make the AI to act accordingly, only then yes, this makes sense.

I know this is not what you want, but try to balance this by playing on giant maps even when are just a few civs. Thus, logistics become much more important. You can surprise the AI with a landing or counter attacking where it is not so well protected.

To talk about it, yes, one can have thousands of units on the same tile. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Knox. If I am correct, there are over 30k elite soldiers in a small city. And that is definitely not the largest army base. Apparently it is Fort Bragg (http://www.bragg.army.mil/) with over 43k soldiers, but accurate infos are classified. Also, there were huge battles throughout the history, literally involving millions of persons during less than a month.

 

Turn the stack-attack from DCM on and the battles will be on and will still be interesting to watch hordes of tanks fight to the death all at once.

To Zapara: yes, you should increase maintenance by an INSANE load. Not only is that realistic because modern units are expensive, but it also may fix the problem that atleast I seem to have lategame, which is me getting thousands of gold a turn even at 100% research. Personally, id like to be limited to 50% research w/o deficit that late in the game if you have a huge army. With 50% research, maybe late game techs wont only take 2 turns to complete.

 

remember that war needs to at least be economicaly benificial in some way otherwise over half the wars that have ever existed wouldnt have happened.

 

I disagree with stack collateral being automatically happening to stacks with 15+ units, as i have stacks that big as soon as I reach construction.. Imagine how much this would penalize the AI on harder difficulties, I would probably play on deity if you let that happen!
A financial disensentive is far better.
x amount of maintanance per unit for first 100 units
x +1 amount per unit for next 100-200
x +2 and so on..


You have to consider the effect though.. it was a great problem in vanilla bts, playing on aggressive mode, the AI would make lots of units that would crush its economy, and games would get stuck in the middle ages.. there is a need to make sure the AI understands the change.

 

2 Turns? it takes me 0 turns in late game...I mean, I would have enough "leftover" research from previous turn to complete the next tech; although the game won't let me actually research more than one tech a turn.

Now, so far, I agree with most of the ideas proposed. But although some of the ideas are nice, such as resource limit on military, I believe it would be difficult to implement; even if it can be, it would eat up a lot of memory as it requires more things for the computer to hold, which may make the med-to-low end computers crash problem more serious. Even if it survives, it'd be annoying to wait 5,6 minutes just for the AIs to complete their turns.

A simple stretegy that may work is to make all AIs less war-like, or at least change some value in the traits that determines how much military it sees fit on average. That combined with a higher maintanance would (hopefully) reduce the AI's overall military.

As for the big stack, is it possible to physically limit how many units can be present on the same unit? If not, I suppose the DCM stack attack is a good idea, so think of a stack of 40 units not as 40 armies, but one army of 40 divisions (which is fairly realistic, for no generals specifically manage just one unit of infantry or artilery). Think of stack attack as less micro-management.

 

I probably won't try to make resource limit on military - first I don't know how it could be made and second I don't think it's "Civ game feature".

Maintenance is adjustable for military units only in civic options so basically if this option is used, I'd have to add military cost bonus to just about every late era civic option just because the game engine allows only +1 change to it per civic option (yes, I've tried higher integers and it only shows them as +1 so it's bugged).

Stack size might be adjustable somewhere, not sure about it. I'll have to look through xml files.

Last option (that I can now think of) is to add that extra gold cost when building units as that option is available in unit xml files.

 

Personally i wish the AI was more aggressive.. oh how I long to sail to the other continent to find another AI with 6 vassals

 

I don't mind huge stacks, if the game isn't challenging, it will be boring. We had an AI go after one of us with a stack of at least 70 fairly early in the game. My friend was able to hold it off, though she needed a bit of help. It was exciting.

The game is very different when you play multiplayer. Also we tend to mess with the rules to make it more interesting. Usually we play with tech trading entirely off, so that each of us had to research what we really want in the way of tech and can't get rich of selling to the AI. We are finding that a "blazing" turn timer is a bit too fast in the late game (we're up to over 700 turns now!) and war is becoming a nightmare for the players, esp. if they like to micromanage their cities at all. Not even enough time to move all the units from turn to turn.

 

Stacks of 70
how do you manage that
on emperor the stacks are hardly above 20

 

Actually, yeah. Sorry for the confusion. I don't want the AI to be less AGGRESSIVE, but to be less MILITERASTIC. That is to say, at least in time of peace, build a harbor instead of a maceman; but when he DOES have the military power to take someone over, (which the AI does currently ....all the time) he would declare war. So more hot wars with less cold wars.