Panzer General Forever - proper scaled 1upt

[niall78]

Love PG to this very day. Here is a free version of PG that runs on all modern systems. Give it a blast if you have never played the game and prepare to be a happy bunny. I'm still scratching my head over why anybody could think the system was scalable into a Civ game but however.

Here's the link:

http://panzercentral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=45039

 

[Anthropoid]

Tactical level dynamic expanded to, not just strategic, but GLOBAL level . . . agree scratches head in puzzlement.

 

[vincentz]

here are the two main reasons why I truly cannot understand why so many people enjoy hex for civ :


"Excuse me sir. Could you please explain again : which HEXitude are you living at?"




"No comments necessary!"



In basics it removes the immersion about grand scale maps and puts it on small scale battlefields.


And 1upt would be great if the units had 5+ moves. not 1-2

 

[Alki]

Panzer General wasn't a patch on Up Front but that is another discussion.

 

[Bibor]

"Excuse me sir. Could you please explain again : which HEXitude are you living at?"

What an argument. No civ game ever used a coordinate system for placing units or improvements. And nobody ever used the tiles to calculate coordinates (except for the Space Elevator).

The compass argument is even worse. Diagonal movement gave you a time machine enabling to catch up with anything moving horizontally or vertically. What's worse BFC also encouraged diagonal placement of cities. The Immersion factor I can understand, but CIV is all about units, their movement and cities. Like moving your caravel diagonally to fasten your discovery of the New World helps the immersion.

 

[Anthropoid]

What an argument. No civ game ever used a coordinate system for placing units or improvements. And nobody ever used the tiles to calculate coordinates (except for the Space Elevator).

The compass argument is even worse. Diagonal movement gave you a time machine enabling to catch up with anything moving horizontally or vertically. What's worse BFC also encouraged diagonal placement of cities. The Immersion factor I can understand, but CIV is all about units, their movement and cities. Like moving your caravel diagonally to fasten your discovery of the New World helps the immersion.

Seem like good points, and I've got nothing wrong with a hex-system for partitioning strategic level maps. Certainly plenty of good games do it.

Problem as I see it is: the combat in Civ5 treats what is happening on the Strategic level as if it was tactical level.

 

[vincentz]

1) What an argument. No civ game ever used a coordinate system for placing units or improvements. And nobody ever used the tiles to calculate coordinates (except for the Space Elevator).

2) The compass argument is even worse. Diagonal movement gave you a time machine enabling to catch up with anything moving horizontally or vertically. What's worse BFC also encouraged diagonal placement of cities. The Immersion factor I can understand, but CIV is all about units, their movement and cities. Like moving your caravel diagonally to fasten your discovery of the New World helps the immersion.

1) Immersion is the keyword IMO. It doesnt feel like a worldmap with hex, but rather a battlefield. And IMO its an epic fail that it wasnt integrated long time ago with lat and longitudes in civ. I love civ4 alot, but I could write 100+ suggestions what could be improved. Some of it I made myself, other modders made some more of it and still the list I could come up with would still be 100+ suggestions.

I was hoping that Firaxis had improved civ 4 instead of making Civ Rev 2

2) Regarding the diagonal movement, there is a very easy fix.
Take f.ex. civ 4. You move E its 1 move, you move NE its 1 move. Thats bad.
Mathmetically you would have to use 1.4 move to move NE. Agree?

Well. If instead of 1 move that almost all the units had in the beginning you scaled it to 10 moves. Now when you move E it costs 10 moves, but when you move NE it costs 14 moves. The math works according to c2=a2+b2.
Not only does it suddenly makes sense, but what I would further suggest, was to make ½ moves using the grid and the center as "stopping points"

Examples : A warrior with 10 moves walks E and uses 10 moves.
If he walks NE he would only get ½ way (to where the grid is) using 7 moves and having 3 moves leftover that was added to the next turn. Ofcourse there would be max leftover movementpoints that could be stored.

I made a small mod (Civ IV, BtS) illustrating that moves doesnt have to be 1,2 or 3 but can be 3 to 10+.
It describes it here :
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9828420&postcount=148
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9828920&postcount=149
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9829106&postcount=150

And can be downloaded here (1.92 MB)

It is in 0.4, but is playable up until democracy (using rom tech tree), as I havent moved the democrazy civic, statue of liberty and intelligence bureau yet.

