Naokaukodem
Millenary King
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Yes, that's what I said. Stacks prevent tactic, that's why there are a problem.
Stacks of DOOOOOOOM: A solution?
- Thread starter Hans Lemurson
- Start date
Yes, that's what I said. Stacks prevent tactic, that's why there are a problem.
No, they prevent all but one strategy. I guess they do prevent tactics, too, but that is one of their positives, if anything. You don't have to be a Total War player to win a war.
But again, it's just unrealistic and ridiculous to have a group of units seemingly exponentially gain power with increasing numbers, when really the power curve should level out to an asymptote.
Well, a major reason that the power of stacks seemingly exponentially increases with more units is that of stack defence. If you have 2 units, you can attack with one, and have another to defend the next turn, whereas if you have 1 unit, you do not have that defensive fall back. If you have 3 units, then the attacking power of that same 1 attacking unit is higher still, as it has 2 units to fall back on. This creates an exponential pattern than extends for higher and higher numbers of units in a stack. AFAIK, this is the major reason why SoDs seem to exponentially grow in power. But furthermore, there is collateral damage. If there are 5 units in a stack, and two artillery attack, all units will be affected twice by collateral damage. However, if there are 10 units, all units will be affected only once by collateral damage. So, added to the increase power simply endowed upon the stack by numerical strength, there is additional real power for each extra unit, again resulting in exponential growth in power.
King Flevance
Deity
I have to disagree. I don't see how exponential penatlies deal with it better. I actually think it would make things simply more complicated. Hard caps don't rule out completely using stacks, it just makes stacks more vulnerable. (Because it forces "weakpoints" in the field. A Stack of Doom will not be the possible. (80+ units on 1 tile) However, Stacks of Doom will be used instead. (80+ units spread over 7+ tiles.) If you were to base this on map size hard caps are not a rediculous idea. If you have 200 units on a tile in an XXL world map game, its like units are giving other units piggy back rides and they are at full offensive and defensive and mobile capabilities in the process. It really isn't cutting anything out but more adding something in, logistics. (Which is basically a rule that says only X amount of something can fit in a certain area.) You could even have Logistics added on the tech tree to allow a civ to have the cap be raised from 12-15-20 units er tile to 15-17-22 and so on. Although I personally wouldn't have it raise a standard tile's holding capacity above 25.'
As for stacks representing "military buildup" multiple stacks can represent that too as if you have 80 units to their 50 and your two stacks fight, you have reinforcements whereas they do not.
Playing a game that hard caps tiles has tactics that get involved that are basically 1 of 2 things. Manueverability or Strength of the stack. Your stacks break down into multiple purposes after that. (Or areas of expertise.)
Not to mention by having the computer have to follow these rules as well I think it would have the computer be able to see more vulnerable weaknesses to exploit and hand more edge to the AI from the player in terms of warfare. I actually think the AI as is would pick up on this quite naturally as is.
If I have a stack of 120 units and you have a stack of 123 and we fight, then 243 units are having a battle on 1 tile. How did your cavalry outmanuever anything in that mess?flyingchicken said:
Nothing is wrong with abstraction too much but in a strategy game that obviously tries to make warfare a main focal point, its odd that THAT is where you would throw in the abstraction. That's where you say "eh, good enough... we don't wanna scare off the people that don't like warfare in games.
My problem is Civ is not a military game, however it seems like it is trying to be one and doesn't know how. Civ is a basic strategy game. However, the best strategy option is generic implementation of military. Civ need to make up its mind IMO.
Hans Lemurson
Prince
One more thing to consider:
If we do want alternate tactics other than the "Stack of Doom" to be viable, what would these other tactics be? (And yes, I mean tactics.)
If we do want alternate tactics other than the "Stack of Doom" to be viable, what would these other tactics be? (And yes, I mean tactics.)
Hans Lemurson
Prince
Ok, "Stack of Doom" is stategic rather than tactical in the sense of "Do I use a SoD or not?", but the way you deploy your forces and move them around the battlefield, that I will call tactics. Moving one single stack has very little tactical variety; moving multiple units of a more dispersed group into optimal locations, that uses tactics. Or rather, that is what I mean when I say "Tactics".
