Sorry, Finnish proverb.
Is it really that bad?
- Thread starter Alex53
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Sorry, Finnish proverb.
I can add one thing as insite for this game, I dont personaly like the game as a civ game (meaning I expected to play this game forever and not get board.) but as just a regular game I think its average as one person put it the game will keep you busy for 2 months. On a side note if you like waring I think this civ may keep you busy longer thats the only time I have had fun with this civ is when I have been in warmonger mode, but I never used to play warmonger in previous civs so that may be why I found it to be so much fun in this civ.
This doesn't make sense to me.
Strategy (n) The science or art of combining and employing the means of war in planning and directing large military movements and operations.
Tactic (n) The art and science of the detailed direction and control of movement or manoeuvre of forces in battle to achieve an aim or task.
What you are complaining about is not represented in the game, as Tactics seem to be more focused on individual troop movements closer to Platoon and Fire Team levels rather than movement and planning on the Brigade or even Army levels. I think the complaint you are trying to file is that the game focuses too much on the Operational level of war, and too little on the Strategic level of war.
In this point, I would have to disagree. Civilization V offers the same level of Military Strategy (If not more) as any of the previous Civilization games. What I think is going on here, is that you don't understand how to compile Operational Plans into Strategic Plans. The 1 Unit Per Tile (1UPT) system forces you to actually develop a strategy, and work on the Operational level to ensure that your goals are met.
As far as strategy goes, that is leaps and bounds beyond "I'm going to build a Stack of Doom and brute force my way through everything", which is basically easy-mode, as far as "Strategy" goes. Granted, it was the most effective way to attack an enemy. I find it interesting that you seem to be suggesting: you would rather fight all wars on the mentality that you are going to simply overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers, than actually control a military and maneuver troops in a calculated and sensible manner? That sounds a lot more like Risk than Civilization, in my opinion.
I don't think Civ5 offers much military strategy either, but when we speak about strategy, we usually mean overall game strategy that includes settling, building, diplo, researching etc., not just military strategy. There are much much less of that kind of strategy in Civ5 than there is in Civ4. I don't think there will ever be Civ5-strategy articles like this Snaaty's guide to acquiring rifleman rush in Civ4 BtS higher levels: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=248435. In Civ5, it's just all about getting swordsmen/longswords up and running and then it's war, war, war and abusing tactical weaknesses of the AI. Not much of strategy really.
I agree in that the Strategy is different in 5 vs 4. I'm not going to say that it's nonexistent, because there ARE strategies to win Cultural and Scientific victories.
Generally, it's easier to win a Cultural victory when you employ a military... but the same can be said historically. I can't think of many cultures that were spread without the aid of a military; especially in distant history. The Greeks, Romans, English, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and many other civilizations and religions (At least all of the Abrahamic Religions, though I'm sure it's not limited to these) were spread largely due to warfare. The player's goal is to win, and the game's goal is to prevent that. If you don't present a military threat, the game will try to eliminate you with a military.
Diplomacy also requires a military, which is a large reason that the UN isn't as effective as it "should" be in real life. When it comes to relations, words can be cheap- what really counts is your ability to enforce your words. What happens when there is law, and there are no police to enforce it? The incentive to respect a word suddenly decreases when the benefit of disregarding it outweighs the punishment.
The game is definitely lacking in some areas when compared to BtS, and even more so when compared to Legends of Revolution and such... but it is not unplayable by any means. The strategies are just different from what a lot of people are used to... what it really boils down to is that war is the EASIEST strategy to complete. The Scientific/Cultural/Diplomatic victories just aren't as forgiving. If you lose four cities in the beginning of the game, you're still good if you have your capital. If you miss 2/4 cultural wonders, you may as well quit trying to win a cultural victory.
If anything, I hope they make other types of victory more forgiving in patches and expansions; but I wouldn't say that the game is only functional as a Military Conquest game.
AfterShafter
Deity
Short answer? No, it's not that bad. Long answer? It certainly has issues and has left some long-time players with a bad taste in their mouth, but it has also left a lot of us pretty darned happy.
