new military system

[ayu1]

Here is an idea for a completely different military system for Civ based on Sanguo (3 Kingdoms) games I've played.
Instead of building military units as is, we can split up the military into men + equipment. So you recruit/ conscript / draft your population to form military units, and arm them with era appropriate weapons which you have to build. So a swordsman unit of 5000 men would require recruiting 5000 men and also building 5000 swords. Upgrading units would simply mean building new weapons to replace the old ones. so in the modern era you build rifles or machine guns instead of swords of spears. There could also be a unit action called "training" where you train your units in the proficiency of a weapon system. You could always send untrained troops to combat, but they will be less effective. Combat experience, of course, will increase effectiveness beyond regular training.
This system could also allowed the giving / trading of arms to allies. So instead of directly involved in a war between 2 civs you could simply supply/sell arms to one of them. this sytem would not only make combat more realistic, but diplomacy more interesting as well

 

[Camikaze]

Welcome to the forums.

I like this idea, to be honest, but I don't know how well it would go with the trinity of gold, hammers and production. I assume you could take the men out of your population growth and the swords (for example) out of your production, but then what happens when you don't have population growth? Do you have to cull your city's population? And then, wouldn't it be exploitable, with you being able to cull down your population as far as possible without losing population points, without incurring any penalty? What I'm getting at is that this idea would require a large scale revolution of the entire system, and would be quite hard to implement, although it would probably be a better way of doing things, at least for military units.

 

[ayu1]

I didn't expect it to be easy to implement, given it's so different from the current system. What I really don't like about the current system is how population is "quantized" where you only increase after certain # of turns. A realistic way of handling population would be just to have a # representing it and it will increase each turn base on external environment, like availability of food, happiness and health. And function of granary could be that it stores food so in event of a shortage, food in granary would be consumed before starvation (- growth) sets in. Another idea about the draft is that out of your total population, there could be a portion of it labeled "recruitable" population, representing able-body men available to join the army. when you draft military units, your whole population and well as recruitable population drops. You can no longer draft once your recruitable population is depleted.
Further tweak of the military system is how supply is handled. I really hate that in the current system you can station military units on far-way lands indefinitely without regard to resupply. It's totally unrealistic in the real world. Instead of maintainance as a function of # of units only, it should also be a function of distance from own borders. And depending on era, there should be a absolute limit on how far you can send your troops before it becomes impossible to resupply them and they start depleting. Of course, pillaging should help with resupply, but it cannot be done indefinitely.
Just some more thoughts. I know it will be unlikely that they will change it, but one can always hope, right?

 

[Camikaze]

Yeah, I'm quite in favour of actually quantifying things in the game, rather than leaving them to be represented by arbitrary measurements. I assume the only reason this is done is for balancing the features together. Which is more important. Changing all of those arbitrary measurements, whilst being cool, would take a gigantic effort, I would think. And yeah, one can always hope, I just wouldn't hope too high.