I hate Stacks of units

[Roland Johansen]

That would take as long...
Quick Battle option for you..
Anyway it is nice, the CIV4 system.
To be more realistic, it could be the system of CIV:CTP, as probably the quoted replier said he wanted, but ah well, CTP had this system and wasn't near the sucess of the original CIV series..

Dale's Combat Mod does something similar to this, except without the mini-screen, but incorporating air support and similar. I don't think there's a BtS version yet - but it's worth looking at if this issue is really spoiling your game so much (and definitely worth a look even if not).

Yeah... that's what I'm pushing for!!

This makes sense to me!

Neat idea! And how about a "Hold Your Fire" button for the attacker that can be pressed at any time, to halt the invasion.

Thanks for the positive reactions. It is indeed the Civilization CTP system (or something like that). That game wasn't very successful, but there were other reasons for that. The combat system was quite ok. Some other ideas in the game didn't work too well and the AI was pretty bad.

It's not a new idea. Something like this has been used in many games. You shouldn't have too much control of the actual battle or the game will become too combat oriented and combat will take too much time. The strategy is just to create well balanced stacks of units and use them in the right positions to attack and defend.

I know about Dale's stack combat mod. He basically has the same ideas and managed to implement them which is a great modding accomplishment. It is a pity that it is not possible to add a screen so that you know what is going on. At present, it is hard to know why your stack lost the battle or won the battle. He probably created a fairly balanced stack combat model, but it is just not clear how it works without a screen to show the battle. It's a type of black box, you put 2 stacks in it and one of them wins.
There were also some issues with it when I was following it a while ago.
And finally, I just don't believe that the AI was completely rewritten to create stacks that are working really great in this new combat model.
But I don't want to criticise his work too much, because I would have thought it was impossible to add such a combat model with a mod. Really a great job he did.

 

[Florian]

I do think stacks should have a limit. A stack with 100 units in it is excessive and unrealistic. There's no way that map square is big enough, or that all those units would be able to participate in the same battle. But there's no reason to complain about ten stacks of ten units each. That's just a macro-production strategy, and it's perfectly legitimate. If you don't want to counter in kind, you need to focus on getting better units and using them better.

I want a civ game, where economics are more important than the number of axeman you can possibly build in a given time.

When in the history of civilization has a wealthy nation ever defended itself from a horde of invaders simply by having a better economy? In Civ IV your economy IS hugely important to defending your empire, but that's because it lets you build and support your own horde of axemen. Or better yet, your own horde of macemen, since your economy has gotten you a technological edge. Economy doesn't win wars, not in history and not in any good Civ-type game. It's APPLIED economy that wins wars.

 

[Arlborn]

Thanks for the positive reactions. It is indeed the Civilization CTP system (or something like that). That game wasn't very successful, but there were other reasons for that. The combat system was quite ok. Some other ideas in the game didn't work too well and the AI was pretty bad.

It's not a new idea. Something like this has been used in many games. You shouldn't have too much control of the actual battle or the game will become too combat oriented and combat will take too much time. The strategy is just to create well balanced stacks of units and use them in the right positions to attack and defend.

Problem is, look Total War series(anybody played Braveheart? )...Biggest competitor of CIV right now I guess, and the 3d combat was actually a success :S
Gave money you know..
I can already picture CIV5 with such a combat system
Not that I like it mind you. I got Total WaR Rome and just hated it heh..

 

[Gelvan]

wow thanks for your replies, that was.. enlightening!

@Civ1: true I forgot about the thing that a whole stack was killed if one unit was killed - but then: not so with forts, wich made them quite useful in civ1. well that's another topic.

I agree that civ4 IS much better than civ3 regarding the combined forces. If you are capable of building axeman, spearman, catapults, and upgraded swordsman, there is a chance to overcome the defense of a city.

But what I really don't like about the civ3 & 4 model is that if you can't build catapults at the moment and you have no horses you can't make a war at all - unless every single city you own is producing axeman in masses. this takes much time and it makes it ..boring.