 

[Meeber]

here are the two main reasons why I truly cannot understand why so many people enjoy hex for civ :


"Excuse me sir. Could you please explain again : which HEXitude are you living at?"




"No comments necessary!"



In basics it removes the immersion about grand scale maps and puts it on small scale battlefields.


And 1upt would be great if the units had 5+ moves. not 1-2

All TBS games should use hexes and not squares.

 

[Meeber]

Seem like good points, and I've got nothing wrong with a hex-system for partitioning strategic level maps. Certainly plenty of good games do it.

Problem as I see it is: the combat in Civ5 treats what is happening on the Strategic level as if it was tactical level.

Which for me makes combat a lot more fun than previous CIV's

 

[vincentz]

Which for me makes combat a lot more fun than previous CIV's

Why is it different with hex?

Or is it because of 1upt?

 

[boredatwork]

Problem as I see it is: the combat in Civ5 treats what is happening on the Strategic level as if it was tactical level.

I don't see that as a problem any more than I see any of the dozens of other absurdities the Civ series of GAMES (as opposed to simulations) have adopted from their inception in order to be fun.

Complain about operational level warfare on a strategic map and you might as well complain about 80% of the other features in the game. (exploration, time scale, 1 of each building per city, linear science, worker improvements, wonders, etc)


People point to Civ5 as "evidence" that the PG system doesn't work with Civ.The problem as I see it is is they simply didn't do a good job of adapting the 2 game systems to accomodate each other.

Civ5 IS NOT the PG system. It's a lazy copy/paste of some elements of the later with little apparent thought about integrating them into the game as a whole.

PG has been "Civilized" (read "dumbed down") by eliminating key things that made it work like: suppression; support fire; sationary attacks (ie attacking without having to occupy the tile you attacked if you eliminate the opposing unit); entrenchment; retreating; supply; etc.

As such the result is not so much the operational warfare of PG but rather Civ style combat but with the SOD turned on it's side.

It's further compounded by poor decisions such as:

- Making the worlds too small and too dense which cluttered up the map and eliminated room to maneuver.

- Increasing unit costs as a misguided means of controlling unit numbers. (a scaleable support hit to production based on army size would have been better.)

- and on a related note: Making units more survivable WITHOUT CHARGING FOR REPAIRS, compounded by the stupid Insta heal.

- Making archers range 2+ instead of range 1, along with all firearms troops (and having 2 "range 1" units fight each other like melee)



I could go on and on but I don't think Civ5 could be "fixed" short of a major rewrite so it would be pointless. However I hope they don't abandon the concept come Civ6 because if they do a smarter job next time there's no reason it couldn't work.

 

[Brawndo]

- Making archers range 2+ instead of range 1, along with all firearms troops (and having 2 "range 1" units fight each other like melee)

I agree with this. Archers having range 2 makes sense in the ancient era, but it doesn't scale properly into later eras where Archers and Cannons share the same range. You also have ridiculous things like Crossbowmen firing into the sea to fend off Frigates

They should have made Archers like in another hex-based game, Battle for Wesnoth. Archers have range 1, but when they attack an adjacent unit, that unit cannot fight back if it is melee, and if the Archer destroys that unit, it does not occupy its hex.

 

[Anthropoid]

I don't see that as a problem any more than I see any of the dozens of other absurdities the Civ series of GAMES (as opposed to simulations) have adopted from their inception in order to be fun.

Complain about operational level warfare on a strategic map and you might as well complain about 80% of the other features in the game. (exploration, time scale, 1 of each building per city, linear science, worker improvements, wonders, etc)

You're absolutely right. My problem is, I DO complain (well, dislike anyway) all of those breaches of realism. I played too many of Matrix games, War in the Pacific in particular. It too has its own abstractions and breaches of reality, but at least it tries really hard to to the space-time thing right. A game that is vague or unrealistic on space-time dynamics and/or counts of things like people and commodities ("A Warrior" what does that mean? 1 guy with a club? or 20 guys? or 2000 guys?). I can't even play my old favoriate Civ4 BTS mods anymore because of this . . . *sigh*

 

[bryanw1995]

here are the two main reasons why I truly cannot understand why so many people enjoy hex for civ :


"Excuse me sir. Could you please explain again : which HEXitude are you living at?"



