Opinions on 1upt

Opinion on 1upt?

  • 1upt is good for gameplay, good for realism.

    Votes: 196 66.2%
  • 1upt is good for gameplay, bad for realism.

    Votes: 45 15.2%
  • 1upt is bad for gameplay, good for realism.

    Votes: 4 1.4%
  • 1upt is bad for gameplay, bad for realism.

    Votes: 9 3.0%
  • Limited stacking would be better for gameplay and realism.

    Votes: 36 12.2%
  • Limited staking would be worse for gameplay but better for realism.

    Votes: 6 2.0%

  • Total voters
    296
A battle map is the way to go for Total War. Nothing would be a bigger departure for the Civ series than having tactical battles. And it wouldn't work in multiplayer at all.

I actually like SalmonSoil's abstraction, that's great imagination and I think Civ players should exercise that more :D
 
Please tell me how this is "Zoomed-in"

Note: Circles represent Melee, Triangles represent Archers, and Stars represent Siege. (see attached)

The units are stretched completely across England! And this scale, I am certain, would be much larger than any in game world map.

NOTE: The cities (for reference purposes) from top to bottom are York, Nottingham, London. :D
 

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I voted good for realism and bad for gameplay.

The reason I did so is that when I meet my- human counterparts- I think the feature will make the battles more realistic but when Im playing against the ai I will crush it and- to be fair- totally abuse it's incompetence and ruin my game by doing so.

Hope Im wrong but that is my opinion atm.

Of course it is silly that entire armies spread as far as they apparently will but when they meet the battles seem fairly realistic from what Ive seen.
 
Thanks for the laugh! If that was the case, archery would not have given way to gunpowder as an infantry weapon starting in the 1400s. I suggest you do some serious research on the subject of what actually happened on the battlefield (not some romanticized ideas). For example, the Janissaries who had started out as top notch archers adopted firearms as early as the mid 1400s (as did the very effective Hungarian Black Army). Gee, I wonder why they did that?? Those troops owned their archery armed opponents and were feared by them and set the example for what was to come.

Gunpowder took over from archery as an infantry weapon for very good reasons. If it hadn't been substantially more effective, the problems such as slow rate of fire, and the complex industrial and resource extraction support needed for gunpowder would have seen it on the sidelines until after rifling. It wasn't easy to adopt infantry firearms and it cost a fortune but people did it knowing it would give them an edge.

But beyond all that, this system has archers outranging rifled weapons. Give me a break!
You laugh and babble about historic anecdotes all you want, it won't change the facts and its compelling conclusions you seem to be unable to grasp.
Facts like this
During the Napoleonic Age gunpowder based infantry did shoot 20-40 meter in range
Which refers to the 18th/19th century in case you are not ware of it.
While at the same time for the 12th century the following applied
The range of the medieval weapon is unknown, with estimates from 165 to 228 m (180 to 249 yds).(note by myself: all capable of going right through average thick amour)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow

So we got 20-40 meters max in on the verge of the 19th century versus 200 meters in the 12 century.

Additionally we got several arrows (10-12 arrows per minute are claimed) while we got about two bullets per minute form the rifle during the Napoleonic age (I can't be bothered to search for an English source just because you feel like playing smart ass, but here is a German one).

I trust you to be able to do the math.

And yes, nevertheless the firearm quickly dominated the battlefield, while the arrow quickly was rendered obsolete despite the arrows massive strategic advantage.

For the following reason
Considerable practice was required to produce the swift and effective combat shooting required. Skeletons of longbow archers are recognizably deformed, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Use

In short: To master archery was a task of a life time, so not only very expensive (I dare to assume that the infrastructure to obtain gun powder is a cheap bug comparing to training your soldiers for a life time) but also incredibly time demanding and thus inflexible.
Firearms on the other hand were a craft mastered within a few months.

So next time save me you arrogant jabber and try to actually contribute something.
 
