Military Scaling Discussion

[Little Billy]

Do you guys not use extra gold to invest in buildings after banks come out? In my experience I often end up with large stockpiles of gold, but often blow through all of it upgrading stuff. Late game when I have an income of 1-2k plus, sure. I invest in everything and have gobs left over. But industrial through atomic? I need that stockpile to make sure I can weather sudden spikes in building maintenance and stuff.

I also fail to see how any of these proposals regarding unit upgrades would add anything but unnecessary tedium to the game. I already prioritize my best units for upgrade in case I don't have enough cash for all of them. Adding a delay via requiring unit cycling or a healing timer or whatever doesnt change the timing of an attack at all relative to the other guy, it just moves it back 5 turns. And why is it desirable for it to be harder to upgrade units during wartime? A big enough army essentially negates that anyway, so this is just a nerf to small armies.

 

[Solic]

I also think that these ideas just make war micro a whole lot more tedious and it's also not AI friendly. There is already a lever to use in terms of the difference in training and upgrading units in gold cost. (Something that is already affected by imperialism too). Simply adjust the scaling if we are unhappy with it. I must note that I am personally not unhappy with it and do not recognize swimming in gold at any point of the game. There are enough buildings for me to invest in.

 

[pineappledan]

If there is a general feeling that modernizing and reforming an army isn't enough of a process then there are ways we can make upgrading units more difficult.
- We could make the restrictions for where upgrades happen more strict, but then that would require moving units around more, and would add tedious micro. Also, this would require a lot of AI training.
- We could increase gold costs by scaling them with XP, but that affects gold economy on the whole.
- We could add penalties, like upgrading units subtracts some XP from them, but that punishes players for having elite units and doesn't seem fun.

Damaging units on upgrade would add some verisimilitude. retraining a corps on new equipment and tactics could entail disbanding and recruiting new blood. It could involve a period of time where the unit is less confident or prepared to use their new tools, and is not functioning at full capacity.
It would add a strategic element of timing for upgrading. Modernizing your force presents an opportunity to enemies, or a casus belli.

I also think that these ideas just make war micro a whole lot more tedious and it's also not AI friendly.

The damaging of units on upgrade was brought up precisely because it's something the AI can handle. They know what to do with hurt units already. To fully incorporate this change, perhaps the only thing that would need to need to be done is treat units that they want to upgrade as already damaged, and pull them back from front lines.

There is already a lever to use in terms of the difference in training and upgrading units in gold cost. (Something that is already affected by imperialism too). Simply adjust the scaling if we are unhappy with it. I must note that I am personally not unhappy with it and do not recognize swimming in gold at any point of the game. There are enough buildings for me to invest in.

The problem with adjusting gold, as you say, is that it has effects on the wider gold economy, and solely on that. Upgrades are already pegged to the difference between the current cost of the unit and the cost of the next unit, and I think that the economic cost is in a fine spot.

This would add a tactical dimension to upgrading. Also, the decision to upgrade units is in contrast to deleting/rebuilding units. Rebuilding units costs time in addition to , but upgrading is almost instant. Adding a time/healing dimension to upgrading would make the two options of upgrade/rebuild more comparable.

 

[Heinz_Guderian]

If there is a general feeling that modernizing and reforming an army isn't enough of a process then there are ways we can make upgrading units more difficult.

Okay, I guess I just dont really agree with that being a problem personally. I think too big armies and the tediousness that brings in the lategame is a much bigger problem

 

[Ranslee]

What if upgrading cost scaled up with the amount of promotions? Say, additional 10% per promotion level, or 1% per 1 XP. This way you get to keep your carefully cultivated units, but the process is slower, and there is more of a reason to recruit new units aside from padding unit supply.

 

[pineappledan]

What if upgrading cost scaled up with the amount of promotions? Say, additional 10% per promotion level, or 1% per 1 XP. This way you get to keep your carefully cultivated units, but the process is slower, and there is more of a reason to recruit new units aside from padding unit supply.

This was proposed in a previous conference and rejected. The change would punish players for having elite units and playing well. It would also favour the AI, because of how XP on construction handicaps work, and how humans need to be much more efficient when fighting so they don’t lose units.

 

[epicivfreak]

Damaging units on upgrade would add some verisimilitude. retraining a corps on new equipment and tactics could entail disbanding and recruiting new blood. It could involve a period of time where the unit is less confident or prepared to use their new tools, and is not functioning at full capacity.
It would add a strategic element of timing for upgrading. Modernizing your force presents an opportunity to enemies, or a casus belli.

The damaging of units on upgrade was brought up precisely because it's something the AI can handle. They know what to do with hurt units already. To fully incorporate this change, perhaps the only thing that would need to be done is treat units that they want to upgrade as already damaged, and pull them back from front lines.

