Kill 1UPT, add city maintenance, and we have a winner

[Jayman1000]

Stack of doom. That is all. 1UPT is infinately better than the alternative.

Because there exists only these two extremes right? Stacks of doom vs 1UPT. Nothing in between. Right.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Stack of doom. That is all. 1UPT is infinately better than the alternative.

I agree. I simply didn't find SoD to be fun. I'd be OK with a new system similar to the Total War series on auto-resolve, but the individual cycling through units and attacking the other big stack of units is far less fun than 1upt, which allows for far more creative play during war.

 

[seasnake]

The eventual gameplay needs to be something more akin to what Pirates! and Age of Wonders do: a stack that has limited slotting that moves together, a larger zone of control the more people in the stack, and when an enemy army comes into zone of control it switches to a combat minimap. Battles go until resolved. You get the tactical IUPT combat, chokepoints, etc. but on the main map your armies are just one tile but they defend. In single player you have an auto-resolve choice.

The AI in Age of Wonders, a fairly old game, was able to make smart decisions using this formula. In Civ this could be so much better because policies/UAs/Great people could make for amazing variety to strengths and weaknesses.

You could have in your army a great general to boost its movement/ZOC/combat. Nearby air units could be called in to perform air strikes, naval units near cities/enemies could bombard. Besieged cities in time will fall without the storming the walls, however it's built on the coast that time is more than doubled, giving the civ the chance to create units in other cities or get neighbors/city state units to help break the siege.

 

[juanpavo]

Why can't we dislike posts on these forums? It's the natural complement to likes, and very necessary in a case such as this.

"Dislike" post == "Like" opposing post. Plenty of back and forth discussion of opposing views, so you can "like" the opposing arguments if you want to be heard.

 

[Usama84]

totally agree with this post, I hate 1 upt so much

 

[wiggawuu]

civ just need to be a real time strategy game Screw it. Sid Meier's Gettysburg! was an amazing game. They should add elements of that into Civ.

 

[dexters]

This again? 1UPT is about the least controversial thing they carried over from Civ5.

This biggest change in Civ6 wrt to 1UPT is slower unit movements due to the new movement rules.

 

[wiggawuu]

I miss SoD. It was so awesome when you finally got a big enough army to go all in! The map sizes are to small for 1 upt. It snot panzer generals.

 

[Turquoiside]

There was nothing wrong with stack warfare.

 

[Gorbles]

In my OP I did: limited stacking starting at 3 and then progressing to 6 as time goes on (and those numbers are just ballparks). Units would still act as individuals. No need to form corps or anything like that.

The problem is that Civ VI only has very, very limited stacking (so limited that I'm not sure it is really helpful at all), and the game still has no stacking for units of different nations, let alone civilian units stacking with other civilians..

But that's precisely the thing. The game has limited stacking. It has combined arms (corps) as well as units being able to overlap.

It does help, because unit pathing and management would be more of a chore without the improvements that have been made. So, you can't say "i'm not sure it's really helpful" - you're just dismissing the entire mechanic out of hand in favour of your own, without actually owning the faults your own suggestion has.

It's a common issue with community suggestions, across all communities. I posted here originally because you were lambasting some dude for having a binary opinion, because your suggestion doesn't actually have enough to distinguish it from said binary. Either your suggestion lowballs the numbers so much that it isn't actually much of a difference compared to the vanilla game (corps and limited stacking of support units), or you highball the numbers of "stacks of doom" because a problem (again).

Let's not forget that the forced statement of "1UPT" is flawed because it actually isn't, and has never been, 1UPT. Noncombat units and combat units have always overlapped, and now we have further areas of overlap with combat-focused units. It's a logical progression that manages to completely prevent any theoretical or realistic problem around "stacks of doom". Conceptually, it is a far better setup than the one you're proposing.

Why? Because it allows for further tweaks and refinements. Your solution is just MUPT, but with vague limits that haven't been defined or tested against. It changes the entire strategic vs. tactical balance that was established with CiV, and while I appreciate you might like the older games, that is precisely what they are. Older. Not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case a clear and obvious progression can be mapped throughout the franchise's lifespan.

