Simple Suggested Change: Let me Stack in my Cities

Before I start: I love Civ 5, and am not here to just whine and critizie aimlessly. I'm very happy with Civ 5 and am looking forward to future improvments and expansion packs. You could say I'm to the point where I won't go back to Civ IV, which to me is a success for Civ V.

But one change that I hope could be made would help with mulitiple issues that the community largely agrees upon.

Allow Unit Stacking/Garrisoning in Cities.

1. All units on a city tile would be garrisoned, adding to the HP/Strength of the city. This would provide incentive to have city defense and make cities much harder to capture, a current flaw in the game IMHO.
2. Would provide a place to "park" your units so you're not constantly deciding meaningless things like "well, I just built this tank, I guess I'll park it in that forest over there."
3. Would allow the AI to better defend itself and keep its units organized. Maybe even keep it from trying to move every unit, every turn to help turn-to-turn performance.

So that's it. It's simple enough (would still keep the one-unit-per-tile outside of cities) and fixes some major holes in the system. I mean come on - it's a city- it can contain more than just one military unit. Capturing an AI's capital should take more than three shots from artillery followed by a single-unit infantry rush. If they were allowed to stack artillery in the city it would be quite difficult to capture it and would take much more overwhelming forces. Plus, just having a place to park your units would be much cleaner and less of a nuisance!

Thoughts?

 

Slightly off-topic but when i read the title i thought you wanted to be able to stack your cities

 

Nice idea. I actually thought this was how it'd be implemented in the game before I got it, and was surprised to see it wasn't the case. It just seemed to make sense to let the cities hold more units. Apparently not, though.

Perhaps it'd be necessary to have a limit on the number of units that can be stacked in a city to avoid the problem of literally impossible-to-take cities. Somewhere around a 4-6 stacking limit in city tiles seems reasonable.

I also think Forts should increase the number of units that can coexist on a tile (perhaps to somewhere around 2-4). That would actually make them quite useful. This was another thing I kind of thought would be implemented in the game from the start, so I was surprised when I found out it was not the case.

(Also, maybe a mod should move this to the "Ideas and Suggestions" forum.)

 

Okay, here`s the flaw in his suggestion. Picture that i move 5 artillery units into a city. There`s nothing stopping them. Nothing at all. Because the unit system is based on 1 UPT there is no way any unit can come within 2 radius of that city and live. It would be unbalanced.

Now I`m sure someone will say "but u cant have 5 units in every city".

Well. Yes. You cannot. But mostly you can preemptively guess where the AI is going to attack you. And the AI is not smart enough not to send his units into a suicide mission.

 

Yes, agree, good thought on the cap. Maybe the max unit cap would increase as population increases - maybe 1/2 the population, rounded up? So a size 1 city gets 1 unit, 4 city gets 2, 7 city gets 4, 12 city gets 6, etc. etc.

Also, yes, moderator, please move to ideas and suggestions forum. Sorry about that.

 

Agree, this would be unbalanced. But instead of just saying it isn't possible, maybe you have a cap on the number of units, but always have a cap of one ranged unit?

So if I can have six units in my size 12 city, only one of those six could be artillery, or similar suggestion.

I just think there has to be a better way than one-unit in a city regardless of size.

And another thing - at first the ranged attack of the city itself was cool, but it is so weak it is almost pointless. Would rather have that removed and the unit-stacking in the cities added.

 

Well it could be 2-4 units in cities. Or a limit to ranged units. Either way, it doesn't discount the whole idea.

Indeed. At the very least the strength of the city's attack should increase with technological progress and appropriate buildings.

 

Small pet peeve, but I get a little prickly when people say something isn't possible. Just because you can't think of a solution doesn't mean there isn't one.

In this case, the solution is to make it so that if any unit in the stacked city attacks, all remaining units in the city lose their turn. That may require an SDK edit. But so would making units stackable inside cities.

 

Perhaps allow one melee and one ranged unit in a city. Melee unit adds to the defense bonus, ranged unit adds to the city's barrage (does a ranged unit already do that? how do a city's defense and barrage scores work under the hood with and without assorted garrisons?)

