Things I have waited for since the first Civ

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

frekk said:
I'll send you a screenshot sometime. It's happened more times than I can remember. What you're discounting here is the power of overwhelming force. 50 units can *easily* encircle and trap 10 units. It can't be a one-to-one battle, either in the real world or in the game. You need a good 4 to 1, or 5 to 1 advantage. And one thing you've forgotten: Armies. A Cavalry army can quite easily defend against a few attacking Cavalry. It also gets an extra move. Having 5 or 6 Cavalry armies is not outside the realm of possibility at all (not to mention you can use infantry or something to block the first squares). So it is not at all impossible; it is just a question of correct planning and use of all the elements of the game, as well as a bit of luck. Same thing with the Normandy example. I land 11 Armies of infantry (4 inf ea) in Normandy, and use some paratroopers in addition to slow down the opposition, 40 tanks is NOT going to cut it. Even if it does, my second wave of reinforcements is going to land succesfully in a country with, for all practical purposes, no military at all, a looming Soviet threat, and a third front in Italy. 11 Armies is far from being impossible for 2 powerful civs in the late Industrial era to muster.

I don't doubt that you can accomplish an encirclement with overwhelming force... if you outnumber the enemy 5 to 1 then you can do pretty much whatever you want.

However, there are instances of smaller armies encircling and destroying larger ones. As it stands now though, you do need around 5 or 6 to 1 odds to accomplish it, simply because the fast units are weak on defense and will suffer high casualties for jumping out ahead of their defensive escorts.

With regards to your other topic, if 11 Armies of Infantry were being landed, that's a completely different situation from what I described.

If you have a second wave of an equal number of units then you're going to win anyways if all the Germans have is 40 Tanks. Again, you're talking about massive numerical advantage.

Limiting the number of tiles units can move deals with the problem of the Normandy inaccuracies (to some degrees - 10 tiles is probably still too much on most maps though) but it doesn't cope with encirclement very well, since already, all units with more than 1 move point could escape a city using just roads. And what is the point of trapping a bunch of defensive units in a city? None. The only way I can see solving the encirclement problem, is to limit the *number* of units a civ can move by rail. That way he could rescue his forces through a single tile still, but, not all of them and he would be forced to give up the possibility of bringing in any reinforcements anywhere by rail that turn. It also copes well with the Normandy scenario, since the German response to the invasion would of necessity be a limited one.

I see no problem with limiting the number of units that can be transported also. If you allow units to use enemy roads then it also opens up new possibilities for strategy. If Tanks can move 6 tiles on enemy roads and Infantry only 3, then it would be quite easy to hunt down wandering Infantry or trap armies.

First up, army stacks *are* a bandaid. We already have stack movement. Second, infinite rail is not an addition to the game - rail has been infinite in the game ever since the beginning, and it is probably the most popular strategy game of all time.

Just because it's always been in doesn't mean it's not also always been a bandaid.

The issue of having to deal with a bunch of units and managing them has always been around. I anticipate the use of units will be even easier in Civ 4, particularly if infinite RR movement is done away with.

The overwhelming micromanagement necessary in the end-game has always been a Civ feature also, but that doesn't mean it should be kept...

Keep the good, alter or replace the bad. What is good and what is bad may vary upon who you ask, but "it's always been in" isn't enough to justify something making a repeat appearance.

You're resting your argument here on the unfounded assumption that the popularity of these areas is due to a single feature they lack, when in fact, they lack alot of features. High unit count, for one. Lots of cities and overall micromanagement, for two. The plain fact is that a turn in the later part of the game takes a long time, with alot of waiting and pointless clicking, and it probably more than sufficiently accounts for the disinterest in these eras. Retarding unit movement to a comparitive crawl isn't going to help that at all.

And like I said, those are problems which can and should be dealt with. I also believe that if all of these other problems were dealt with then infinite movement would have a lot fewer supporters...

But these *are* all changes to how the game is played. The game is not played that way now. The game as it is now, as it has been throughout its highly popular history, has infinite rail movement. Keeping it isn't a change. To change it, it has to be a system that will be proven to be equally popular as the game is now. I'm saying that the complete elimination of all infinite rail movement is going to make unit management harder. Infinite rail makes large amounts of units easier to handle, and it doesn't "change how the rest of the game is played" because that's how it's always been played. I can abide some limitations to the rail system, limiting its total capacity for instance, or a movement cost which still allows some measure of rapid long-distance transit, 20 squares or something. 10 tiles is ridiculous - cavalry can ride on a road that fast almost.

