[GS] New units in Gathering Storm

[AriochIV]

The problem I have with introducing a Rifleman unit is that it turns the Melee class into the relative overloaded mess that the Cavalry class will become in Gathering Storm.

How is it a mess? Melee currently has 5 iterations; with GS light cavalry will have 4 and heavy cavalry 5. Seems to me that some obvious gaps have been filled.

 

[Sostratus]

The problem I have with introducing a Rifleman unit is that it turns the Melee class into the relative mess that Cavalry class will become in Gathering Storm.

At least at the moment there's a Era gap between Musket and Infantry that allows a few Unique Units to shine, namely RedCoats and Garde Imperiale (and maybe Janissaries?)

I wrote this elsewhere but, the fallacy of unit gaps is that they implemented them for two reasons:
1) More UU usage
2) varied army compositions since some units are upgrading each era while others aren't

If the unit gaps were such that every unit didn't have a eg medieval upgrade, then yes, UUs really would have a better lifetime. But, if combat is balanced*, and the point two is a viable thing (you can form an army out of whatever the upgraded units are for any given era), then point one fails.
case one: UU that replaces a standard unit in era X
UU fights well in era X. In era X+1, though, half the unit lines have upgraded such that UU isn't that great of a choice anymore.
case two: UU is a unit that isn't on the tech tree (like a redcoat) in era X
UU fights well in era X. In era X+1, UU's unit line has an upgrade available to all civs. Thus its prominence is limited to one era anyways.

Furthermore UUs which don't have a base unit, like the redcoat, suffer massively because they can't be hard built or upgraded into.
If we had a rifleman unit, this problem would be solved and you would see many more redcoats in the game.

Let's consider what filling a gap does for the UUs that replace the unit before it (like a musket unit if we added a rifleman)
A conquistador is able to fight well in the renaissance. In the industrial, its relative power wanes. However useful it is against other industrial units, it will still be that useful against those units. If the player then has an option to upgrade his Conquistadors into riflemen, he will do that whenever it is advantageous. This makes conquistadors better because building one means you will either use them as is in the next era (say for resource reasons or to leverage their unique ability), or upgrade them into a better unit because that unit is more useful.

Here's a more concrete example of the last point: Legions exist. If we removed musketmen from the game, would it make legions better? No, because they'd sit around for a couple eras and be useless until infantry.

Point 1 is tied to the number of turns a unit can effectively fight contemporary units.
Point 2 is tied to the relative effectiveness of contemporary units.
They aren't actually tied to the same thing. If each era took longer (like if tech pacing was slowed down) and you filled in unit gaps, you could achieve both.

*Of course, combat is not balanced; but it is unbalanced in such a way that heavily exacerbates the lack of unit upgrades for select trees.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Boris G: Didn't the French use also lots of cavalry at that point of the war ?

French, Germans, Austrians, Russians all had 20 - 30 cavalry divisions each. Most of them were supposed to screen flanks of an advance, scout, raid - some even tried charging with cavalry, but no cavalry unit tried that twice, because there usually weren't enough survivors to try it after the first attempt.

In an era when each infantryman had a rifle that could fire 20 aimed shots a minute out to 800 meters, and machine-guns could hit area targets out to 1000 meters, and the artillery (like the French '75' or Russian M1902 76mm) could fire 20 or more shells a minute, a man on a horse was just too big a target to survive on the battlefield...

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

I wrote this elsewhere but, the fallacy of unit gaps is that they implemented them for two reasons:
1) More UU usage
2) varied army compositions since some units are upgrading each era while others aren't

If the unit gaps were such that every unit didn't have a eg medieval upgrade, then yes, UUs really would have a better lifetime. But, if combat is balanced*, and the point two is a viable thing (you can form an army out of whatever the upgraded units are for any given era), then point one fails.
case one: UU that replaces a standard unit in era X
UU fights well in era X. In era X+1, though, half the unit lines have upgraded such that UU isn't that great of a choice anymore.
case two: UU is a unit that isn't on the tech tree (like a redcoat) in era X
UU fights well in era X. In era X+1, UU's unit line has an upgrade available to all civs. Thus its prominence is limited to one era anyways.