This would add a tactical dimension to upgrading. Also, the decision to upgrade units is in contrast to deleting/rebuilding units. Rebuilding units costs time in addition to , but upgrading is almost instant. Adding a time/healing dimension to upgrading would make the two options of upgrade/rebuild more comparable.

Even though I agree with @Heinz_Guderian that this isn't really a problem, for my money, which is exactly zero cents, I do like the flavor and strategizing this adds to the game.

 

[azum4roll]

It would also favour the AI

On the other hand, AI units start with more XP.

I think it's better to tie the cost to XP instead of level so there's no disincentive to level up before upgrade.

But at the end, upgrade cost isn't really a problem if we get rid of the additively stacking upgrade discounts. 1 gold to upgrade everything? No please.

 

[Tekamthi]

Some interesting ideas here.

The notion that a highly promoted unit should cost more than a rookie unit, in some capacity makes sense and is very satisfying to me. However it is not satisfying that the cost would be at upgrade time -- I'm thinking any cost should probably be routed through the supply system if anything -- and the supply system should be the constraint on army size overall as well. This discussion about upgrades, though interesting, strikes me as tangential to the OP concern.

Also a bit at cross purposes, but I wonder if it might alleviate the problem somewhat to leverage the game engine's ability to stack units, but only in the following circumstance: allowing stacking on other civ's units only (not your own) and only when not at war with the unit's owner, and not recently denounced by them. The size of armies would not be addressed, but at least you'd only have your own units and units you're at war with to worry about as obstructions on the map. As it is, the OP concern is most obnoxious to me when I have open borders "friends" jamming up my territory

 

[pineappledan]

On the other hand, AI units start with more XP.

I think it's better to tie the cost to XP instead of level so there's no disincentive to level up before upgrade.

But at the end, upgrade cost isn't really a problem if we get rid of the additively stacking upgrade discounts. 1 gold to upgrade everything? No please.

Could break both ways, yeah. The AI already has problems where it spams a UU and then keeps them unupgraded way past their effective eras, because it doesn’t manage gold as well as humans. If you increase the gold cost of unit upgrades you will definitely see more of that.

If armies are supposed to cost more gold overall then we should implement that via tweaks to unit maintenance, and not through the 1-time cost of upgrades.

 

[pineappledan]

This discussion about upgrades, though interesting, strikes me as tangential to the OP concern.

It’s entirely on-topic to discuss ways to make unit upgrades more difficult. Unit upgrading being too easy was point 2 of OP’s 3 points.

Problem 1 is a simple matter of increasing the CS of late game units and seems uncontroversial to me. Not much to discuss re: increasing unit CS scaling, either you agree or you don’t.

Problem 2 is making unit upgrades harder somehow. You can either believe that upgrading should be made more difficult with a pure economic requirement (ie. increase gold cost somehow), a non-economic requirement (ie. make it harder or take longer to upgrade units), add some non-economic cost (make upgrading lower unit HP or XP), or disagree with this point entirely.

Problem 3 is that late game armies are too big. This can be addressed either by increasing unit maintenance scaling or restricting unit supply.

 

[Tekamthi]

It’s entirely on-topic to discuss ways to make unit upgrades more difficult. Unit upgrading being too easy was point 2 of OP’s 3 points.

Of course, and I rather like the upgrade to 1 HP idea -- just saying it won't really improve the tedious micromanagement of unit positioning in late game, which strikes me as the main concern here. In fact the positioning and shuffling will probably be heightened if we can no longer upgrade a unit right in a combat position, and instead now have to cycle it out early. Nonetheless I'm strongly in favor of this idea.

To me the OP concern is one of those things that's in a "good enough" state -- but it is there nonetheless, sometimes this stage of the game reminds me of those puzzles for children where you have to slide all the pieces around to get them in the right other

Spoiler :

perhaps could be alleviated, albeit only slightly, by selectively toggling the NumStackingUnits field in the units table -- ie at turn start, all units with whom the active player is not at war with and have not denounced recently get +1 to this field; at turn end it's all toggled back. Likely would come with a number of small conflicts that would have to be addressed, would have to be theory crafted out much further if it was of interest. I've explored doing this in Lua but the NumStackingUnits attribute is not exposed to modders afaik. I also anticipate it may be costly on cpu

Edit: my response here only addresses "problem 3", which I see as the most critical of those identified. Read this suggestion as "in addition to" rather than "instead of" some of the others here

 

[Anarcomu]

What about a temporary malus via plague ? Something like a combination of any of:

• Reduced CS (additive),
• Reduced CD (multiplicative),
• Reduced Healing,
• Reduced max health,
• Reduced movement

Also, if possible and desirable make it impossible to upgrade as long as the malus is there (or make it stack duration).

 

[Anarcomu]

Also, I'd be in favor of an overall concentration of armies :

• Increased units CS or reduced City CS,
• Increased overall costs and upgrade costs of unit,
• Increased supply of military units,
• Reduced supply.

