Logistics.

[Tech Osen]

So I've been following the news on Ukraine avidly. Not wanting to go into discussing real life events but it got me wondering about the whole logistics thing in Civ6 or rather the lack there of, as in it's not something you have to worry about while sending your armies across the world.

Not sure how it could or should be implemented but just in general: do you think it should be a part of Civ warfare or would it be too much micromanaging?

 

[SammyKhalifa]

So I've been following the news on Ukraine avidly. Not wanting to go into discussing real life events but it got me wondering about the whole logistics thing in Civ6 or rather the lack there of, as in it's not something you have to worry about while sending your armies across the world.

Not sure how it could or should be implemented but just in general: do you think it should be a part of Civ warfare or would it be too much micromanaging?

I get where you're going here, but I think there are better games for tactical and I'd rather civ not spend TOO too much on the warfare side.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

On the time scale of Civ turns significant logistics consideration doesn't make sense. On top of that already-intractable issue, in-depths logistics would necessitate completely difference systems for different unit types across eras, nearly impossible to implement when you can insta-upgrade units and have them interacting like this.

But yeah, when a unit is in the same spot for 10 years it's hard to abstract meaningful logistics. Early game wars also imply that literally every soldier alive at the start of it will die of old age before it can possibly end in some cases...that's not an environment where logistics/supply issues make sense. It just doesn't work for a game like this, for the same reason it wouldn't work in Call of Duty. It's not what the game is about.

 

[Leyrann]

Yeah, I have to agree, by the game's very scope it's difficult to implement logistics at all.

The only avenue I can think of that might be worth exploring (but I'm not convinced Firaxis should) is to have a line to 'home' for each unit, which can be interrupted by enemy units or attacks, giving said unit a combat penalty. It would probably also greatly limit exploration in the early game, and I don't know if that's something you should want. On the other hand, perhaps Scouts could get a Foraging ability where they don't need a supply line.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Yeah, I have to agree, by the game's very scope it's difficult to implement logistics at all.

The only avenue I can think of that might be worth exploring (but I'm not convinced Firaxis should) is to have a line to 'home' for each unit, which can be interrupted by enemy units or attacks, giving said unit a combat penalty. It would probably also greatly limit exploration in the early game, and I don't know if that's something you should want. On the other hand, perhaps Scouts could get a Foraging ability where they don't need a supply line.

I like that. The old board game Fortress America had something similar iirc.

 

[Gedemon]

That's how it was in my mod, no micromanagement required.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah, I have to agree, by the game's very scope it's difficult to implement logistics at all.

The only avenue I can think of that might be worth exploring (but I'm not convinced Firaxis should) is to have a line to 'home' for each unit, which can be interrupted by enemy units or attacks, giving said unit a combat penalty. It would probably also greatly limit exploration in the early game, and I don't know if that's something you should want. On the other hand, perhaps Scouts could get a Foraging ability where they don't need a supply line.

We already have a loose abstraction of this with how surrounding a unit give you an advantage relative to just attacking it 1v1. Sometimes a quite significant advantage.

I'm not convinced tracing a "route home" through ridiculous terrain would make it better. You also run into problems with how the game decides to place that "line home" and whether the one chosen makes sense...or whether multiple lines are possible etc. But if you allow multiple lines, then it becomes quite impractical to cut it off w/o surrounding it...something the game already heavily incentivizes you to not allow/probably means it's going to die if you do allow it.

 

[kaspergm]

One thing I would like is the return from one of the old game where you couldn't use infrastructure freely when moving through enemy land. Some sort of attrition damage if not having a line home would also make sense to me.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Infra move advantage was huge when collateral damage initiative was crucial to winning wars. I'm not sure it makes as much sense now though.

 

[Gedemon]

I'm not convinced tracing a "route home" through ridiculous terrain would make it better.

While I was there, I finally made a breakthrough in implementing the new pathfinder (with path cost) for units supply lines as I wanted it, ie following rivers to the source of supply then allowing a bit of land path to the unit.

Without the river, the supply line would be at max 2 tiles of land plots from a settlement, here it's 6 river plots + 1 land...

... but the supply line stop one land plot further (crossing the river add a penalty to the path cost)

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not sure that's an improvement to historical realism, especially in some time periods. And once cities are settled, you'd go right back to typical practice of rolling over nearby cities and removing the penalty en route to next.

