Poll: do you think there are too many units on the map?

[purringcat]

Too many AI units. Between the City States and Barbarians, there are warriors everywhere.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

I know people hate stacks of doom (though to be honest I will never really understand why). But for people who never want to go back to the Civ IV days, what would you say if we allowed perhaps 5 or 6 units per tile? Maybe starting with 2 or 3 allowed and going up to 5 or 6 as tech advances? There just aren't enough tiles in the game to support 1UPT. There weren't in Civ V and Civ VI is even worse in this regard, with lower unit costs and more religious units around. The amount of traffic is incredible.

 

[Agent327]

I'm not sure what games you guys have been playing, but my maps seem rather... empty. Any sort of 'clutter' only occurs during wartime. But that's to be expected when fighting AI.

Too many spammed religious units for my tastes. Also, allied military units keep blocking areas my builders need access to. Allies need to keep their military at home until war calls them out.

So don't ally. You know it grants open borders. Religious unit spamming? Use Closed Borders mod.

 

[Atwork]

Ranged units should be treated like support units, meaning they should be able to stack with non-ranged units. The consequence is that their ranged attack distance would be reduced by one tile, but that is how it should be. With this rule change, ranged units could be extremely weak on defense, also as it should be.

And, this would reduce some of the sprawl.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

There are times I look at a situation where a single AI has 20-25+ units just in sight, and the sheer tedium of killing them one by one over the next however many turns is enough to make me want to stop playing. Vague mechanic descriptions like the one for war weariness are not appreciated. It's a game rule, don't hide it.

 

[Gedemon]

Ranged units should be treated like support units, meaning they should be able to stack with non-ranged units. The consequence is that their ranged attack distance would be reduced by one tile, but that is how it should be. With this rule change, ranged units could be extremely weak on defense, also as it should be.

And, this would reduce some of the sprawl.

Yes, I used exactly this in civ5, with some added ability like support or counter-fire.

This and allowing civilian/religious/military units of different Civilization at peace to share the same tile is all I would need.

 

[miaasma]

the AI needs a delete/upgrade unit function, because city states just continue to pump out warriors throughout every era and it makes it impossible to move through certain areas

 

[Heklios]

I seriously hate the amount of clutter and chaos civ6 map contains. There are simply to many units. All the time and everywhere, too many units. Both religious and military ones. Too many of them in general.
- The map looks ugly and barely readable
- There is a huge mess
- There are countless traffic jams problems everywhere and anywhere
- There are constant AI "border threats and promises" spam
- There are so many units they often don't fit inside borders (it becomes super ridiculous when AI puts dozens of its units in your territory, as they don't fit inside theirs)
- There is constant pain with micromanaging gigantic armies
- AI is terrible at managing that amount of units
- Add to this terrain restrictions and 25 000 missionaries spam and I can't stand it. I never felt civ5 maps to be so overcrowded (only civ6 huge map size is significantly smaller than analogical size from civ5).

I honestly think units, all units, should be more expensive to build and maintain so there would be two or even three times less of them on them (in case of religious ones it can be even 4-5x less for me) - of course, various other measures would be necessary to balance this, so smaller armies would be capable of conquest (as in civ5), but I need some solution to this. I'm considering making some mod drastically increasing unit build times and maintenance.

I was curious if many people think similarly.

Amongst the great strengths of the Civilization Series and the particular ones of Civ6 there are indeed several key issues that were more than covered in this forum so far.

But "too many units on the map" ?
No bro.

Reading again your list of complaints to try and find some common ground with you, the only conviction I get is that :
- either you aren't taking your time to play each turn. Remember it's a turn based game, there's no turn timer against AI, there's absolutely no incentive to play quickly. Quite the contrary the whole concept of the series is to preserve the STRATEGY aspect while entirely removing the QUICK REFLEX and handling of the hardware (mouse/keyboard APM) you may find in other RTS like StarCraft.
- or... (And I hope it's not the case) Civ is just not the game for you.

There's very few units, by the time this number grows you can Corps them, you can triple link Army+Support+Civilian to move them all at once. You can Fortify, Sleep, or queue orders.

Civ is supposed to emulate a board game. Have you seen a massive Warhammer Army ?

I mean, no. I honestly don't think there's "too many units on the map".

 

[caiman0815]

OP is right in everything he said. Nuff said

 

[Solaxe]

I know people hate stacks of doom (though to be honest I will never really understand why).

Maybe because it's a lazy mechanic which doesn't promote any kind of strategy and also is exploited by terrible AI? Use your grey cells a bit

But "too many units on the map" ?
No bro.

Yeah, not at all! (stolen from another thread):

 

[Zuizgond]

I never open my borders to anyone in civ5 and civ6, in order to reduce the number of AI units walking on my tiles. But this limits the diplomatic aspect of the game.

Too bad I can't do that for religious units.

 

[Cyon]

It would be better if they double the conversion strength of religious units and make them twice as expensive. Or make the cost climb faster. And also fix the bug where apostles run out of promotions, they where do week at the end then iI did a religious victory as the Arabs.

 

[Cymsdale]

It would be simpler if religious units were on their own layer completely. Using military units to block them (or vice versa) does not seem like something that is really intended from a game design perspective.

 

[Stilgar08]

Maybe because it's a lazy mechanic which doesn't promote any kind of strategy and also is exploited by terrible AI? Use your grey cells a bit

Yeah, not at all! (stolen from another thread):

Sea Horses!
Nice shot.

IMO it would help big time if religious units would be on their own layer like many posters suggested... and it would help if the AI could be taught to use them in groups of 4-5 like humans might do in order to build clusters rather than just spam apostles.