So reduce the bonus that roads give to 2x.

And who is to say how popular infinite RRs really are? If the end-game is so unbalanced and tedious for most people to play, maybe the reason it's still around is because nobody ever actually plays the eras in which RRs are around.

I'm looking at it from an objective standpoint. If things were fine as they were then there wouldn't ever be a need for sequals because there would be no need for change. Saying "it's been around, it's fine" doesn't cut it.

It seems to be a popular formula, actually. But I agree there could be some changes made. What I'm essentially saying though, is that you'll NEVER be able to model Normandy or Stalingrad perfectly in Civ, not even close. It's hard enough to do in a game specifically dedicated to modern war, let alone Civ, which is dedicated to alot of other things. I don't see anything concrete you've suggested to manage alot of units - stack movement (we have that already since PTW), worker automation (have it already and even with all workers fortified and doing nothing, a modern turn is still alot of management), etc. I only see a proposal to make it harder to manage alot of units, without any real ideas about how to compensate and make it easier that we don't already have. I've seen very very few proposals that will signifigantly reduce the workload of the game, the only one that comes to mind is the idea of getting rid of worker units. And I don't think that will reduce management all that much.

I tried to stay away from that arena because I try to stick to one topic at a time.

Do you honestly think that there is no way of reducing the micromanagement of the latter part of the game? I find that to be a rather pessimistic way of looking at things.

Anyways, I'll try not to get too detailed... one topic at a time, after all, though I'm sure you'll probably grab this one and run with it anyways.

The micromanagement of units can be assisted through the grouping of units into actual armies units. They would move together and there would be an interface which would easily allow the creation, splitting and joining of "armies."

A lot of city micromanagement is due to "waste." Not in the literal Civ 3 definition of it, but when a city grows all excess food is lost. Same for shields on builds and gold on techs. Have it carry over and you'll reduce a lot of the city MMing. An improved domestic screen would make it easier to manage many cities without having to babysit them.

Workers are a bit more tricky. The use of Worker gangs would help, along with the ability to queue up tasks for units to do, so you could plan things out ahead of time and simply watch them run later on without babysitting a bunch of Workers and having to worry about what everone is doing. Obviously there is only so much you can do, so an improved automated Worker AI would help. The ability to set preferences like roading, irrigating, mining, and so on would allow players to customize certain types of tasks for Workers and less babysitting.

Anyways, there's more that can be done, but that's not what this topic is about...

Are you saying people play Civ now, and they do so with "quite a bit of strategic thinking" and it is "certainly much more than whoever has the biggest army wins, even with the largest campaigns" ???

Because they're doing it with infinite rail right now.

I'm actually saying the opposite.

Certainly there's some strategy involved, but once you lay down rails then it becomes MUCH more dependent on numbers. I've played Civ 3 almost daily since its release in late 2001 (sadly, no, I'm not exaggerating

) against high AI difficulty levels, in Democracy Games against AI and human, in a multitude of PBEM games and in over 100 Conquests MP games. In almost every situation - especially in which RRs are involved - the side with the most units wins... except, of course, for defenders who are always at an advantage, especially with RRs.

Anything else is just a supposition as to how it would be played without it, since nobody has.

Assuming Civ 4 has gotten rid of infinite movement, in which case there are people who have played without it, and if so, then I trust their judgement...

Plus, I don't see how sending all your units by goto to the front and slowly waiting for them to arrive is fundamentally going to change anything. It will still be 'who has the biggest army wins', you're only adding a waiting game to the process. There isn't any additional strategy involved - you send them off, and wait for them to arrive. You're still faced with the same old problem, biggest army wins. Again I can think of a rail solution to this - limiting total rail capacity per turn - that would require you to use your movement strategically, carefully, and selectively. To make choices and sacrifices, rather than just issuing a pile of gotos to the same general location, round after round.

If you have a limit to how many units you can move then you still have to babysit the ones that aren't moved. I'm assuming the limit would have to be a fair amount less than the total number of units a civ has, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point in adding the limitation, no?

Preventing the ability to move troops from Stalingrad to D-Day certainly adds more strategy. You have to worry about defending both areas with a fewer amount of troops on each front, instead of being able to gang up with all units on a single front. With fewer troops you have to consider your moves more carefully. Rather than 50 Tanks and 60 Artillery fighting against 40 Infantry and 10 Tanks which land at Normandy, it might be 20 Tanks and 25 Artillery against those 50 units. You have to decide whether to fight on the beaches and possibly lose quite a few units, only to also get bombed, or to fall back and wait for a better shot at attacking.