I guess if you nerf the heck out of cities' baseline defenses, it wouldn't be a big deal though. Civ 6 defender advantage is meme-tier for most of the game.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

A few comments on logistics, because I've dealt with the concept in board games and military history writing for decades.

1. Almost all logistics constraints/rules/concepts get very complex and messy very quickly, and in general they are always Negatives - resulting in things you cannot do because of lack of supply. And therefore they are not particularly liked by the gamer who wants to move around the map and is now told that he cannot go there or there because his little digital people will starve to death if they try it.

2. As mentioned, the time and ground scale of Civ has to be kept in mind: in a game where battles between individual units all take at least a year, and can take (Ancient Era) Centuries, and 4 units in 4 tiles can cover all the ground between two cities, worrying about whether all the men in a Unit got enough to eat for the 5-year turn is pretty inane.
Furthermore, for most of history most armies didn't have supply lines as such. They carried their weapons with them, they found or stole food wherever they went, and only exceptional large armies in exceptionally bad terrain could not feed themselves. The times and places where they couldn't feed themselves were relatively few:
Sieges - where an army has to sit in one place for a long time
Desert, tundra, mountain and similar terrain that simply does not provide a lot of food for anybody for any length of time - any large group that spends a lot of time sitting in terrain of that sort is going to suffer.
Modern Armies - that require constant supply of ammunition by the hundreds/thousands of tons, plus fuel, spare parts, replacements, etc to function for any length of time. Even a small 20th century or later military unit requires tons of 'supplies' every day to continue to function, and so supply even in Civ scales becomes a significant problem, requiring major effort.

3. All of which means 'logistics' can be relegated to specific instances in the game instead of being a constant. Early in the game, multiple Units cannot all tramp through the same desert or tundra tile: the first unit will scrape the area bare, and everybody else will starve before they are in that terrain more than a few days. Any force that sits in front of a city attacking it for multiple turns will take attrition unless it has a naval route to home - sea transport was the only way to supply food from a distance in the quantities necessary to feed an army.
Once you have Gunpowder, the supply/logistics problems start to multiply. You can't just buy or steal artillery shot, bullets or gunpowder from the local peasants - they don't have any. That means you have to get supplied with the ammunition you need to fight a battle, and especially the tons of artillery shot required to attack a walled city, and again, before railroads and motorized transport that means you need a Sea Route to the place where you are fighting.
This is where cutting supply lines becomes a major part of Strategy: in a Civ turn, having no route of supply for even one turn means the army has been unable to move (fuel) and unable to fight (ammunition) for most of the turn, and will be taking losses during that turn from Supply - tanks and other vehicles abandoned because they can't move any more, men surrendering o deserting because they are starving, artillery being abandoned because without ammunition, a modern piece is just 5 - 15 tons of scrap metal.

4. So, limit any "supply rules" to only certain Eras of the game and only on certain terrain/situations. Keep any measuring of 'Supply Lines' as simple as possible - or as easy as possible for the computer to determine for you so the gamer isn't micromanaging ox carts full of bread following his Units for 500 turns.

Now, the advantage of Supply Rules is that they can automatically solve some other problems in the game:
Stacking. The more units you stack in a tile, the more trouble those units will have feeding themselves, even in the most productive tiles imaginable. So, a Stack o' Doom can be formed, but without a supply line robust enough to bring in supplies from outside that tile, it will start to crumble instantly. My suggestion would be to have the computer trace a supply line of limited length (changing with transportation technology as the game progresses) over land, more extended over water, but tracing back to the nearest friendly city, AND it supplies only as many Units as there is population in the city. Trace supply to a convenient city only 5 tiles away, but that is only a 5 - population city, and all Units beyond 5 start taking losses to starvation/desertion Immediately. Massing men and animals in any one place almost always requires supplies from somewhere else, unless they are just 'passing through' ("living off the land", stealing everything that's not nailed down, but no matter how good they are at 'requisitioning', they will strip the tile in a single turn - staying in place without supply is simply Suicidal for most of the game)
Overpowered Units. Ranged Units have been considered overpowered ever since 1 UPT and multi-tile attacks became normal in Civ. But ranged fire requires ammunition, and ammunition after a certain historical point requires supply. And at the extreme, Artillery requires supply of massive tonnages of ammunition to have any combat factor at all: 50 - 90% of all supply in a modern army by tonnage is Artillery Ammunition, and without ammunition, as stated, a modern artillery piece is just scrap metal. Without fuel, a Tank is just a Big Target rather than a combat unit. Overpowered Units can be tamed easily with proper supply considerations to keep them and the gamer 'honest'.

