Relating Civ to Real World?

[Yashcheritsiy]

Greetings,

I was wondering if this way of relating Civ to the RW makes sense?

I try to think of individual land units as containing about 5,000 soldiers (say, regiment size). The reason is because, let's say in the late Industrial age you have a huge civ with 150 land units, either offensive or defensive. Well, it would make more sense to suppose that this civ's army has 750,000 men in it then, say, 150,000 (if we took a size of 1,000 per land unit), since 150 units is a fairly decent sized army for that period in the game if a civ is large (including, of course, city defenders).

The problem is early on, if you have a size 1 or 2 city, but have like 5 units, this could lead to you having more men in your army then you have in your civilisation, or have an insanely high percentage like say 75-80%. What I've read in the past indicated that the max percentage of population under arms which is still economically sustainable by a nation is around 10%, unless that society is just simply a tribal/nomad society like the Mongols. What I came up with was to think of the cities as "regions" (after all, how many cities actually cover all of northern Florida or central Italy???) and to multiply the city population by 10. Hence, a size one city(region) has not 10K, but rather 100K people, etc., and thus can support more readily the two warriors and a spearman you have built.

This works out better later on. Say you have a nation whose total population is 15,000,000 and you have 100 land units. You could then think of it as having a pop of 150 million, with an army of half a million men under arms. Does that seem reasonable?

I think of land artillery as such - 50 guns, etc. per unit

Air units as - 20 planes per unit

Sea units as individual ships, due to the greater size and complexity compared to land and air units.

Any thoughts?

Yashcheritsiy

 

[SesnOfWthr]

I see what you're saying, and the numbers seem reasonable, but I don't understand the obsession people have with relating civ to RL. Obviously, it is loosely based on RL, but if these things were made too stringent so that the numbers made more sense, the game would lose much of its playability. I say if you want to think of civ as "RL", just think of it as an alternate dimension.

 

[DogmaDog]

You're never going to find multipliers that work at all times and places in the game.

Sure, you could call each "Marine" a "Marine Division" with 10,000 marines in it, but there's no military transport ship that can carry 8 divisions.

I just think of each unit as a unit--not an individual combatant, but not any specified number of individuals. A warrior is a gang of warriors. A swordsman might be a century. Infantry might be a battalion. Whatever.

In modern eras it becomes problematic as units become more diverse with the use of combined arms...a Marine fireteam of 4 individuals has 3 kinds of primary weapon. A company adds in mortars, medium machineguns, and rocket launchers...yet "marines" can't bombard.

DD

 

[Hakim]

It's a good point, since it might help someone to accept when inferior units somehow wins over superior. Some people seem to think that a spearmen are a single man with a little spear...

 

[Yashcheritsiy]

I see what you're saying, and the numbers seem reasonable, but I don't understand the obsession people have with relating civ to RL. Obviously, it is loosely based on RL, but if these things were made too stringent so that the numbers made more sense, the game would lose much of its playability. I say if you want to think of civ as "RL", just think of it as an alternate dimension.

Oh, I'm not obsessing about this, don't worry. I've actually found that thinking of the game in these terms (loosely) actually *increases* its playability for me, for no other reason than I can sit there and think about moving 50,000 troops to the border and so forth (I also like to name each of my ships....go figure). I find it to be a small touch of realism that deepens the Civ experience for me.

Maybe people like to relate this to RL because they don't like the way RL goes sometimes, and would like to "get a do over"

There are some who would probably love to see the Celts put the smack down on the English....England out of Wales, and all that rot!

Cheers,
Yashcheritsiy

 

[fazzoletti]

You're never going to find multipliers that work at all times and places in the game.

Sure, you could call each "Marine" a "Marine Division" with 10,000 marines in it, but there's no military transport ship that can carry 8 divisions.

I just think of each unit as a unit--not an individual combatant, but not any specified number of individuals. A warrior is a gang of warriors. A swordsman might be a century. Infantry might be a battalion. Whatever.

In modern eras it becomes problematic as units become more diverse with the use of combined arms...a Marine fireteam of 4 individuals has 3 kinds of primary weapon. A company adds in mortars, medium machineguns, and rocket launchers...yet "marines" can't bombard.

