Single unit (per class) rule in naval warfare and tactics

[Theon]

It is now most likely the current game mechanic of civ 5 allows one unit of every class on a single hex.

We only know of a few unit classes for certain because these have been quoted in magazines, I believe these are military, civilian and air. I thought I read somewhere that naval combat is also being improved, with naval bombardment on land and the need to escort land unit transports in intercontinental invasions.

I am however concerned with the way a navy would carry air units in order to achieve air superiority. I am certain aircraft carriers are in because of their extreme importance in modern navies, but I am unsure how a single aircraft carrier being able to carry a single squad of jet fighters/bombers would allow for air superiority in an invasion.

The enemy civilization which is the target for the invasion would have a significant advantage in terms of air superiority over the attacker because of the sheer amount of space available for air units to be stationed, even assuming air units are only capable to be stationed in cities and forts like in civ 4. The attacking player would have to bring at least the same amount of carriers (staffed with single fighters and bombers) as there are cities and fortresses on the enemy continent. Not to mention the huge navy one would need to adequately protect and support the vast amount of carriers.

Another point which came to mind is the way submarines can carry nukes and cruise missiles to perform sneak attacks. If a single submarine can only carry a single missile unit, this kind of tactic is almost not worth the effort.

I know much of the game mechanics are still unknown to us, and I am sure these issues would probably be addressed before the game launches. But all I am saying is that there should probably be some flexibility in the single unit/hex rule in order to enable some of the tactics that we have come to know in the previous civ games.

 

[SMA333M]

I just hope that you will be able to select all your units and move them with 1 click, instead of moving each unit... and keeping their formation too... if you won't be able to do this, the wars will take tooooo long

 

[66th of Foot]

From all that I've been able to read so far there has been very little mentioned of how naval warfare mechanics will be or air units either.The instant transport they mention kills naval strategy on that level too...that means a land unit can rush to a coastal tile,immediately construct wooden or steel transports somehow,and be on their merry way.
I'll guess theres some sort of function carry multiple units on a carrier,how they intend to pull that off with 1upt escapes me also.Ditto your point on nukes,cruise missiles on a sub.They've moved the game to a tactical level away from the strategic so lots of what we got used to,love it or hate it,went to the dumpster.
Another thing...how would you be able to escort any naval transports with 1upt,even if the transport is a non unit the ground forces inside it are.So you couldn't have a frig/dest escort them in the same hex as they are both military units.Would you have to have 6 escorts surrounding the transport in each adjacent hex to deter sub attacks,that wouldn't work for an aerial attack though either.
I don't know,wait and see we'll have too...lots of questions and no logical answers.

 

[pi-r8]

In panzer general the land units can turn into naval transports. Basically any transport like that is extremely vulnerable, it's really to stop enemy ships (especially subs) from getting to it at all. So the basic strategy is to send your whole army all at once, and get them across as fast as possible. It makes sense- transports are always vulnerable. The Civ 4 style where you have to kill every single escort ship before you can kill any transports is strange and annoying IMO.

edit: and I imagine that missiles, instead of being a separate unit, might just be like "ammo" on the submarines. I'm not sure how aircraft carriers would work, though i'm sure they'll think of something.

 

[bonafide11]

I just hope that you will be able to select all your units and move them with 1 click, instead of moving each unit... and keeping their formation too... if you won't be able to do this, the wars will take tooooo long

That's a good point. When you have to send your whole army across the ocean, it'll be annoying having to move each unit one by one. It'd be nice if you could just have the game keep the formation and allow you to move the "stack" in a formation across the ocean. I doubt they'll allow that though.

 

[66th of Foot]

Agreed pi-r8 that transports are vulnerable no matter what and escort elimination is a problem.Could have something like a targeted ranged torpedo attack option then to get around that.As for missiles if they were 'ammo' and therefore non-units then might that apply to aircraft as well??? Who knows,its just not a logical answer to me.Whatever mechanics apply to units/situations that can't be explained as a plausible reason except for the purposes of 'thats just how it is' moves it further down the road to fantasy.If we have to accept it as that then we might as well have armored flying battle dragons as they couldn't be explained in a logical manner either.