Now, as for talking about the density of forces involved by comparing tiles to their real-world land areas, I don't really think that's applicable. Sure you can probably fit half a million or more troops onto a tile on a large map(I won't debate exact figures), but also remember that the presence of a single military unit in all that area is enough to make it impassible to enemy armies. That level of area-control would challenge even modern armies. Thus, the way armies behave in Civ is as though the tiles represented a much smaller area.
Now, that aside I will reiterate my point: If one does not wish for Stacks of Doom, what would be the preferable alternative? By weakening stacks, what do you hope to achieve?
Naokaukodem
Millenary King
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But by your definition of "strategy", there can't be other strategies involving stacks, because precisely it occults any element of "tactics".
That's not always the case in reality, I think. Most of the time armies was exponentially stronger in reality. There are some circomstancies where it's not true, but it involves "tactic" elements like a funnel made by some forest for example.
King Flevance
Deity
Alright you made a good point there. I have never been one much for calculating civ into real world spaces. However, as Hans mentioned if that is the case, individual units (or stacks under 4) should then be invisible to enemy units as they are a small band of men in a vast land area and the odds of running across them in that tile are slim at best. maybe allow a 5% chance they will be spotted if an enemy unit steps on the same tile. (Or really substitute the word enemy for 'another player' in that paragraph.)
As Hans pointed out better, civ treats the tiles as if they are much smaller pieces of land. However, 12,908,375,487,836,183,459,970,837+ men could fit in that area if you could build them. And that is a game winning stack right there if there ever was one.
I assume you are reffering to this statement:
SO you don't think the best strategy option is generic implementation of military? Diplo victory is best done by "muscling" it in, domination and conquest are no brainers, Cultural can somewhat abstain but the computer is programmed to go offensive if you are about to achieve a cultural victory so military is required to a good extent. And Space is best achieved by having a large empire to pull commerce or food from which requires carving out a sizable portion of the map.Me said:
The bolded question will be debated forever as its preference. ANd how you weaken the stacks really is what will open up what you can achieve.Hans Lemurson said:
No, hard caps do quite definitely physically (and unrealistically) prevent Stacks of Doom. That is their entire point. They allow for what exponential penalties would only to a degree, but do not offer any penalty for units under the cap (so, if the cap was 25, an exceptionally low cap, IMO, then a stack 24 would have the benefits of being a stack, as opposed to under exponential penalties, where it would still be penalised for being a stack, just not as much as an even greater stack), and are completely unrealistic (as flyingchicken pointed out, although some liberties regarding scale need to be taken with civ). Exponential penalties, on the other hand, allow for the limitation of stacks, but still allow for the option to use them, if one so desires. This plus allowing for a myriad of particular penalties instead of one arbitrary cap, and allowing for an intuitive system (you would know that as you put more units on a tile, for instance, unit maintenance will become increasingly higher, and units will be increasingly vulnerable to collateral damage).
No. Having several small groups of units invading a coast line at various points, for instance, is still strategy. You are not manipulating the outcome of particular battles, you are directing the overall flow of troops.
Each extra troop an army has is not going to make as much difference as the one before it. For instance, if you have 1 soldier, the added benefit of having a 2nd will be higher than the benefit to the 2 troops of having a 3rd. Sure, more units still mean more power, but as the number of units in a stack increases, the asymptote is approached, the power curve (if you will) flattens out, so that 1000 units on a tile will effectively have the same total power as 1500 on a tile.
Naokaukodem
Millenary King
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But your distinction between strategy and tactics makes no sense... having several stacks instead of one is more close to an individual units war than a grand scale war. Having a battle between two stacks that is solved in one shot, like it is the case in every Civs, is the only way to have only "strategy" only driven wars.
I simply not agree. In reality, an army with 1500 soldiers have more chances to win against another army of 1000 soldiers than 1500 soldiers.
Hans Lemurson
Prince
I suggest that we cease bickering about the extremely difficult-to-define difference between tactics and strategy. Whether something is tactics or strategy will differ greatly depending on what scale you wish to look at things.
Now, Camikaze, you have always advocated for an "exponential" penalty whose slow but steady increase will render the total power of a stack logarithmic ensuring that additional units will always increase the power of a stack but at a continually decreasing marginal gain.
However, though I do agree with the spirit of the proposal, the mechanics of Civ4 so not lend themselves well to this, and it would be a non-transparent and largely incomprehensible penalty system to most players.