Thorburne said:
Well, in order for the map 1UPT to work in a more reasonable level, the map would have to be so huge that even the most top-of-the-line computer 5 years from now wouldn't be able to run it. And as I have said, I am already suspending so much belief to enjoy CIV. The more you stack on to that, the less enjoyable it is. There is a limit!

As you yourself recognise the fact it would take immense computer power to generate the true size of theese maps, adding to that the large amount of activity on it. It really forces the devs to drop it down alot, sometimes we have to take things that ruin immersion to be able to play at all.

It honestly doesn't take much suspension of belief to enjoy a game like civ, if you are incapable to get past things like this then maybe games in general aren't for you? :confused:

Thorburne said:
Unit Micromanagement is not referring to the standard micromanagement that comes with strategy games, but with the fact that you have to move each and every unit one-by-one. As far as I know, there is no function that would allow you to select a group of units, then select a point on the map and they all maticulously march to that spot and form up around it. If there was, I am certain it would have been mentioned and discussed to death.

That said, just wait until the first time when you move your army of, say, 6 or 7 units toward an unprotected enemy city and have to take several turns manipulating them through a checkpoint allowing the enemy to pull units from the other side of their empire and form them up to defend. It WILL happen and people WILL get frustrated... even the 1UPT apologists!

I sure hope they add such options, but even without that you could select a move point that goes far and you won't have to give orders every turn for that unit.

6 or 7 units is nothing to me, and im most likely not alone to be used to far greater numbers in other games.

Ye sure navigating a crevice would slow you down enough for an opponent to mobilize defences, and most likely affect your attempt to take that town yes. Will it frustrate me? not likely, I knew about that crevice or I wouldn't know about that town.

You need to plan for that, that's part of strategy. And lets not forget it works both ways, if they want to attack you that same crevice is going to help alot. That's how it should be, an army should be hindered by rough or inaccessiable terrain.

I understand that it's a issue for some people, but I don't think the devs will be catering to thoose at this point.

I'm sorry for thoose that are angered or frustrated with the solution the Devs made for this game, if it was up to me I'd have added the option to use stacks of some sort if one wants to. I always like options to customise gameplay to fit as many people as possible, but as it is now you will have to hope for mods to solve the issues you have or others have.

Earthling said:
No, see, this doesn't answer that question at all - it's not really a fair statement. There's a lot of reason to say that 1upt is going to specifically make AI play worse than it would otherwise.

It's like that in most other games that have ever had such systems and is a limitation of AI, such as understanding pathing or "kiting," overextending lines, optimal formations and many other things already discussed around here.

People with lots of experience as game programmers have stated so, people with lots of experience just playing games often have seen it, and I too would agree unless someone has strong evidence otherwise for civ5.

So you saying that a AI can't possibly manage to play OUPT comptetently because it couldn't handle the requirement of formation and the koncept of kiting, yet such functions are entierely possible to program. AI doesn't understand things true, it merely carries out what it's programmed.

You can program it to recognise there is a melee unit within reach for it's archers and if they are within a certain distance the archers should be moved back before attacking. Then they can add lines to thoose that add or remove them depending on difficulty.

Formation itself is harder but again it's possible, program some preset formations and set the AI to put it's units in their patterns. Any AI can put X unit on Y spot, unless they left it out from the programming. Yes this is oversimplified but the point should still be clear, the limitation of AI is that it cannot do anything beyond it's programming. Even the smallest mistake can cause it to act irrationally, and finding all thoose minor mistakes is difficult.

So I don't see how OUPT would cause the AI to fail any more than before, each stack from CIV4 is basically a unit now. It can simply check the relative powers between each unit and then decide who to attack with what, the same thing that calculates success rates for you is what the AI uses to decide what or how to attack.

Yes there will be some things that the AI won't be programmed to handle, but the same thing happened in CIV 4. I recall there being an issue mentioned where the AI would basically self destruct when it couldn't reach the player during it's "war setting" stages.

Where are thoose people you mention anyway? where are thoose statements?
 
Please tell me how this is "Zoomed-in"

Note: Circles represent Melee, Triangles represent Archers, and Stars represent Siege. (see attached)

The units are stretched completely across England! And this scale, I am certain, would be much larger than any in game world map.