Plus, if you do decide to fall back from the beaches, and the enemy begins penetrating on one of your flanks, the inability to zap between locations on the same front instantly means you have to better consider when to retreat and give ground in order to have a shorter front. Certainly if you're working under the 10 tile (or whatever) RR limit then there's not much to consider, but in that case you're dealing with something like the Italian front in WWII, when it was basically a slug fest - which I have no problems with, in certain situations. It's places like the East Front in 1941 where infinite RR movement has its greatest effect.

To me, its just a proposition that adds complexity, and an assumption that somebody else can or will make the game simpler to make room for the new idea ... well, you can't count on that, and there are lots of competing ideas that add layers of complexity and tedium, what should we make room for? I think new ideas should be self-sufficient in terms of adding complexity, that is, a zero sum balance or as close to it as possible, rather than counting on other elements becoming simpler to make room. Maybe they will actually be more complex and if every area of the game decides to add a little complexity and tedium to implement new features, more accuracy, or more balance, the game is overall going to be *alot* more complex. If you're going to change rail for the sake of improving gameplay and balance, it will have to be in a way that addresses those problems without signifigantly creating other ones.

I don't see why you believe so fervently that changing the game in other areas must make it more complex as a whole. People can tend to head down that road, but it's not a necessity.

You've said yourself that the end game is full of excessive micromanagement. Even infinite RRs as they exist now doesn't assist that much. If the game is changed in certain ways it may make it less complicated as a whole, to the point where infinite RRs wouldn't even reduce the amount of micromanagement necessary. I believe that's possible to do. I don't think that it's necessary.

I think units can be dealt with in a way alternate of how it works in Civ 3 in order to cut down on the micromanagement. If that is accomplished, then alll infinite movement does is take away from the strategy of the game.

sir_schwick · Nov 21, 2004

Here are some ideas that might give ideas for how to approach these issues.

CONCEPT

Before you can enjoy the benefits of your naval/land/air infrastructure you must invest in the vehicles of that infrastructure. Many times the infrastructure that feuled your economy in peace times provides logistics in war time. In Civ terms this means that in order to increase your economic/logistical potential you must invest production(shields) into increasing that infrastructure. For wars this infrastructure will help move your troops where they are needed faster and more efficiently. Otherwise this infrastructure determines the trade capacity of your nation. More capacity means more trade arrows flowing through your territory.

Spoiler CONCEPTS BROKEN DOWN BY MEDIUM OF TRANSPORT :

I will refine these ideas once I get some sleep.

INVESTING IN INFRASTRUCTURE

Each medium would have a 'transport pool' you built into. You would build transport units like any other improvement. There would be a base cost based on the technology being utilized. However, what you produce goes into the appropriate pool. Whenever you need transport for military reason it comes out of the pool. The economy will try to utilize, up to its maximum activity, what is left of the transport pool. There will still be purely military transport units you can build for combat situations, but the ones I am describing handle getting from one battle to the next or peacetime.

Spoiler EXAMPLE :

TRADING

Each city will produce a plethora of goods and services based on local resources, culture, production, population, and technology. Obviously the market for these goods and services could be domestic and international. Either way there is an amount of transportation infrastructure that is required to recieve all the benefits of that trade. If that infrastructure does not fully exist you only get the portion that does exist.

Spoiler WHICH GOOD/SERVICE GETS SOLD FIRST? :

Spoiler WHICH TRANSPORT MEDIUM WILL BE USED? :

ROADS

Information pending sleep.

RAIL

Information pending sleep.

SEA

Each time you build a 'Shipping System' you add to the Marine Freight Pool(definitely needs a different name). When they are not transporting troops and supplies, they are transporting large amounts of cargo. All this cargo is represented by ships travelling between source and destination ports. Protecting these ships is vital or else you lose your original investment and the trade from that route.

AIR

Information pending sleep.

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

frekk said:
You've said that 'biggest army wins' is a problem you're trying to resolve by changing rails, but I don't see how it affects it in the least. Even if it takes time to reach somewhere, it is still 'biggest army wins'. Sure - Little Army can launch some surprise attacks to take a city or two before Big Army can respond. But Big Army is still going to respond. And poor Little Army when Big Army launches a surprise attack. He won't just be taking a city or two. Rail movement rates do not in any way fundamentally affect this dynamic. Yes, you make it easier to go on the offensive and more difficult to defend. This actually favours the larger army, not the smaller one.

