I really think people oversell the faults of 1UPT. CiV is so lacking in so many other areas that we feel the drawbacks of 1UPT more keenly.
Have you played a game on the Earth Map with accurate start locations as Rome? Try it some time and tell me that the 1UPT convention cannot be a game killer. Seriously. The Italian peninsula is 1 hex wide. That's 1 hex for a worker and a soldier and THAT IS IT. You cannot fit ANYONE else on that hex. Not now, not ever, not unless you use a mod, which pretty much defeats the purpose of 1UPT. You can modify the map this way or that, but the problem persists.
Plus, it's not just the map headaches or the micromanagement necessary. It's the fact that 1UPT necessitates a range of other design decisions to support it. Taken on its own, it's an annoying pain in the ass, but not an insurmountable one. Modding it away, though, still leaves plenty of other issues that need to be addressed which were -- apparently -- created to make 1UPT "work."
In every strategy game I've played with a tactical overlay, I felt like I had to play out every combat manually because it was rare that using auto-resolve or allowing the AI to control my units didn't feel like kicking myself in the head. I would do that for a week or three, until I had a good handle on the strategy side of it, and then I'd use the strategy side of the game to help me avoid needing to use the tactical overlay by always outnumbering the AI by enough to win without it. Battles almost always felt like chores. I generally only used tactical combat if I needed to cheese the AI to survive because I was hopelessly outclassed. When I think back at the games where I recall enjoying the combat, it wasn't the ones with particularly deep gameplay or strategy (like the Total War series), it was the extremely simplified and deterministic ones that made it fun to cheese the AI without it becoming boring, like Master of Orion 2 or Master of Magic. I can't imagine breaking the flow of a Civ game to play out a MoM or MoO2 style tactical battle every time units clashed, though. One of the things that is most appealing to me about the Civ series is how the strategy and tactics are integrated on one playfield. Civ5 has pushed the game even further that way, by removing most of the "Spreadsheet Overlay" (sliders) and moving their functionality to buildings and improvements.
I don't disagree with you, although I've always enjoyed MOO. Usually in MOO1 and MOO2, I had sufficient leads that I could eventually just autoresolve combat, although I did enjoy some battles. They could be a chore, though, no question.
But that, ultimately, is the nature of tactical combat. ANY tactical game is going to involve LONG battles. X-com, MOO1 and MOO2, Total War, Steel Panthers, Battleground, etc., etc., etc. The tactical battles take a while to resolve. This is why I say that I doubt people who like 1UPT actually really like tactical fighting. If they did, they wouldn't mind the "tactical phase." The problem is that, without MASSIVELY increasing the size of the game map, you cannot integrate tactical combat with the "main" screen in Civ. You just don't have the space.
So what's the solution? I'm not sure "autoresolve" is the perfect choice, although it's better than forcing people to fight the tactical battles (actually, often in Total War I'd skip the RTS battles and autoresolve to get back to the building!). I do, however, think there are other options.
I agree.
The problem with 1Upt without any sort of tactical overlay is that I think the scale problems irrevocably ruin both. Either I need to be able to build components (where components are different unit types serving different purposes) and group them into a unit to move around on a strategic map as a single entity under one entity per tile rule, or, I have to be able to tactically resolve individual unit combat.
That raises an idea that could combine elements of Civs 2-4 into something that would retain the "single screen" approach to combat, while still allowing for SOME thought to go into fighting, and avoiding simply "Big stack wins."
Here's one option for a system. Units can all be stacked on a single tile. You can move them together, or move them individually. The "top" unit is auto-selected to be the strongest unit vs. the unit that attacks it (a la Civ 4). However, if your "top" unit dies, your ENTIRE stack dies with it (a la Civ 2). Thus, there becomes a DISincentive to stack units, at least in close proximity to enemy troops. You could offset the disincentive by creating armies. An army becomes a single unit that gets combined strength and modifiers from its component units (a la Civ 3). So, your "stack" is no longer just a Pikeman standing "on top" of all your other units, who is royally screwed if he runs into a Maceman. You could create an army consisting of a maceman, pikeman, knight, and trebuchet, which would pretty much be able to take on any single unit and survive.
To balance out the strength of this unit, you could make it so that armies CANNOT be disbanded once created. You stick your unit in that army, and it's stuck. You can upgrade the individual units over time (IE: spearmen can upgrade to become pikemen even if the other units are still swordsmen and horsemen), but you cannot "unstack" them. Ever. This creates different considerations for how to compose your armies. Do you focus more on defense or offense? Are you primarily threatened by a particular type of enemy? Will your army be able to effectively garrison a city, or would that city be better defended by an army of nothing but archers? And so on and so forth.
Now, what's wrong with this idea? Well, for one thing, it strikes me as being INCREDIBLY gamey, and thus a bit immersion-breaking. But then, just about all combat in Civ strikes me as gamey and immersion-breaking. None of the Civ entries have effectively (to my tastes, anyway) modeled combat in a way that DIDN'T seem like "oh, these are just rules for the sake of rules." I think this comes from Civ 1 which was basically a straight board-game-on-your-PC in terms of how combat worked. Very basic rules, binary combat (you win or are destroyed utterly), etc. Each successive iteration has tried to address the flaws of the previous iteration, while introducing new flaws of its own, and each time, the new system is STILL gamey -- because it's trying to "fix" the LAST system which was, itself, gamey.
So, maybe a better way to approach this is to think in terms of what these concepts are designed to model. What is your real-world guide as far as what restrictions you want to place on combat, armies, etc., and what concepts do you NOT want to include because they're either too nitpicky or too "unfun" for a game? That's a very tough question to answer, and it is, I think, a question that many of the Civ games haven't even really bothered to ASK, let alone answer.
I think that's the biggest flaw in 1UpT thinking -- the idea that we can just organically grow a chessboard.... Chess 'works' not just because of the finely balanced pieces -- but because of the scale. Add another column or row (or multiple rows/column) on the board and it no longer works -- the attributes of the pieces no longer work and you can't just scale them up as a factor of rows/columns added.
It's extremely difficult to make tactical and strategic work on a map/board if you DON'T make a 'space' into a commodity (and that's basically what 1UpT does - it turns a tile into a commodity) -- previous Civ iterations with stacks did OK with it, but I think that once you cross that threshhold of commoditizing tile spaces for your units, you either have to make it a tactical map or a strategic map.
Well said. You can either "embiggen" the map to match the scale of the units, shrink the units to fit the scale of the map (IE: allow stacking), or create a two-tiered system with strategic and tactical views. But you can't do both strategy and tactics in the same view.
). One problem I have with it is that with the still predictable tech tree but missing random techs it's neither one thing nor the other. You will be tempted to think about a certain strategy beforehand and then frustratingly screwed out of the strategy by the RNG. I think you either need to go for a game where you take techs "as they come" and have little control over research at all, or a system like Civ where you can decide on a strategy and then be reasonably sure that you can implement it to some extent. If you want randomness, you could randomize tech paths, for example the Civ4 OR requirements could be used by only allowing one of each for every game instead of making them optional.