I would place the battle somewhere between London and whatever city that is. Although it may be more accurate to place the battle outside to the black city, as the black city is more likely to be able to bombard the green soldiers.
We can also tell from this map that the war between London and the Black city took place in a large band between the cities expanding westward.
Of course this is my interpretation, it would be nice if the developers would offer their own interpretation.
 
As you yourself recognise the fact it would take immense computer power to generate the true size of theese maps, adding to that the large amount of activity on it. It really forces the devs to drop it down alot, sometimes we have to take things that ruin immersion to be able to play at all.

It honestly doesn't take much suspension of belief to enjoy a game like civ, if you are incapable to get past things like this then maybe games in general aren't for you? :confused:

There are many elements in CIV that you have to suspend belief already. There is a certain point, however, when the suspension of beleif becomes too much. As I said, their are limits. I am pretty certain that it was this thread that I spelled it all out. To say that I shouldn't play games... :dubious:

I sure hope they add such options, but even without that you could select a move point that goes far and you won't have to give orders every turn for that unit.

Select a point that is far away is not a solution. A temporary releif at best and I am not going to send my units around the world so that I don't have to deal with them. The point is, when you have a lot of units to cycle through, it IS going to get tedious. You will start to see it a bit during the classical period, more so by the medieval period.

6 or 7 units is nothing to me, and im most likely not alone to be used to far greater numbers in other games.

I think that you misunderstand me when I say 6 or 7 units. That is not the number of your enire army... just what I assume (based on screenshots and such) to be the average size of the attack force. If you take a standard map, where you have, say, 5 cities. The number of units can get substantial. I figure about 1 unit per city, plus at least two main attack/ready forces. (If we call 7 the magic number) that makes 19 units there. Of course, you are going to want to have a Navy if you have any coasts. One ship isn't going to do... I would say at minimum 3 per major coastal city (probably more by the industrial/modern age, though your melee force may drop... than again, it may not with all of the support units). We'll assume that 3 of the cities are along the coast. That makes 9 added to the 19 original units. That is 28 right there. Now, my estimates could be off, being as I have not played the game and don't know the exact sizes of the cities, but I would say that those are fair estimates. Those numbers will obviously vary, but I think you get the idea.

Ye sure navigating a crevice would slow you down enough for an opponent to mobilize defences, and most likely affect your attempt to take that town yes. Will it frustrate me? not likely, I knew about that crevice or I wouldn't know about that town.

You need to plan for that, that's part of strategy. And lets not forget it works both ways, if they want to attack you that same crevice is going to help alot. That's how it should be, an army should be hindered by rough or inaccessiable terrain.

I understand that it's a issue for some people, but I don't think the devs will be catering to thoose at this point.

I'm sorry for thoose that are angered or frustrated with the solution the Devs made for this game, if it was up to me I'd have added the option to use stacks of some sort if one wants to. I always like options to customise gameplay to fit as many people as possible, but as it is now you will have to hope for mods to solve the issues you have or others have.

As I have said before, at this point, I have accepted the 1UPT idea as there are other features that I AM interested in. That doesn't mean that I like it, though, and I will continue to argue against it. Maybe when I finally play the game, I will find it is not as bad as I predict... but at this point I am highly doubtful. Especially when you look at that map I posted earlier and get a sense of the scale. As I said then, the scale of that map will be much greater than anything by default I am sure (unless you count area specific maps).
 
I think we all agree that the battle scale is unrealistic. But I can live with it, the Civ games were never among the most realistic ones. And I think the battles themselves will be realistic enough for this kind of game.
 
Just to further illustrate size, I have included a few additional shots. The first includes mountains and hills in place, the second, cities, and the third a zoomed shot (no units in any pics). I am posting this in part because I want to demonstrate how an earth map would look. Again, since I don't know the map sizes, I am certain that this is way zoomed in in scale compared to how it will be in game. Still, this could serve as a sample scenario map for those who wish to create one of Britain. I was able to fit 10 cities on this map (with room for more)... 3 in Ireland, 7 in England and Scotland. I am pretty certain that even the largest earth map will only have room for maybe 3 in all of GB.
 