It's a good game that's not for everyone. Be wary in buying it, but don't buy into the vitriol around this forum. As usual, it's the negative audience that feels the most need to scream to the rafters (though, I do wish they'd do something they enjoy rather than raining on our parade at this point) while the happy people are happily doing the things they enjoy.
It's a good game that's not for everyone. Be wary in buying it, but don't buy into the vitriol around this forum. As usual, it's the negative audience that feels the most need to scream to the rafters (though, I do wish they'd do something they enjoy rather than raining on our parade at this point) while the happy people are happily doing the things they enjoy.
rschissler
King
What about this strategy involving embarcation, that doesn't exist in Civ V?
You're playing Civ IV and there is a continent you want to invade. You have to start planning this way in advance, because you have to build transports, or if you already have them, you need the time to sail them to the point you will invade from. You even need to consider the point from which to embark from, so your transports can travel the least amount of distance, and then return to reload more invasion troops.
You also need to make sure you have enough transports, so you'll have a sizeable enough force to resist the initial counterattack after landing. Also, you need to decide whether your initial invading force should be mostly offensive or defensive units, or perhaps a mixture of the two. Maybe even include some explorer-medics, to help your counterattacked units survive.
In Civ V all you do is just hop in the water from any point and sail wherever, totally brainless.
You're playing Civ IV and there is a continent you want to invade. You have to start planning this way in advance, because you have to build transports, or if you already have them, you need the time to sail them to the point you will invade from. You even need to consider the point from which to embark from, so your transports can travel the least amount of distance, and then return to reload more invasion troops.
You also need to make sure you have enough transports, so you'll have a sizeable enough force to resist the initial counterattack after landing. Also, you need to decide whether your initial invading force should be mostly offensive or defensive units, or perhaps a mixture of the two. Maybe even include some explorer-medics, to help your counterattacked units survive.
In Civ V all you do is just hop in the water from any point and sail wherever, totally brainless.
I'm not saying that it's perfect- just that it's better. Granted, you don't have to build transport ships anymore... but those don't exist in real life either. The transport ships depicted in Civ IV are actually Landing Craft- which do not sail across the ocean but are held on Attack Transports or Assault Crafts... which are actually pretty accurate in Civ V as far as what they were: Civilian ships outfitted with military equipment in order to carry troops across oceans during WW2.
However, this practice was replaced DURING WW2 by LVTs and AAVs carried on war ships. The practice of building large ships specifically to carry troops just isn't practical. If anything, you should have to use war-ships to carry troops.
rschissler
King
Sure, we can discuss how WWII changed invasion tactics with the types of landing craft used to ferry troops and material. Nowdays, you'd have to say that almost all transport is by air. If Civ IV doesn't mimic real life, Civ V certainly doesn't either.
However, my main point is the difference in strategy between Civ IV and V.
However, my main point is the difference in strategy between Civ IV and V.
I think we do plenty of things that we like, I only post on here when I have downtime at work. Also why dont you follow your own advice and stop posting your braindead crap all over the forums.
Moderator Action: Trolling is not allowed in these forums here.
Different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse is the point I was trying to make earlier. You don't have to build transports, but it is definitely a lot less cumbersome. With the 1UPT, transports would get in the way more than they would help. It's already a little nerve-wracking to move an army by sea due to the vulnerability of it; I think that building transports would then make it tedious.
Left Foot
Chieftain
It depends on what "that" is for you.
If "that" is: 'I want to gouge out my eyes with rusty nails and smash my fingers to a bloody pulp so that I never again see or have the possibility of playing Civ 5' then no, Civ 5 is not as bad as that (for me at least).
If "that" is: 'I feel like I've wasted 50 and X hours of my life and will therefore no longer play this sorry excuse for Civ game' then yes, for me Civ 5 is as bad as that.
If "that" is: 'I want to gouge out my eyes with rusty nails and smash my fingers to a bloody pulp so that I never again see or have the possibility of playing Civ 5' then no, Civ 5 is not as bad as that (for me at least).