The objective being that, for a same amount of production or gold, there is a smaller amount of units on the map but a similar capacity to project force - capture cities, pillaging, doing quests etc.
Barbarian should ever count fewer units, of having them have more numerous but weaker units could be their particularity.

 

[Tekamthi]

Problem 1 is a simple matter of increasing the CS of late game units and seems uncontroversial to me. Not much to discuss re: increasing unit CS scaling, either you agree or you don’t.

Problem 2 is making unit upgrades harder somehow. You can either believe that upgrading should be made more difficult with a pure economic requirement (ie. increase gold cost somehow), a non-economic requirement (ie. make it harder or take longer to upgrade units), add some non-economic cost (make upgrading lower unit HP or XP), or disagree with this point entirely.

Problem 1 here is not such a big deal here to me -- I would love for certain upgrades to feel impactful the way they were historically, but at the same time I accept that VP has flattened these upgrade stats purposefully. Strikes me as something to be solved via modmod and not in the main branch where balance is king.

What about a temporary malus via plague ? Something like a combination of any of:

• Reduced CS (additive),
• Reduced CD (multiplicative),
• Reduced Healing,
• Reduced max health,
• Reduced movement

Also, if possible and desirable make it impossible to upgrade as long as the malus is there (or make it stack duration).

Problem 2 might be well addressed by applying some temp malus promo after upgrade, as per @Anarcomu suggestion here. (I'm a fan of this style of effect in modmod, seems underutilized in main). Suggestion re HP reduction is also good, has my vote, but is it enough? Mechanism for temporary malus already exists, should be trivial to implement

Problem 3 is that late game armies are too big. This can be addressed either by increasing unit maintenance scaling or restricting unit supply.

Flat maintenance scaling and restrictions to supply are uninteresting, and feel gamey when over applied. If either approach were adopted, I'd rather see it done dynamically in a manner that is responsive to the game world ie unit far from home costs more maintenance/supply, battleship more than infantry. This would add some satisfying complexity, whereas flat cap reductions, or universal cost increases feel a little artificial, contrived.

Thinking a little further afield here, could we have low level units mergeable into higher level units? Just spitballing here, but consider unit A is level 5 and sits damaged to 20% HP, unit B is level 1 and has 40% HP -- could we allow B to "merge" into A so that A is now 60% HP and B is deleted? Combine with the upgrade HP loss and suddenly we have a mechanism for cleaning up the too-large armies

 

[Anarcomu]

Flat maintenance scaling and restrictions to supply are uninteresting, and feel gamey when over applied. If either approach were adopted, I'd rather see it done dynamically in a manner that is responsive to the game world ie unit far from home costs more maintenance/supply, battleship more than infantry. This would add some satisfying complexity, whereas flat cap reductions, or universal cost increases feel a little artificial, contrived

Unfortunately, Civ 6's army system would solve that problem, but it cannot be implemented within Civ 5 engine as far as I understand...

Or at the very least, not in a elegant way.

 

[Tekamthi]

Unfortunately, Civ 6's army system would solve that problem, but it cannot be implemented within Civ 5 engine as far as I understand...

Or at the very least, not in a elegant way.

Yes, I've speculated on how it might be done, and iirc the supply portion would only have an inelegant solution.

I will dig up my notes in a moment here and edit in the details

Edit: there are two existing fields in 'Units' table: <SupplyCapBoost> and <ExtraMaintenanceCost>. Would need to test whether these can be given negative value, but if it can, we can effectively tweak both maintenance and supply as desired on a per unit type basis. If our devs added access to these attributes via the promotions table we could tweak them situationally. Might put this as feature request on git

 

[CppMaster]

Unfortunately, Civ 6's army system would solve that problem, but it cannot be implemented within Civ 5 engine as far as I understand...

Or at the very least, not in a elegant way.

Why not? You just delete 2 units and create a new one with sum of all promotions + army promotion that boosts CS.

 

[Tekamthi]

Why not? You just delete 2 units and create a new one with sum of all promotions + army promotion that boosts CS.

I think @Anarcomu was responding to another idea I floated above -- I'm probably packing too much into each post, my bad.

your take re: adding the promotions together when "merging" units sounds like fun to me, a nice player choice to army composition, and added incentive to reduce army size. I haven't explored this particular idea very extensively, just brainstorming here based on what I know about database and existing functionality available in Lua, but it probably comes down to whether AI could make smart decisions about when to merge, vs keeping two units. AI can churn out so many units so fast, it's probably not a big deal if they're not fully optimized in doing so, but they'd have to be at least half competent... Could be a lot of work in dll

 

[CppMaster]

Well, yeah, every change also affects AI. If they produce so many units, it may be very benefitial to them to merge them, so they have a higher concentration of power.