The reason that the combat-system of Civ4 doesn't lend itself well to this is a combination of two factors: The combat effectiveness of a unit is proportional to the Square of its power, and if you look at a graph of "Victory chance vs. Strength Ratio" you will see that it contains several discontinuities, the most significant ocurring at 1:1. The difference between 5v5 and 5v5.1 is immense. By having a slight advantage in terms of strength, the odds of victory go from 1:1 to closer to 2:1. In many places, a small strength difference will have a rather huge effect while larger differences will have a lesser effect in some areas. (This is due to the fact that damage-per-round increases for the attacker and decreases for the defender, and so there are points at which it takes an additional hit to kill the stronger unit, or one less hit to kill the weaker one) Basicly, there is a non-linear relationship between power and combat effectiveness. Remember that an Archer has over a 90% chance of defeating a warrior, even though it has a strength ratio of 3:2 (plus a first strike). So again, I do support the spirit and intentions of your proposal, but I do not believe that it would actually work out in the way in which you intend.
Now, and I think this was brought up earlier in the thread, it is always best to deal with things in terms of "Bonuses" rather than "Penalties". Given the difficulties in coming up with an effective means of penalizing the concentration of troops, I think there should simply be an increased benefit for somebody attacking a stack. We could simply take a page out of Alpha Centauri's combat system whereby a successful attack against a stack of units by ANY unit would result in collateral damage for the whole stack. No fancy system of increasing weaknesses for each additional unit to the stack; the units in a stack are simply more vulnerable to focused firepower.
I think though, that collateral damage to every unit in a stack might be a little severe, especially given that this would impinge on the role of catapults, but something similar would be good. Maybe each "Anti unit type X" promotion (Shock, Cover, Pinch, etc.) would enable that unit to be able to deal collateral damage to units of that type within a stack in a similar fashion to how cavalry units in BtS can deal collateral damage to siege units. This will increase the vulnerability of stacks and increase the necessity for the diversification of unit types and promotions.
Aside from this, Civ4 really has no existing mechanisms by which a "large army" might suffer the realistic penalties that a large concentration of forces might have. No Supply lines = no Supply problems, and no capacity to disrupt the enemy's Supply lines nor engage in "scorched earth" tactics to penalize invaders. This is the main reason one might want to disperse one's forces, the other being the potential of "being flanked", which again is non-existant in Civ4 as armies have no "flanks".
Providing an increased availability of collateral-damage is within the existing framework of Civ4, and requires only a simple modification to existing promotions.
edit: The main "jump points" for the increasing combat ratios occur around 1, 1.4, and 1.6 (1.387 and 1.571 if you really care). The rest occur at ratios that are already in the "guaranteed victory" range.
link: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/combat_explained.php
Now, Camikaze, you have always advocated for an "exponential" penalty whose slow but steady increase will render the total power of a stack logarithmic ensuring that additional units will always increase the power of a stack but at a continually decreasing marginal gain.
However, though I do agree with the spirit of the proposal, the mechanics of Civ4 so not lend themselves well to this, and it would be a non-transparent and largely incomprehensible penalty system to most players.
The reason that the combat-system of Civ4 doesn't lend itself well to this is a combination of two factors: The combat effectiveness of a unit is proportional to the Square of its power, and if you look at a graph of "Victory chance vs. Strength Ratio" you will see that it contains several discontinuities, the most significant ocurring at 1:1. The difference between 5v5 and 5v5.1 is immense. By having a slight advantage in terms of strength, the odds of victory go from 1:1 to closer to 2:1. In many places, a small strength difference will have a rather huge effect while larger differences will have a lesser effect in some areas. (This is due to the fact that damage-per-round increases for the attacker and decreases for the defender, and so there are points at which it takes an additional hit to kill the stronger unit, or one less hit to kill the weaker one) Basicly, there is a non-linear relationship between power and combat effectiveness. Remember that an Archer has over a 90% chance of defeating a warrior, even though it has a strength ratio of 3:2 (plus a first strike). So again, I do support the spirit and intentions of your proposal, but I do not believe that it would actually work out in the way in which you intend.