(oh and once I put on the option "let stack attack in one fight" which resulted in 15 units killed, 4 units injured, and NOT ONE unit of the opponent destroyed... he had an axeman with level 3 or 4 in the city which killed my whole stack... )

I think it's o.k. to build an army of about 7 units, to get one city, but I don't like the idea of having 20 axeman killed by one axeman which is a bit better. That's nearly the same as in civ1, isn't it? Or to have 4 preat.. pretor... legionaries which is the best unit at it's time, which are killed by one archer.

of course no one says I would be pressed to play any harder difficulty level than chieftain, I've never encountered stacks at that level. But on chieftain the AI also is a bit weak in science, wonder building and diplomacy so I really would like to have a better AI - but without any need of building 20 or 40 units to get 1 city.

@civ4
I know it is like it is now, and we can't do anything about it. but if it was possible to make something like "only 5 units on one tile" I think that would make combat a bit more interesting. I'm sure I miss something in my strategie, maybe I should do some field fight and get more unit promotions etc. - but that takes time and if one axeman is on a forest, it's rather useless as well. The calculation of civ4 is great, but I think if the chances to win are 12,4% then SOMETIMES you should win (about 124 times in 1000 attacks ).

 

[Florian]

I don't like the idea of having 20 axeman killed by one axeman which is a bit better

There's no way that could happen unless you stopped attacking after he had killed your first or second axeman and allowed him to heal up and take advantage of his experience points. Victorious units still take damage in Civ IV, almost always, and this makes them considerably weaker in the next fight.

 

[Gelvan]

@florian
well that happened when I put on the option to attack with the whole stack in one fight, I suppose I don't use this option any more and honestly it's super axeman (of level 4) was not injured at all... But your right, normally that's not happening, but if there are 10 units in an opponents city (or approaching your city) then everytime you attack it's like 12% chances. I know you need catapults, but if you have no mathematics and construction, what shall you do? in FFH you have fireballs and many other units which had a bombard ability even quite early in the game. not so in vanilla bts.

 

[Neo Guderian]

The problem is not that stacks exist. The problem is that stacks are difficult to manage.

Fighting war shouldn't be so tedious. My recommendations (and if I didn't work so much I would just mod it) are as follows:
1) Armies
Units grouped together should create super units, not loose collections
of individual units. I propose that in combat, each unit will take a turn,
depending on their movement, morale, and type. Each combat turn, a
unit will deal and receive damage. Then the next unit in the army will
fight 1 round. When units start taking damage, their morale drops until a
'retreat' threshold is reached. Once they withdraw from the fight, they
can be captured or destroyed if the enemy has any fast units with
movement left. Units with high morale fight longer. They are more likely
to win the fight, but are also more likely to be destroyed because they
are less likely to run away.

1) Increase survivability of unints:
If units stay viable, even when wounded, you won't need to keep
replacing them and thus spending soo much time moving units. This
means that units shouldn't fight to the death each time.

2) Units have morale:
Morale will be affected by a Great General unit in the Army, being full
strength, having more experience points, whose land they are fighting on,
and how long they have been away from 'home'.

3) Draft units, not build with hammers:
You should be able to draft units and then have them 'train' for a certain
number of turns to reach full xp. You build their equipment like anything
else and can stockpile weapons to equip troops with. When the war is
over, you can return units to a city and have them rejoin the populace.

Conclusion:
Having such a system in place would allow the player to build, move, and maintain, a military in a fraction of the time it now currently takes. This means that you could move 4 -10 units around and maintain in a few seconds.

 

[SewerStarFish]

Large stacks should suffer attrition especially in the early ages. This would simulate the obvious and historical logistics problems faced by early armies. Ancient armies' sizes were limited by the amount of food they could scavage; even Napoleonic armies were so limited. It was canned foods that led to the very large armies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Stacks of >10 should automatically pillage each square they end their turn on, including freindly squares. Stacks >10 should suffer collateral damage for every unit over 10.

It is not unreasonable to increase the allowable stack size with each era, with perhaps the modern or future era having an unlimited size.

 

[afa2000]

I like the military slider idea. It would let quality be better than quantity.

 

[GrandWazoo]

Personally I like the system as it is now, it rewards having some balance with your troops and it brings a lot of strategy. I think it's the best combat system I've seen in a civ game.