 

The thing you need is units per unit-building.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=389787


What if you could stack units in cities, but you need to build special buildings to do so?

For example: 1 Barrack could host 1 Unit.


So you could build multiple barracks, raising the unit capacity +1 for each.
This is also kind of realistic, as you need a place/building where your troops can stay in real life too.
The same could work for Airports/Airfields.

It doesn't have to be the barracks building, just as an example, name it what ever you like

This would also enhance the rest of the Civ V gameplay greatly in return:
Empires would spread out more, as there is an important reason for building cities etc.

This also would not lead to defensive Stacks of Doom, as you can only stack as many units as you have buildings/space for them, and this buildings can be expensive and take a while to build.

So no too big stacks, no overpowering!

 

Adding rule on top of rule is not good though.

 

Couldn't agree with you more.

As I have been saying elsewhere, at the very least the option to park multiple units on a single hex and garrison multiple units should be available (ie in the game setup screen). Any ideas on how to convince Firaxis to make what is clearly only a simple tweak?

 

I would just stack my cities with range/siege units and they'd be untakeable. It's difficult enough attacking a city that's got a catapult raining death on your poor swordsman, nevermind a city with 3 or 4 catapults in it.

I think I good solution is that defensive buildings (walls, castles, etc.) should speed up the recovery of the cities health, something like +2 per defensive structure each turn and they should greatly increase the strength of the cities ranged attack.

 

One of two things needs to happen:

1) Make it so you can park any number of units in a city/fort/heck, even citadel, or...

2) fix the bug where if an AI's scout comes near where I've parked all my units in peacetime, it doesn't think I've parked them on their border & gets mad at me.

As long as #2 exists, #1 is a necessity. Fixing #2 is preferred, of course.

 

Or if you have several range units in the city you can use only one by turn. Or even say that only one unit of any type in the garrison can act by turn, otherwise horsemen will rush out to finish wounded units then hide.

 

I agree.

Adding rule on top of the rule just so that we can stack units in cities doesnt really sound like a good idea and i think that it would just create civ4-like dull wars no matter how would you implement it.

EDIT: It would again be almost like civ4 exept that this time the attacker couldnt stack units and the defender would have all of its units in perfect safe inside a city, so the defender could attack any unit individually from inside the city. Terribly unbalanced.

 

Its fine as it is in my opinion, you just have to organize the defences around your town more efficiently...
Love the new front line thinking, its just the AI need a bit improvement

 

Personally, I love 1upt. It's the best change to Civ for me. But I do understand what you mean by...

But having said that, I just tend to place my units strategically as opposed to just just parking them in some random location.

As for adding defense and whatever for sitting more units in a city, if you place units around your city, then the attacker won't be able to get to your city anyway. But I do agree that it doesn't work very well for the AI. I don't think the solution is to be able to stack units in cities though. I think the solution is to work on making the AI use better tactics. In time, I think it will happen.

There is one time when I would really like to be able to stack 2 units though. Naval action. I think it would be nice to be able to stack one land unit with a ship. I know you can strategically place protective ships around your embarked land units, but even then it's not impossible for the AI to get past your ships and destroy an embarked land unit before you can even get a shot off. Which, as much as it does make sense that it can happen, it doesn't make sense to me that there's not a better way to defend against it. If an army is transporting a unit of tanks across an ocean in a ship, the tanks aren't sitting in a defenseless ship. And even it was some form of defenseless transport ship, it's not like it would be that much slower than a destroyer or something.

 

I'm more inclined to add a tile improvement (army base) than letting all those units inside a city, same could be for air bases. That would address the problems of number of units in the cities and connecting these with defence complications. It would also get the solution closer to the real life where armys are not based in the cities anymore. It would also solve the possible patches of "fog of war" among cities where barbarians are able to spawn - it should not spread culture, just make visible / claim the imidiate area (9 tiles?).
For not abusing this for claiming land it shouldn't be possible to place it on a resource and if you wanted to use that resource (or would be discovered later) you'd have to erase that base to make a mine or some such.
Might be more realistic to enable this in later (industrial / modern) era.

There you go.

 

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas and Suggestions