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.
The other Civ's only represented the Strategic level of warfare, yes. This one represents the Strategic and Operational level- but because, in the game as well as in life, the Strategic level is an abstraction, and can actually be viewed as a composition of Operational plans they tend to get confused.
What I am saying is that while the game did not announce it, they are representing down to the Operational level- either intentionally or a byproduct of the 1UPT system. I feel that the combat system is a complete overhaul, and have had no issues with it. I think it's a new concept, I was a little wary of it at first, but I feel that enough systems have been changed to accommodate it that it isn't too bad.
Sure, there are flaws- but CiV is a new game that is also new to 1UPT systems, as well as hexagons. There were
going to be flaws. I mean, the diplomacy sucks nuts and there's no excuse for that- but the combat at least deserves the benefit of the doubt and a chance to correct itself.
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.
Tactical decisions have always been handled by the game abstractions. In Civ, it seems to be done with dice rolls. The game just doesn't seem to
care about tactics, determining them in the "two regiments stand next to each other and shoot until the other one dies" style. But it doesn't pretend to do it, so I don't care.
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.
Maybe it's just that I'm not that hurt by the 1UPT rules. I have had units in my way, but I just move around them if I really need to get units across. I was successful with the SoD; sometimes more than others, and sometimes WAY more than others. It was't that you COULD stack units together that bothered me, so much as that you could stack an INFINITE number of troops together and move them around as one massive death machine. It had much the same feel that the Giant Death Robot does in CiV. If they were going to improve on this, I would say to make it 2 or 3 units per tile; or give units a "scale" point as to how much of a tile they take up, but at a hit to defense/offense so that you can move troops around without issues, but you wouldn't really want to attack with them stacked.
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.
There really wasn't a reason behind why you could stack an infinite number of troops together. You could stack 10 machine gunners together, all with Medic I/II, and sit them on a pillaged resource almost indefinitely. Unless the enemy wanted to waste marines on it.
I can appreciate that.
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.
I'm not saying that 1UPT is PERFECT, but that given the way they modified the cost of units, the mx (maintenance) for units, and the city defense, it definitely makes more sense than stacks of doom. Sure, it has points where it's flawed- sure, you can expect to lose a lot of troops until late game- sure, there are times where I won't even go to war because I can't afford to lose troops to cities... but it's a new system. As with all new systems, it's going to need improvement- and it will most likely GET improvement. Maybe I'm just used to 1UPT already, but I can't go back to Stacks of Doom. I tried, and I feel like my planning stops at unit building, then I just move the army of Xerxes around in that one tile. It would be different if there was a limit to how many units can be on a tile, but the argument that 1UPT doesn't have any inherent scale can be said just as easily about Unlimited Units per Tile.
I just don't understand how you can put your entire multi-million-person army in one tile and be perfectly valid; but you can't be limited to one regiment or batallion per tile because it's unrealistic.
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.
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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 horsehockey 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.
I generally don't use these cities for production, anyways. If it's walled off from the rest of the country by mountains, I shouldn't have settled there without good reason. If the enemy did it, it's a landing point. The game can't shell what it can't see, and behind those mountains just became a great place to hide artillery and aircraft.
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."
That's how a lot of games work. I can't find any justification for Unlimited Units per Tile other than "It's just the way the game works." Fine, I'll accept that- but it makes far more sense that "1 unit can occupy a tile" than "you can stack units on this tile until the game crashes."
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.
I think it was implemented fabulously. It lets you operate on the, as I've said, Operational level during combat- without having to be bothered with the Tactical level, which actually WOULD be micromanaging. Otherwise, a city would not be able to take up one hex and still make sense.
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.
It isn't as obvious when the SOD's have some kind of control behind them- but I've rolled around with SODs so large that it really didn't matter what the enemy had in their ENTIRE army. I was overrunning continents before the REST of my army could make it to land. If Unlimited Units per Tile (UUPT) had some kind of limiting factor, I'd accept them as a valid point- but as it stands, they're just as ridiculous as 1UPT.
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.
I feel that this is actually a better mechanic, given the way combat works. If you could stack a bajillion units in one tile, then you can overrun cities with numbers. CiV makes promotions and units more important. Last game I played, I built 2 artillery and upgraded them along paths that made them actually operate like 4 artillery. If I lost one, I was actually losing the offensive capability (capes) of two. Suddenly, I had a reason to block units from attacking them. You don't have that in UUPT.