 

[Arlborn]

I like the military slider idea. It would let quality be better than quantity.

military slider = same as science sliders if you 'only' research military techs.
Maybe what you guys need is more different kinds of promotions/updates..?

 

[Arlborn]

Large stacks should suffer attrition especially in the early ages. This would simulate the obvious and historical logistics problems faced by early armies. Ancient armies' sizes were limited by the amount of food they could scavage; even Napoleonic armies were so limited. It was canned foods that led to the very large armies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Stacks of >10 should automatically pillage each square they end their turn on, including freindly squares. Stacks >10 should suffer collateral damage for every unit over 10.

It is not unreasonable to increase the allowable stack size with each era, with perhaps the modern or future era having an unlimited size.

Well, they simulate it in a certain degree by the maintenances costs of the units..Ofc it is not perfect...but well

 

[mice]

This thread a couple of weeks ago looked at the same problem.

Too many units
I don't have a solution better than those or the ones on this thread but I will say that going the war route makes a game much much longer in real time and therefore creates it's own game imbalance issue.

There shouldn't be such a big huge gap in what's involved in getting various victory conditions.

Firaxis need to address this problem IMO in a big patch or ,more realistically, in Civ 5

 

[Lurking Liu]

Out of curiosity, people do know there's a Stack Attack option in the Settings menu, right? You don't even have to restart your current game, you just press Escape and fiddle around a bit. It's... Really not that hard. Any attack commits the entire stack.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Problem is, look Total War series(anybody played Braveheart? )...Biggest competitor of CIV right now I guess, and the 3d combat was actually a success :S
Gave money you know..
I can already picture CIV5 with such a combat system
Not that I like it mind you. I got Total WaR Rome and just hated it heh..

Now, that wouldn't be my preference either. It would take ages to play such a game. No, stack combat should be automated, but the stack should fight like one army and you should see a visual representation to know and learn which army compositions work better and which worse.

 

[Jops]

IIRC the Civ1 stack rule was different: The best defensive unit in the stack was the defender and if it lost the whole stack was destroyed. So it was very risky to move stacks close to enemy troops.
The civ1 rule has the disadvantage of being unrealistic (why lose X units when only 1 unit actually has lost a battle and the X others didn't get the chance to fight) but its change resulted it the stack-mania of civ3 and civ4.
Civ4 introduced the collateral damage system to counter stacks - which is a big improvement over civ3 IMHO. Maybe stacks should be limited in size (increased size with GG in stack) or should cause increased unit costs (unrealistic, too?!) to make stacks a little bit less attractive. An other idea would be some kind of bonus for combined-arms-stacks (big discussion topic for game designers)...
just my 2 cents

Why is that unrealistic? In real life, the greatest casualties in wartime come when the defender leaves its position and starts to flee.

So when the first defender loses the others are also lost because the loss of an army doesn't only mean loss of people but also of territory, and therefore defending positions.

 

[The Navy Seal]

It really depends on the map size I think in bigger maps their should be bigger armies.

 

[dutchking]

I like stacks, they keep my millitary force organized. For me it's hard to win a war without that organization.

 

[Underdawg]

Just need a stack limit for now (10 is good)... speaking pragmatically... I don't think we'll see combat changed to stack battles with any upcoming patch.

 

[afa2000]

military slider = same as science sliders if you 'only' research military techs.
Maybe what you guys need is more different kinds of promotions/updates..?

Nah, its not. Military slider would be the same as spending at training your troops, making it more experienced ( better promotions or maybe updating to special units ). Now, the best ancient city attackers are the axeman/swordsman, if you want a better one, you need to research CS + machinery. Why not spending some points at military slider, getting some promotions, so you could ease the transition ? Old GG, instead of letting it join city as military instructor, should always be used in battlefield, as warlords. Of course warlords should be improved, I dunno how.

We also need more different kinds of promotions/updates. I would say, lots of. Military units should be very expensive though, so you need to be carefull at your strategy. Also, you need to spend at espionage to see which kinds of promotions your enemies got ( now you dont need that ), so you can counter them. It would make all sliders well balanced.