Now, and I think this was brought up earlier in the thread, it is always best to deal with things in terms of "Bonuses" rather than "Penalties". Given the difficulties in coming up with an effective means of penalizing the concentration of troops, I think there should simply be an increased benefit for somebody attacking a stack. We could simply take a page out of Alpha Centauri's combat system whereby a successful attack against a stack of units by ANY unit would result in collateral damage for the whole stack. No fancy system of increasing weaknesses for each additional unit to the stack; the units in a stack are simply more vulnerable to focused firepower.
I think though, that collateral damage to every unit in a stack might be a little severe, especially given that this would impinge on the role of catapults, but something similar would be good. Maybe each "Anti unit type X" promotion (Shock, Cover, Pinch, etc.) would enable that unit to be able to deal collateral damage to units of that type within a stack in a similar fashion to how cavalry units in BtS can deal collateral damage to siege units. This will increase the vulnerability of stacks and increase the necessity for the diversification of unit types and promotions.
Aside from this, Civ4 really has no existing mechanisms by which a "large army" might suffer the realistic penalties that a large concentration of forces might have. No Supply lines = no Supply problems, and no capacity to disrupt the enemy's Supply lines nor engage in "scorched earth" tactics to penalize invaders. This is the main reason one might want to disperse one's forces, the other being the potential of "being flanked", which again is non-existant in Civ4 as armies have no "flanks".
Providing an increased availability of collateral-damage is within the existing framework of Civ4, and requires only a simple modification to existing promotions.
edit: The main "jump points" for the increasing combat ratios occur around 1, 1.4, and 1.6 (1.387 and 1.571 if you really care). The rest occur at ratios that are already in the "guaranteed victory" range.
link: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/combat_explained.php
Trias
Donkey with three behinds
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I agree, I've been thinking about similar options. About this impinging on the role of catapults. I think we need to mover away of catapults directly attacking other stacks anyway. This would probably mean the return of ranged bombardment, which need to be nerfed in someway, probably by having a high damage cap. (let catapults do 10% damage max. or something)
Another option I've considered is basically the "support" mechanic from one of Soren's new web based strategy games "Conquest". It this game artillery effects combat by adding to the power of combats happening in adjacent tiles. This needs some modification to work in the Civ framework. The main issue being what to do with multiple artilleries. One easy rule would be to only allow strongest artillery piece in each tile to support adjacent combat. This is in the spirit of the current combat mechanics, but causes the issue that multiple artillery units in a stack are completely redundant. I does however provide an incentive to spread out once army, since having multiple stacks adjacent to a combat will increase your power, effectively introducing a "flanking" aspect into the game.
Hans Lemurson
Prince
Well, in the Soren Johnson game of which you speak, the benefits of artillery are not limited to one per territory; it is the total of all artillery in all the territories that border the location of the battle.
One problem with the system you propose is that it violates the "one unit, one battle" paradigm of Civ4 combat. I guess maybe artilleries could have a command of "support next combat" where they would lend a strength aid or provide collateral damage to the attack of the next unit you attack with. For multiple artilleries and multiple attackers, it would just be that the highest-strength artillery does the first supporting attack, and so on until all the artillery has been used. I'm not sure how that would work or what the consequences would be, or whether it would have any reasonable effect on the relative merit of stacks. It is reminiscent though of the Brigade system used in Hearts of Iron where a unit would have a brigade attached to it which would increase it's combat abilities in different ways.
Hearts of Iron also used a flanking system whereby if a province is being attacked from multiple directions, you gain an attack bonus for each additional direction. It also had "command limits" whereby there was a maximum number of units that could participate in an attack from one province at any given time (all subsequent units over the command limit would suffer a -75% combat penalty). This forced you to spread your army out so that you would be able to mount concentrated attacks from multiple directions as well as providing you with a flanking bonus.
(This cannot be elegantly implemented into Civ4 though, because it would require you to designate in advance which units would be participating in an attack from a particular tile, and then cause there to be an arbitrary combat penalty to further units making the same attack from that tile. You can't really apply this system to Civ4.)
But I do think that some form of "flanking" or other bonus for attacking from multiple directions would force people to spread out their forces to take advantage of this. Maybe. However, what all of this does is increase the tactical complexity of Civ4, which is good for some players, but not others, and especially not the AI. The "Stack Attack" function for rapidly resolving large numbers of combats speaks towards the ideal of simplifying combat and reducing micro-management. However, this would all be just fine in some sort of "Tactical Combat Mod".