Furthermore UUs which don't have a base unit, like the redcoat, suffer massively because they can't be hard built or upgraded into.
If we had a rifleman unit, this problem would be solved and you would see many more redcoats in the game.

Let's consider what filling a gap does for the UUs that replace the unit before it (like a musket unit if we added a rifleman)
A conquistador is able to fight well in the renaissance. In the industrial, its relative power wanes. However useful it is against other industrial units, it will still be that useful against those units. If the player then has an option to upgrade his Conquistadors into riflemen, he will do that whenever it is advantageous. This makes conquistadors better because building one means you will either use them as is in the next era (say for resource reasons or to leverage their unique ability), or upgrade them into a better unit because that unit is more useful.

Here's a more concrete example of the last point: Legions exist. If we removed musketmen from the game, would it make legions better? No, because they'd sit around for a couple eras and be useless until infantry.

Point 1 is tied to the number of turns a unit can effectively fight contemporary units.
Point 2 is tied to the relative effectiveness of contemporary units.
They aren't actually tied to the same thing. If each era took longer (like if tech pacing was slowed down) and you filled in unit gaps, you could achieve both.

*Of course, combat is not balanced; but it is unbalanced in such a way that heavily exacerbates the lack of unit upgrades for select trees.

Sostratus, may I say that I always enjoy your analysis of elements of the game: there's almost always something there that I missed or that I didn't see in the same way.

However, I submit that the main reason for the '1 Era gap' between Unit Upgrades is that they made significant mistakes in designing separate systems in the game that HAVE to work together:
They designed a Tech Tree with about half the Techs of Civ V, and then added Eurekas that speed up Research. Result: turns between getting Techs that allow new units are also reduced. When the Tech Tree can be completed in about half the turns that the game is supposedly designed for (250 out of 500) then Unit Upgrades at 1 per Era would come along, all else being roughly equal, an average of 30 turns apart, which frequently isn't even enough time to build a unit and send it across the map and into battle.
Then, they designed a speedy Improvement system where by using 'Charges' Builders can build Improvements virtually as fast as they can move to the tile, but Units and everything else still have to be built 1 per city turn after turn. When it requires 5 times longer to get a Slinger unit than it does to build a Mine, and the Slinger requires 200 nominal years in the Ancient Era, there's a problem...

Finally, they not only reduce the utility and length of useful life of Units, they also picked the wrong units to depict, which gives me as a military historian a serious headache whenever I look at the game. Most egregious examples:
Spearmen - in use from at least 2000 BCE to 1000 CE, over 3000 years, and was the Primary close-combat unit in most armies for most of that time. In the game it is a 'niche' unit, only used if you are stuck next to Tomyris and Temujin on a flat plains/grassland map.
Musketman. - I know it's a Civ-Staple, but historically, the separate musketman never existed as a unit at all: 1475 CE: first visual depiction of a matchlock arquebus. first shoulder-fired gunpowder 'small arm'. 1493 CE: 'Colunelas' deployed in Spain, combining pikemen, arquebusiers, swordsmen and halberdiers (they later developed into the Tercios).
So, you can have Musketmen for about 4 turns of game time: then they Upgrade into Pike & Shot.
Quadrireme - invented AFTER the Quinquereme, which is why as far as we know it was used by exactly two states: Carthage and Athens, and both abandoned it in less than 50 years for the larger and more capable Quinquereme. So here's another unit you can have for about 3 - 4 turns before it's Obsolete!

I will stop now before I start gnawing on my keyboard...

 

[Sostratus]

They designed a Tech Tree with about half the Techs of Civ V, and then added Eurekas that speed up Research.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of the tech/civic tree, which i quite like in abstract. I do not think they intended players to be broadly as good at getting eurekas as they planned. You can get a eureka for nearly everything with minimal effort - And this cuts the game in half as you note. But redoing all those is hard work; they could simply make techs more expensive globally, and especially add more prereqs to the tree so a player can't beeline too much. I don't want them to break their backs.

