Opinion: Healing should cost Production

[isau]

Just thinking out loud here.

IMO: Healing should cost Production.

IMO healing is the single biggest flaw in Civ 5 and 6. In previous civs, most combats resulted in production loss through the deaths of units. In 5 or 6 the units are far hardier, which results in units who live from Turn 1 to end game.

We don't necessarily need for units to die more often, we just need the proxy of units in the stack dying to occur. In other words, healing should not be completely cost free. Or, at least, if Healing is free, it should be very weak and the bulk of the fighting handled by either fresh units or units that are healed via Production (or possibly Gold or Faith). In essence, there should be a cost. Taking another civ's capital should leave you depleted somehow, not sitting there with freshly leveled up units ready to invade the next target after 5 turns of healing.

In saying that, there are some balance risks:

• Ranged units don't take damage when they attack so they should possible be considered on a separate scale from other units, e.g. requiring more Production to heal
• Want to avoid the problem of damaged units sitting around being worthless
• The AI being dumb as a box of rocks

 

[acluewithout]

I wonder if this might be a greater degree of granularity than the game can bear.

I think you might come at this another way (at least in part). Start by reducing healing rates outside of your own territory - either for all units or only for units past a certain tech level. Units would then need to use the medic or supply convoy units more, which would represent ‘supply’ or otherwise pillage more. You might also then reduce the cost of these healing units, but increase the maintenance cost.

 

[cinattra]

I don't think that healing should cost production...but units should have to be supported by gold and production.

In the older games if I remember correctly units were supported by 1 production. That one production was less one production that could be used to produce anything additional in that city that produced it. So mines were a lot more important than they are today.

I have never really looked at healing as damaged. I have looked at it as supplies. So maybe what is needed is a supply units or quartermaster unit from the beginning of the game. How it would work though is that the supply unit could allow healing during taking an action or healing during movement. I think units should still be allowed to heal the normal way also.

 

[killmeplease]

what if military units had to be stationed in camps/cities to heal, and to heal them abroad the player had to pillage improvements or establish a supply line with a trader unit. The trader would move back and forth between a supply base (a city) and a great general unit, with the great general healing all units in a certain radius. A supply line could be cut by plundering the trader.

 

[dunkleosteus]

I've always favoured the idea that healing might cost population/food.

 

[darkace77450]

Production is already a pretty serious bottleneck as is. I wouldn't mind it being tied to food though. In fact, I personally think the maximum size of our military should be directly tied to empire-wide food production.

 

[awesome]

Gold or faith would probably be easier than production.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I like the idea of military units having a small maintenance cost in food, production and gold. That way, spamming too many units would drastically slow down your development and the player would have to choose between maintaining a large standing army or developing their science, culture etc... It would also make protracted wars a bad thing since you would losing out on production and food that could go to growing and developing your cities. I think that is a good choice to have to make in an empire building strategy game. I would also propose letting the player "build" green troops automatically in 1 turn but having more experienced units take longer to "build". This would enable the player to rapidly raise up an army for defense in an emergency at the cost of having poorly trained units. This would represent a draft well. I would also bring back stacks but limit them to a certain number of units unless you have a great general which would increase the cap. This could represent many wars pretty nicely where you could raise a big army quickly, fight a war and then make peace and disband most of your army when they come home, to focus on peaceful building again.