You would have to take away the cities ability to defend themselves without help of military, make units less expensive to build, and decrease maintenance per unit; in order to make UUPT a valid strategy in CiV; otherwise, SOD's are THE easymode for warfare.
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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?
If your plan is to take one city, Operational planning and Strategy are the same thing. If there's a reason for taking that city, and a plan beyond taking that city, then that is your strategy- in military terms. If you are taking a city because it allows you to perform some role, or allows you to hinder the enemy in some way, that is the strategy.
The exact method in which you take the city is Operational Planning. Will you use bombers/fighters? Or the Navy? Or Artillery? That's OPlanning. Tactics don't exist in the game, but do exists in games like Battle for Middle Earth, where unit facing and such matter. You can flank with a regiment- but Tactics involve use of cover, breaching buildings, etc.
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.
The complaint is that 1UPT doesn't make sense and that UUPT DOES. The fact is, neither of them make sense, but 1UPT makes more sense because it gives a tile space; Civ 4 didn't care what space was, which wasn't bad in itself- but it cared so little that you could put EVERY unit in the GAME on one tile, and it still didn't care.
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Actually, this is not true.
People complaining about 1upt complain mainly about two things:
a) it makes troop movement a hassle within your own borders (neutral scouts sitting in the way, anybody?)
b) it makes the incompetence of the AI even more obvious
Valid, on both accounts. I have no argument for A, except for that I'll just suck it up and move around the unit.
Civilization 4's AI was just as horrendous, however. It was compensated for by allowing the game to move around units without regard to scale. It makes the incompetence of the AI obvious, but not worse. The real issue in point B is that the AI is bad, not the system.
The second point is most probably the one, why there are still fans for 1upt in the Civ scale.
Suddenly people who never were able to keep an invasion going in previous Civ games are successful (military-wise).
In Civ4, as a rule of thumb, you only needed around 1/4 of the invader's strength to stop him - if you did it in the right way. As attacker, you needed around 1/2 of the enemy's strength to be successful - in a war which was not about only taking this ONE city, but to keep your invasion ongoing.
Many people lacked the necessary skills for doing so.
And now they praise a game in which you can kill opponents which are both, numerically favoured AND one era ahead.
The weakness of the AI compensates for their own lacking, so the concept HAS to be good.
I've annihilated entire continents with a stack of doom with naval assaults. The most thought I put into it after unit composition was wondering if I could get the job done faster by splitting my 1 massive SOD into 8-9 average SOD's. I still won.
SOD isn't a better strategy or even a better game mechanic... it's just what people are used to.
What kind of "tactics", "operational skills" or "strategic decisions" are required to do so?
Tactics: Bombard first, move one or two units forward for the "flanking bonus", attack with mounted units which can retreat to make way for the final blow of the melee units.
Operational: Don't expose your ranged units to enemy melee units, have melee units in the first line, ranged weapons behind and mounted at the sides.
Strategic: Have units.
That's not what any of those mean.
Having units is not a strategy. Your strategy is what your goal in that war is, and a general overview of how you are going to accomplish it. Are you taking the city because you need the area? Will you be launching more attacks afterwards? If so, from where? From this city? Does it provide you cover, in terms of terrain bonuses? Does it hide your movements from the enemy in the fog of war? If these questions didn't already have answers- you aren't using a strategy. Maybe your strategy is to wipe out the enemy- but that's more of a goal.
What you have listed as Tactics actually belong grouped in with your Operational section. Tactics are generally used in tactical shooters, such as Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, or Rainbow Six. They involve use of cover, breaching points, etc. The Operational level is, as the name suggests, planning for Operations. A war isn't won in one operation (Contrary to what Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation New Dawn/Operation Enduring Freedom suggest; as they are actually comprised of several Objectives and Operations).
A good example would be that the suppression of Korengal Valley in Afghanistan was Operational planning, Operation Enduring Freedom is Strategy, and how troops accomplished that would be Tactics.
The game only accommodates down to the Operational level.
Actually, this concept is easily grasped by a six-year-old one.
Quite some people are proud to have finally mastered these "skills", too.
You don't seem to have grasped the concept- which is fine, because some of the longest technical schools in the military are to train people to understand them- surpassed only in length by people learning to be fluent in other languages, and by special forces training.
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