 

[PhilBowles]

Having to pay maintenance is not a 'punishment'. Things cost money to maintain, and distance makes this problem worse. It is a basic reality.

Corruption drains funds and distance makes the problem worse. It is a basic reality. And yet mechanically corruption was rightly disliked mechanically. The flaw isn't with the system in concept (if you want to pick holes in core concepts in Civ IV you need look no further than the way it enacted slavery, the fact that the healthiest cities are the ones placed in the middle of the forest, or the fact that Divine Right is a technology, or the nuke-happy spies, or the way it enacted religion, or...), it's with the poor design of the mechanic.

Besides, eventually cities became profitable, so it wasn't an issue.

That's not the point. Mechanically maintenance was purely negative - it existed for no purpose other than to set the rate of expansion to the level defined by the game design, not leaving it meaningfully within the player's control. A strategy game shouldn't tell you "the correct strategy is to spam cities across the map as fast as possible, but we're setting an arbitrary constraint on the rate at which you can do that which has to be managed in exactly the same way every time". It should present strategic alternatives.

Are you genuinely arguing that you were 'punished' for going wide in Civ IV?

No, I'm arguing that the mechanic was strictly punitive - that's not the same thing. It doesn't incentivise you to take approach X over Y, or gain benefit A for doing X in lieu of benefit B for doing Y. It just tells you "here's a penalty that will apply when you do X, but not doing X is not a viable option". If maintenance didn't exist, cities would be even more productive earlier than they are - so evidently the existence of maintenance is a penalty.

Contrast with at least the intent of global happiness: you have a resource pool from which all your population is managed (although this is offset to a degree by the fact that you'll have greater access to luxury resources, and access to extra copies of happiness buildings). You can go wide, but doing so comes with the penalty that your individual cities will be smaller for the same level of happiness. You can keep happiness at the bare minimum needed to avoid penalties, but you also had a different (and in practice less viable) option to expand/grow more slowly and keep positive happiness, in order to maximise Golden Age benefits. One mechanic provides multiple strategic alternatives while still performing the essential function of maintenance: constraining expansion.

Tall v. wide is a debate that maybe we never needed to have. If tall is an option then it is almost inherently a better option since it requires no risk and very little effort. Why get rid of one of the four Xs?

Civ V went as far as it did because the intrinsic advantages of going wide are very hard to offset. You get extra income from every resource type, you have access to greater numbers of strategic, luxury and bonus resources, you get extra production slots, you get the ability to duplicate key resource buildings, and your overall population (and the resources that come with it) expands far more quickly because multiple small cities grow much faster than a few larger ones. Civ V only managed to succeed in going tall by piling on multple expansion penalties on top of the global happiness mechanic, and skewing the policy tree in its favour. And even then going tall wasn't as heavily-favoured as is often made out; going wide was very viable if you had the right map - it's just. as you say, more of a risk because you had to commit to it before knowing whether the map was well-suited for going wide.

It's certainly entirely possible that tall vs. wide is the wrong dichotomy to focus on - the big lesson I took from Civ V is that while the game's goals in trying to provide alternative strategies and routes to victory were admirable, ultimately playing tall is just boring because you end up without as much to do. But the goal of providing alternative ways to play (not just alternative routes through the tech tree while you play the game essentially the same way every time, differing only in which resource your cities specialise in spamming +X% bonus buildings) was an advance over earlier Civ games that certainly shouldn't be rolled back because Civ V's attempt wasn't fully successful.

 

[DJ_Tanner]

So, here's what I'm thinking. If we have unit stacking (say growing from 3 to 6 units per tile over the course of the game) then everyone will have to build far more units to hold choke-points, garrison cities, and have enough weight to launch an attack. This will mean having a larger manufacturing base will be a huge advantage, which is good: we need incentives for players and the AI to expand. More units should also mean deadlier combat, so the human has to keep building units in war (to say nothing of the need to build garrison forces as you advance and take new cities). As it currently sits it is easy to get through the entire game and only lose a tiny handful of units. This shouldn't be the case.

So what if we instead used stacks that moved from 2 to 3 over the course of the game? Its a slightly smaller scale but it gets at the same thing you are talking about. And then what if also we build in a modifier to those stacks where they lose a bit of power when stacked?