Result: turns between getting Techs that allow new units are also reduced.

It's funny that game pacing gets lost in these discussions. There's no fundamental reason we can't have upgrades almost every era and a good unit life time too. Especially in civ6, where the map has literally gotten smaller- since a big drain on unit's window to shine is that you have to physically get them from the barracks to the front, which could take a long long time in civ5. I fought a lot of wars in that game with rifles and gatlings... ah, nostalgia.

But to this thread's recent turn: muskets upgrading to rifles or not, you still have to contend with field cannons and cuirassiers and cavalry. 64 str horsies will put the kibosh on muskets whether we like it or not. the same applies to swordsmen: regardless of if they added "longswords" or not, knights still trample swords, so they won't be the stars of the middle ages either way.

A unit may be in use, but that doesn't mean it's going to be useful.

Sostratus, may I say that I always enjoy your analysis of elements of the game:

 

[rattatatouille]

My biggest pet peeve in Civ, unit-wise anyway, is that musketmen always become available before cannons, when in real life, bombards existed for a century and a half (in Europe, and even longer in the East) before the musket became a commonplace weapon.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

There's nothing wrong with the concept of the tech/civic tree, which i quite like in abstract. I do not think they intended players to be broadly as good at getting eurekas as they planned. You can get a eureka for nearly everything with minimal effort - And this cuts the game in half as you note. But redoing all those is hard work; they could simply make techs more expensive globally, and especially add more prereqs to the tree so a player can't beeline too much. I don't want them to break their backs.

Absolutely agree. Building Tech Trees (or Civics, or any other 'Tree') is a tremendously challenging job. Aside from the 'dead end' Techs, which have been commented on at length, the Tech Tree is not overall bad by itself: the problem is that it was not integrated and/or apparently play tested with the construction times and Eureka acceleration times in the game.

I have suggested elsewhere that one possible solution is to require, instead of a single +40% Eureka which is not always directly related to the boosted Tech, that each Tech have 3 Eurekas, which can be obtained in any order but which would provide only +10% for the first, +15% for the second, and +20% for the third. Get all three and the total boost in research would be 45%, but you would have to work very hard and concentrate more time and effort on that Tech to get all three.

For example, for Archery the Eurekas might be:
Kill a Unit with a Slinger
Be attacked by an Archer or Horse Archer
Have 2 Deer, Ivory or Cattle Resources within a City Radius

The three Eurekas represent, respectively, having a Need for a better ranged unit, Seeing an Example of a better Ranged Unit, and having the resources (bone, sinew, glue) to build a better Ranged Unit.

The research and work required for this is much less than for a revised or new Tech Tree: I have managed to come up with most of the 'extra' Eurekas for the first three Eras, and probably haven't spent more than a couple of hours at it...

Increase the 'basic' Unboosted research time for the Techs by X percentage (would require some play testing to get right) and coupled with a system like that above that requires more concentration to get the complete Boost, and we might have both a Tech progression more in line with the total length of the game in turns and one that requires more decisions and effort on the part of the Player to make the most of it.

But to this thread's recent turn: muskets upgrading to rifles or not, you still have to contend with field cannons and cuirassiers and cavalry. 64 str horsies will put the kibosh on muskets whether we like it or not. the same applies to swordsmen: regardless of if they added "longswords" or not, knights still trample swords, so they won't be the stars of the middle ages either way.

A unit may be in use, but that doesn't mean it's going to be useful.

Here we attack the problem from different 'knowledge bases'. You look at the numerical relationships among unit strengths and pinpoint where they are going to produce units that are ineffective or even achieving the opposite of their intended effect in the game. I look at the historical interactions among the units and see where the game does not achieve those interactions because they have inaccurate relative strengths or the wrong unit being represented entirely.