Concerning military units: I never came upon such a big chunk of units all at once - although sometimes you ARE stuck with your scouts due to heavy traffic in fopen border territory. I never was a big fan of 1UPT but I'm not a SOD fan either.

another approach: In peacetime you simply should be able to use the same tile with other civs - if I remember correctly we had the same discussion and approach to the problem with ciV and it never happened.... Maybe the devs think you loose track of the hidden units below your own. I think they are wrong and you should be able to differentiate...
What about restricting usage of tiles two 2 units max in general (like if escorting a builder/settler) - you could show both unit-emblems and reduce traffic jams....

 

[Futumch]

Those religious units. Sooo many at a time.
When I disable religious victory, I would love it to disable all religious units, wonders, diplomacy fluff and great people. It's bloody annoying when you're counting down to a space launch only to have the game slowed down by a ponderous version of computer religious tetris. It's annoying when I can't improve a tile in my own territory because some sack-cloth wearing freak is occupying a mine site. Bah. Religions. Waste of bloody space.

 

[agonistes]

I think unit maintenance needs to go up. Increase it by one or two per unit.

A scaling cost would be okay too. Like, 3 free units for the capital, +1 per 4 cities, then 2 gold for next 4 units, 3 gold for next 4... something like that. But one musket man is worth a chunk of warriors. I wish they had taught the AI that.

There needs to be a place for us and the AI to store units in a stack... like in a city or barracks. Like how nukes are handled. The units are called out when needed.

From what I've seen, the AI is cheating with holy units. I suspect they get free units somehow.

The whole holy unit mechanic can be changed. Make them like 20x more expensive, all get about 2 promotions, and have base 5 charges, with each charge being 2x or 3x stronger. Hell, or even 5x stronger. And each civ can only have 1 active holy unit at a time. Then allow religion to be pressured through trade routes (if its not already). Religion, I'm afraid, needs to become much more passive. And holy units much more unique and special.

 

[UWHabs]

A scaling cost would be okay too. Like, 3 free units for the capital, +1 per 4 cities, then 2 gold for next 4 units, 3 gold for next 4... something like that. But one musket man is worth a chunk of warriors. I wish they had taught the AI that.

There needs to be a place for us and the AI to store units in a stack... like in a city or barracks. Like how nukes are handled. The units are called out when needed.

From what I've seen, the AI is cheating with holy units. I suspect they get free units somehow.

The whole holy unit mechanic can be changed. Make them like 20x more expensive, all get about 2 promotions, and have base 5 charges, with each charge being 2x or 3x stronger. Hell, or even 5x stronger. And each civ can only have 1 active holy unit at a time. Then allow religion to be pressured through trade routes (if its not already). Religion, I'm afraid, needs to become much more passive. And holy units much more unique and special.

Religion could be done a bit more like espionage or trade routes, except that every action performed will simply cost faith points. You should accumulate apostles through the great prophet points, and each apostle can be assigned to a city to do major conversions. Missionaries maybe they should function more like trade routes. Each holy site gives you a missionary, that you assign like a trade route to convert a city.

The difference being that in those cases, your apostle/missionary actions would cost you faith. So you can keep your apostle at home doing "counter-pressure" for free, or for certain amounts of faith, you can send him out to convert other cities. that gets them off the map, and also eliminates the silly religious warfare.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Sea Horses!
Nice shot.

IMO it would help big time if religious units would be on their own layer like many posters suggested... and it would help if the AI could be taught to use them in groups of 4-5 like humans might do in order to build clusters rather than just spam apostles.

Concerning military units: I never came upon such a big chunk of units all at once - although sometimes you ARE stuck with your scouts due to heavy traffic in fopen border territory. I never was a big fan of 1UPT but I'm not a SOD fan either.

another approach: In peacetime you simply should be able to use the same tile with other civs - if I remember correctly we had the same discussion and approach to the problem with ciV and it never happened.... Maybe the devs think you loose track of the hidden units below your own. I think they are wrong and you should be able to differentiate...
What about restricting usage of tiles two 2 units max in general (like if escorting a builder/settler) - you could show both unit-emblems and reduce traffic jams....

You see those kind of unit distributions fairly often on higher levels. Bad as that looks, when you involve rough terrain + new movement rules it's even worse. It's extremely difficult to actually kill anything unless you're way ahead, they flounder incapable of putting focus fire on you either, and you get an endless rotation of pathing hell + healing as you slowly wear down the enemy...only to have the vague WW rules sometimes cause problems but usually not.

I guess you could just set up a couple chokes and declare on every AI, keep killing units for free since they can't stack up, and drag its victory progress so far into the gutter that you'll eventually win somehow, but that doesn't sound like the fun kind of grind.

 

[agonistes]

I guess you could just set up a couple chokes and declare on every AI, keep killing units for free since they can't stack up, and drag its victory progress so far into the gutter that you'll eventually win somehow, but that doesn't sound like the fun kind of grind.

Or you could just beeline nukes and blow the world to hell. I assume that's what Firaxis wants us to do.

 

[Victoria]

Some great points and some poorish ones. It is easy to go OTT with the distaste.

I feel forcing the AI to upgrade and sell units to pay for it if over a certain threshold would make sense. There is not the upgrade pathing happening well enough currently.
There should also be weighting for variety of units, the carpet would not be so bad if it did not look like the last hurrah of the golden horde.

I quite liked religion in Civ5 it seemed to work well. The new one has some great concepts but the spamming of religious armies is not one of them.

The whole board is not carpeted, we face some menaces at time (my galley was once set upon by about 12 Norwegian heavy chariots) and yes the issues must be addressed but they are not stopping the game in its tracks IMO