 

[elitetroops]

I agree. I simply didn't find SoD to be fun. I'd be OK with a new system similar to the Total War series on auto-resolve, but the individual cycling through units and attacking the other big stack of units is far less fun than 1upt, which allows for far more creative play during war.

Who says you can't be creative if stacking is allowed? Sure, in Civ IV you can put everything in a stack and walk over an opponent, but you can also win the war faster with less units if you are more creative. The "just put everything in a stack" strategy mentioned by critics in this thread is actually a horribly inefficient way to wage war in Civ 4.

That's not the point. Mechanically maintenance was purely negative - it existed for no purpose other than to set the rate of expansion to the level defined by the game design, not leaving it meaningfully within the player's control. A strategy game shouldn't tell you "the correct strategy is to spam cities across the map as fast as possible, but we're setting an arbitrary constraint on the rate at which you can do that which has to be managed in exactly the same way every time". It should present strategic alternatives.

Huh? I don't get this at all. What do you mean "managed in exactly the same way every time"? There are so many different ways you can overcome maintenance costs in Civ IV. How many cities you can afford is totally up to the meaningful decisions you make as a player. The main constraint for the rate at which you can expand is your own skill level.

 

[Nefelia]

I agree. I simply didn't find SoD to be fun. I'd be OK with a new system similar to the Total War series on auto-resolve, but the individual cycling through units and attacking the other big stack of units is far less fun than 1upt, which allows for far more creative play during war.

...

There was nothing wrong with stack warfare.

Aside from the fact that I personally rejoiced when the SoD went extinct, the fact remains that most of us have played Civ IV to death. Civ V brought some refreshing new mechanics and systems... which we have now played to death. And now we have Civ VI, with refreshing new mecanics and systems... and people are calling for a return to Civ IV mechanics?

Civ VI already has limited stacking in place: support units stack with military units, as do civilian units. Later on military units can stack together with others to form corps. The only problem right now is the apostles, which block military units. If this is fixed, then we will have a very good system in place.

 

[Stalker0]

AI cant handle ANYTHING.
Get over it, you will never have a competitive AI(in any game, not just civ), if you want a though and balanced game... GO MULTIPLAYER.

And 1UPT is the best change ever, combat is so much better.

Go try the Vox Populi Mod for Civ 5. The AI is leagues better than vanilla. It can be done, its just an incredible amount of work.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Who says you can't be creative if stacking is allowed? Sure, in Civ IV you can put everything in a stack and walk over an opponent, but you can also win the war faster with less units if you are more creative. The "just put everything in a stack" strategy mentioned by critics in this thread is actually a horribly inefficient way to wage war in Civ 4.

The "who says" would be me (based on Civ3 and Civ4). I'll agree on an absolute level, but on a comparative level, I don't think it's any comparison. The number of times I've had to cycle through units to find the best matchup is exhausting and on map tactics while filling some role, don't compare at all to the maneuvering of Civ5.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Soft cap on stacks through the application of attrition is a blindingly obvious solution that would alleviate all the problems, and likely satisfy both camps.

I hate 1upt because it has an enormous micro overhead, turning the game's focus from the 'strategy of civilization building' into one about the 'tactical arrangement of units'.
It's minutia that I don't find enjoyable because it's obvious, repetitive, slows the flow of the game down dramatically, and enormously handicaps the AI. (not to mention the other issues of economic & geographical scale that necessitate scaling down the grandeur of the entire experience)

That said, civ4's stacks were not perfect; stacks became so huge that the interface for interacting with them became tedious. They obviously also stretched realism somewhat.

So, go with the Paradox grand strategy approach;
- tiles provide support to units on the tile.
- Different tiles/improvements/techs alter the support of the tile.
- if support requirements of the units on a tile exceed the support of the tile, the units take attrition damage.

This will bring back the minimal micro-management load of unit movement that we had in civ4, and release the AI from the debilitating constraints that 1upt places upon it.

I'm really frustrated and disappointed that Firaxis didn't do this for civ6; it was the one change that might have brought me back to the franchise.

 

[Sobornost]

Disclaimer: I haven't gotten Civ 6 yet, for a number of reasons, chief being my limited amount of free time right now. I have been paying a lot of attention to reviews and the AI though.