If "that" is: 'I feel like I've wasted 50 and X hours of my life and will therefore no longer play this sorry excuse for Civ game' then yes, for me Civ 5 is as bad as that.
well put civ 5 is a major dissapointment.
I've written on this elsewhere, but the real issue is that the Civ games have never been really military strategy games. They've never been designed as such. They're "empire building" or "4X" games with a bit of combat thrown in. Successive entries have tried to vary the combat a bit. Civ 2 modified the Civ 1 approach to combat in that it added health bars and removed the binary nature of Civ 1's combat outcomes. Civ 3 kept the health bars and added armies, where you could form 3-5 units into a single "super" unit with multiple different kinds of troops, and which attacked at once. Civ 4 did away with armies and added unlimited stacking, where stack composition counted and the AI selected the strongest unit to defend against a given attack. It also had collateral damage to the entire stack, so taht you could technically attack past the first unit. And Civ 5 did away with all of that and replaced it with a hybrid of 2's health/retreat combat and a new 1UPT system.
The problem is that 1UPT does not fit with a Civ game. 1UPT is a gaming convention that makes sense when you take scale into account, but makes a lot less sense in games where the map is to the "scale" that a Civ map usually is. Civ maps aren't actually to ANY scale except "uhh.....big?" The Italian peninsula on Civ 5's earth map is exactly 1 hex wide at most parts. Ooook... And you can only have one military unit and one non-military unit per hex. Ooook... So....what exactly is our scale again?
1UPT seems to suggest something at either a tactical scale or a smaller strategic scale, but the map is something more akin to larger strategic scale or operational scale. Except it's not even as clear as that. The thing is, this never MATTERED before with Civ games. Combat wasn't the point, or at least not the ONLY point. Sure, it was effective and fun, but the game had a lot more going on than just combat. While plenty of attention and design focus was spent on combat, it wasn't the central element of the game.
Personally, I'm not even 100% sure that 1UPT is a workable convention in tactical level games or smaller scale strategy games. Take the Battleground series, where you typically command multiple armies consisting of individual units that are as small as companies of skirmishers and as large as a single regiment (although you can instruct armies to move together). Even in that game, you can physically occupy the same hex with multiple units. Granted, your units get disordered, which weakens their capacity to damage the enemy and makes them far more prone to routing, but you can still do it. Steel Panthers: World at War uses somewhat similar techniques, and has you commanding individual units that are as small as a single sniper, or as large as a squad of, say, twelve men. You can cram sometimes as many as three or four tanks on a single hex, too.
In both of those games, though, maps are rigidly to scale and each hex is meant to represent a defined amount of space. Therefore, it would at least make more sense to include a 1UPT system in a game like that where attention has been paid both to the mechanics of combat AND to the ground on which such combat will occur, in an effort to keep things consistent.
The problem with 1UPT is that it adds a level of definition and detail to a game that has never been about such definition and detail, and does so on maps that have NOT undergone the same process. So you end up with a vaguely defined, but "big" scale map (where each hex represents a larger parcel of land, so you need fewer hexes to represent large landmasses), mixed with a far more precisely defined (but still vague) "small" scale unit size which somehow ends up occupying the large scale hexes in such a way as to prevent any other unit from occupying that same space?? WTH?!
It doesn't make sense and it's a badly designed mechanic. It's not that 1UPT itself is a bad idea IN THE RIGHT GAME. With a game that was FULLY designed around 1UPT conventions, and was consistent in how it scaled and managed combat, 1UPT could be a real blast. As it is, the mechanic creates traffic jams and headaches in moving troops, especially given how unit pathing works (or rather, doesn't). You have to micromanage troop movement on maps that aren't to scale and at any rate don't really fit the "pseudo-scale" of the 1UPT game convention.
What's more, personally, I reject the notion that this adds anything resembling real complexity or tactics. It's not as if, say, unit facing matters. You can't use enfilading fire. There's no command and control mechanism in the game, (the closest we get is the martial social policy tree which gives a bonus to closely packed troops). There's no unit suppression or routing, so using overlapping fields of fire to pin down an enemy and pick him to pieces until he runs or cowers and is overrun is impossible. You can't roll up anyone's flanks, and getting behind an enemy doesn't matter. So, again, you have this 1UPT MOVEMENT convention, but the combat itself is still pretty simplistic.
