Scale

[Junuxx]

...And that's the long answer.

 

[Danger Bird]

Since this thread has come up again, I'll just clarify what my concern was. I am not really against ranged attacks and 1upt per se. I overstated my case in the OP (with archers taking 20 years to pick up their arrows, etc.); that, I admit, was silly.

As for the "OK scale has always been messed up, but now they're just taking things too far" arguments, well why is ranged archers taking it further than hundreds of years for my ancient era army to reach my neighbour? That seems pretty extreme to me. Besides the fact that in all cases other than the few where they happen to be firing over a city or a lake, an archers two tile range will look fine, so long as you don't consider the context, which is pretty much true of all Civ scale distortions - your Chariots may be taking hundreds of years to reach that neighbour, but local scale is kept, because his units are at least moving at the same pace.
Since I've noticed one unit per tile has been brought up I'll mention another thing which is literally never considered by anyone, which I have brought up a few times. It is that improvements have always been one per tile, and this has exactly the same scale ramifications as 1UPT. If people using the scale argument against 1UPT were consistent they would argue for us to be able to stack improvements (more than just road and other).

I accept that what happens in civ, on a tile during a turn, is just an abstraction of whatever world you want to imagine when you are playing.

• Takes several '20 year' turns for my units to get to another city? We can easily imagine that this represents (in an imagined world) a march on that city sometime within that period, and it didn't take hundreds of years.
• Archers attack from behind the enemy front line, two tiles away? I need not see this as a 200 mile shot. I can just imagine that somewhere in this vicinity there was a battle where the armies formed fronts and archers stayed behind, perhaps horsemen flanked, and so on. In a sense, the map doubles as a campaign map and a close-up tactical map, or, as Junuxx said, the scale is flexible.
• A tile has only a watermill as its sole improvement? I can imagine that there are probably farms and villages as well, but that the mills are the most prominent feature of that area's rural economy.

All in all, I think Hypernova's and previous posters' points about it all being abstracted and flexible are valid, and I find myself mainly agreeing with most, but I guess I am just worried that all the small-scale tactical detail might not mesh well with the larger picture. We'll see how the developers handle it.

I probably think too much while playing civ.

 

[bowervt]

I don't understand why this comes up all of the sudden. It's always been the case in every CIV game. You can choose your map size, which basically increases or decreases the number of tiles. If you want to think of it in planet circumference or whatever fine, but some games will be played on Mercury and some on Jupiter.
And the time thing is exactly as Souron described: early game turns are larger time gaps than end game.
Why don't we start complaining that the units are too big? My archer is the size of Mount Everest! Please fix this in CIV 5! I want to have to zoom in 1000x every time I want to move someone!

 

[BubbaYeti]

Why don't we start complaining that the units are too big?

Exactly. Civilization games have never represented appropriate size scales, they never will, they don't need to for the game to be great, end of story.

 

[bowervt]

"Ranged archers will certainly increase fun a lot, and fun > realism"

It's hard to disagree with someone who backs up their argument with algebra!

 

[Danger Bird]

Why don't we start complaining that the units are too big?

Well, these are merely icons that represent military units. Maps often have icons that are larger than what they represent. That isn't what this thread is about.

 

[Hypernova]

• Takes several '20 year' turns for my units to get to another city? We can easily imagine that this represents (in an imagined world) a march on that city sometime within that period, and it didn't take hundreds of years.
• Archers attack from behind the enemy front line, two tiles away? I need not see this as a 200 mile shot. I can just imagine that somewhere in this vicinity there was a battle where the armies formed fronts and archers stayed behind, perhaps horsemen flanked, and so on. In a sense, the map doubles as a campaign map and a close-up tactical map, or, as Junuxx said, the scale is flexible.
• A tile has only a watermill as its sole improvement? I can imagine that there are probably farms and villages as well, but that the mills are the most prominent feature of that area's rural economy.

Exactly, scale is flexible as Junuxx said, and it is very easy to rationalise. It's also worth noting that some unrealistic features are less easy to rationalise, such as archers that don't contribute anything to offensive operations at all (Civ IV). While I stand by fun > realism (Civ is a game), it is worth noting that giving archers range is not a simple trade of scale realism for fun; it is a trade of scale realism for fun AND increased combat role realism. And scale realism, due to it being easy to rationalise, is probably one of the least important forms of realism.