"No comments necessary!"


In basics it removes the immersion about grand scale maps and puts it on small scale battlefields.


And 1upt would be great if the units had 5+ moves. not 1-2

how many units in the game have only 1 movement? I think that all the non combat are 2, most combat are 2, but mounted are 2-4 and everything from mech inf + is 4 or more. oops, gdr is 3 but it's strong enough that it can probably get away with that

btw, try playing ciV for a couple hundred hours then going back to civ iv. you'll be p****d off at the sssssslllllloooowwwww movement on undeveloped terrain.

 

[Bad Brett]

What an argument. No civ game ever used a coordinate system for placing units or improvements.

What!?! The early games used them all the time. When you gave a unit an order, it would say "going to 23,48" and then you could right-click to check out the different coordinates. I think the city screen told you on which coordinate your different cities was located, I think the military advisor told you where your units were located... I even recall a "find tile" option, where you could type in coordinates to move the cursor there. I think this system was really brilliant actually.

 

[vincentz]

how many units in the game have only 1 movement? I think that all the non combat are 2, most combat are 2, but mounted are 2-4 and everything from mech inf + is 4 or more. oops, gdr is 3 but it's strong enough that it can probably get away with that

btw, try playing ciV for a couple hundred hours then going back to civ iv. you'll be p****d off at the sssssslllllloooowwwww movement on undeveloped terrain.

Its been a while since I played V. It just didnt catch on for me. I recall it being 1-2 moves due to lack of infrastructure and nowhere to go except forest and hills due to occupied land, so it kind of felt slow moving. When the next patch is out, maybe I'll try it again and see if it was as big a disappointment as it was the first couple of times I played it. But if you compare civ with the other hex 1upt games that is out there, then 1stly most of the friendly and enemy units are preplaced and secondly they will often have more than 5-8 moves (if I recall correctly. Its been a while since I played those.

 

[niall78]

I don't see that as a problem any more than I see any of the dozens of other absurdities the Civ series of GAMES (as opposed to simulations) have adopted from their inception in order to be fun.

Complain about operational level warfare on a strategic map and you might as well complain about 80% of the other features in the game. (exploration, time scale, 1 of each building per city, linear science, worker improvements, wonders, etc)


People point to Civ5 as "evidence" that the PG system doesn't work with Civ.The problem as I see it is is they simply didn't do a good job of adapting the 2 game systems to accomodate each other.

Civ5 IS NOT the PG system. It's a lazy copy/paste of some elements of the later with little apparent thought about integrating them into the game as a whole.

PG has been "Civilized" (read "dumbed down") by eliminating key things that made it work like: suppression; support fire; sationary attacks (ie attacking without having to occupy the tile you attacked if you eliminate the opposing unit); entrenchment; retreating; supply; etc.

As such the result is not so much the operational warfare of PG but rather Civ style combat but with the SOD turned on it's side.

It's further compounded by poor decisions such as:

- Making the worlds too small and too dense which cluttered up the map and eliminated room to maneuver.

- Increasing unit costs as a misguided means of controlling unit numbers. (a scaleable support hit to production based on army size would have been better.)

- and on a related note: Making units more survivable WITHOUT CHARGING FOR REPAIRS, compounded by the stupid Insta heal.

- Making archers range 2+ instead of range 1, along with all firearms troops (and having 2 "range 1" units fight each other like melee)



I could go on and on but I don't think Civ5 could be "fixed" short of a major rewrite so it would be pointless. However I hope they don't abandon the concept come Civ6 because if they do a smarter job next time there's no reason it couldn't work.

Couldn't agree with you more. They couldn't even implement PG properly and made a relatively simple tactical game even simpler. Never mind that the scale is completely wrong, not even from an immersion point of view but from an actual game play view, with maps being way to small for the amount of units.

And don't get me started on the AI. In PG it will give you a good fight, especially the updated version I linked to above. It can attack, defend, fight aero in air or ground attack role, use AA, combined arms, artil., naval attacks and shore bombardment. Civ5 AI can't do much of anything.

 

[Jediron]

O, come on. its a game, its CiV. Just enjoy it, play with the setup till you are satisfied