DD

Mmm, so how many ships would you need in the RW to carry 10 000 marines? I guess it is ok to say that a carrier unit compares with 1 aircraft carrier, whereas a transport unit represents maybe 100 RW vessels (for instance). I think this 'research' is actually quite interesting. One problem with comparing units with the RW is recuperation. How do you explain that if you let a unit rest in a city one turn the loss of lifes is replenished? In ancient times it would work, because one turn is 20 years, but in modern times? I'm interested to hear your thoughts about this!

 

[LorenzotheMad]

How do you explain that if you let a unit rest in a city one turn the loss of lifes is replenished? In ancient times it would work, because one turn is 20 years, but in modern times? I'm interested to hear your thoughts about this!

Actually, in modern times where the turn is equal to about a year, this makes total sense. A year is plenty of time to repair say an aircraft carrier. During world war two, the USS Yorktown was repaired in a matter of days after being hit by multiple torpedoes.

 

[DogmaDog]

As far as recuperation goes, after fighting, a unit that's been hurt can regain some of it's strength just by redistributing ammunition and getting it's bearings ("consolidation" to use Marine parlance). With turns being a year, you can add in equipment maintenance and repair, and replacement troops from the rear.

Of course, much of that becomes problematic if you consider units far into enemy territory. So I do think units that "h

eal" over time is realistic, but it is kind of abstracted in the game.

As for transporting a division of Marines...today we have amphibious ships. 3 ships will be grouped into a Marine Expeditionary Unit, carrying an infantry battalion + (about 1,500 troops), a composite squadron (several attack and transport helicopters and a few Harrier jets), and a MEU Service Support Element of about another 1,000 troops with transport trucks, bridging assets, refeuling assets, and maintenance capability.

The Marines in the ships get to shore via landing craft (which look like the "transports" in CIV). There are the WWII-style craft (as seen in Saving Private Ryan), which can carry as many as ~100 troops. Amphibious Assault Vehicles each carry only a squad (13) of Marines, so one platoon of AAVs (12 vehicles) carries one company of infantry ashore...the MEU has 1 platoon of AAVs.

There are also LCACs (landing craft, air cushioned), which can carry a platoon of Marines plus several vehicles.

Anyway, all the "ship to shore" stuff is abstracted in civ just by having units walk off the ship and on to the beach, straight from a "transport" that acts much more like a ship than a landing craft.

I think the key to looking at unit size in CIV is to think of the size of units that can truly act independently in battle. Squads really don't act by themselves, but companies or battalions today might. In the civil war era, regiments and divisions were the maneuver elements. WWI is sometimes called "the Captain's War" because that was the first time that the company was used as an independent maneuver element.

Oddly enough, what I think you wind up with, is units in really ancient times were small--organized warfare didn't exist yet, then they get really large up through Napoleonic times, when they start to shrink. A tank in Civ III might be a tank battalion, while Modern Armor might only be a tank platoon because increased range and communications allow smaller units of modern tanks to act independently.

Obviously this brings up issues when units of different eras fight, but if one spearman represents a division, or even a corps (50,000 guys?) going against a modern tank platoon (4 M1A1 Abrams), maybe we do have an explanation for the spearman winning?

A'ight, enough of my rambling.

DogmaDog

 

[dgfred]

I like to re-name each of my units as divisions, or something else like 4th
Gallic army and so on . I just imagine no matter what age the
divisions are not a certain # of men, b/c of casualties, lack of men, etc...
It just makes it more interesting to me to have Fred's Mounted Warrior
Division smashing through the enemy .

 

[BassDude726]

Not to be a party-pooper or anything... but it takes a whole heck of a lot longer to service modern aircraft carriers than the WWII versions. They'll sometimes take as long as two years to work on the nuclear-powered ones!

 

[Jaded_Feriluce]

Well I dont have the wealth of knowlege all of you guys seem to have lol..... but at least as far as the early ages go for me..... I think that the 80-90% of the population being in the army is right... I mean it is the dawn of time, and there's all kinds of enemies lurking.... not to mention there isnt really enough people to have a very separate warrior class....... so I just imagine that while not fighting and exploreing the warrior guys are tending the feilds and chillin in the smokeholes........ IMO