In this case, the latter: the sequence historically was Knights to Gens D'armes to Cuirassiers provided heavy 'shock' cavalry from about 1100 CE to 1820 CE (Medieval to Industrial Eras). The Gens d'armes were simply Renaissance Knights: heavier plate armor, but indistinguishable from Knights in their basic weapons, tactics, and effects.

The Counter Units to these were:
Pikemen
- Which appeared almost simultaneously in several 'versions' about 200 years after the Knight did, for examples:
1302 CE: Battle of the Spurs - Flemish pikemen massacred knights, hung up 700 pairs of knightly spurs in the cathedral to commemorate the victory (don't ask what happened to the original owners of the spurs - it was not pretty)
1314 CE: Bannockburn. Scots schiltrons, which were really using 'half pikes' rather than pikes, but had the same effect: another army of Knights massacred.
1315 CE: Morgarten, Swiss pikemen chop up a third army of knights, this time by charging so fast the knights literally never knew what hit them.

Conclusion: the relationship between the numerical factors and Combat Results of battles between Pikemen and Knights in the game is grossly inaccurate - not News to anyone who has followed your posts, among many others.

Pike and Shot
- Which appeared in 1493 CE (Renaissance Era) with the first Spanish Colunelas, a mere 20 years after the arquebus/musket (1470-75 CE). 'Musketmen' then, should not even be in the game, since they were never used as separate units.
Pike and Shot dominated land warfare in Europe for the next 200 years. Major Refinements (or, if you will, 'UUs' or 'Promotions') were:
Turkish Janisseries using Volley Fire with muskets, at Mohacs (1526 CE)
Spanish Tercios in 1530 CE, combining 50% pikes with 50% arquebuses.
Muscovite Streltsy raised by Ivan the Mighty (around 1550 CE) with arquebus and 'berdische' axes as sidearms
Battalion of 1/3 pikes to 2/3 muskets introduced by Maurice of Nassau by 1592 CE: the definitive infantry unit in all 'modern' armies to the present day, regardless of the weapons used.
Les Vieux - first regular French infantry units formed in 1597 CE, using the battalion organization. Permanent infantry units, maintained in peacetime with all their flags, uniforms, and traditions.
Squadron of Swedish infantry (1618 CE), with pikes, muskets, and light cannon in battalion-sized units permanently combined into regiments and Brigades, each Brigade of over 2000 men a complete self-contained Combined Arms infantry force.

IF the R&F Pike&Shot unit had been really understood, it would have replaced the Musketman completely as THE Renaissance Era Melee/Anti-Cav unit, because it combined those capabilities in one, and would provide the basis for a number of UUs for Civ's like Holland, Sweden, Spain, Turkey and France.

And, as you pointed out, by trying to maintain a separate Melee Unit without any Anti-Cav properties, they produced both historically inaccurate and Near-Useless Game units.

 

[Cuneiform]

And, as you pointed out, by trying to maintain a separate Melee Unit without any Anti-Cav properties, they produced both historically inaccurate and Near-Useless Game units.

This is the heart of the problem, by rights both the Pikeman and Swordsman units should upgrade into Pike & Shot. But because the game puts them in separate classes, then under the current system its impossible.

Basically Pike & Shot needs to "Own" the Renaissance Era, so one solution might be:

Introduce Medieval Era "Dismounted Knight" melee unit at Stirrups.
Eliminate the Musketman unit and bring forward Pike & Shot to unlock at Gunpowder.
Introduce a "Bayonet Infantry" melee unit in the early Industrial, possibly about 60 strength.

This way we still have an Era gap in the Melee Class, but instead of the Gap being Industrial it's now Renaissance.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

This is the heart of the problem, by rights both the Pikeman and Swordsman units should upgrade into Pike & Shot. But because the game puts them in separate classes, then under the current system its impossible.

Basically Pike & Shot needs to "Own" the Renaissance Era, so one solution might be:

Introduce Medieval Era "Dismounted Knight" melee unit at Stirrups.
Eliminate the Musketman unit and bring forward Pike & Shot to unlock at Gunpowder.
Introduce a "Bayonet Infantry" melee unit in the early Industrial, possibly about 60 strength.

