(More) Realistically Paced Wars

[ThisNameIsTooLo]

To make wars resolve more quickly and efficiently without disrupting the rest of the turn-based flow, I suggest a War Turns mechanic. Simply put, it condenses many turns of combat into a single "I go, you go" session, without the need for overly-tactical things like "battlefields" or "simultaneous turn-taking".

When you end your turn, and any military units of a Civilization that you are at war with are within the attack range of your units, this mechanic comes into play.

Military units that are within the attack range of enemy military units are henceforth referred to as "threatened".

• Upon ending your turn, the enemy Civilization with threatened units receives an extra War Turn.
• A War Turn is an extra turn used only for responding to enemy action. During a War Turn, all of the Civilization's threatened military units (and only those units) get Move Points equal to one-quarter their max, which is enough to move to or attack an adjacent tile.
• During a War Turn, the Civilization does not receive their gold-per-turn, and production, research, culture et al. do not progress. They cannot manage their cities, or command their Builders. Units do not heal. Diplomacy cannot be conducted with non-involved Civs. (All these things will be given during regular turns.)
• If a Civilization ends their War Turn while their units threaten enemy units, even if the enemy Civilization was the instigator, that Civilization gets another War Turn.
• Fortified units do not threaten enemy units.
• Wars continue in an "I go, you go" fashion, with non-involved Civilizations simply standing by, while the warring Civs kill off each other's units or retreat out of range, until the point when all immediate opportunities for combat have been resolved.
• Once War Turns are no longer being triggered, the flow of regular turns resumes from where it left off. Warring and non-warring Civilizations take their normal turns as usual, receiving their yields per turn and managing cities as always.

The benefits of this mechanic are two-fold:
1.) If you are a warmonger, you'll love this system. There are long stretches of turns where you can completely take your mind off of empire management, and just focus on the battlefield. Furthermore, you only have to wait as long as it takes for the AI to directly counter your moves, and non-involved Civs will never bog you down with diplomatic requests while you're trying to focus on your crusade.
2.) If you are a peacemonger, this system shortens the amount of total wait-time in a game. While you can expect longer wait times when AIs have to resolve a war you're not involved in, the fact that AIs manage war and peacetime separately instead of simultaneously means that AI calculations can be made much more efficient. (I would even argue that this extends to human players in a Multi-Player game; people play faster when they only have to focus on one part of the game instead of everything at once.)

Now, I'm sure the set of rules I've made here have holes which can be exploited. By all means, please point them out so I can make this idea as airtight as possible.

 

[Eklabiaan]

Actually a good idea. A clean more or less minimalistic solution.
A few observations.

a) A war might be over in one normal turn.

b) sending in reinforcements is hardly possible during a battle. One can buy new military with gold or faith, but they cannot be produced. Can be annoying but also has some realistic value. March -> *Battle* -> regroup & reinforce -> *battle again* (* indicates these war turns)

b) The war-turns can be seen as turns with a shorter timestep e.g. one month, or one week in the later game. So a lot shorter than the normal turns. So one will have enough war turns before the smaller timestep adds up to a normal timestep. e.g. 25 months > 2 years in an era where the normal timestep is 2 years.
It would be weird (immersion braking) to have no sence of time at all.

c) No or less opportunity to interfere in a war between two other players, as one would see/notice less of their war. It might be over before you can set up some deplomacy.

 

[ThisNameIsTooLo]

Actually a good idea. A clean more or less minimalistic solution.
A few observations.

a) A war might be over in one normal turn.

That is definitely a possibility, if your opponent is a great deal weaker than you. Players pursuing a military victory could very well run into this, having a much more robust military than their rivals.

But for those players that prefer to pursue peaceful victories, it's generally a bad idea to try to resolve a war in the span of a single normal turn. Against a tougher foe, due to the lack of healing you get during the War Turns, you could quickly wear down your troops to a state of defenselessness.

There is one way to prolong a war if you're up against a really formidable opponent, and that's by turtling as much as possible. Fortified units do not threaten enemy units, so if you keep your units fortified, you'll avoid giving your opponent a War Turn, which means you (and your opponent) will get more normal turns to manage your cities.

Though, typing this out, I now realize that this might possibly lead to another problem: encouraging ultra-defensive tactics could actually make wars play out longer than normal, which is the opposite of what I want to happen. Well, I'm still working out the kinks.

b) sending in reinforcements is hardly possible during a battle. One can buy new military with gold or faith, but they cannot be produced. Can be annoying but also has some realistic value. March -> *Battle* -> regroup & reinforce -> *battle again* (* indicates these war turns)

It's definitely true that you can't bring in reinforcements during a battle, only through the war at large. But as stated above, you can fortify all your front-line units to eke out some more normal turns to produce those reinforcements.

What I'd like to encourage is a tactic of fighting until your units are around half health, and then Fortifying to cause a ceasefire and bring about the next normal turn (since Fortified units don't threaten enemy units). If you're fighting an equally-matched opponent or weaker, then they should fortify their units in response, since attacking Fortified units is more costly.

During this "ceasefire", your units can defend and heal in the following normal turns, and you can also produce some reinforcements for your army, before the next wave of skirmishes breaks out.

This, I think, is not too dissimilar from how wars are fought in Civ already: attack for a while, then fortify for a bit to heal.

b) The war-turns can be seen as turns with a shorter timestep e.g. one month, or one week in the later game. So a lot shorter than the normal turns. So one will have enough war turns before the smaller timestep adds up to a normal timestep. e.g. 25 months > 2 years in an era where the normal timestep is 2 years.
It would be weird (immersion braking) to have no sence of time at all.

There probably should be a limit to how many consecutive war turns can occur between normal turns, so that the small timesteps never add up to a normal timestep and make the calendar all weird.

Does 10 seem like a reasonable limit?

c) No or less opportunity to interfere in a war between two other players, as one would see/notice less of their war. It might be over before you can set up some deplomacy.

Yikes. So maybe disabling diplomacy entirely during war turns isn't such a good idea after all. Do you think it'll be enough if the participants in a war can initiate diplomacy with civs outside the conflict, but not the other way around? But then again, they shouldn't be able to ring everyone up every single turn; it can already be annoying enough if an AI civ tends to bother you every turn with lousy deals, but if they could do it multiple times in the span of a normal turn...

Okay, this is definitely a big problem that I can't think of a nice neat fix for off the top of my head. The (M)RPW system will almost certainly fail unless I can find an elegant solution for this.