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I'm quoting from the PC Gamer Review of Civ5
Having to move each unit individually rather than in stacked groups makes moving a large force around pretty tedious. A bigger problem is the AI, which can't grasp the subtleties; it has a bad habit of wheeling its long range artillery directly up to my melee units.
 
Thanks for the laugh! If that was the case, archery would not have given way to gunpowder as an infantry weapon starting in the 1400s. I suggest you do some serious research on the subject of what actually happened on the battlefield (not some romanticized ideas). For example, the Janissaries who had started out as top notch archers adopted firearms as early as the mid 1400s (as did the very effective Hungarian Black Army). Gee, I wonder why they did that?? Those troops owned their archery armed opponents and were feared by them and set the example for what was to come.

Gunpowder took over from archery as an infantry weapon for very good reasons. If it hadn't been substantially more effective, the problems such as slow rate of fire, and the complex industrial and resource extraction support needed for gunpowder would have seen it on the sidelines until after rifling. It wasn't easy to adopt infantry firearms and it cost a fortune but people did it knowing it would give them an edge.

But beyond all that, this system has archers outranging rifled weapons. Give me a break!
If firearms "owned" archers, then why were both longbows and crossbows used as late as start of the 16th century? It wasn't because firearms were more expensive since the loading mechanisms for crossbows were more expensive than handcannons. However both firearms and crossbows were also used by armies who had longbowmen. One of either firearms, longbows or crossbows is most likely a little more effective than the others (though it's highly controversial which one is better),
but none of them "owned" the others. Assault rifles own swords and breechloaders own handcannons, but it's highly unlikely for weapons completely "own" another weapon from the same time.
 
Thorburne, I absolutely get what you mean, and I agree to a certain extent.

However, the way my suspension of disbelief works here, tells me "there is a military campaign taking place in that area". It's actually something I learned from GalCiv2, an approach which makes the SoD-Battles seem far more epic is just stretching out your lines a bit, fighting in formation. Sure, on the galaxy map, your line might stretch from Earth to Mars, but in your head, the battle is about the size of the Battle of Endor. How much space did that one cover, anyway? For my brain and imagination, that works just fine.

Edit: Okay, allow me to elaborate a bit:

There are TWO distinct ways to look at this situation.

A: "the battle simulates a military campaign, i.e. a series of skirmishes and battles over a larger area".
This works for most long-term conflicts, but is not as exciting as

B: If the English army has hills on its right flank (battlefield setup), does it matter WHICH hills those are? Is it important that those hills are actually the hills shown to be in Yorkshire on the strategic map? On the scale of the single battle, there are just hills. That's all that matters when looking at this engagement: There are hills on the English army's right flank. Yes, it requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but again, it works for me.
 
There are many elements in CIV that you have to suspend belief already. There is a certain point, however, when the suspension of beleif becomes too much. As I said, their are limits. I am pretty certain that it was this thread that I spelled it all out. To say that I shouldn't play games... :dubious:

No I said that if you can't suspend your belief enough to play a Civilization game then maybe games aren't for you, I didn't say you shouldn't play games. Just saying if you can't suspend your beliefs for a civ game, then you will have a hard time enjoying games period. Since there are alot of games out there that stretches this so much further than civ does.

I suppose we all got different limits, just worries me when people get hooked up on things like "units are bigger than cities" "they can shoot across the ocean!?" Relax and just go with it, it's not meant to be a reality simulator.

Select a point that is far away is not a solution. A temporary releif at best and I am not going to send my units around the world so that I don't have to deal with them. The point is, when you have a lot of units to cycle through, it IS going to get tedious. You will start to see it a bit during the classical period, more so by the medieval period.


You could have them "sleep" until you need them if you don't want to order them around every turn, since it sounds like you aint interested in moving them anywhere specific. If you already know where you want to go then why not send them there directly instead of going step by step? You can keep track of them as they walk each turn in case of any dangers showing up.