Regardless, even the movement isn't REALLY complex. Stick your shock troops in front, your archers in back, and your fast units on the sides.
Wow.
Rommel, you magnificent bastard, it looks like NOBODY read your book while designing this game.
rschissler
King
I'll agree that having transports with 1UPT won't work. Landing troops in Civ V seems clumsy to me, looking for any open tile to land without any real stategy involved. Then, you have all the other units sitting in the water, waiting for the landed units to get out of the way.
All of the "Unit facing N, so I'm attacking from E/W to flank" is Tactical planning- not Operational or Strategic planning. Tactical information is abstracted by the engine. There are 3 levels to military planning- not 2 as people seem to suggest.
A gross simplification would be that Strategic Planning is the goal you are trying to accomplish (Take a city, Deny an enemy access to resources, Gain access to an insertion point for troops later); Operational planning would be the general method of how you want to accomplish it (How to attack a city); Tactical planning would be flanking, crossfire, etc. Operational planning takes place AFTER Strategic planning, and while some people tend to group Operational planning in with Strategy, it's not the same thing.
An example of Strategic Planning is deciding how to mount an offense, given factors such as terrain, and features that they may have constructed that could help or hinder your goal, and even what kind of technology you expect OPFOR to have. Operational planning would then be the actual layout of the troops- how you're going to use your aircraft/navy/artillery to support infantry, while using the infantry to keep the support safe. Tactics (not represented) are things that are generally handled by the infantry themselves; in this case, it's the combat mechanics.
I can understand the gripes about how it is inconvenient to no longer be able to build stacks of doom and swing them around to wipe out entire civilizations with near invulnerable armies- I enjoyed it as much as the next guy. However, I don't see the point in distancing myself from the game because I can't do that anymore. If I can't fit enough troops around a city to swarm it, I need to make a better plan that doesn't involve a pseudo-SoD. Maybe something involving Bombers? Or my Navy? Hopefully I brought along some Artillery to lay some hurt from two or three tiles away. Otherwise, I wasn't planning appropriately, and I deserve to lose every unit I station in that adjacent tile.
I think that the difference between how you are thinking about the maps, and how I am thinking about the maps is that I think of scale in terms of the map as a whole. If I am playing on a "Small" map, the tiles are the same size- but the map has less of them. On a small map, you play on a Large scale... I'm playing on a smaller globe.
As far as troop movements go, it's not particularly impressive when you have a 360 degree option for troop placement, on flat terrain or even hills. Where it really can shine is where chokepoints, mountains and ocean come into play- or later in the game, when you are avoiding losing troops or start using paratroopers/bombers in tandem.
Also, it's not that you are locked into conquest victories. It's that conquest is the easiest one, and you can forget about spamming culture and neglecting your military. The game is trying to win, also. If you don't have a military, they're going to try to kill you.
From what I have seen, the complaints about the 1UPT system is that you actually have to think about how you are going to move troops around, instead of just showing up with 7 million soldiers in one tile and throwing your human wall at them.
I understand the difference between the three. I'm saying that the game itself is not clear on what it's representing. Is it operational? Strategic? Tactical? The previous Civ games never really cared to get into any particular detail about this stuff, but to the extent they were anything, they were -- by your definition -- strategic.
I think, however, that you're missing my point. I also disagree that tactical decisions are being handled by the game abstractions. I don't think the game actually is quite as clear about that.
I actually don't mind the removal of SoD as a game function IF it's replaced with something that actually works. Right now, the system they're using doesn't work. It's not really representative of anything. It's a game mechanic conceived of in response to another game mechanic and that's it, or at least that's how it seems to me. It seems to me that the designers literally thought it through thusly: "I really hate SoD. It so cheapens combat. Just build a huge stack of troops and attack. ho hum. No thought required. What could we do to make combat a process that requires more thought? Hmm.....Oh!! I know! 1UPT!! YES!!"
