The argument in favor of 2 units per tile (military)

[jpinard]

I've seen people say they want giant stacks, and others say they like 1 unit per hex.

But honestly, when you have a lot of Civs at prince level and above, 1 unit per hex is awful. The map becomes a solid mass of units. There is no longer any strategy whatsoever. In my current game at Prince, 75% of the giant world mass is occupied by units. Movement and management of armies isn't just a nightmare, it's impossible with so many differing political setups.

My solution, is 2 units per hex for the following reasons:

#1 - The graphics engine can already handle it (workers coupled with army units)

#2 - The AI can, to a certain extend, already handle it.

#3 - You can still bottleneck areas, yet you've potentially free up 50% of the tiles for movement.

#4 - As in real life, you could easily cycle units to the front as opposed to how it works now.

#5 - The AI would be much more capable at higher difficulty levels with stacked high level units.

#6 - Lots of units does not equal intelligence. It just means more tedium.

#7 - Turns could potentially be faster since routing would be easier.

#8 - Stacks of Doom would not be game-breaking, but you'd still have the ability to have a premier fighting combo.

#9 - Having units on almost every single tile on the whole map looks stupid, plays stupid, and ruins the game.

 

[Bandit17]

I would add that it would help the ai in that the ai seems to suffer the most in congested contests. The ai would also be able to attach it's general to a stack instead of keeping it in their capital. Another idea is to move stack limits up to 3 units with combined arms bonuses with the right mixture of units. The ai could also avoid those suicidal water crossings by attaching an escort to their disembarked units. Having a 1 or 2 more unit per hex can also free up our road networks and would stop the one unit block fiasco. If you want to build that city where that neutral warrior is just move your settler on top of him and create your city. Even have your settler wave at the warriors as they put up their houses and barns....

 

[jpinard]

I would add that it would help the ai in that the ai seems to suffer the most in congested contests. The ai would also be able to attach it's general to a stack instead of keeping it in their capital. Another idea is to move stack limits up to 3 units with combined arms bonuses with the right mixture of units. The ai could also avoid those suicidal water crossings by attaching an escort to their disembarked units. Having a 1 or 2 more unit per hex can also free up our road networks and would stop the one unit block fiasco. If you want to build that city where that neutral warrior is just move your settler on top of him and create your city. Even have your settler wave at the warriors as they put up their houses and barns....

I fully support this idea as well. Right now, 1 unit per hex has no strategic value on most maps with many civs. It's a big mess.

 

[greggbert]

I'm playing on King right now, I have about 10 units and I'm the number 1 civ. No big masses of units, perhaps you are playing on large or huge map instead of standard? Perhaps you are playing epic or some other setting? Not sure.

Two units per hex would be disasterous in my opinion. I do not want to click on every enemy unit to see how many and what type are there. That was bad enough with just a single stack to worry about. NOT WANT! It would be cumbersome and confusing. Sometimes a simple approach is better even if you forgo some benefit because a great game is as simple and elegant as possible and not bogged down by obvious and clunky work-arounds.

Sure 1UPT can make gameplay clunky sometimes in a bottleneck situation, but it's still completely natural in the way it feels

 

[}{ELL/\/()]

I wouldnt make it a simple 2 units, maybe 1 standard 1 ranged, or 1 standard 1 mounted/mobile. The other option would be to allow armies of say 3 units or something. But I have a feeling this will come in a 30$ expansion.

Also they do need to allow stacking of non combat units (hey if they want to keep only 1 working/tile/turn thats fine) it just becomes a huge pain trying to build roads.

 

[fendrake]

I don't think 2-unit stacks are the solution. First of all, I have yet to see the problem mentioned, where the board is littered with units. And if this were the case, I would suggest that it is a problem with maintenance costs being too low for the AI. They can be given a bonus in some other way if need be.

I do find worker-juggling annoying, and realized that workers are just kind of annoying in general. Maybe it makes sense to simply not have worker units at all. Tile improvement around cities can be done by the citizens, perhaps automatically upgrading a tile as it works it. Road building would be done by military units. Then we wouldn't have to always watch our workers in the case of barbarians, and takes away worker-jacking which is perhaps too powerful, random, exploitive, etc depending on the situation.

 

[UknowsI]

In my opinion, the hardest thing with combat right now is to defend your ranged units. Since most of them can't shoot over hills or forests, they can't stand right behind your fortified defensive unit in a forest/hill and shoot, which makes it a lot harder to attack. With 2 units per tile it would all be about fortifying the best spots with ranged units doing the damage. That's kind of how sieges worked in Civ 4, so I guess some people will like that more.

 

[Charybdis]

The problem is one of supply. The AI can build units, so they do, and then it floods the area.

Make the supply from cities taper off quicker after say city 3 or 4 so you can have a moderate military without having to invest infastructure (ie, one unit garrisoned in each city, 3-4 workers and an army of a few melee, couple seige and few cavalry sounds reasonable).

If you want more, you have to invest in military buildings to help increase your supply, rather than it all coming from city count (does it come from city size as well?)

 

[jpinard]

I don't think 2-unit stacks are the solution. First of all, I have yet to see the problem mentioned, where the board is littered with units. And if this were the case, I would suggest that it is a problem with maintenance costs being too low for the AI. They can be given a bonus in some other way if need be.

