One unit per tile?

[bohemian]

but it will take away some of the fun strategic and tactical millitary aspects of the game.
i dont think 1unite1tile will be any major success for this game, what would be more resonable would be to make supply units, or higher support cost pr unit, to scale down the amount of troops put in a stack.
as a millitary stratgist once told me, it takes 7to1 to attack and win against a fortified entrenchment, so that the defender allways have the upper hand might not be so unrealistic at all. there other issues to take accountable here, ...ie. what would the spanish amada look like if it it limited to a 1unite-1tile-fixture, and how would you defend your carriers without filling up 1/3 of the pacific? how would you land paratroopers without being in the way of the landing troops at omaha beach, would it ever be possible to make a normandy landing?
1unite-1tile would be ok, if the maps were gigantic, and the tiles very small, but there are limits to how big the maps can be, especially with regards to "playable" multiplayer - internet hosted games...

 

[Sonereal]

Honestly I think this was the stupidest implication they have ever done to a game. That is so unlogicial... I know Civ is not a military simulator but it just makes more sense to at least keep combat how it is and not to ruin it. Two things...

1.) Tell me your opinion on the matter.
2.) Is there any confirmation of a mod/alternative to this?

1. You're being silly.
2. No. The game isn't out yet and good luck trying to get the AI that was built around the idea of using tactics to using SoDs again. Think about that. They would be so use to having a frontline that the idea of a neutron star smashing through the center would throw the AI into a fritz.

And 3, with your logic, we should skimp complex diplomacy since the game isn't supposed to be a diplomacy simulator.

Seriously, there's so much crying over this. It's not like anyone's forcing you to buy the game. Do you think complaining about it will all of a sudden make them rework the system (including the AI) or make a mod just so you can be happy playing a simple game of:

1. Build SoD
2. Send at enemy city.
3. Take City
4. Repeat steps 2-3 three times
5. Go back to step 1.
6. ???
7. Fun!

Honestly, even in mods that have implemented a similar system using Better AI has the AI performing better and this is for people using 2UPT or 3UPT simply because there's a lack of unit swap so far.

For another poster (Can't find his post right now) that says that Civ5 looks like its railroading us to war: Didn't Civ4 do the same? Sure, there were peaceful options such as the Diplo victory, cultural victory, and space race victory but it wasn't long until players simply.

A.) Nuke the other players before the Diplo Vote was called, often awarding them a massive vote count compared to the other civilizations.

B.) Razing enemy cities that were getting too close to cultural victory.

C.) Using espionage or, worst case scenario, capturing the enemy capital to prevent them from achieving a space race victory.

And finally, EUIII's system doesn't work given that those were provinces, not cities. For all this talk about uber-complex systems of upkeep and whatnot, some players just don't want to accept that there will be a tile limit and that you can't just spam a unit and siege units any longer.

That combat is going to take longer and actual thought as well. Fixing a weak spot of a game isn't the same as making it a military simulator. By the sounds of it, people are making it sound like the game is called Hearts of Iron: Civilization instead of the still rather simple military game it is.

I honestly can't believe that someone is asking for logic and realism in Civilization and then trying to defend the idea of wars being waged through brute force throughout history.

With 1UPT, it's possible for a small civilization to do major damage to a larger army through terrain and bombardment. That's nearly impossible in Civ4 without the use of suicidal siege weapons (which makes absolutely no sense in the first place).

This thread is another case "They changed it so now it sucks"

 

[abilard]

It's been a long time since I've sounded off on the boards, but this discussion of 1UPT intrigues me.

I recall hating the 1UPT rule in previous versions of CIV and was ecstatic when it was removed. However, many are right that with "Stacks of Death (or Doom)" the game degenerates into a series of sieges.

But I can't bear the thought of archers firing across the English Channel.

Isn't there a middle ground? Why not 3, 4 , 5 units per tile? This way you could have local diversification of armies without reaching the SOD point. Even better why not implement the ability to stack 3UPT at the beginning of the game, allow 4UPT when discovering something like "logistics", and allow 5 UPT when discovering some technology like "advanced logistics".

hmmm... maybe there's a mod here once the game's released...

