No more 1UPT/"Support" units

[stealth_nsk]

Either the attacker would get to choose which unit to target or the most defensible unit would take the damage, with exceptions. ( example melee can target rams ) Rams would have a bonus to taking hits from archers basically requiring melee units to kill them. Anti tank guns would have a bonus to tanks obviously so on attack or defend get a bonus, with armor you probably aren't going to target the anti tank gun but with a ranged unit or bomber you would attempt to destroy it first.

It looks quite complex and it's not that 1UPT. Anyway, we have to wait and see. The actual implementation could depend on a lot of factors.

 

[Ikael]

By merging ideas from Civilization Revolution (multiple units forming an army) and Alpha Centauri (support units) this idea combines the best strenghts of both Civ 4 and 5:

- Unit composition from Civ 4
- Unit positioning from Civ 5

I would have prefered if the number of allowed units per tile would be determined by terrain instead of technology level, but still, good idea nonetheless, and really genious to make war itself more complex as the game progresses.

 

[cazaderonus]

I see a lot of people think support units are some sort of upgrade to base units, where was this mentioned? I don't see it this way. Lets say you have 3 warriors and 3 battering rams outside an enemy city.

Pretty sure i red that support units arent actual units. They never appear on the terrain. How it will work exactly to add a support to an existing unit though i have no idea.

And it makes sense for the scenarios of attacking\defending. Instead of deciding which units fights, i assume it will simply add a battle modifier to the base unit that has the support.

So instead of having :

1 infantry + 1 antitank unit : Having to decide which fight who when attacking\defending. (Civ IV style)
you get 1 infantry (or more if an army or corps) with anti tank support : giving 15% more power against armored units.
Battering ram would give +15 % against cities.
Anti aircraft +15 % against aircraft etc..

If i got this right, it would probably make sense to see a revamp of the promotion system for units as well. Maybe even a link. Maybe promotions may allow for more and more support slot to be added to a unit. perhaps an army will also have more room for support.

 

[ferenginar]

I am cautiously optimistic about the proposed changes to units, SoD was wrong, and 1upt has not worked either. It seems that the new system will offer a third way, corps, armies, and support units, making up a 1upt, but also a mini SoD.

 

[Ryuu Falconwing]

I like the sound of this change. I alwats hated having to maneuver my siege weapons in such a way as to not have them get killed before they can actually attack. Now I can properly defend them.

 

[TrailblazingScot]

I would have been keen on the concept of different terrains allowing a different number of units to stack.

Grasslands and plains should allow more units to deploy than hills, jungles or mountains. For example 5 units could move through open plains, but only 2 could move through hilly terrain and maybe only one unit if it was hilly and wooded.

I feel that would add another layer to the map and warfare. Perhaps different technologies could allow more units to deploy.

 

[Blitzscream]

If workers are removed I want to see combat engineers as support units to build roads, forts, airfields and the like.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

There are Builder units, and I hope they can act as support to the same effect.

 

[Callonia]

lol. in the late game instead of having 9 units to move, the player will have 9 corps to move & the hassle to unite all those units into corps.

maybe I am not clear enough.

You Unite them into corps one time. Civ6. You move all 3, and march into position with 3, you launch 3 separate attacks upon city 3 times. You press standby 3 times.

You move all 9 and march into position with 9, you launch nine separate attacks upon city 9 times. You press standby 9 times.


Is it clear enough now? Work has been reduced.

 

[stealth_nsk]

All this is a matter of balance - maintenance costs, production rate, etc. I expect individual units to be produced faster than in Civ5, but less cities capable in building them and about the same maintenance. Overall, the inidividual units number should be bigger than in Civ5, but with corps/armies/support the amount of units to operate will be significantly less. Just my guess.

 

[dexters]

The corps thing is just the same thing as in Civ 3 with the armies set-up.

I hope it works, and that they allow you to un-combine them.

Not similar. Civ3 armies were super units that were exclusive to human players only because the AI never could figure out how to build a proper one in the vanilla game and PTW and then they got broken in Conquests and Firaxis never fixed it so AI's never builds armies in Conquests unless given an empty army via the scenario editor. I had a mod that generated an army every 50 or 100 turns iirc just so they AI would get some armies. They were game breakingly broken

Corps in Civ6 , by the sounds of it, it only available for like-like units, and borrows a page from CivRev unit combinations.
Combining two units also don't double their power, so it's not always the 'smartest' thing to do.