What's missing there? Well, a lot of consideration for how game mechanics connect to each other, as well as what the game itself is supposed to be modeling/representing. 1UPT doesn't represent ANYTHING other than....1UPT.
Again, I think you may be missing my point. My point is not that I think of the maps in any particular clear "scale." My point is that the games have never really BOTHERED with any kind of clearly defined scale because it never MATTERED before. Introducing 1UPT requires that some additional thought be put into how maps are scaled and how they're layed out. If you're going to introduce a game mechanic like that, you need to have consistency in implementing the REST of the game, and you need to have a good reason WHY you're doing all of this. I don't see that they HAVE a good reason, and ultimately that's probably my biggest complaint about the system: it's meaningless.
1UPT does not represent any larger concept. It doesn't abstract some element of warfare throughout the ages like supply lines or logistical problems brought on by slow communication or anything else. It's just a meaningless rule. It serves no purpose other than as the "answer" to the SoD problem. That, to me, is simply bad design, ESPECIALLY as implemented.
In general, I think that game rules and design choices -- especially in games like Civ -- need to be abstractions of larger concepts into game-like mechanics. For example, consider "culture" in Civ 3 and Civ 4. What was "culture" meant to represent? Well, basically it was meant to be a generalized form of "influence" in ways other than merely economic or military, and which creates a sense of "identity" with which people bond. This accounts for, for example, city-bombing. This is an abstract game mechanic, but one that stands for some generalized principle or concept.
1UPT doesn't do that. It's just...a game mechanic for the sake of a game mechanic. And it doesn't work. Maybe if you ONLY ever play on "small" maps it works, but on anything beyond that, it just doesn't translate into anything logical or consistent.
Again, this never mattered in previous Civ games. Their simplicity in terms of how they portrayed combat was part of what allowed the game to scale well. It didn't matter if 1 hex = 5 acres or 27 hectares or 15 feet. It didn't matter if 1 unit = a regiment, a squad, or a battalion. A square/hex was a square/hex, and a unit was a unit. They were imprecise by design and it worked. Adding 1UPT invokes a certain level of precision, but one which was not thought-through, nor supported sufficiently by the rest of the game. Oh, sure, some game mechanics were altered considerably to accommodate 1UPT, but not ENOUGH mechanics were altered.
Yes, but you had choke points in previous games, too, without the need for a 1UPT convention, which allowed for better game scaling and more consistent gameplay. You could always, for example, put a fort on a single square isthmus. In Civ 2, you had ZOC mechanics that let you block enemy movement (but not stacking), too. My point here is that there are other better options than 1UPT.
Which brings its own problems in terms of diplomacy, but that's a separate issue. You can, for example, be PRECLUDED from developing any kind of real military MERELY by virtue of geographic city placement. I'm not talking production, mind you. I'm talking where your cities are in terms of the surrounding geography. Is your city on an isthmus? Hemmed in by mountains? You'd think those would be an advantage, but all they mean in this game is that you have less room to deploy your troops SIMPLY because you have less "board space" on which to place them. That's just bad game design, in my opinion. At best, it's inelegant.
Then you either didn't read my post, didn't comprehend it, or didn't really care to and only chose to map your own attitudes onto a post that disagreed with you.
I'm not a fan of SoD. But they made sense in terms of the rest of the game. I'm WAY less of a fan of 1UPT, though, because -- as implemented --it's simply lousy game design in THIS game. 1UPT could be a brilliant and exciting game mechanic....in some other game. But it doesn't work in Civ games, certainly not the way they used it.
Again, my fundamental complaint here is not simply "oooh, I don't like having to move troops around." It goes well deeper than that. Having to move troops around is indeed irritating, but it's an irritation I could live with if the degree of micromanagement involved had anything to do with...well....anything other than just "It's the rule because it's the rule."