It is assumed that usually, but certainly not always, that a civ with a larger army will also have a larger amount of territory to have to defend. Assuming the guy who's larger is facing more enemies, the fact that he has a much larger army won't be as much of a factor, since he won't be able to teleport his units across the map to fight different foes on different turns with most of his offensive and artillery forces.

In a more specific situation, yes, the USSR should be able to defeat Poland in a 1v1 war. It's when the USSR has to fight Germany in Eastern Europe, Britain in the Caucausus, China in southeast and Japan in the east that my greatest concerns come to the surface. The ability to transport a civ's entire Tank Corps from Vladivostok to Brest-Litovsk is not the paramount of balance or strategy, even if you limit the number of units that can actually be whisked 4000 miles away.

In a 1v1 situation, the limit of rails prevents one civ or another from rapidly containing a breakthrough. Yes, this hurts both the attacker and the defender, both the stronger and the weaker parties, but it also means that offensives are easier to carry out. A smaller nation that wants to gamble a bit and go on the offensive (ala Napoleon in northern Italy in the late 1790s) actually has a shot at splitting up two enemy armies and defeating them individually. Take an important RR junction (since obviously we don't want RR sprawl everywhere in Civ 4

) and the more numerous enemies will have a harder time meeting, giving the attacker a better chance at victory.

You say you think you've argued effectively why unit management can be dealt with to make up for the increased difficulty imposed by removing rails. I must have missed that part. All I saw was some very vague suggestions about stack movement (have it since PTW), Armies (had them since Vanilla) and worker automation (have it since PTW).

You don't think those can be more effectively implimented?

I was vague on purpose. There's many possibilities that can be explored in that department, but I was keeping my focus on infinite movement just to keep the discussion contained. To be frank, I'm surprised that you don't think there's any solution to unit tedium besides infinite movement (which obviously isn't helping much anyways).

frekk · Nov 21, 2004

Trip said:
With regards to your other topic, if 11 Armies of Infantry were being landed, that's a completely different situation from what I described. If you have a second wave of an equal number of units then you're going to win anyways if all the Germans have is 40 Tanks. Again, you're talking about massive numerical advantage.

Second wave is massive numerical advantage, but having 11 Armies is the same number of units as you gave in your model, just a different choice of units. Strategy.

I anticipate the use of units will be even easier in Civ 4, particularly if infinite RR movement is done away with.

Now that's just crazy talk.

Keep the good, alter or replace the bad. What is good and what is bad may vary upon who you ask, but "it's always been in" isn't enough to justify something making a repeat appearance.

Sure, but keeping something is not "changing the game". You were talking like keeping the rail model we use now would "change the game".

And like I said, those are problems which can and should be dealt with. I also believe that if all of these other problems were dealt with then infinite movement would have a lot fewer supporters...

Maybe, maybe not. How do you know with all the other things people want to see that there will be any room for added complexity over something as relatively trivial as rail movement?

And who is to say how popular infinite RRs really are?

Who is to say it's unpopular? A few (how many is quite questionable) people on this board don't like it, I wouldn't exactly say that's going to be any indication of how succesful it would be with the general public.

If the end-game is so unbalanced and tedious for most people to play, maybe the reason it's still around is because nobody ever actually plays the eras in which RRs are around.

Maybe. But I think it would be alot more rational to assume it had something to do with too many units, too many cities, and too much territory that all looks the same.

I'm looking at it from an objective standpoint. If things were fine as they were then there wouldn't ever be a need for sequals because there would be no need for change. Saying "it's been around, it's fine" doesn't cut it.

Doesn't mean you've picked the right element for change. Not everything needs to be changed. Would you like to turn it into a realtime game because keeping it turn based ("it's been around, it's fine") doesn't cut it? Change for the sake of change is ridiculous. There has to be an overall advantage for a change, and it has to come out on the plus side. You can't just implement a change and not consider its drawbacks and leave it up to magic to compensate for them.

Do you honestly think that there is no way of reducing the micromanagement of the latter part of the game? I find that to be a rather pessimistic way of looking at things.