This way we still have an Era gap in the Melee Class, but instead of the Gap being Industrial it's now Renaissance.

The problem with this is that there really wasn't a pure 'melee' unit after the classical swordsman. Even the artificial 'Longswordsman' of Civ's past is not a Medieval Unit: Xenophon describes tribesmen using long swords two handed style and the Indian armies Alexander stomped on the Indus included swordsmen with long, two handed swords (but no body armor or shields, which was their undoing when faced by a charging mass of pikes). Knights did dismount, but it was always a temporary thing, so making that a permanent unit is another artificial answer, which is no answer at all. Between about 1080 CE when the knights started charging with couched lance and maximum impact and shock effect and about 1300 CE when pikes formations returned (some of the early Pike & Shot innovators eagerly perused the new Renaissance translations of Classical military manuals on Alexander's pike phalanx and the modified Legions with spearmen included as 'anti-cav' components for pointers!) infantry largely consisted of ranged (bows, crossbows, longbows) or 'Men at Arms' who were mostly using variations of spears and swords but had better armor. That would make a new Melee Unit, but the factors wouldn't realistically be a whole lot better than the Classical Swordsman, and they still got ridden into the dirt by charing knights.

I've been wrestling with this mentally for months, and have pinned the problem down to this: the Anti-Cav and Melee separation is artificial from the start.
Armies did not adopt the spear and shield in close formation because it was better against mounted troops: neither Greece nor Italy had good cavalry country or produced much cavalry, yet Greek and early Roman armies both were composed almost entirely of spearmen. They adopted spears because they were the perfect weapon for part-time soldiers: you could learn how to use it quickly, and then go home and farm until you were needed to go stick the pointy end in someone. By contrast, a sword required constant practice to be good with it, so swordsmen were almost always troops that were professionals - paid by Someone Else so they could stay proficient, or Warrior Classes whose self-image and reason for existence was their skill with weapons.

So, my tentative answer right now (subject to change as I think about this more!) would be One Class: Melee which comprises:
Warriors at Start
Spearmen at Bronze-Working, which have a 'built in' advantage against Mounted Troops, and relatively low cost and maintenance.
Swordsmen at Iron-Working, which have a 'built in' advantage against Spearmen, Pikemen OR Mounted in forest or rainforest tiles, but are expensive to produce (but not as expensive as Mounted) and very expensive (like, at least three times Spearmen) to maintain.
Pikemen NOT where they are now, which is Earlier (300 cost versus 390) than Knights!. They should come in the 'last tier' of Medieval Techs, because pike units were slaughtering knights at the beginning of the 14th century, at least 100 years before the beginning of the Renaissance. They should have a huge built in advantage over Mounted Units.

And then we get to the Renaissance Era, and Pike & Shot, which still has the Pike advantage over Mounted but also has a huge Melee Factor advantage over swordsmen - a 1 ounce lead ball at 1000 feet per second beats a sword every day of the week, especially when the sword (or lance) cannot get at you because of all the pike points.

Promotions, then, would be divided into Melee, which would include a combination of the current Melee and Anti-Cav 'trees', and Firepower Infantry: all the foot troops armed primarily with gunpowder or chemical-propelled 'distance' weapons. Ideally, that would include an Industrial Era Fusilier or Rifleman unit which, with fixed bayonets now, still has a good Anti-Cav built in bonus but can also massacre just about any previous Melee unit in close combat in any terrain, and after that the current 'melee' units: Infantry, Mechanized Infantry.

The separate Anti-Cav line and Machinegun Ranged units as separate units are a travesty in the late game now: AT units and machine-guns of all kinds, at game scale, are not separate units, they are included in every Infantry unit larger than a Platoon. So Firepower Infantry gets a new Promotion tree of its own with Promotions giving extra Anti-Tank or Heavy Weapons bonuses.