I enjoy other turn-based combat games where you have to maneuver troops effectively to use them to good advantage. The two games I mentioned previously are favorites of mine precisely because the way they handle unit movement is part of an overall game concept that hangs together as a whole. The rules they impose are abstractions and game mechanics, yes, but they are abstractions of larger concepts, reduced to game mechanics. With Civ 5's 1UPT system, you don't get that. You get a single game mechanic that -- at the BEST argument in its favor -- may or may not have been designed to represent some...limit...of some kind....in warfare. The problem is that the mechanic and the game as a whole don't go far enough in implementing this level of detail, so you end up with a game mechanic that's just a hassle to introduce a hassle.
It doesn't even require all that much more thought than Stacks o' Doom, really. I see people dismiss Stacks o' doom as "easy mode -- just roll up with a big army and spank the enemy" but you still had to consider which order your units attacked, stack composition, whether to continue bombarding and wearing down cultural defenses or just to charge in, etc. So, yeah, not a ton of thought, I grant you.
But 1UPT doesn't really involve a ton of complex thought either. It's like treating someone as a military genius because they can solve one of those sliding square puzzles. Seriously, that, to me, is the degree of thought it involves, and for about the same level of reward. Now, if folks dig those kinds of puzzles, great. They've never run my engine, though.
Really, the problem is this. The Civ series has always -- at its core -- been a series of games that take real world concepts and abstract them into boardgame/computer game mechanics. Sometimes those game mechanics were more "gamey" than representative. For example, Civ 1's "winner take all" combat or Civ 2's zones of control. The thing is, the games have always been a general progression towards greater refinement of those "Gamey" mechanics towards an overall more representative gameplay experience. Not necessarily a simulation, mind you, but the gameplay mechanics seemed less and less like meaningless "rules" and more and more like abstractions of real-world concepts. Not perfect abstractions, but still abstractions.
1UPT is not that. It's a gamey game mechanic introduced to combat another game mechanic (which was, itself, also fairly gamey, but at least fit better into the REST of the game). It's not an abstraction, it's not based on some real world concept, and if it is, it's a piss poor implementation of it that either goes too far on its own, or where the rest of the game doesn't go far enough to support it.
sketch162000
Warlord
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Forgive me, but I am having a lot of trouble understanding your distinction between operational planning and tactics. So, a large number of enemies is approaching, for example. I line my heaviest infantry up at a choke point, to reduce their battle front with the archers behind or off a flank, if possible, to pick off their rear lines. To me that is simply the deployment of my troops on the battlefield, an early step in battlefield tactics. Is this your idea of operation planning? At what point does this become tactics, when everyone starts swinging?
From what I have seen, the complaints about 1upt include the fact that the AI is not so good at it, and that it causes jarring issues with scaling. As to your last sentence, I will pose the same question to you that I have asked others?
What is so unrealistic about the larger stack winning most of the time?
I mean, sure, we have many, many examples in human history of a smaller force besting a larger one, but the very reason why we remember those is because they are so unexpected, yes? Out of all those famous battles, you could probably boil the outcomes down a combination of to a few explanations--tactical brilliance or blunder, act of nature, logistical failure, or the smaller army possessing superior troops. It makes perfect sense, to me at least, that if you are vastly outnumbered the best you can hope to do is slow down the enemy and make it out alive. Not really "win" per se. Look at the most famous underdog story in history, the Battle of Thermopylae. The Spartans lost. Yes, they caused a massive dent in Xerxes's invasion plan, but the Spartans were all dead at the end. They lost the battle for all intents and purposes, as expected when 300 to a few thousand men go up against one million. Out of all the reasons that smaller armies beat bigger ones, Firaxis has chosen tactics, which has arguably thrown scale into question and influenced a lot of other game mechanics. Why?
The other issue is the implication that stacking is just brainlessly cobbling together large numbers of random troops and winning. Will the larger stack win? Probably, but unless you think about which troops to put into the stack, you stand to have a lot of unnecessary casualties, which amounts to wasted production and gold. Terrain and promotions exacerbate this effect. To maintain a large enough military of random troops would probably cripple everything else, forcing you to be a warmonger and allowing everyone else to pull far ahead of you in every other victory condition. I am awe-stricken at the bad rap that stacking gets around here compared to 1upt.
sketch162000
Warlord
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