It is indeed possible it will get tedious, so we can hope they add group selection. In a patch or in there already maybe, or maybe some modders can fix that? Not sure how much the modders can access to change.


I think that you misunderstand me when I say 6 or 7 units. That is not the number of your enire army... just what I assume (based on screenshots and such) to be the average size of the attack force. If you take a standard map, where you have, say, 5 cities. The number of units can get substantial. I figure about 1 unit per city, plus at least two main attack/ready forces. (If we call 7 the magic number) that makes 19 units there.

Of course, you are going to want to have a Navy if you have any coasts. One ship isn't going to do... I would say at minimum 3 per major coastal city (probably more by the industrial/modern age, though your melee force may drop... than again, it may not with all of the support units).

We'll assume that 3 of the cities are along the coast. That makes 9 added to the 19 original units. That is 28 right there. Now, my estimates could be off, being as I have not played the game and don't know the exact sizes of the cities, but I would say that those are fair estimates. Those numbers will obviously vary, but I think you get the idea.

As far as I heard and seen you require roughly 4 ~ 5 units to handle a city early, potentially add another 2 ~ 3 to that to deal with defenders. Have another group the same size standing by for reinforcement so thats around 16 units and add 3~ 4 naval units. So roughly 20 units, can be quite an overkill against a single city.

Now you probably gonna have your reserves standing by near the battle, just standing there. So you can just put them on sentry or sleep while the others battle. That's down to 12 units to command, now the naval can basically stand put near the city within bombard range so no more movement once they get there. You'd end up having to activly command around 8 units, possibly 12 counting the naval bombardments or occasional movement.

I don't find it that difficult to handle that many, it can get tedious possibly yes. But hopefully the excitement of the coming battle will keep you occupied. And lets hope the Devs reocgnise that it needs some kind of grouping function to move a larger army.

I suppose it comes down to that if you feel it gets tedious with a large army the cut it down into smaller numbers and park them along the way to rush into battle as you take losses. Even if you brought along that entire army of 20 or in your case 28. You'd not have space to have them all participate anyway, so several of thoose can just hang back as backup.

As I have said before, at this point, I have accepted the 1UPT idea as there are other features that I AM interested in. That doesn't mean that I like it, though, and I will continue to argue against it. Maybe when I finally play the game, I will find it is not as bad as I predict... but at this point I am highly doubtful. Especially when you look at that map I posted earlier and get a sense of the scale. As I said then, the scale of that map will be much greater than anything by default I am sure (unless you count area specific maps).

Aight it's good you don't give up a game because it has a feature you dislike, hopefully you'll grow to like it when you do play. And hopefully it won't turn out so bad as you suspect.

KingArthur said:
I'm quoting from the PC Gamer Review of Civ5

Having to move each unit individually rather than in stacked groups makes moving a large force around pretty tedious. A bigger problem is the AI, which can't grasp the subtleties; it has a bad habit of wheeling its long range artillery directly up to my melee units.

Hmm well if they played the full release I sure hope they will patch in a grouping function of some kind, I'd still be fine without it. But if it helps management and to make things more smooth then it'd be good.

Worrying that the AI seems to drop the ball on the Artillery there? Was it mentioned what difficulty they played? Maybe it was one of the easier ones where the AI is far more reckless?

Man I want to read that review : D
 
See I also have to suspend my disbelief for cIV, a war takes place in a space the size of Chicago? What? I can fit say 4 million men in an area the size of any given large city, and feed them, and maneuver them? My cavalry ALWAYS attacks the pikemen?!?

In 1UPT it's, an infantry, oh say corps, takes up an area the size of Chicago? Archers fire farther then armor? Possibly, my artillery can fire across the channel?

Also I've got no trouble managing 28 units in a timely manner, I've got forty Ruskies that I can move one at a time in about five minutes at an average of five MPs, outside of difficult terrain. If your planning three moves ahead you should have no problem moving in a timely manner.
 