 

[oynaz]

Well, the info so far states 4 domains: Air, land, sea and civilian, so excorting transports are perfectly within the rules - the transport is technically a land unit, so a naval unit in the same hex is allowed.

 

[SMA333M]

I doubt they'll allow that though

Well, in all Civs you can just select all and move them... so they should allow that here too...

 

[Theon]

They might actually announce other domains such as 'submarine' or 'missile' with their own set of rules, or maybe they can exempt some units like carriers from the 1 unit rule when it comes down to transporting aircraft.
However as SMA333M pointed out moving an entire invasion fleet manually 2 hexes each turn would become very tiresome indeed. I guess we'll have to wait for a demonstration of the actual gameplay to see how movement in general plays out.

 

[bonafide11]

Well, in all Civs you can just select all and move them... so they should allow that here too...

In all Civs, they also allow stacks on a single tile. Having units on different tiles completely changes that.

 

[Rusty Edge]

It is perplexing. Of course, there is a certain amount of balance to be had if cities, carries/subs and forts can only hold one air unit/missile each.

I'm wishing for a CivIII style army/fleet/airwing, but that might be unbalanced. They probably tested that.

We'll have to wait and see. Perhaps carriers, subs and missile criusers will be more like a battleship with long range blitz attacks than transports for air units and missiles.


I fear the game will become tedious if we are unable to move unit formations. On land formations will probably plod along one tile at a time, because the formation will have to keep pace with the slowest unit, and there will always be forests or mountains or something in the way. At sea islands would be impassable, so I hope formations have a go-to feature.

Another scaling problem, I guess, unless it will have battlefield maps like Pirates! or Total War.
I hope that scaling issues don't spoil my sense of immersion.

After all, the abillity to immerse myself in another place or another time, or as an immortal in a world of my own chosing , just to see what happens next, is what has made the series my hobby.

 

[The_J]

In panzer general the land units can turn into naval transports. Basically any transport like that is extremely vulnerable, it's really to stop enemy ships (especially subs) from getting to it at all. So the basic strategy is to send your whole army all at once, and get them across as fast as possible. It makes sense- transports are always vulnerable.

...and this system has been mentioned in one of the threads on weplayciv, which's informations are based on a magazin.

 

[Tomice]

Don't despair, my friends, the answer to all of your questions can be found in real life!

In a modern amphibious strike group destroyers are not stacked over transports, yet they are able to defend them!

How? Control zones!

A modern destroyers CIWS (close-in-weapon system) consists of automated machine cannons and AA missiles. If a hostile missile enters the control zone, they are intercepted in a second without human involvement. Since the missiles are based on stingers, they have a few kilometers range, modern ESSM even more. So the carriers/transports are kept within the control zones of the accompanying ships, but they stay as far away as possible to avoid nukes.

Back to the game:

What if armed ships can be set to "auto-intercept", fighting threats in an area? You would need to keep a number of ships around your troops, but not in a way that all 6 tiles around transports are covered? Totally realistic and fun IMHO. Naval control zones missed anyway, since ships later moved much further than range of sight.

To the other concerns:

Attack subs could have a ranged land attack, and SSBMs have one nuclear attack every three turns. Early subs have only torpedoes. Civ4 missiles could also be represented as missile trucks, a very long range land-based artillery.

Who says carriers as a unit can't be a fusion of the actual ship and its airwing? The argument against would be the possibility of suicide atacks (since you can't loose only one part of the merged unit) and the uselessness of missile cruisers having the same gameplay mechanic. So I'm not so sure about this one, but there are ways to make the new system fun! I somewhat believe the 1upt rule doesn't apply to air units, anyway. it would be strange to have either a bomber or a fighter in a city!

 

[bonafide11]

Tomice, you have an awesome signature.

 

[Yakk]

Nukes: Meh, just implement MIRV nukes. Fire your nuke, then select up to 5 targets within 10 hexes of each other to hit.

Given the high speed of naval vessels, and the ability for units on-ground to attack 2 hexes away, having a zone-of-control approach for modern naval vessels makes sense. When you move from 1 hex to another in the zone of control of a vessel that can detect you, it attacks you.

Ancient ships could have a ZOC of 1, Cannon ships a ZOC of 2, Destroyers 3, Battleships 4, and Aircraft carriers would have a ZOC set by their fighters (6+). Subs set on "intercept" would have a ZOC of 2 as well (but, by default, wouldn't).