Of course, the micromanagement can be reduced. But I don't think finite rail movement is going to do it. That's going to increase micromanagement. If you don't believe me, start up a game, and take out railroads. Call me back when you've got to Modern Armour and tell me how it's going. If retarding unit movement to a crawl is going to reduce micromanagement, you should have a really fun late game. :mischief:

The micromanagement of units can be assisted through the grouping of units into actual armies units. They would move together and there would be an interface which would easily allow the creation, splitting and joining of "armies."

Like I said, stack movement is *already* fully implemented, at least after PTW. It hasn't helped much, ask anyone. It's more beneficial to move your units individually because it creates a delay to gather them into stacks, and they therefore arrive later. If there is a benefit to micromanagement, it sucks, because then if you don't do it you know you're not getting the most out of your turn.

Notably, gathering forces into stacks would also be ten times harder without railroads.

Workers are a bit more tricky. The use of Worker gangs would help, along with the ability to queue up tasks for units to do, so you could plan things out ahead of time and simply watch them run later on without babysitting a bunch of Workers and having to worry about what everone is doing. Obviously there is only so much you can do, so an improved automated Worker AI would help. The ability to set preferences like roading, irrigating, mining, and so on would allow players to customize certain types of tasks for Workers and less babysitting.

First up, same problem with gangs as there is with stacks. Second up, queing would be a nightmare, the same as automation is now. When you get some new improvement to build, you'll have to go around and un-automate all your workers. Also there is no way to remember what you've got in queue for every worker so you will get lots of workers moving to tiles to do tasks, that are already finished. More waste, that micromanagement will reduce (and thus players will micromanage to get the most).

Second up, the improved Worker AI already exists. Advanced Unit Actions were implemented with PTW (I'm beginning to get the feeling you've only played Vanilla here) that allow workers to be automated to specific tasks, like build irrigation only, build roads only, build at this city only, etc.

Anyways, there's more that can be done, but that's not what this topic is about...

I know, but what I'm saying is that solutions have to be simple and carry their own weight, without assuming that other parts of the game are going to become any more simple. Likely alot of new features that we haven't even thought of are going to be included in the game, which is going to require more "room" in terms of complexity and demand that existing features, be simplified, not made more complex.

Assuming Civ 4 has gotten rid of infinite movement, in which case there are people who have played without it, and if so, then I trust their judgement...

Trust your own judgement. Remove railroads from an Epic game on Martha Singer's World Map, or at least a Huge map. Play it out.

If you have a limit to how many units you can move then you still have to babysit the ones that aren't moved. I'm assuming the limit would have to be a fair amount less than the total number of units a civ has, otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point in adding the limitation, no?

I'm thinking you would start moving about 5 units in the days of rifle and cavalry, up to about 30 by the end of the game (when you've researched everything). Presumably, this will be roughly enough to move newly produced units. Old units will already be sitting around fortified; why would you need to "babysit" them? When they're built they get where they need to go, and you won't move things long distance over roads. In peacetime, you'll move your units to your borders and to dispersed reserve forces kept back behind your borders, but within striking distance by road. In wartime, you'll be able to use a limited amount of strategic movement, bringing in a few of your newly produced units in as reinforcements or evacuating a few troops from a front, but not that many. Certainly not an entire army. Why is this realistic? Well, for one thing, consider the Normandy example. If I land some massive force on a coast line, and the enemy can only respond with a few nearby units, either he has to maintain massive defences everywhere (what were you saying about the bigger army always wins? less micromanagement? slugfests?) or coastal assaults are way too easy, when they should be extraordinarily difficult. D-Day was no cakewalk. Some limited response - at least the ability to organize local reserves cleanly and easily, and from a national perspective, during peacetime - gives the defender a chance to mount a reasonable defence.

Fundamentally, theres no real telling if a RR movement point system is even going to prevent the shifting of massive forces. 10 pts is absurd, because Cavalry go that fast on a road, and people aren't going to want to reduce roads to a crawl as well (!). 20pts is probably more realistic for it to be bothered with in the game at all. But you can probably ingather a pretty huge army from 20 tiles in all directions. Alot more than 5-30, I think. Instead of having one massive central reserve, you'll have ... two. Maybe 3, at most.

Under a rail capacity system, your rail response will be quite finite. In peacetime, you'll organize local forces which can respond by road (6-9 squares away). So there's more strategy to assigning forces to your fronts, and to protecting your fronts. You won't be able to match an invasion force with rail alone because presumably, he will have spent some time gathering his forces and very likely can match your reinforcements by bringing in his own. Also, if you deplete other fronts to wage war on one, you will not be able to rebuild them fast enough to counter a threat, so forces at a front will stay at a front for the most part.

