Not excited...... not one bit

[pepe26]

1upt blows haaaaarrrd.... so much agreement!

 

[Babri]

This is true, however, taking combat off the main map would be a new feature for the Civ series so you could look at as a break from Civilization tradition. I love tactical combat though and wouldn't mind a "battle" map based on the tile. That is the only major benefit I see from having a battle map, much deeper tactical turn based combat than what can be done on the world map.

True. Also 1UPT may be improved by tweaking here & there but there are some inherent limitations such as smaller armies, lack of space for maneuverability, too much micro if moving armies for large distances etc.

The good part about the stack was the ease of use, that you could easily transport units from one place to other. Otherwise it was brain dead mechanism where you just needed to spam units. I am glad Firaxis decided to tried to change the war formula instead of sticking to good old days SODs.

By combining both system we get the tactics of 1UPT (even more so as there could more space for maneuverability) we will have the flexibility of stacks & complexity of 1UPT.
Saying that the whole game should be played on the main map is ignoring the potential of civ. We already have a diplomacy screen, an espionage screen, a cultural screen that are vital to your progress in the game. A separate map for wars would just help you in focusing on war when you want to do it. And there could be an auto resolve system when fighting 1-2 units.

And I disagree with people saying that civ is a strictly economy/diplomacy based empire building game. IMO warfare is one of the most important part of civ series. Even in the beloved cIV, might was right. Actually there were 3 victory types which greatly benefited from wars there. Even the diplomacy victory was more about conquering & expanding the size of your empire to get more votes in UN/Apostolic Palace.

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[blackchimes]

True. Also 1UPT may be improved by tweaking here & there but there are some inherent limitations such as smaller armies, lack of space for maneuverability, too much micro if moving armies for large distances etc.

"Smaller army" is hardly a limitation, it's a design choice; Total Annihilation is not inherently better(or deeper tactically/strategically) than Brood War just because it allows more units on the map. You might personally not like the design choice of fewer but more valuable units, sure, but one is not inherently "better" than the other.

"Lack of space" is the argument that I find most baffling when used against 1UPT. The most widely copy-pasted 1UPT criticism piece starts by comparing size of Great Britain in Panzer General and in Civilization 5. Since the one in Civilization 5 is much smaller, then 1UPT is broken beyond repair on the tactical level.

First of all, yes, GB in Panzer General is much larger, but PG also gives you much more units to use on the map. Instead of just counting how many "hexes" are there in Great Britain in both PG and Civ5, it would be more fair to compare unit/hex density.

Second of all, and this is the part that most baffles me, because the answer is so obvious and yet I've never seen it mentioned by anyone in defense to that argument, is: then just make Civ5 Great Britain bigger. Problem solved. Scale it up 2-3 times, along with the entire map. Is this a problem? The maps in Civilization games have always been very small, especially if you consider that the game supposedly operates at the level of Cities. Standard-sized map of Earth in Civilization 5 is so small that a City with full workable borders is larger than some countries in the real world area-wise!

"Too much micro" - this argument works both ways, you can just as well say that the ability to position and control your units in Civ5, to predict in what order to move them taking into account the terrain limitations and control zones adds another layer of skill/strategy to the game, as opposed to just moving twenty units in a single stack along exactly the same route for all of them. Someone earlier noted that an idea of defending with terrain simply doesn't exist in other Civilization games, meanwhile a city that only has few "open" hexes around it in Civilization 5 can be much harder to take precisely because of 1UPT.


The mistake Shafer made was that he basically took a Civilization game and then put 1UPT on top of it, which caused a lot of problems later on, rather than re-designing the game from the ground up with 1UPT in mind. That does not mean that 1UPT is inherently flawed or inferior, only that it needs to be considered at low level in game design process, which he simply didn't do. To his credit, he fully admitted his mistakes later, and to Ed Beach's credit, Firaxis went a long way to fix some of the ailments with the system in the two expansions. Unfortunately not everything could be fixed because you can't re-write most of the game system in an expansion pack, but to discredit 1UPT because of it would be simply short-sighted.


Let's hope the duo behind Civilization: Beyond Earth will have enough sense to not repeat Shafer's mistakes, though I remain skeptical given their previous track record, or rather lack of it. Why didn't they hire Ed Beach as a lead designer for Beyond Earth is... beyond me. *Puts on sunglasses*

 

[bite]

Let's hope the duo behind Civilization: Beyond Earth will have enough sense to not repeat Shafer's mistakes, though I remain skeptical given their previous track record, or rather lack of it. Why didn't they hire Ed Beach as a lead designer for Beyond Earth is... beyond me. *Puts on sunglasses*

An interesting analysis of 1upt, I would suggest that since afaik Ed Beach still works for Firaxis, then the reason he is not headlining this, I would surmise, is that he is working on something else. (please note: I do not have any special knowledge, this is just supposition)

 

[Nick Carpathia]

Someone earlier noted that an idea of defending with terrain simply doesn't exist in other Civilization games, meanwhile a city that only has few "open" hexes around it in Civilization 5 can be much harder to take precisely because of 1UPT.

