t0mme said:
Civilization is a game is which you nearly control every aspect of your Civilization, except the wars you fight. Bumping units into occupied squares doesn't reflect the intensity of a full-scale war.
I think you mean "
battles you fight" - there's plenty of control over the overall war, just not any control over the individual
battles.
Anything Real-Time should be avoided for Civ 4 - there's a substantial portion of Civ players who enjoy Civ because its
not real time. There's never any hurry to decide anything or worry that you need to click a button at just the right time.
Turn-based tactical combat would be more acceptable, but the problem is that it would still take up way too much time: both the players' and the developers'. The developers only have a finite amount of time, money, and resources to put into the game, and creating an entire sub-program dedicated to tactical combat would suck up a lot of resources that I feel could better be spent elsewhere, especially since I usually wouldn't bother playing the individual combats because it would suck up too much of
my time.
If playing out the combat yourself rather than just accepting the odds Civ-style provides any advantage (in your example you suggest doing it when the odds are against you) then players will be forced to use this feature to beat the higher difficulty levels, in which one wants every advantage one can get. In other words, while you could make it technically "optional", the only way to make it actually optional from a practical perspective is to make it so that your tactical choices have no affect on the outcome (in which case what's the point). As long as good tactics during a battle can increase your odds of winning, then players will be pressured to use this feature whether they want to or not. Even in cases where you'll clearly win or lose, on high difficulty levels it might make a big difference
how badly you win or lose, so you'd be pressured to manage the combat yourself in every single case, not just the close battles.
Furthermore, even if I assume you meant "battles" and not "wars" when you complained about lack of control, I still think you're wrong on that count. You don't control every aspect of you civ except the battles. You don't control what neighborhood within a city a temple gets built in, nor what percentage of the food a city produces gets put into the granary, not what any specific citizen eats for lunch on any given day.
Everything in the game is an abstraction, in which you control the big picture but not the tiny details. Why should the game focus on letting you manage the details of combat, instead of, say, the more intricate details of aqueduct building or scientific research. The point is, there's no way the game can be infinitely detailed, and I think the current level of abstraction is pretty reasonable. Making combat
less abstract (giving you more detailed control) while at the same time not changing the abstraction-level of other parts of the game would have the effect of shifting the focus of the game towards combat, and then it becomes just another wargame. I don't want to spend all my time managing combat: I also enjoy managing diplomacy and exploration and construction of things in cities and so on. Tactical combat would make combat take up a bigger percentage of a player's time, and therefore make all those other things take
less of a players time. I, for one, don't think that's a good thing.
I'd much rather they focus any changed to combat on making things more interesting at the current "strategic" level, rather than introducing a whole new "tactical" level. For example, in Civ 3 they made the way artillery (and catapults, etc.) work much more interesting than in Civ 1/2, in which artillery were just units with high attack values. Also, adding resource tiles that may need to be defended, and being able to cut off trade by blocking certain tiles or pillaging roads, etc, made for more interesting military strategies. Further improvements along these lines, to the existing abstract, strategic combet model, would be much more welcome than a "realistic" tactical simulator that will make every battle take minutes instead of seconds.