 

[Zegangani]

On the time scale of Civ turns significant logistics consideration doesn't make sense.

I'm not sure that's an improvement to historical realism, especially in some time periods.

That was never a Priority nor a Goal in Civ. In fact, the Unit System in Civ V/VI (can't speak for IV or earlier here) is one of the least mechanisms with historical accuracy/realism, it was primarily made functional for the gameplay side of the Game. And there are many evidence for that, some you named yourself:
- Promotions: how is it possible that a Unit that survived from 1000BC to 300 AC to get promoted? and select a "+1 movements on forests and rainforests" eventhough it never enterd tiles with those features? I mean, seeing a the same Unit for over 1000s years in the same spot I can still see it as like the same Unit but with different soldiers, but the sole notion of Promotions affirms the immortality of the Unit.
- How does a Unit exactly get Upgraded? without any training? Instant upgrade bc there is a super fast Jin/Jet that transports all the necessary equippement/material for the upgrade, which is the reason it costs Gold and not production/training? We could at least have a 2-3 Turns waiting period, or have to place them on an encampment tile.
- 100s of Years to build
- costs no Population
- No limit on how many Units you can have at a Time (if economy allows it), or things like unlimited unit production(hiring) in a City with low Population/Production and no Military Infrastructure
- Corps/Fleet and Armies/Armadas unlocked way too late, were Empires had Armies of 100.000s of Soldiers in ~300-200 bce
- Mercenaries always available to be hired (and as much as you can hire)
- No Morale
- No Attrition
- No clear Militia/Conscripts/Mercenaries/Professional Army System, even in an abstracted way
- ...etc.

The Unit System doesn't need to be realistic or historically accurate, and tbh it can't. So we can only have abstracted things. The current Promotion and Upgrade Systems aren't the best that can be made out of them, but when designing a Units System from a purely realism perspective, then we probably wouldn't have those mechanisms at all, and that would mean a much less fun Military Gameplay. Units should cost Pop? the AI isn't good at handling this, and in Games that have this Feature, it tends to self-destruct with it.
IMO there are ways to make those abstractions better and more realistic, the only question is: (if at all) how much would that improve the (military) gameplay?. So when it comes to gameplay Features, I always prefer fun and interesting gameplay over realism, but I want to have as much realism/historicity as possible, so that we neighther have a gamey feature that has completely lost connection to realism nor realistic features that are no fun and uninteresting. Perhaps a good approach to that would be to design a realistic Feature, and then redisign it little by little to make it more and more interesting and good for gameplay, till we have a partly fun and partly realistic gameplay feature.

 

[reddishrecue]

In civ 4 there used to be open borders and stacks of doom would be able to pass through any allied civilization who had open borders. I think civ 1, 2 and maybe 3 also have gotten into allowing civilizations to have military all over the world. It was a bit expensive but it was possible. The thing that really stopped this process however is the ideological pressures that have been added in civ 5 for civilizations that have open borders. Even the best of allies became enemies when culture and tourist victories became possible this new way that was way different from civilization 4 and below. The AI didn't like opening up their borders like it used to and charged more for it. Personally I didn't either because of the new id pressures. Open borders suddenly became annoying and new wars broke out with the neighbors sometimes particularly when id pressure was becoming too much on your culture.

 

[Leyrann]

They carried their weapons with them, they found or stole food wherever they went, and only exceptional large armies in exceptionally bad terrain could not feed themselves. The times and places where they couldn't feed themselves were relatively few:

Could you expand on this further? I find it hard to imagine how five or ten thousand people could live completely off of the land. Then again, I'm not exactly an expert, so maybe I just don't have a good view of things.

Overpowered Units. Ranged Units have been considered overpowered ever since 1 UPT and multi-tile attacks became normal in Civ.

Is this really the case? As far as I'm aware, the multiplayer meta is mostly centered around heavy cavalry, so I was assuming those are the strongest units.

neighther

That is an impressive spelling of 'neither'.

 

[kaspergm]

A few comments on logistics, because I've dealt with the concept in board games and military history writing for decades. (...)

(...) The Unit System doesn't need to be realistic or historically accurate, and tbh it can't. (...)

Really interesting posts. I agree there needs to be a very tight balance between the need/wish for realism vs. the need for fun gameplay in such a feature. Something that makes the game extremely difficult to manage will not be fun or fit in the game. When that is said, I think there are some aspects of the game that could be fleshed out in these areas. Here are some random thougts and ideas.