Worrying that the AI seems to drop the ball on the Artillery there? Was it mentioned what difficulty they played? Maybe it was one of the easier ones where the AI is far more reckless?D

The very next sentence of that review says:
"On higher difficulty levels, the AI simply gets a resource boost to overwhelm you with numbers, rather than any more tactical smarts".

Still it's not all bad, they give it 93% - overall verdict is "Gorgeous graphics and deep combat make this a great place to start or renew your interest in global domination".

[edit] - the reviewer was playing on "Normal" / Prince level
 
Im against 1UPT. The reasons being that i think itl take some fun out of the game. Like someone mentioned earlier. 1 plane on an aircraft carrier, why would I waste my time building one.

Also dreading having to move all units one at a time. I know its too late for them to back out of the 1UPT now but it would be nice if you had the option to group your units and move them towards a target as a single army. That way the game could pathfind in the most efficent way.

I would have prefered to see limited stacking or full stacking in the game.
 
Im against 1UPT. The reasons being that i think itl take some fun out of the game. Like someone mentioned earlier. 1 plane on an aircraft carrier, why would I waste my time building one.

According to the Civ5 Analyst site, a Carrier can carry up to 3 air units. Cities probably can have more than 1 too, so 1UPT doesn't seem to apply to air units.
 
No I said that if you can't suspend your belief enough to play a Civilization game then maybe games aren't for you, I didn't say you shouldn't play games. Just saying if you can't suspend your beliefs for a civ game, then you will have a hard time enjoying games period. Since there are alot of games out there that stretches this so much further than civ does.

Well, if you don't care at all about reality, then maybe CIV isn't for you. After all, there are plenty of other games out there that don't have any basis in reality at all. By your arguement, CIV would be better if they just stripped every aspect of reality away and made it so that the game consisted of nothing but fairies, and instead of waging war, you wage big parties and the A-Bomb sprouts not a mushroom cloud, but a giant mushroom that everybody dances around.

Suspension of beleif has it LIMITS!

As far as I heard and seen you require roughly 4 ~ 5 units to handle a city early, potentially add another 2 ~ 3 to that to deal with defenders. Have another group the same size standing by for reinforcement so thats around 16 units and add 3~ 4 naval units. So roughly 20 units, can be quite an overkill against a single city.

Now you probably gonna have your reserves standing by near the battle, just standing there. So you can just put them on sentry or sleep while the others battle. That's down to 12 units to command, now the naval can basically stand put near the city within bombard range so no more movement once they get there. You'd end up having to activly command around 8 units, possibly 12 counting the naval bombardments or occasional movement.

I don't find it that difficult to handle that many, it can get tedious possibly yes. But hopefully the excitement of the coming battle will keep you occupied. And lets hope the Devs reocgnise that it needs some kind of grouping function to move a larger army.

I suppose it comes down to that if you feel it gets tedious with a large army the cut it down into smaller numbers and park them along the way to rush into battle as you take losses. Even if you brought along that entire army of 20 or in your case 28. You'd not have space to have them all participate anyway, so several of thoose can just hang back as backup.

You obviously didn't understand what I was saying... I did not say to bring the whole army to an attack. I was giving a rough estimate of how many total one could potentially have in a game. I stated that a standard attack force would likely be about 6 - 7 (give or take). I said nothing about taking the whole army to attack a single city.

If you are putting your entire force into a military engagement, then that indicates a point of desperation... unless you are one of those who completely disbands your entire army during times of peace. If that is the case, do you ever win?
 
Im against 1UPT. The reasons being that i think itl take some fun out of the game. Like someone mentioned earlier. 1 plane on an aircraft carrier, why would I waste my time building one.


I would have prefered to see limited stacking or full stacking in the game.

you can carry 3 Atomic Bombs, 3 Bombers, 3 Fighters / Jet Fighters or any mix thereof on a carrier. i think you can stack air units over land / sea.....possibly up to 3 air units over 1 land/sea. either way, people are flying off the handle with incomplete information and making stupid assumptions.
 
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