The more I've thought about "Stacks of Doooom" (and the possible methods of reducing its effectiveness to encourage multiple smaller stacks), the more it seems that in many cases, "the cure is worse than the disease".
I think the main problem most people have with Stacks of Doom is that they violate the Spartan Battle Manual:
This might be a fruitful direction to explore in, though.
Interesting. I like it, I think.
I don't like this one, though; wrong scale.
And the cure for this is much steeper curves between unit strengths, I think.
If Civ A goes for lots of cities and building fifty legions, and Civ B at the same time focuses on tech development, does not have to spend the cost of maintaining a standing army, and so has four knights by the time Civ A has fifty legions, four knights being able to defeat fifty legions handily makes a stack of doom useless too Civ A.
Hail
Satan's minion
there is a pitfal, in that, if new techs would give units that where a lot stronger, civ would degenerate to a tech race, if the time required to build up an army exceeds the time required to research those techs
Just bringin my 5 short cents. If you have a SOD, that can easily defeat an enemy city, what kind of difference it would bring if you had to split your SOD into three miniSODs in order to defeat the enemy? If you are stronger, most likely you will win. There is the collateral anyway. If you have SOD of 40, the enemy has defenders, 15. If 5 of those defenders are arty, the collateral becomes significant already.
In my recent game on naval invasion. I had 11 infantry, 3 arty. Cyrus had in his city MechInf, some SAMs, + 2 arty. I landed into 3 different locations, all in striking distance of a city. Not surprisingly, Cyrus sent his artillery against me. If I had stacked, all my troops had propably taken some collateral. Now 1/3 of my invasion-group was spared.
And when it comes to someone earlier mentioning D-Day, in terms of map/square size, normandy was nothing but a single square, attacked by allied SOD, defended by some heer machine guns.
In my recent game on naval invasion. I had 11 infantry, 3 arty. Cyrus had in his city MechInf, some SAMs, + 2 arty. I landed into 3 different locations, all in striking distance of a city. Not surprisingly, Cyrus sent his artillery against me. If I had stacked, all my troops had propably taken some collateral. Now 1/3 of my invasion-group was spared.
And when it comes to someone earlier mentioning D-Day, in terms of map/square size, normandy was nothing but a single square, attacked by allied SOD, defended by some heer machine guns.
Precisely.
I'm not advocating one singular exponential penalty be arbitrarily applied. I'm advocating a number of penalties that have the effect of exponentially penalising stacks. So a combination of things, like getting rid of collateral damage limits, raising maintenance costs for the number of units on a tile, and even the benefits that you speak of, would achieve this end.
As for the rest, with it not being compatible with the Civ 4 combat system, well maintenance cost is in the game, so supply lines would not be necessary. However, supply lines may be needed for other penalties, but I advocate the introduction of automated, yet customisable supply lines. In fact, the introduction of supply lines into the game in itself would limit SoDs (with them needing to be broken up in order to protect the supply lines). So, yes, some penalties involved in limiting SoDs are not all that practical under the current combat system. But if anything, this calls for a review of the current combat system more than a review of an exponential penalty, which would seem perfectly fitting.
I don't think it would degenerate to a tech race any more than it degenerates to an arms race now.
And I think I've expressed my prefered shape of overall strategic landscape before; for it to be possible to defeat large armies by advanced tech, buy convrting them with culture, or by bribing, each of these effects being powerful, so that following any one line of development exclusively gets you hammered by someone with a complementary one, and winning the game requires skilled development in all those directions.
bob rulz
Prince
Heh, perhaps this is my fondness for Civ III over Civ IV bleeding through. I realize that in Civ IV you're required to have a lot more units because you have to have a lot more variety. So yes, in that case, 15-20 would be limiting. But I mean, you could have another stack of 15-20 units in the square next to it so I don't think that would be excessively limiting.
But I'm just gonna go all-out and say that there is no need to limit the power of the Stack of Doom and that it should stay as it is.
bob rulz
Prince
On another note, I think the easiest way to limit the power of the Stack of Doom would be to place more emphasis on defense. There needs to be a lot more Zone-of-Control defensive abilities. Having a number of stationary defenses along your border should be able to significantly weaken an approaching army, which could force the other player to change their strategy a la Germany invading France through Belgium in World War II instead of taking on France's defensive front head-on.