1UPT combat is more fun on a move-by-move basis, each tile has tactical importance as opposed to just being the open countryside you traversed on the way to sieging the enemy city in Civ 4. I do like that.

But the AI is terrible at it. I think that in my, and a lot of other people's, view really trumps pretty much any advantage to be gained. A defense of 1UPT mechanic really has to acknowledge that and argue that 1UPT brings advantages that outweigh the fact that you can't lose even in a substantially-outmatched fight where a chieftain-level human player would annihilate you given the same forces. Saw it too often in Civ 5. I never once got to the point where I just threw my hands up in the air, said 'crap, Monty really got me there' and quit in desperation, like in Civ 4. 1UPT has tactical combat, yes. But I don't want to go every battle with me feeling like I'm Leonidas and the 300 Spartans (inevitably outmatched, inevitably winning).

Key to a fun game is the strong possibility that you will lose. It's the risk that provides excitement and genuine satisfaction in victory.

I think the balance a lot of people want to see is to bring back AI competence at war that has regressed significantly, while maintaining some of that 'each tile is important' sense of combat we have now. Other than that I wouldn't want to go back to Civ 4, civ has really evolved for in fun and beneficial ways since then. But an AI that can really catch you off guard and ram your mistakes down your throat, surely that is a worthy feature to bring back?

 

[CaiusDrewart]

City maintenance had a flaw that was common to too many Civ IV mechanics: it wasn't a strategic choice, it was a flat penalty. Civ IV had no real 'tall vs. wide' dichotomy of the type Civ V attempted: you had to expand. You just got punished for doing so. While the series has scaled back too far on punitive mechanics, they shouldn't exist purely to punish when there are no alternative ways to manage them, as it makes the correct gameplay too binary and too obvious; 'expand or don't expand', 'manage health at point X or else'. It was really no different from Civ I-III's corruption mechanic in this regard. Civ V's much-maligned global happiness had the right idea as a mechanic that offered more varied ways to manage expansion and the game better-rewarded taller play, but it notoriously went too far in the latter direction and the former was never particularly well-executed. I haven't yet played enough Civ VI to know whether it would benefit from a way to constrain expansion, but if so it needs to adopt a different system from Civ IV.

You're quite right about the effects of city maintenance, but for me this is a feature, not a bug. I love that it, together with stacks (which means you absolutely need high production and a big army) gives Civ IV an "expand or die" feel. That's my favorite thing about the game. If you don't have enough land available in the early going, you'd better build a few catapults and take some before it's too late.

I do agree that lots of elements in Civ should be non-linear. I like that in Civ VI you can viably be a culture or science-focused Civ, with very different results. But not expansion. But once you make it OK not to expand, a lot of the tension and fun disappears. At least for me.

(And of course, another minor feature of Civ IV's expansion limiting mechanic is that it made sound conceptual sense. Global happiness makes zero conceptual sense.)

 

[Chinese American]

These arguments about units per tile really miss the real fundamental flaw with Civ 5 and 6: lack of city micromanagement. Once they removed attention from the cities, all you're left with is unit simulator. That would exacerbate any unit/tile system flaws.

In older games, including 1-4 and Civ Rev, I would give so much care and attention to my cities. Every turn I would fret if they have enough yields and the right amount. Whether I should have extra food or extra production. This seemingly minute dilemma made a huge impact on how much I care about my cities and my civ.

Unfortunately, they essentially removed all city management from 5 and 6. So that I no longer care about my cities, what their output is, what tiles surround them, etc. I used to spend over half the turn in the city screen in older games; now they're just bothersome reminders. I just don't feel the conections with my cities anymore. They've become sideshows to the tedious shuffling of units. 99.99% of the turn is wasted shuffling units like they're so fragile and be stepped over.

Meanwhile, maybe one second per turn total at most is thinking about my cities. Really, 99.99% of the time they might as well not be there. All this hoopla about happiness and housing is better whatnot, doesn't matter. Because you'll never spend time looking inside your city. Looking after the citizens, how and what they're doing, if they're behind in food or production or trade. That doesn't happen any more because they've simplified and streamlined too much of city management.

So the real question is 'Why did they make cities the background, where they used to be the focus of the game?'