On why civ5's combat system is nothing more than a good idea...

[Jediron]

RoxlimnWe are talking about 1UPT here. So far the best reason you've put forth is that the graphics didn't appeal to you.

Sir, your are ingnorent and have a hard time READING, thats what i think.

The OP is right. 1upt on a CIV map scale with a relative small amount of hexes is bad. The opposite; many units on these maps are BAD too. I cannot see the charm in a contentinet; carpeted with armored forces! City-states, that embark there armor, so that mine can pass their land; i've seen this! Don't you think that's horrible ?

In other civ's, it could get busy AT THE FRONT; where you expect it to be busy. With CIV 5, sooner or later the whole WORLD is filled with units, as far as your eyes can see. You think that's pretty ?

Reasons:
1) Scale of theatre
2) No more epic battles in the older ages.
3) No Armies
4) Tactical a joke
5) No frontline

And last and also least, which you brought up YOURSELF to begin with: it's a mess, seeing a Carpet of Doom in action.

 

[MkLh]

The problems with Civ5 are:

- they tried to implement 1UPT - a system that inherently needs ALOT of tiles to make it work - at the same time as they tried to make the game SMALLER with fewer cities and slower cultural border growth.

This leads to many units crammed into a small front where the disadvantages of 1UPT - ie the traffic jamming are magnified and the AI is less able to cope.

20 units advancing on a 10 hex front is alot different gameplay wise than those same 20 units advancing on a 40 hex front.

It is indeed, and a smaller map helps the underdog. With only a few hexes, the stronger one has no space to throw all his units at battle at once. I prefer the smaller map for that reason. In maps with a lot of hexes, 1UPT comes closer to SoDs, since the space is no longer an issue.

 

[JudgeDeath]

Yes, it is much better when it takes TIME. Rome wasn't build in one day, you know!

Hah, if there was ever a non sequitur, that's it. The outcome of a SoD battle was known before you start. You just have to wade through interminible battles for it to finish. Explain why that is better than individually managing your units to get the best possible result, taking the time to check your options after each fight?

More thinking time, but less waiting time seems like a win-win to me.

There are issues with Civ V combat, but this silly complaint is not one of them.

 

[Jediron]

MkLH, you show exactly what is going one here. Some people translate all the "habits" to their advantage. Some people don't want to control huge armies. There are many reason to like or dislike a system, wheter it be SOD or 1 UPT.

Me, and i think alot of us; liked the old system; warmongering with many, many spears, horses and archers. They took that away, fighting on that scale isn't possible anymore. A system, that went from 1,2,3 and four. Now it's gone. Some love, some hate it.

I think much of the hate, comes from the fact; that Fireaxis never handled the SOD system very efficiently. There were always drawback, and much repetive action to get things done. Problems, which could easely be fixed; Look how TW:series handle alot of units. Much better and easier to use.

Hah, if there was ever a non sequitur, that's it. The outcome of a SoD battle was known before you start. You just have to wade through interminible battles for it to finish. Explain why that is better than individually managing your units to get the best possible result, taking the time to check your options after each fight?

Not always. Only if you could assemble enough forces for a "sure"win. Which wasn't always the case. Or you suffered quite some losses, taking a City; where they were picked up in the enemies counterattack; from other hexes.

More thinking time ? Yeah right, i see people just following the "popups". If a city state want anothers ass whipped, they bravely go do that.
I've seen it happen.

Anyway, i am not totally AGAINST a 1 upt system. You know, there is a reason i played PAnzer General, Steel Panters and such alot!
I spell it out again for you, and rimnlock : it's the SCALE of things that bothers me.

It feels more like "Axis&Allies" or "Risk" now, instead of Panzer General/Steel Panters.

 

[pazmacats]

Indeed, but that "solution" destroys the design, and the game. It's that what you see at higher levels with the production bonuses for the AI, and the game becomes unplayable. So no, the obvious solution (lower costs) is not a solution. In fact, I thought and thought these two weeks about how to make it work and I could not find an answer. Thus, my hopelessness... and believe me, I love Civ since forever (1991), I love anything related, I WANT to love civ5, but mine is not a blind love... it is profoundly broken...

you need a deployment pool to fix this. Units are prebuild (at a higher rate) and get deployed as needed. This way you (or more: the AI) can replenish losses and there won't be thousands of units jamming around.

One more thing about the current design: It is ALL about tactics. 0% about economy. That means that you can basically build 6 units and ignore economy and infrastructure afterwards. The civilization as a whole is not fighting. The cities do not matter. Production is too slow, so all that matters is gold (saved during the last 100+ turns or traded for) and tech (=how well were you doing before)

The war part feels like a seperate minigame to me. And not one of the fun part. I played panzer general a lot. And in Panzer General it was not enough to just park your units on a hill and annihilate hordes of zergs swarming your way.

