Stacks are really only good for troop movement. For a proper war and attack posture, you have to split your stack up into little stacks with specialized units. I like to think of them as little armies or battalions if you will. Each small stack has a specialization and purpose. Some for pillaging, some for bombardment, some for city attacks, etc. It requires some planning and forethought. Playing with just one big stack is boring, and like you say, leads to a victory being applied to the biggest stack. In addition, splitting your stacks allows you to attack against counters. Attacking pikemen with horsemen is kind of silly, because pikemen have the advantage, but hitting the pikemen with musketmen and leaving your horses to attack siege weapons is a much better idea (IMHO). Annnddd, the AI is not able to effectively counter a specialized stack or two (sometimes). I have faced larger stacks than I have had and won by using unorthodox methods like this. (Even though I am the Princess of sub optimal play.)
In contrast, you have a slider puzzle... No strategy there. Just a traffic jam.
I thought that stacks in Civ IV would automatically defend with the strongest unit, which meant a combined-unit-type stack would automatically put a pikemen against an attacking horseman, if the stack had a pikemen in it?
Anyways, in VI you definitely do want to maneuver such that you've got type-bonus units facing the enemy. The temptation is to just send units out willy-nilly but you have a lot more success when you have defensive units at the front of your column, ranged units at the rear and mounted units running the sides. Ultimately, I don't mind the slider puzzle because it adds some strategy depth to the game that really isn't there with stacks IMO.
The sliding puzzle is what argues against it, which is why, back when Civ5 was against to come out, I said that the solution was to have tile unit caps. Alas, nobody heard me.
They sort of have that in VI though as you can now combine 2 or 3 units into armies on one tile, and also non-combat units can share tiles with combat units.
Military Engineers can build roads, but each road takes a build charge, so you can't build many which is frustrating. Later they can also build railroads, which don't require build charges, but DO require resources, so eh.
Districts also auto-generate roads underneath them, so a tight-knit empire has little need to worry about building roads.
I did not know this!
My major frustration with VI right now is that you can't tell the AI to stop proselytizing in your lands. I only have the vanilla game so maybe they fixed this with the expansions.
The Last of Us Part II
I thought that I had beaten the game, only to get pulled into yet another major segment. I'm kind of annoyed to be honest, the criticism that this game is too long is valid. The gameplay is split between two nemesis characters that you alternate between, so some of the redundancy/backtracking in the story is actually welcomed as the characters effectively play cat and mouse for a bit. However, there are entire segments of the game that are superfluous to the overall story and only serve to pad it out and add length without driving the narrative forward. The first game was long, but it was relentlessly narrow in scope with a tight narrative that moved purposefully toward the conclusion.
The structure of this game with opposing nemesis characters means almost by definition that the narrative cannot be very tight as the goal - either nemesis to find and kill the other - is continuously shifting as they react to one another; whereas in the first game the goal of getting Ellie to a medical center was a constant, fixed point that you worked toward. That's fine and dandy but they did not need to pad the story out to the extent that they did. As I said, some segments truly feel redundant and back-tracky, with the death of several major characters along the way that were predictable and therefore cheap.
On predictability - the game also relies fairly heavily on the jump scare to the point where I have consistently been able to predict them such that they lose their surprise. They also use the jump scares as a way to force the narrative along at key points (again, in a predictable manner) and it's kind of lazy story telling to be honest. Like when I am able to guess that walking through the door in front of me will result in my character getting captured or a major sidekick getting killed, the use of the jump scare/door grab loses its luster as an effective narrative element. But they do it over and over again as if they couldn't get enough of it.
And perhaps because of all the padding, the level layout is much less thought out than it was in the first game. This is a stealth game at heart and they did put thought into giving you hideaway spots and alternate routes to travel around and avoid or stealthily strangle your enemies. However, the overall level crafting is much less focused than in the last game and while they certainly give you options to get around within a level, overall the choices are much less meaningful as you will inevitably be forced into open combat as the game continuously throws hidden enemies at you which spoil your cover and ability to maneuver. In the first game, it was very rare that new enemies would enter a level unexpectedly, without detection and without a way to avoid them. In this game, new unseen enemies constantly enter the levels from vectors which make it really hard to plan around.
Part of this is due to my own personal failings - I know all of the maps in the first game like the back of my hand so I can always prepare for the walk-on enemies. This game is new and so I don't know the routes of the walk-on enemies or all the cover places. Still, the game is exceedingly frustrating in the way it just flat-out makes the enemies invisible before you commit to entering a new area. This is meant to add tension as you're always walking into traps or sticky situations but in reality it just adds frustration because you lose your ability to plan and strategize. Seriously, I've been on the other side of an open door and been unable to detect enemies that are right there on the other side until I walk through it, simply because the game wanted to scare me or force me into an open confrontation.
Hopefully my opinion on this will change on my next play through as I learn the maps better but as of right now I've basically given up on trying to play this as a stealth game and instead run right into open battle with my upgraded weapons and approach the game more like a cover shooter than a stealth game.
All that said, I am still enjoying the game quite a lot and there have been some truly touching moments. I just wish they have put more effort into focusing the story and the maps rather than dragging everything out. I've gone from feeling this game was superior to the first in every way to feeling it's the lesser of the two if only because of how protracted and padded it feels.
Also they took the music in a much more conventional direction (read: they dropped the theramins) and the game is worse for it. I did not realize how much the music from the first game set the tone and provided an emotional center for the game until it went away.
I'm waiting for a reply from Help.