 

[whb]

I do wonder why they don't do Civ 1/2's trick -- allow you to put more than one on a tile if you like, but only one defends and if it loses the stack is routed. That way you can have your 1upt tactical battles if you like, but don't have to do the annoying piece-shuffle just to get your own piece past your own troops in your own unthreatened lands.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

1 UPT again! That is so depressing.

I bought Civ V not long after its release. I played one game; it was so utterly disappointing with its 1 UPT, not enough room on the map for the units, extremely slow city growth and slow unit build rates. All done to attempt to make 1 UPT manageable on a empire wide scale, a Herculean task, that the developers utterly failed to do. I went back to playing Civilization IV Beyond the Sword, which I am extremely happy with.

1 UPT will never work on the scale of entire empires, no matter how they attempt to spruce it up with support units and corps. It looks like Civilization VI will be a mishmash of unconnected tactical and strategic game subsystems that will never work well together, not much different from the way it works in Civilization V. Even the developers of Civilization V admitted they made a huge mistake with 1 UPT which forced design decisions in most other areas of the game detrimentally.

They would have been much better off to admit that 1 UPT was a total failure in Civ V and design something completely different to replace it in Civ VI rather than apply support and corps bandaids to 1 UPT that was itself clearly inappropriate for a game about all civilizations on the world for all time (all eras).

1 UPT works great for a tactical tank game like Panzer General where the designer of Civ V got the idea to use 1 UPT in Civ V, but there was simply no way to graft its tactical elegance onto the scale of a game like Civilization. It didn't work in Civ V and it won't work in Civ VI either. If you want 1 UPT to work in Civ VI, you are simply asking too much of the game designers; a strategic level game can never be distilled down into tactical elegance without compromising nearly everything else in the game.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I wonder if you can add mounted units as support to infantry to create mounted infantry or to ranged units to create mounted bowman or to cannon to create field artillery.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

1 UPT again! That is so depressing.

Except that it is not 1upt since you can have more than one unit per tile.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Except that it is not 1upt since you can have more than one unit per tile.

Of course, you are right. Civ VI expands on 1 UPT as stated in the Civ VI announcement; relevant section quoted below:

[*]COMBINED ARMS:
Expanding on the “one unit per tile” design, support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry, or a warrior with settlers. Similar units can also be combined to form powerful “Corps” units.

From the phrase, 'Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design', I gather that the actual design will essentially be 1 UPT with some minor additions called support units and corps. We don't really know from the announcement how many units can be in tile and under what limitations, but it will probably be much closer to CiV V's 1 UPT than Civ IV's unlimited stacks.

Civilization is strategic level game; it can never really be tactical, because of the huge scale of the game going through all recorded history plus a bit more. 1 UPT or variations like it (2 UPT?) can really only support a tactical level that really doesn't work well on the scale of civilizations over many centuries of time.

 

[civvver]

well it's kind of ok if it does a couple things.

Like you said, issues with 1upt in civ5 are that too many units and combat bogs down. You can't move units anywhere. It stalls.

So to limit this issue you need to limit units. Which means make their production costs high. Which is too limiting and has balance issues.

Maybe the key then is have 1upt, but by allowing squads to combine or whatever you essentially allow your empire to go ahead with a singular, weaker unit, or wait until it can build a full army. Now you've solved production issue as you can spam singular, weaker units, or a with high production build stronger armies. There doesn't have to be as much of a limit on production this way if you can stack a few into something stronger.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

From the phrase, 'Expanding on the "one unit per tile" design', I gather that the actual design will essentially be 1 UPT with some minor additions called support units and corps. We don't really know from the announcement how many units can be in tile and under what limitations, but it will probably be much closer to CiV V's 1 UPT than Civ IV's unlimited stacks.

Well of course it will be closer to civ5's 1upt than civ4's unlimited stacks. But the fact that you will be able to stack a civilian unit with a military unit, or stack a support unit with another military unit or stack 2-3 military units together, means that the system is by definition not 1upt anymore. So, I think saying that the system is the same as 1upt is unfair.

 

[dexters]

There are no 'stacks'. From the sound of it units Like AA and anti tank can be embedded into modern units so they act more like promotions allowing players to customize their units to defend against specific threats.


The corps and army system allows the creation of stronger units but combining 2 similar units ; Doing so doesn't double the power of the final unit. It only increases by 40% but it will still be a single unit on the map, not a stack of 2 units.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

My understanding of the announcement is that the units will "meld" into a single unit.