 

[Hypernova]

Oh dear not this again.

As usual people are bringing up scale, and it always baffles me that an issue I have brought up a few times is never thought of: Civ has always had the scale issues of 1UPT because it has always been one improvement per tile. If Civ was "realistic" I should be able to stack a fort, workshop, village and farm all on the same tile since they apparently represent so much land.

I don't know why people are even trying to pin values on the the "size" of a tile. They don't have a value, they are abstract slots and 1UPT finally solves the inconsistency that units were stackable but improvements weren't (how is it realistic that a huge army can only pillage the same amount of infrastructure as a small band of soldiers?).

There is no fixed scale in Civ and never has been. The scale is flexible for the purposes of good gameplay - in the case of 1UPT fun and tactical battles.

Incidentally, for those who really care about realism, 1UPT massively increases that as well in a way unrelated to scale. The vast majority of warfare was not done in cities (with some notable exceptions such as Stalingrad).

In pre-modern times there were pitched battles and skirmishes, in modern times front lines (in warfare between states as opposed to counter-insurgency). SoDs would have you believe most warfare was done in a series of contests between a single group of defenders and a single group of attackers held inside a city. However much their proponents claim SoDs represented the armies of Civ IV, they never played like an army (and including an option to combine units is a crude way to deal with this).

 

[abilard]

First concerning scale: It's not so much an issue of scale as it is a respect of natural geographic features that have shaped the course of human events. Consider Gibraltar, the Straights of Malaca, or the English Chanel. In a game it would be simply ludicrous for long bowman of one civilization to stand on one square of land in their own terrotory and rain down arrows on a unit across one tile of sea in another territory (Oh those poor poor French!). For the most part, the concept of ranged weapons (aircraft and rail guns excepted) seems to be more tactical and shouldn't have a place in a strategic game.
Now about 1UPT: I really am advocating a 1UPT concept in my previous post if you think about it. By upping the limit to 3 - 5 units you allow players to create diversified armies on their tiles which would be more realistic and allow for very interesting strategy. I too would love to take battle back out into the fields where it has historically belonged.

 

[mna27]

i think its great there making it one unit per tile. it's ******** when a stack of ships/(other units) come and you can only attack one of the ships once before it hides behind uninjured ones. you should be able to attack the same unit multiple times.

also its unrealistic for an army when taking over a city to attack from one spot, not to mention a big army could not fit on just one side of a city.

 

[frekk]

Isn't there a middle ground? Why not 3, 4 , 5 units per tile?

1 ... or 3 ... the difference is arbitrary. They could break things down so that you'd have 3 battalions as opposed to 1 division but it would mostly just be six of one, half a dozen of the other. The only difference is that you'd have to increase the unit count.

For the most part, the concept of ranged weapons (aircraft and rail guns excepted) seems to be more tactical and shouldn't have a place in a strategic game.

Agree with you here, unfortunately the game's designer is a rather young fellow on whom these distinctions are lost. He played Panzer General (a decidely tactical game) and decided civ should be like that . . .

I wouldn't mind so much having some ranged fire; modern artillery and battleships in particular. But archers is absurd. Frankly I think they should do away with differentiated infantry types and subsume support elements (archers, artillery, mechanization/motorization etc) into a unit, perhaps as upgrades or attachments.

 

[Hypernova]

Abilard, this particular scenario of firing over a body of water is bandied around all the time by opponents of ranged units, but real world maps on Civ already have equally pressing scale problems. Movements which in real life took days take decades on Civ, it's an abstraction. Besides the fact that the particular problem of firing over water could be easily modded out, if it isn't already disallowed (yeah I know the archers firing over the lake picture, maybe they're only allowed to fire over fresh water lakes, or Firaxis just trolled us all). I think the blindness of opponents of 1UPT to Civ's currently existing idiosyncrasies in the scale department is evidence that this is indeed simply a case of they-changed-it-so-now-it-sucks syndrome as Sonereal said.