I have no idea who said it, but that person is pretty wrong because you can definitely defend with terrain in earlier civs like Civ4. And there were more options in there: pushing culture to push their borders back and forcing them to spend more turns inside your borders. Arranging roads and staging units in zone defences so you can swat down their units if they step inside your territory. Arranging cities so that you have a unified front, instead of having multiple cities that can be forked. And on the offensive end, using your city's culture to push a salient through their land, which can be used to fork multiple of their cities.

 

[Babri]

"Smaller army" is hardly a limitation, it's a design choice; Total Annihilation is not inherently better(or deeper tactically/strategically) than Brood War just because it allows more units on the map. You might personally not like the design choice of fewer but more valuable units, sure, but one is not inherently "better" than the other.

I think the smaller armies has more implications than you are assuming. Smaller armies as you said makes individual units more valuable. The focus of value on a single unit can be very harmful for AI because it is not that great at prioritising to protect them. It also makes it possible to make super OP units that we sometimes get in civ 5. A good example would be a Keshik with blitz & extra range. Because units are few, individual unit fights more battles & you can funnel all the XP into one unit making it uber powerful. When the armies are considerably larger you have to spread out XP, resulting in a more dynamic war experience instead of few Godly units fighting each other other to decide the fate of the planet. The few valuable units concept would go much better with an RPG game, but civ is a strategy game & you shouldn't depend 'too much' on a single unit.

"Lack of space" is the argument that I find most baffling when used against 1UPT. The most widely copy-pasted 1UPT criticism piece starts by comparing size of Great Britain in Panzer General and in Civilization 5. Since the one in Civilization 5 is much smaller, then 1UPT is broken beyond repair on the tactical level.

First of all, yes, GB in Panzer General is much larger, but PG also gives you much more units to use on the map. Instead of just counting how many "hexes" are there in Great Britain in both PG and Civ5, it would be more fair to compare unit/hex density.

Second of all, and this is the part that most baffles me, because the answer is so obvious and yet I've never seen it mentioned by anyone in defense to that argument, is: then just make Civ5 Great Britain bigger. Problem solved. Scale it up 2-3 times, along with the entire map. Is this a problem? The maps in Civilization games have always been very small, especially if you consider that the game supposedly operates at the level of Cities. Standard-sized map of Earth in Civilization 5 is so small that a City with full workable borders is larger than some countries in the real world area-wise!

Perhaps I should elaborate my point about 'lack of space'. My point was not from realism point of view, rather I was trying to focus on the gameplay effects of it.

By lack of space I was trying to say that due to 1UPT rule it can be a nightmare to maneuver your troops in any given area considering that you have a sizeable army. It gives players a lot of headaches to get their siege units in place & have swords on front etc because everything is so tightly packed & most importantly because a city with a garrison can destroy 1 unit in a turn. So you end up doing a very frustrating kind of maneuvering because you don't have enough space to place your units properly. This happens most often in terrain where there is a mixture of forests & hills. For AI this gets even worse. Even now I have seen AI continously shuffling it's units to position them correctly & ending up its whole army being destroyed by a city+garrison + 2 defending units to block the enemy path..

"Too much micro" - this argument works both ways, you can just as well say that the ability to position and control your units in Civ5, to predict in what order to move them taking into account the terrain limitations and control zones adds another layer of skill/strategy to the game, as opposed to just moving twenty units in a single stack along exactly the same route for all of them. Someone earlier noted that an idea of defending with terrain simply doesn't exist in other Civilization games, meanwhile a city that only has few "open" hexes around it in Civilization 5 can be much harder to take precisely because of 1UPT.

Too much micro was referring to micro for moving troops over large distances. Part of it is also due to lack of space in case of densely packed units & few spaces to move. Stacking helps it. But as I said in my post, that the tactical depth of stacks is almost nill. Nevertheless 1UPT isn't perfect & it needs improvements.