 

[JLoZeppeli]

It feels more like "Axis&Allies" or "Risk" now, instead of Panzer General/Steel Panters.

Ehi bro, that's wrong! Axis and Risk use stak of units per territory (or tile if we compare)... Dude don't forget in Axis the plates under the soldiers! Grey and red ones...

PG has a battallion scenario scale with more movement points and a wider and more coerent map, so the difference is clear...

 

[Jediron]

So, i am right. The SCALE of "Axis&allies" is just as ridiculous as it is with CIV 5 ; aldo it ain't upt 1....

 

[MeowTau]

How is this situation any different than Civ IV. If you were playing on emperor and lost your stack of doom, that was pretty much guaranteed gameover. And standard procedure as well was to place your stack of doom in a town the AI was attacking, hope it survives, heal, and then walk over all their towns. Nothing has really changed.

In an even match, neither side should have enough units left to conquer much territory after initial victory. The situation is actually improved because town defenses now prevent a lone warrior from capturing a city, and will typically destroy an attack of less than 3 units. A lone catapult purchased and placed in a city can hold off a serious number of troops. It has always been the case with Civ that if one side gets much of their army wiped out without inflicting equivalent damage, there is little realistic way they can catch back up.

That is a feature of the Civ series, not a problem with 1upt or Civ V. If you throw away all your troops you will lose. If your troops are dieing while the opponents troops are not, then you should lose. If this is consistently happening, you are either playing human opponents far more skilled than you or playing on too tough a difficulty setting.

 

[boredatwork]

I suppose a solution could have been to make Civ5 maps a lot bigger. But that is simply impractical. Maps would have to be WAY bigger than presently.

So other than making the map impractically big, there is no way to make 1UPT work, at least none I can possibly think of.

I'm sorry but upon what are you basing your contention that a map of sufficient size to have 1 UPT work would be "impractical", other than your personal dislike of 1UPT in a Civ game?

They don't necessarilly need to be *much* larger than they are now - For one thing the current mechanics make poor use of the space available. ie culture grows so slow and population never maxes out that there is loads of empty space scatter around the map which would be more profitably spent on empires. Likewise all the pointless city states that spam annoying messages would be better off making the empires bigger.

It is indeed, and a smaller map helps the underdog. With only a few hexes, the stronger one has no space to throw all his units at battle at once. I prefer the smaller map for that reason. In maps with a lot of hexes, 1UPT comes closer to SoDs, since the space is no longer an issue.

A larger map size doesn't preclude the possibility of choke points, or of a smaller force using terrain as an advantage against a stronger opponent. It does however give the smaller force space to fall back so it can actually make use of the advantages of fighting on home soil. Right now it's usually possible for an opponent to bombard ones cities from within his own territory. If you make cities stronger so they can survive a prolonged siege the weaker side has time to concentrate it's limited forces and wittle away the opposing force before it succeeds.

Unfortunately currently there is no viable defense other than "upfront" which negates much of the advantage 1UPT was supposed to bring.

Winning as an underdog because you outmaneuvered a much more numerous but weak AI is fun. Winning as an underdog because you clogged up the only available attack path with archers and let the AI lemming itself against you is not.

 

[Terrance888]

Reduce production when you go to total war in exchange for no money or culture profit. '

Not talking about the social policy, I'm talking about a button or something that you press to initiate total war. You sacrafice growth in $, Culture, population and research in exchange for more military production.

Heres a solution.
Units cost even more in peace.
Units cost less in war.
Total War: No production in anything else, all hammer for units get boasted.

 

[Guardian_PL]

How is this situation any different than Civ IV. If you were playing on emperor and lost your stack of doom, that was pretty much guaranteed gameover. And standard procedure as well was to place your stack of doom in a town the AI was attacking, hope it survives, heal, and then walk over all their towns. Nothing has really changed.(...)

... No, not really. If you had a big enough empire (like 12+ cities) then yes, you'd surely lose 3, even 4 of them and then reload/ragequit but in the meantime by excessive whipping (and you always have population for that, with Kremlin it's actually powerful) you could assemble another SoD, often with more advanced units. You could trade your precious techs to other AI to declare on the AI that attacked you.

Obviously, if you have 6-8 cities and it is Monty or Shaka (wow, AI leaders had personality!) with their 80+ stacks then yes, you're screwed. Happens sometimes, but normally you can take steps to minimize such danger before - getting them to Friendly, squashing those monsters while they're still underdeveloped, or simply have 1/3 of that stack in advanced units because y'see, on the contrary to broken Civ5 mechanics having huge army and warring constantly puts you way behind in techs - Shaka could sometimes do ok thanks to Ikhandas but Monty's staple was running with Jaguars while others had Rifles.

EDIT: Forgot about the drafting - drafting/whipping/cashrush could help you assemble a large force in no time...