As for upping the limit to 3 - 5 units; stacks of whatever limit fundamentally change the combat system. The limited stacks you advocate would act just like somewhat more arbitrary versions of the current SoDs. As I said in my previous post, stacks don't work even remotely like armies, in a tactical or strategic sense. The units don't affect each other at all, and in most real battles both armies attack each other, there is no attacker and defender other than in a diplomatic sense. People seem to forget that along with the abolition of stacks comes other fundamental changes to the combat system, such as non-fatal combat, which is very important to 1UPT, whereas With limited stacks, warfare would continue to play largely as it does now. It would still be impossible to hit an enemy armies weak spot, such as by flanking infantry with cavalry to hit the enemy's archers, because even with stacks limited to 2 units you know those archers would be stacked with spearmen, and the "defending" army can magically use the best unit for the job. Anyway, why aren't you supporting limited stacks of terrain improvements, then you could "allow players to create diversified armiesinfrastructure on their tiles which would be more realistic and allow for very interesting strategy".

As for rejecting tactical warfare altogether, critics ignore the tactical warfare that has always been vital to Civ gameplay. If all tactics were truly eliminated, you would simply compile your force, send it to the area where battle commences and leave the rest to the generals. Terrain bonuses as they work now would be gone, as would specifically ordering a band of spearmen to take down some pillaging cavalry. You could take the strategic decision to have a mixed force of spearmen and swordsmen defending your northern border but that would be the extent of it. Since some tactical elements are here to stay, it's better they be fun and realistic (realistic yes but not in the scale sense).

 

[Deggial]

My two Cents to this theme:

1UPT:
Great! I loved PG and if CivV will be inspired by this game, I happily look forward to it.

Scale:
Civ is a game, is a game, is a game! If game mechanics indicate, that it is smart to leave scale, then I #### on "realism"! A game has to be fun, not "realistic".

Ranged attacks:
I have to admit, that there are some pitfalls here.
First of all, let my suggest an easy solution for the early archers ranged fire: Reduce the "range" to the adjacent tile. The effect will be, that attacked meele-units (let's say, swordsmen) can not fight back and water tiles can not be overshot. More advanced units will have a wider range.
True: if there will be something as "assisting fire" (will it? I don't know), 1-tile-ranges may cause some logical problems.

A bigger issue could be the ranged fire itself, if given to non-siege units at all. If an archer has it, ALL units after gunpowder-thechnologie have to have it! This will totaly change the combatsystem and will eliminate the familiar close combat, as we know it from Civ so far.

But hey - why not? Attacked units will only be able to fight back (say: harm the attacker), if it is in their own range. Might be an interesting tactical concept. But if it will be like this, I have the feeling, that even the range of modern infantery-units should not exeed two tiles. (This assists my 1-tile-archer-idea)
Tanks could range 3 tiles and artillery up to... hm..., 5 or 6 tiles?

 

[Jopo]

I played Panzer General too back in the day and its sister games aswell People´s General etc.

There seems to be TWO problems here, the Stack of Death (Doom) on the stacking side and also problems on the 1upt side, how do you solve the problems and create a game that is acceptable to ALL?

Panzer General had 1upt and I remember it had problems with roads getting clogged, units couldn´t get past each other and reach the front line as all roadlines were completely packed with units, especially artillery and truck mounted infantry were in a bad situation since they were stuck on roads, you had to upgrade your infantry to cross-country capable halftracks or similar vehicles if you wanted to get anywhere.
In Civ 5 units can swap tiles, so that´s a step towards solving that problem, but will it go away with that or will we see armies stuck on roads again?

Another problem comes with space, how are you going to fit a massive invasion army onto England or Japan? The answer is, you DON`T, there simply won´t be enough tiles for your units and theoretically this places a maximum unit count on the game, there can only be as many units in the game as there are tiles on the map. What if you mod the resource production of ALL tiles up dramatically so that everyone will have MASSIVE amounts of resources at their disposal?
Eventually everyone will have massive armies which will fill up the entire map and no one can move anywhere because there are no empty tiles left.