• Wrt. supply lines, I think a good addition would be that a unit that stays stationary in enemy lands, for instance during a siege, should take some attrition damage. This might scale with army size (i.e. number of stacked units).
• Units should also take attrition damage from ending their turn in desert, tundra or ice (maybe even jungle). This should happen both in hostile and neutral territory. Units trained in a city founded on that type of territory will be immune to this. There was a Civ5 mod that did this which I liked.
• I think a way of handling supply lines could be with a supply unit that works a bit like a trader unit. When an army sets up a siege, the supply unit must be send to a friendly city to provide a supply route. This would work similar to how traders work, just going from the hostile (besieged) city instead of from a friendly city. The supply line should have a limited range based on technology and terrain (rivers and ocean increasing it, similar to traders). It should be able to pillage the supply route. If the supply route is broken, the units take attrition damage and certain units may stop working (those requiring ammunition or fuels).
• The whole unit system could need some rethinking. For a start, I'm in support of producing a unit taking a population from the city. Alternatively, make the military unit work as a citizen assignment, similar to how the citizens can be assigned to work a farm/mine/specialist slot. This would obviously need to be thought into an overall balance of citizen growth.
• I think drafting untrained units should be much cheaper, given the available population. This ties into my suggestion above wrt. population and units.
• I think the locked unit types could need some rethinking. Instead of a unit being a "swordsman" or a "pikeman", maybe one could separate the weapon from the unit, so you have a "unit", and then you can equip it with different types of "weapons" (swords, pikes, crossbows, ...). This ties into the idea of supply above: Supply lines could be used to bring new supplies of weapons to units, but this could become heavy on micromanagement.
• As mentioned above, the idea of a unit instantly, almost magically, upgrading into a unit using a new weapon and retaining all promotions seems weird. I know units losing promotions on upgrade was unpopular (I hated that myself), but I think it would make sense to have two different types of promotions: Basic combat promotions (for instance terrain related) that are retained with upgrade, and weapon mastery promotions, that are lost with upgrade. Units should be able to train in an encampment to increase their weapon mastery. This should take a number of turns for each promotion.
• A random and perhaps slightly unrelated thought: Great persons should have a limited lifespan like the Heroes from Heroes and Legends mode. This would make Great Generals more interesting. There should be other ways of earning Great Generals than just through building encampments and related buildings.

 

[Gedemon]

I'm afraid attrition damage would be another difficult task to handle for the AI.

Supply units IMO would require too much micromanagement over automated supply lines.

The population/army relation should be in the game one way or another, yes.

Fully agree on equipment defining the unit for healing/upgrading, and drafting units at a low cost (but for a limited time), I mean, all that was in the mod and worked quite well (automated supply lines, so no micromanagement unless you really wanted to specify the equipment sent to the unit)

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Could you expand on this further? I find it hard to imagine how five or ten thousand people could live completely off of the land.

It depends on specific period/location, but this sometimes implies supplying not just from the land, but from people of the opposing country. If they didn't want to give food/etc then it was "persuasion by force".

Much more viable for pre-modern armies which did not also need fuel and infrastructure for heavy equipment. But that's the overwhelming majority of a Civ game, including all of it that matters to outcome in a typical game.

It's not like supply issues were never a thing in pre-modern times, but armies did manage without a logistics train to home territory, and they did so pretty frequently.

 

[kaspergm]

Supply units IMO would require too much micromanagement over automated supply lines. (...) all that was in the mod and worked quite well (...)

Good point. Can you enlighten me, what mod is it you refer to? And is it still working? You speak of it in past tense?

 

[Gedemon]

Good point. Can you enlighten me, what mod is it you refer to? And is it still working? You speak of it in past tense?

past as development stopped before it could be considered "finished", but it's fully playable up to the medieval era, and longer if you don't mind some oddities/unbalance/empty techs and a big drop in performance at some point in mid/late game (it's fully Lua, wasn't meant to be, the migration mechanism start to use a lot of processing power past mid-game, especially on large maps)

but the equipment production/stockpile/capture used for units construction/upgrade/healing with trade routes and supply lines is fully coded/working.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/gedemons-civilization-a-total-overhaul-project.576/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/installation-instructions.630069/

you'll need the preview version if you want to test those mechanisms, the dev version is limited to a pre-city gameplay loop.

it requires YnAMP too, but just to pass data from setup, no need to play on a real world map.