The mistake Shafer made was that he basically took a Civilization game and then put 1UPT on top of it, which caused a lot of problems later on, rather than re-designing the game from the ground up with 1UPT in mind. That does not mean that 1UPT is inherently flawed or inferior, only that it needs to be considered at low level in game design process, which he simply didn't do. To his credit, he fully admitted his mistakes later, and to Ed Beach's credit, Firaxis went a long way to fix some of the ailments with the system in the two expansions. Unfortunately not everything could be fixed because you can't re-write most of the game system in an expansion pack, but to discredit 1UPT because of it would be simply short-sighted.

Agreed. The problem isn't in 1UPT, rather it lies in its implementation. If you read my full post, I mentioned to move units in stacks but have battles on a 1UPT map. It may be inconvenient, but I don't see a better way to fit 1UPT with the huge scope of a Civ game. Instead of fitting the whole game to go along with 1UPT, we should mold 1UPT to suit the needs of 4X game with a massive world spanning empire scope with large armies & overseas invasions etc.

Let's hope the duo behind Civilization: Beyond Earth will have enough sense to not repeat Shafer's mistakes, though I remain skeptical given their previous track record, or rather lack of it. Why didn't they hire Ed Beach as a lead designer for Beyond Earth is... beyond me. *Puts on sunglasses*

Realistically I won't get my hopes high in getting 1UPT revolutionarized in Civ BE. I do hope though that they would do other things in the game right. 1UPT would need to be done from scratch in order to be completely fixed. We can't expect that to happen in a stand alone expansion.

And regarding Ed Beach, he might be working on civ 6 & hopefully he would fix the 1UPT problems we had in civ 5.


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[Myth and Legend]

I like 1 upt. It makes tactical combat actually tactical, instead of "Let me watch Yang's lemming 40 impact rovers move for 1 minute"

 

[Fabio1701]

I like 1 upt. It makes tactical combat actually tactical, instead of "Let me watch Yang's lemming 40 impact rovers move for 1 minute"

yeah, I still have nightmares of a hoard of 89 Egyptian workers doing absolutely NOTHING walk across the screen in civ3 for no reason. Went to make dinner and they were still busy when I came back.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I think the smaller armies has more implications than you are assuming. Smaller armies as you said makes individual units more valuable. The focus of value on a single unit can be very harmful for AI because it is not that great at prioritising to protect them.

I'll give you the last point... but the former, why is that a bad thing? If you see units as full armies, it makes sense. You won the war because of the legendary 101st Airborne Division! A carrier group can make or break a conflict if you lose the entirety of it!

Civ5 definitely moved the abstraction to a higher level, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a design decision. It has knock on effects, but these are not inherently bad.

I can certainly see why you'd aim for "more important units" if you see an unit as something on the division level (for the Modern Era onwards).

 

[Commander Bello]

If you see units as full armies, it makes sense.

No, it doesn't.

I am pretty sure that almost never, nowhere an entire army consisted only of archers or swordsmen or whatever.
If you want to raise the abstraction level that high, then you should have only "army units" - in other words, for each era only one army type.

 

[Fabio1701]

No, it doesn't.

I am pretty sure that almost never, nowhere an entire army consisted only of archers or swordsmen or whatever.
If you want to raise the abstraction level that high, then you should have only "army units" - in other words, for each era only one army type.

nor an army of catapults, anti-tank guns or aircraft careers!

really the unit in civ is quite an outdated piece when compared to, say, the army make up of CK2. CK2 is more startegic and civ is more tactical, even though the governing stuff in civ is quite strategic (barring city micromanagement if you do that kinda thing).

I wonder if civ will ever evolve beyond the unit as a chess piece? (because that's as far as the realism goes!)

 

[Babri]

I'll give you the last point... but the former, why is that a bad thing? If you see units as full armies, it makes sense. You won the war because of the legendary 101st Airborne Division! A carrier group can make or break a conflict if you lose the entirety of it!

Civ5 definitely moved the abstraction to a higher level, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a design decision. It has knock on effects, but these are not inherently bad.

I can certainly see why you'd aim for "more important units" if you see an unit as something on the division level (for the Modern Era onwards).

I am not saying to make all army units generic, boring & without any personalisation. My point was that too few units result in uber powerful units which doesn't go well with the philosophy of civ. In your case legendary 101st Airborne Division could have played a vital role in turning the tide of a battle but it doesn't mean that 101st Airborne beats 10:1 ratio odds in a Hollywood fashion. In short the concept of fewer but valuable units can have a side effect on a grand strategy scope of civ franchise. Larger armies on the other hand also have the epic feel that goes well with the strategy game where you are ruling a large empire.

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[Lord Tirian]

If you want to raise the abstraction level that high, then you should have only "army units" - in other words, for each era only one army type.