 

[Alexadamz]

have suggested elsewhere that one possible solution is to require, instead of a single +40% Eureka which is not always directly related to the boosted Tech, that each Tech have 3 Eurekas, which can be obtained in any order but which would provide only +10% for the first, +15% for the second, and +20% for the third. Get all three and the total boost in research would be 45%, but you would have to work very hard and concentrate more time and effort on that Tech to get all three.

I like this idea. It would make China's UA more appealing: only 10% more Eureka or Inspiration is negligible. China could get one of those 3 Eurekas or Inspirations for free and just make the other 2.

 

[L4Psha]

For now it's: Hungary - Black army and huszar, Maori - Toa, Canada - Mountie, Inca - Warak'aq, Mali - Mandekalu cavalry, Sweden - Carolean, Ottoman - Barbary corsair and Janissary, Phoenicia - Bireme. It's 10 units. New Global units - GDR, Rock Band, Skirmisher, Courser, Cuirassier. It's 5 units. 15 in total, but it's been said that there will be 18 units. Can they still announce remaining units, or i made a mistake somewhere?

 

[UWHabs]

For now it's: Hungary - Black army and huszar, Maori - Toa, Canada - Mountie, Inca - Warak'aq, Mali - Mandekalu cavalry, Sweden - Carolean, Ottoman - Barbary corsair and Janissary, Phoenicia - Bireme. It's 10 units. New Global units - GDR, Rock Band, Skirmisher, Courser, Cuirassier. It's 5 units. 15 in total, but it's been said that there will be 18 units. Can they still announce remaining units, or i made a mistake somewhere?

The theory is that they counted the units before they decided to combine multiple late units together into the GDR, hence the counts being off. Perhaps the same thing with the district/improvement counts - they possibly originally had the Seastead as a district, but then later changed it to just be a tile improvement.

 

[L4Psha]

It's sad if it's true. But it's only a couple of weeks between the announcement of the game and reveal of a GDR. Were they able to scrap all previous units and make a whole new in that time period?

 

[acluewithout]

SeaStead looks like a district, so maybe it was at some point along the lines of Neighbourhoods. I would have preferred if it was a district, but not for any specific gameplay reasons. Just would have been cool to have a late game district.

 

[WillowBrook]

It's sad if it's true. But it's only a couple of weeks between the announcement of the game and reveal of a GDR. Were they able to scrap all previous units and make a whole new in that time period?

I'm guessing that units in the scenarios are included. For example, there's at least a plague doctor.

 

[UWHabs]

I'm guessing that units in the scenarios are included. For example, there's at least a plague doctor.

That is also possible. Could also potentially explain why the Janissary doesn't seem to have been included in the "new unique units" count (as it has previously appeared in a scenario).

 

[Siptah]

At this point, I believe they just guessed the amount of new things we get in GS for the announcement. I mean, except for the amount of buildings, unique buildings, and unique districts, everything was off.

 

[AriochIV]

The announcement was only a few months ago; I doubt that much changed between then and now in terms of features. I think whoever did the count just missed a few things and included things that shouldn't have been included (like perhaps scenario-specific units).

My guess is that it was a marketing wonk, but you never know.

 

[acluewithout]

I think there was a late decision to hold back some stuff, which we might then see in a third expansion. Indeed, I think the World Congress was likely held back from RnF.

The Sea Stead really bothers me for some reason. This must have originally been a District, right? If so, then why did they change it to be an improvement? I really don’t get why it’s am improvement at all...

 

[AriochIV]

I think there was a late decision to hold back some stuff, which we might then see in a third expansion.

I doubt such a decision would have been made less than two months ago, and I very much doubt that three units constitutes much of a foundation for a third expansion.

I see little evidence and a lot of wishful thinking when it comes to the issue of a third expansion.

I never really got why the Neighborhood was a district instead of an improvement. I guess it was because the yield is variable based on Appeal. The Seastead doesn't have this variability, so there's no need to make it a district.