Limiting Exploration

[HorseshoeHermit]

If you have an army supply system, or even a unit cap, then using the possibility of limitless stacking will not result in -actual- gigantic stacks because you wouldn't be able to support an army of that size anyway. Then you cure the traffic jam problem without having a reality of stack based warfare even though it's allowed. There are pros and cons to advancing in a Stack or positioning units nearby but not overlapping, provided that attackers commit to move into the space they win and will be weakened after victory.

Units that have a statistic of their experience or combat readiness would be another fun repeat of Great Things from Alpha Centauri. I think I even like it better than gaining promotions, which is the equivalent thing after Civ4. Your army consists of hardened veterans, it goes into battle with a bunch of green upjumps, yeah those boys will get obliterated. But I do not think we can get away from having to actually run it on a unit by unit level. Playing out the game on the map means that the tile you occupy is important, which means the unit being on that tile is important, which means the strategic decision starts with producing the unit and continues into each decision to tell it to stand and hold its position. If we are fighting over specific tiles, and everything about the Civ series just screams that we always will, then there is an amount of command and control that will always be front and center in the military side of the game.
With an interface of military power measured as just a number, sitting at one end of the spectrum, we are far towards the other end. I would like it if we just made the tactics matter by enough to reward scouting, deception, and positioning, but otherwise the victory to go to the numerically, and statistically, better forces. Each war will be about either discovering that your war machine is outmatched, or slugging out a battle that quickly yields one weakened side and one defeated side.

Back to promotions, I wish we could do something from Beyond Earth, where you upgraded your entire fighting force all at once and chose a "perk" that was associated with a certain combat class. Here is where I'd like to see something like promotions exist, to accumulate power to a player that invests in their military. I don't know exactly how, but I can see a dynamic where, just like in Civ5/6, where you build up a "highly promoted army" with all kinds of busted abilities, by bringing your units into many battles and managing them all well (not losing them), similarly I imagine a system where building up your army gives you "perks" that enhance your army as a bonus for all the combat experience you get, plus investment in military through other systems like social policies.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Civ doesn't need it.

You're going to get confused with stacking, everyone is. "What units are even here, where can they move, what are the movement mechanics, how strong is this?" All are questions implicitly already answered by not stacking. The fundamental complaint is not "stacking is better", but "I'm not having enough fun with non stacking". If you're not having enough fun with non stacking, that can be solved without adding stacking. Stacking just creates confusion, and isn't necessarily better in any way, shape, or form. "War" in Civ VII just needs a better design, stacking will just make everything worse.

I agree that having to solve a sliding puzzle is the major problem with 1UPT. However if you enlarge that to 3UPT without any mechanism to make stacks less effective, then everyone will build little armies of 3 units instead of 1 because that would be the optimal way to play the game, and the sliding puzzle game will start again.

To me, limiting the number of units per tile is the wrong way to look at the issue. It makes everything incredibly tedious for no good reason, discouraging the players to go for large scale wars later in the game, preventing it to reach epic proportions, basically destroying the fun of the game.

Whereas since Civ5, Firaxis forced us to think that the reason why "stack of doom" was a problem was because of the "stack" part of it, I actually believe the problem comes from the "of doom" part of it. The right way to prevent players from stacking in combat while still maintaining a reasonable fluidity for units is simply to make them more vulnerable when stacked. This way, you don't need any longer a limit because the more you would have being stacked, the worse it would be.

I don't quite understand why you wouldn't have the sliding puzzle problem but just with stacks of 3 instead of 1? What's the difference?

I am quite happy with Civ6's pseudo stack system to be honest. Best of all worlds, works perfectly fine.

I don't think hard-limited stacking solves any of the problems that people have with 1UPT. It just leads to 1UPT problems but with a couple units on a tile instead of 1.

Civ needs to commit. Either go back to stacking (but with more abstract limits like attrition like Paradox games have) or stick with 1UPT. I hope we go back to full stacking.

With 3 UPT the stack is small enough that you are still moving units individually, because there is no need for an extra “stack management menu”, so the issue you are talking about doesnt happen.

I strongly recommend people try the following mod out, it immediatly makes sense once you see it in action

ARS Improved movement

 

[Patine]

With 3 UPT the stack is small enough that you are still moving units individually, because there is no need for an extra “stack management menu”, so the issue you are talking about doesnt happen.

I strongly recommend people try the following mod out, it immediatly makes sense once you see it in action

ARS Improved movement

3UPT is still arbitrary and jarring, does not fix the shuffle and bottleneck problems, does not allow for large-scale wars, realistically, and does not take the scope and scale of the global, strategic of Civ games into account.

 

[aieeegrunt]

3UPT is still arbitrary and jarring, does not fix the shuffle and bottleneck problems, does not allow for large-scale wars, realistically, and does not take the scope and scale of the global, strategic of Civ games into account.

Have you actually tried it?