 

[Aristos]

The war part feels like a seperate minigame to me. And not one of the fun part. I played panzer general a lot. And in Panzer General it was not enough to just park your units on a hill and annihilate hordes of zergs swarming your way.

quite the opposite, if anything, war feels too dominant now, and even worse: too definitive. I am a wargamer, and a empire gamer, and I like them SEPARATED. War has its place in history and research (by the way, not reflected in civ5 anymore), but in civ it should be (as it was before) one more part of the flow of the game, and strategies. In civ5, it is too dominant for the game to claim the name Civilization. Sad, but the facts so far point to this being true.

 

[Aristos]

I wonder if after two months of playing this debate has still the same points of view...

 

[duddyz_dad]

My suggestion is to maintain the hex system but do away with 1UPT. On the main map, the two opposing sides would engage in battle with their stacked units. Once battle is engaged, then the game 'zooms' into the battlefield where the stacked units are then spread out based on their ranges. Infantry would be in front followed by ranged attacks and catapults. Horsement would be at the far flanks. Battle would be turns-based where each player decides which unit to engage first. What I'm not sure of is how many turns would occur before one player has the option to order a retreat. This may also be more difficult to apply in modern warfare where artillary and helicopters have much greater ranges. But I could never understand why the battlefield scale has to be the same as the city scale.

 

[}{ELL/\/()]

id like to see cheaper production costs for most units but have population costs, or some kind of draft ability would allow for armies to be raised a lot quicker but still be limited and have a lasting detrimental affect. Your army just got whipped so you sacrifice 2 population in each city for new units. Youd need some kind of balance to prevent this mechanic from being exploited but it wouldnt be too bad.

The alternative would be to change combat. Give units higher movement points and a lot more hit points making "decisive victories" much harder to obtain (say 5 attacks from equal units in the open vs 2). IT would allow for both human and AI players to actually retreat in most scenarios and fight another day.

 

[}{ELL/\/()]

... No, not really. If you had a big enough empire (like 12+ cities) then yes, you'd surely lose 3, even 4 of them and then reload/ragequit but in the meantime by excessive whipping (and you always have population for that, with Kremlin it's actually powerful) you could assemble another SoD, often with more advanced units. You could trade your precious techs to other AI to declare on the AI that attacked you.

Obviously, if you have 6-8 cities and it is Monty or Shaka (wow, AI leaders had personality!) with their 80+ stacks then yes, you're screwed. Happens sometimes, but normally you can take steps to minimize such danger before - getting them to Friendly, squashing those monsters while they're still underdeveloped, or simply have 1/3 of that stack in advanced units because y'see, on the contrary to broken Civ5 mechanics having huge army and warring constantly puts you way behind in techs - Shaka could sometimes do ok thanks to Ikhandas but Monty's staple was running with Jaguars while others had Rifles.

EDIT: Forgot about the drafting - drafting/whipping/cashrush could help you assemble a large force in no time...

You could usually fight SoD's with the right unit compositions and promotions and focusing on collateral damage rather than matching numbers. I never found the AI to match unit diversity to the point he would have favorable matchups or as much collateral damage potential as I did. My bigger gripes in civ 4 were the way the AI would sprawl in ******** places and declare war on you while taking 30 turns to send their army to you.

 

[Aristos]

id like to see cheaper production costs for most units but have population costs, or some kind of draft ability would allow for armies to be raised a lot quicker but still be limited and have a lasting detrimental affect. Your army just got whipped so you sacrifice 2 population in each city for new units. Youd need some kind of balance to prevent this mechanic from being exploited but it wouldnt be too bad.

The alternative would be to change combat. Give units higher movement points and a lot more hit points making "decisive victories" much harder to obtain (say 5 attacks from equal units in the open vs 2). IT would allow for both human and AI players to actually retreat in most scenarios and fight another day.

That is interesting. In fact, it addresses a factor that is not present in civ5, or it is weakly there: in wars, enemies trade off territory for time for the most part of it. It's not that the destruction of an army is immediate, and even then, if it happens, it does not mean the immediate destruction of the civilization. As it is in civ5, that is what happens if you (or the AI) loose the army in the first battles.

A system that does not destroy the units but severely weakens them, therefore making you loose territory while you "heal" the units (healing should also cost experience points to simulate new recruits), would simulate said trade-off quite nicely.

That is a good idea. Maybe we should propose it to the devs.

 

[}{ELL/\/()]

ya destruction of units was fine in earlier civs because they were so easy to come by and there was always the assumption that more were in the pipeline. But when it takes as long to build a unit as a wonder in some cases they are really each armies in their own right and need much more durability, especially when the AI has a very poor understanding of the current battle mechanics.

Crossbows, front and center.

CHARGE!!!!

 

[gilmore606]

just because you (or anyone else) can win at Deity doesn't mean that you know enough about the combat system to judge it well.

This may be true, but if so, what does that say about Civ V?

 

[Terrance888]

I feel a new term has been coined.

I reveal the Blanket of Doom!