With such ZOCs, you'd have to deal with enemy aircraft/ships before you could bring your transports in. And you'd escort your transports using your navy-the enemy could smash at a weak spot in your escorts and wipe out a bunch of your transports, risking a counter-attack.

 

[cspyr0]

I'm guessing there will be some ZOC stuff going on. But even without it the units will likely be considered non-military when they are in transport, which means that a destroyer could sit atop one transport to escort it. This would encourage a player to cultivate a large navy if they don't want their invasion fleet to get jacked on the way over. This is exciting because it means with a large navy you could damage or stop an invasion from even getting to your shores - this was always difficult for me to do in Civ4 because it meant I'd have to take out every single escort before I could destroy a single transport (not very strategic or realistic). This way you take out one escort and then you could destroy a transport!

I agree with Tomice that a carrier could have fighters/bombers built in. This would make a carrier an extended bombard unit which would work with the mechanics they've already revealed pretty well. There could be a stat on the unit that says how many sub-units it has like the carriers from starcraft.

 

[66th of Foot]

Don't despair, my friends, the answer to all of your questions can be found in real life!


Who says carriers as a unit can't be a fusion of the actual ship and its airwing? The argument against would be the possibility of suicide atacks (since you can't loose only one part of the merged unit) and the uselessness of missile cruisers having the same gameplay mechanic. So I'm not so sure about this one, but there are ways to make the new system fun! I somewhat believe the 1upt rule doesn't apply to air units, anyway. it would be strange to have either a bomber or a fighter in a city!

If you allow the fusion of carriers and its airwing as a single homogenous unit then you couldn't move land based fighters/attack aircraft onto that unit nor could you pull the airwing off the carrier if needed elsewhere.Cuts down on your flexibility to say the least.
Say I've got a CBG cruising off the bad guys coast but during the air actions these 'sub units' all suffer damage, I cannot swap them out for new air units,so now I'm left with a degraded airwing sitting on a useless,expensive target until they heal/repair which I have to protect with crus/dest.
This doesn't even get into the multiple mission scenario...say 1 sqdn on a recce mission,1 sqdn on attack mission,1 sqdn on escort duty and another sqdn for fleet defense.If its a 'fused' unit you couldn't assign separate missions to multiple sub units.
That would mean I'd need to use 4 carriers just to carry out 4 tasks...hardly efficient.
Getting into the limited number of units allowed as is mentioned everywhere else and increased maintainence costs then a single 'fusion' carrier/airwing would already be prohibitively expensive let alone the 2,3,4 plus escorts it would take to carry out the same tasks as 1 carrier with individual sqdns embarked and its escorts.

 

[trickofthehand]

The enemy civilization which is the target for the invasion would have a significant advantage in terms of air superiority over the attacker because of the sheer amount of space available for air units to be stationed

Just like in real life? We forget this because we watch on TV as American strike aircraft get launched from carriers and then zoom around Iraq and Afghanistan.

Carriers aren't meant to sit off the coast of a continent and go toe to toe with the local air force. They're meant to be constantly on the move, launching air strikes at select targets or providing air cover in select places. The key to their survivability in a major theatre war is evading enemy vessels or recon aircraft.

In truth, carriers no longer fit a role in a major theater war of equal power projections between combatants. They are horribly vulnerable and easily spotted via radar satellites, their only use would be in remote locations with extremely light fighting.

The reason the US keeps building them is because we don't expect anymore major theater wars versus industrialized nations.

 

[trickofthehand]

Cost of construction ALONE for a Nimitz class carrier (not counting attached air wing, training for personnel, fuel, maintenance, ordnance, food, etc...) is 4.5 billion dollars.


Cost of supersonic, stealthy cruise missile: 4 million dollars. Do the math.

Carriers are extinct, they just don't know it yet.

 

[Grimlin]

It is very possible to have multiple units on a tile... ie a carrier has 5 wings onboard but only one can provide aircover over the same tile. The other 4 however can fly someplace else as long as there are not 2 wings on the same tile.
So in the end, its impossible to have 2 flying wings on the same tile but 4 or whatever number of wings inside a carrier. You just have to launch them on different tiles in combat.