I'd actually like that! You make an "army unit" and then you can tweak its composition percentages, set an army to "60% swordsmen, 10% catapults, 40% archers and -10% disgruntled mathematicians". Depending on composition, your melee/ranged stats and HP would change as well as upkeep. New technologies would unlock new compositional types.

Not going to happen, though - I doubt it's "civ" enough. There's the general problem, though, that Civ is positioned in a weird spot: a lot of players enjoy the slightly boardgame-esque feel it always had, some enjoy the Paradox Grand Strategy-like simulation aspect. Civ always sat in the middle, being pulled towards either end (Civ4 was more grand strategy, Civ5 was more boardgame). Either direction of pull will upset the other party.

 

[Commander Bello]

I'd actually like that! You make an "army unit" and then you can tweak its composition percentages, set an army to "60% swordsmen, 10% catapults, 40% archers and -10% disgruntled mathematicians".

Which would bring you quite close to the old, oh so outdated stack system of the infamous Civ4.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Which would bring you quite close to the old, oh so outdated stack system of the infamous Civ4.

Well, the good bits of it (army customisation, flexibility) but not the bad bits (potentially infinite HP, rampant offensive power growth, tediousness, pathing calculation turn times). It would probably need a bit of tweaking to discourage 33/33/33 mixes, but that's details.

I like the ease of use, the importance of terrain and the smaller number of units in the game that 1UPT brings. I find the lack of Civilian stacking silly and find some situations a bit too simplistic. It's just that 1UPT feels better to me than the SoD overall, but it doesn't mean one is perfect and one is irredeemably bad.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Well, the good bits of it (army customisation, flexibility) but not the bad bits (potentially infinite HP, rampant offensive power growth, tediousness, pathing calculation turn times). It would probably need a bit of tweaking to discourage 33/33/33 mixes, but that's details.

I like the ease of use, the importance of terrain and the smaller number of units in the game that 1UPT brings. I find the lack of Civilian stacking silly and find some situations a bit too simplistic. It's just that 1UPT feels better to me than the SoD overall, but it doesn't mean one is perfect and one is irredeemably bad.

I just think the "units" are an abstract representation of a mixed "army" that you speak of. An aircraft carrier is a "Carrier Group," containing the usual escort and support ships that come with one. An infantry unit probably has some accompanying tanks and arty, etc.

Though to be honest even if that weren't the case it still would not bother me. It takes my warrior unit approximately 1000 years to walk from Boston to DC in the early game. There are many more issues with the (necessary) scaling of civ than the distribution of unit types within an army.

Frankly I think that that the main reason people who dislike this aspect of 1upt while not having an issue with the other inconsistencies is that the others have always been that way.

 

[OneFootInThe...]

Not excited either, for the same reason... and meh - if you played civ a lot, this looks more like civ Rev in space than even Civ V...

It will still sell though, as long as it is not totally broken. (aka Moo III which managed to kill that franchise)

 

[OneFootInThe...]

Not going to happen, though - I doubt it's "civ" enough. There's the general problem, though, that Civ is positioned in a weird spot: a lot of players enjoy the slightly boardgame-esque feel it always had, some enjoy the Paradox Grand Strategy-like simulation aspect. Civ always sat in the middle, being pulled towards either end (Civ4 was more grand strategy, Civ5 was more boardgame). Either direction of pull will upset the other party.

Inviting and accessible game design does not need to be limited in depth by default. Civ as a franchise has a great opportunity to be both easy to start and deep to explore.

Civ IV, expansions and mods are by far the best in that respect, Civ V is just more limited, ie a lot less depth due to often discussed reasons... in direction of Civ Rev which is even more shallow. BE civ looks more like Civ Rev, or somewhere between it and Civ V at least directionally at this point.

Not really interesting, or in principle, my expectation is - quickly boring - a sale buy at 90% discount in few years.

At least it reads that way from initial previews for me.

Likely few rounds "and done", to see the setting, the new graphics, completing a few times will likely give you all the strategic and tactical "secrets" that you need to roll it over whenever you want, and that's that.

 

[Wodan]

I love the fact that people are so quick to judge. For me, I'm going to wait on more info such as actual game reviews and feature descriptions/lists, than jumping to conclusions based on pre-pre-pre-release marketing statements and a casual interview or two with Firaxians at a con.

I mean, really, fellas? This says more about you than the upcoming game.

 

[pepe26]

Most people were judging 1UPT, as I was. And that's a valid thing to do, unless the war game is much different from last Civ5's. I hated warfare in Civ5 to the point of deinstallation.