One of my biggest gripes with Civ V, and by extension, BE. Removal of 1UPT should have been a dev priority as soon as vanilla Civ V was released and people who know the series could tell you that it was a horrible idea.
So, how would I remove 1UPT? How about... no units? At least, not in the traditional sense.
Rather, when a city builds a military unit, units are stored in a city much like air units. Unlike air units, there is no limit on how many units a city can store, though units stored cost maintenance. The same applies to Naval units.
In order to form units on the map, cities must deploy armies, rather than individual units. An army may consist of as little as one unit, but has no limit for ground forces.
All units in a stack fight as one, rather than as individual units. This way, there is no longer a game of fighting hundreds of battles between SoDs, and computational processing per unit is minimized. Use of different unit types is encouraged, and has logical effects - for instance, ranged units (archers in Civ, rangers in BE) function primarily as city garrison units and stack defenders, but are not particularly effective at assaulting enemies in offensive combat. However, each unit stack is burdened by their slowest unit - for instance, armies with siege units move slower.
While multiple armies can occupy the same stack, the following conditions apply to combat;
- in defensive combat, all units on a tile fight together.
- units fight in combat with (battle power of combined units) * (combined HP of all units); thus, multiple units stacked together are far more effective in combat than individual units.
Bigger stacks perform better than two individual units attacking or defending seperately; thus, there is a great advantage to having all your army in one piece, but by having everything in one place, that army can only be in one part of the map at any given time. Committing your entire army to a single battle thus is a huge risk.
Ranged combat is limited to siege units (range of one tile until the VERY late game) and air units. However, even ranged units are at risk of counter-attack - moreso against units that can effectively counter the ranged unit type (other artillery and archer units for siege, anti-air weapons and interceptors for air). Even normal unit types will inflict damage to ranged units, however, simply because artillery must expose their position to fire. (Air units are highly resilient against something like spearmen however, but they still take a small amount of damage.) There is no more automatic, consequence-free damage, outside of nukes/rockets and (in BE) orbital units.
Cities still have their own base combat strength, and possess a range 2 attack as they do currently; this attack strength reflects the natural defenses in the city, and functions primarily as a means to stall a city from being taken, and forces players to build enough of a military to post significant threat. No more "conquer the world with 5 units". For BE, the game gives some pretty nice city defense options, but they are generally wasted due to 1UPT and built-in flaws with Civ5.
Finally, another big difference;
Simultaneous turns, except done right.
Rather than each player moving one after the other, each player (including AI) input their orders for movement. If two units stumble upon each other, then they engage in combat; however, units can also be commanded to follow a target army, or stand ready to intercept attacks within their movement range (if movement has not been expended).
With this, a lot of emphasis is placed on ambushing enemies in pitched battles, and no one can claim unfair initiatives, and the game doesn't degenerate into an idiotic clickfest where spamming ranged units is the only way to go. Even proper turns degenerated into a ranged unit spamfest, and the AI doesn't know how to play that game at all.
This is of course a VERY rough overview of a potential solution to 1UPT, and not the only one. I'd really, really like to see players of this game put together a system that is better than what we have now, because I'd prefer to play Civ and not be annoyed by cheese.
So, how would I remove 1UPT? How about... no units? At least, not in the traditional sense.
Rather, when a city builds a military unit, units are stored in a city much like air units. Unlike air units, there is no limit on how many units a city can store, though units stored cost maintenance. The same applies to Naval units.
In order to form units on the map, cities must deploy armies, rather than individual units. An army may consist of as little as one unit, but has no limit for ground forces.
All units in a stack fight as one, rather than as individual units. This way, there is no longer a game of fighting hundreds of battles between SoDs, and computational processing per unit is minimized. Use of different unit types is encouraged, and has logical effects - for instance, ranged units (archers in Civ, rangers in BE) function primarily as city garrison units and stack defenders, but are not particularly effective at assaulting enemies in offensive combat. However, each unit stack is burdened by their slowest unit - for instance, armies with siege units move slower.
While multiple armies can occupy the same stack, the following conditions apply to combat;
- in defensive combat, all units on a tile fight together.
- units fight in combat with (battle power of combined units) * (combined HP of all units); thus, multiple units stacked together are far more effective in combat than individual units.
Bigger stacks perform better than two individual units attacking or defending seperately; thus, there is a great advantage to having all your army in one piece, but by having everything in one place, that army can only be in one part of the map at any given time. Committing your entire army to a single battle thus is a huge risk.
Ranged combat is limited to siege units (range of one tile until the VERY late game) and air units. However, even ranged units are at risk of counter-attack - moreso against units that can effectively counter the ranged unit type (other artillery and archer units for siege, anti-air weapons and interceptors for air). Even normal unit types will inflict damage to ranged units, however, simply because artillery must expose their position to fire. (Air units are highly resilient against something like spearmen however, but they still take a small amount of damage.) There is no more automatic, consequence-free damage, outside of nukes/rockets and (in BE) orbital units.
Cities still have their own base combat strength, and possess a range 2 attack as they do currently; this attack strength reflects the natural defenses in the city, and functions primarily as a means to stall a city from being taken, and forces players to build enough of a military to post significant threat. No more "conquer the world with 5 units". For BE, the game gives some pretty nice city defense options, but they are generally wasted due to 1UPT and built-in flaws with Civ5.
Finally, another big difference;
Simultaneous turns, except done right.
Rather than each player moving one after the other, each player (including AI) input their orders for movement. If two units stumble upon each other, then they engage in combat; however, units can also be commanded to follow a target army, or stand ready to intercept attacks within their movement range (if movement has not been expended).
With this, a lot of emphasis is placed on ambushing enemies in pitched battles, and no one can claim unfair initiatives, and the game doesn't degenerate into an idiotic clickfest where spamming ranged units is the only way to go. Even proper turns degenerated into a ranged unit spamfest, and the AI doesn't know how to play that game at all.
This is of course a VERY rough overview of a potential solution to 1UPT, and not the only one. I'd really, really like to see players of this game put together a system that is better than what we have now, because I'd prefer to play Civ and not be annoyed by cheese.