I do find worker-juggling annoying, and realized that workers are just kind of annoying in general. Maybe it makes sense to simply not have worker units at all. Tile improvement around cities can be done by the citizens, perhaps automatically upgrading a tile as it works it. Road building would be done by military units. Then we wouldn't have to always watch our workers in the case of barbarians, and takes away worker-jacking which is perhaps too powerful, random, exploitive, etc depending on the situation.

Then up the difficutly a bit and run with more Civs:
I'm seeing the problem on prince level. NOTE: This is not my screenshot.

 

[Jediron]

Two units per hex would be disasterous in my opinion. I do not want to click on every enemy unit to see how many and what type are there. That was bad enough with just a single stack to worry about. NOT WANT!

Can easaly be solved by a simple "mouseon" command : so that the two units will shift positions, every 1 a2 sec or so. Then you see in a glance, what's there.

 

[jpinard]

Two units per hex would be disasterous in my opinion. I do not want to click on every enemy unit to see how many and what type are there.

DUDE... have you even played the game? There are symbols for every single unit in the game. If units are doubled on a hex YOU ALREADY SEE BOTH IN THE GAME. Most powerful unit gets the sprite displayed.

For the zoomed way out strategic view, most powerful unit gets displayed. Maybe a bolded outline of the icon to show there's more than one. This is a very easy thing to implement since it's already been done a bunch of times before. I'm not saying this has to be the answer, but it could be the best option between stacks and single units.

 

[Grimberht]

I fully support this idea. The 1upt is a way too drastic solution to the SOD. 2 units per tile would give the game deepness, add some strategic value to war without hurting the tactical too much.

I think we need a better city defence mechanism. A garrison unit should be defeated and not should "vanish" with a defeated city. It would definitely make it tougher to capture one especially if there's 2 units in the garrison.

 

[Camikaze]

Why 2? It's completely arbitrary and doesn't make any realistic sense.

 

[jpinard]

Why 2? It's completely arbitrary and doesn't make any realistic sense.

Because it's a good option with the current game code. It's not just an arbitrary number, but one that works with the current interface, the graphics, and the engine. Doesn't my first post kind of say that? The AI would need added code to handle it, but it's not impossible. Most of the other suggestions throw out practically the whole game.

 

[Camikaze]

You're right in that it perhaps isn't arbitrary in terms of functionality and minimum changes to the game, but any particular number could be made to work without too many drastic changes, I would think. If you had 3 units per tile, for instance, it would not be all that different. 4, neither.

I just have a pet peeve with the choice of a number that no reason other than functionality, where it only has a marginal benefit over other randomly chosen numbers.

 

[UknowsI]

Don't you see any problems with the fact that it makes positioning irrelevant for defending your ranged units?

 

[PieceOfMind]

Moderator Action: Moved to Ideas and Suggestions

 

[joncnunn]

Many SSI games had a 2 units per hex limit.
They also featured "traffic jams": If not on a road hex and you stacked up the unit, it resulted in an extra MP used.

An attack on a stack unit was an attack on both; but you also could attack them with every unit already adjoining in a single combined attack.

Some of them even featured splitting and joining units as well. If that were added as well there'd be little point in having N higher than 2 since on a choke point you could easily have a Tank division composed of 5 Tank companies and an Artillery division composed of 3 Artillery companies.

The AI still has trouble keeping it's ranged units behind a screen; 2 UPT would definitely help the AI.

I've seen people say they want giant stacks, and others say they like 1 unit per hex.

But honestly, when you have a lot of Civs at prince level and above, 1 unit per hex is awful. The map becomes a solid mass of units. There is no longer any strategy whatsoever. In my current game at Prince, 75% of the giant world mass is occupied by units. Movement and management of armies isn't just a nightmare, it's impossible with so many differing political setups.

My solution, is 2 units per hex for the following reasons:

#1 - The graphics engine can already handle it (workers coupled with army units)

#2 - The AI can, to a certain extend, already handle it.

#3 - You can still bottleneck areas, yet you've potentially free up 50% of the tiles for movement.

#4 - As in real life, you could easily cycle units to the front as opposed to how it works now.

#5 - The AI would be much more capable at higher difficulty levels with stacked high level units.

#6 - Lots of units does not equal intelligence. It just means more tedium.

#7 - Turns could potentially be faster since routing would be easier.

#8 - Stacks of Doom would not be game-breaking, but you'd still have the ability to have a premier fighting combo.

#9 - Having units on almost every single tile on the whole map looks stupid, plays stupid, and ruins the game.

 

[SpearMan153]

if you were really set on 2upt (not really a fan of any of the xupt suggestions that I've seen so far) you could probably make a system that worked quite well with 1 melee, 1 ranged per hex. you'd want to reduce range by 1 and have both units displayed at the same time on the map though

The real issue in my view is allowing all those units to be built in the first place. I dislike unit spam whether combat is 1upt, xupt or uupt

 

[kekekeke]

If you want to play tactical combat game there are other better choices for that than civilization. Imo civ should focus on empire management and fighting wars with armies, not with individual archers.

Allow stacks of dooms. Penalize stacks with good amount of collateral damage and/or management of supply lines. Problem solved.