Okay, the reason why I think tactical combat isn't important for civilization games is because it's a strategical game. I'll compare this game to Age of Wonders to explain the difference.
In civilization, the map and the turn times are all strategical. You build a unit in a few turns and a city centre is one tile. In the time you do a tactical manouvre, a lot of things happen like building things or researching new techs. An archer in this game can actually shoot all the way to the other side of a city.
In age of wonders, the map and turn times are split up between strategic and tactical. Once you enter battle, you dive into a tactical map where you spend 10-20 turns fighting between armies. Units have interesting abilities, walls are part of the tactical map and battles are really well done. As soon as the battle is done, you go back to the strategical map.
And this is why I think tactical combat isn't important for civilization games. I really really do want there to be strategical decision making. Using chokepoints, defensive positions, flanking enemy armies and using the proper unit types. But you don't need the tactical 1UPT to achieve that. You can do that with stacked armies as long as you properly balance out big stacks or limit stacks to something like 4 units. By simulating combat between stacks, archers can still behave completely different to cavalry or melee units and chokepoints still matter.
More importantly, it's a way to do combat that doesn't completely gimp the AI. Having such a terrible combat AI makes the rest of the game (you know, the strategical aspect) a lot less enjoyable. In essence you get a strategy game where the tactical aspect ruins the strategical aspect.
In civilization, the map and the turn times are all strategical. You build a unit in a few turns and a city centre is one tile. In the time you do a tactical manouvre, a lot of things happen like building things or researching new techs. An archer in this game can actually shoot all the way to the other side of a city.
In age of wonders, the map and turn times are split up between strategic and tactical. Once you enter battle, you dive into a tactical map where you spend 10-20 turns fighting between armies. Units have interesting abilities, walls are part of the tactical map and battles are really well done. As soon as the battle is done, you go back to the strategical map.
And this is why I think tactical combat isn't important for civilization games. I really really do want there to be strategical decision making. Using chokepoints, defensive positions, flanking enemy armies and using the proper unit types. But you don't need the tactical 1UPT to achieve that. You can do that with stacked armies as long as you properly balance out big stacks or limit stacks to something like 4 units. By simulating combat between stacks, archers can still behave completely different to cavalry or melee units and chokepoints still matter.
More importantly, it's a way to do combat that doesn't completely gimp the AI. Having such a terrible combat AI makes the rest of the game (you know, the strategical aspect) a lot less enjoyable. In essence you get a strategy game where the tactical aspect ruins the strategical aspect.
and 100 % I am sure the AI is intentionally clumpsy.
sometimes this fun making rules showed to obviously and the human player finds out and feels