Yet another problem comes with multiple unit movement, in Civ 4 you can select multiple units at a time and move them in a stack, how are you going to do that in Civ 5? There HAS TO BE some sort of way to move multiple units at a time because armies can get very large and it´s laborious to move them one by one even with a small army.

I would propose a solution, an idea I got from a Paradox game, Hearts of Iron.
They have a STACKING PENALTY, all stacked units would incur a -50% or more (-75% or maybe even -100%) penalty to their strength, so you could not fight in stacks, you would have to deploy to a wider battle formation on the field to do battle and while you do that (it would take a couple of turns to move your units to a formation from the stack), the enemy can fortify and prepare or lauch a counter-attack against your stack, it would make the stack of death VULNERABLE, forcing everyone to deploy to a battle formation which is the idea of the 1upt system, to have field battles instead of stacks going at it.

With stacking penalty you would have to protect your marching stacks with flanking guards and scout ahead of the army so your precious stack doesn´t get ambushed while moving.

In essence with STACKING PENALTY you would have the best of BOTH worlds, you would have field battles like in Panzer General and you would have stacking to allow you to place large amounts of forces in small spaces like islands.
City defence will be different in Civ 5, it won´t be done by stacks of units, but by the city itself, which will have hitpoints and organic defence, you can "merge" units with the city giving it more hitpoints, so this would take care of city defence in a stacking penalty scenario. Hopefully cities will have "active defences" so they can hit back with artillery etc. at the sieging units.

I think stacking is NECESSARY for large armies and it would be useful to have it in the game, but the SoD problem needs to be solved and I think a stacking penalty would do just that, giving the benefits of the 1upt system (field battles) WITHOUT removing stacking.

There´s my idea for a solution, do I get any votes?

Cheers!

PS.
"Support Fire" from PG would be a good idea, all artillery units in range would immediately fire to assist a defending unit, making it a priority to neutralize enemy artillery before attacking. Air support could be done in a similar fashion, you could have a fighter hover over an area and fire in assistance of defending units or attacking units.

Manpower and supply from Paradox games make sense aswell, a small nation cannot support an army of millions (except by conscription).

Also, I would like to have multiple improvements on a tile, maybe two plus roads, it´s a question of graphics, what looks good, the graphics have to go together well, in Civ 4 a farm and a village could very well go together without looking bad.

Has anyone heard of Buckypaper? (look it up in wikipedia) A new nanomaterial that promises to be light, thin as paper and 500 times stronger than steel, imagine bullet-proof vests or army clothing made of buckypaper, you´d be impervious to bullets, maybe in the future AK-47´s will be obsolete.

 

[Hypernova]

Jopo, there will be far fewer units in Civ V than in Civ IV with greater emphasis on individual units e.g. combat will mostly be non-fatal, merely inflicting damage on the units involved. This mitigates both the problem of overcrowding and the problem of moving multiple units.

And support fire is already in Civ 5

 

[Jopo]

Great, that´s what I wanted to hear, support fire is IN !

However, I was afraid someone might say that there will be fewer units in the game, because I DON`T WANT FEWER UNITS, I want MASSIVE armies dueling to the death and large empires and...

Anyway, the amount of units can simply be modified by adding more resources to the map and I for one intend to do so, so the problem of multiple unit movement and unit placing persists.
I don´t see any way around it but to re-enable stacking even if it takes a lot of coding (any volunteers for the job of coding such a mod, any talented coders around?) So, stacking would be re-enabled, but with a twist, there would be STACKING PENALTY, making combat in stacks impossible, solving the SoD problem, we would have the BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, field battles like in 1upt and stacking to move things around and place things in small places and NO CLOGGING of roads, it would be great. And of course those that like the old system could still remove the stacking penalty and play like Civ 4.

I think a modular approach would best solve the problems for all, just install a module that suits you and you can play the Civ as you like it, 1upt or stacking.

Cheers!