Finally, I cannot see why infinite capacity is any more realistic than infinite moves. Can you explain that? The only difference I see between the two is that a limited capacity infrastructure is alot easier to manage. Your new units go out to the front swiftly, no fuss no muss, but you cannot move your entire army on the rails. Isn't that the real problem, moving the entire army, in terms of gameplay? And in terms of realism, I don't see either model having any advantage over the other. Capacity was always the major concern in moving forces by rail, bar none; good old "rolling stock".

I think units can be dealt with in a way alternate of how it works in Civ 3 in order to cut down on the micromanagement. If that is accomplished, then alll infinite movement does is take away from the strategy of the game.

If other areas reduce micromanagement, I think people would like to keep the savings and not simply raise it back up to the same level again by adding complexity in other areas.

frekk · Nov 21, 2004

sir_schwick said:
Here are some ideas that might give ideas for how to approach these issues.

CONCEPT

Before you can enjoy the benefits of your naval/land/air infrastructure you must invest in the vehicles of that infrastructure. Many times the infrastructure that feuled your economy in peace times provides logistics in war time. In Civ terms this means that in order to increase your economic/logistical potential you must invest production(shields) into increasing that infrastructure. For wars this infrastructure will help move your troops where they are needed faster and more efficiently. Otherwise this infrastructure determines the trade capacity of your nation. More capacity means more trade arrows flowing through your territory.

Spoiler CONCEPTS BROKEN DOWN BY MEDIUM OF TRANSPORT :

ROAD - In peacetime many fleets of carts, wagons, and trucks ferry around industrial resources, goods, people, and other neccessities for society. In wartime these same resources can be used to transport troops more quickly to the front lines well-supplied and rested.
RAIL - Railroads are useless without the thousands of trains that run cargo over them. In peacetime railroads are necessary to feul any modern economy logistical needs. In wartime rails are an excellent way to move troops and supplies at a rapid pace.
SEA - The oceans have been a great route for trade for thousands of years. Many ships are required to keep freight and passengers ferried between various ports. During a war these same freighters provide passage for troops and supplies going to friendly ports.
AIR - A suprising amount of passenger and commercial goods are taken to various destinations by aircraft everyday. A significant network of planes is required to maintain the commerce of a modern economy. These aircraft can also transport critical troops and heavy equipment to fronts where they are needed.

I will refine these ideas once I get some sleep.

INVESTING IN INFRASTRUCTURE

Each medium would have a 'transport pool' you built into. You would build transport units like any other improvement. There would be a base cost based on the technology being utilized. However, what you produce goes into the appropriate pool. Whenever you need transport for military reason it comes out of the pool. The economy will try to utilize, up to its maximum activity, what is left of the transport pool. There will still be purely military transport units you can build for combat situations, but these handle getting from one battle to the next or peacetime.

Spoiler EXAMPLE :

It is 3500 BC and you want to invest in Sea infrastructure since you have a couple coastal cities and have contact with a coastal neighbor. It will cost 20 shields to build a Marine Infrastructure Unit(needs a better name). Two cities build these and now your Sea infrastructure is 2. If no units use the marine infrastructure then you can do a maximum marine trade of two(not sure what that quantifies to yet). If you had moved a unit, you only do one unit of marine trade. Large scale military action could potentially ****** your economy.

ROADS

Information pending sleep.

RAIL

Information pending sleep.

SEA

Information pending sleep.

AIR

Information pending sleep.

Hmmm ...

I like it. Being that it's a single national feature, it probably would be fairly easy to implement, although I think if playtesting revealed it was too much work you could just lump it all into a single score as "Transport Capacity".

I really like the idea of unused transport capacity benefitting the economy (and vice versa, war penalizing the economy by disrupting civilian infrastructure).

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

frekk said:
Second wave is massive numerical advantage, but having 11 Armies is the same number of units as you gave in your model, just a different choice of units. Strategy.

Ummm... Okay. My point was that I'm not sure why someone wouldn't want to use the Armies to begin with. What if you have the 44 German Tanks in Armies vs. the 44 Allied Infantry in Armies?

And having armies definitely changes the makeup of a landing force. 44 units in 11 armies is much much tougher unit-by-unit than 44 units and no armies. If you have 11 armies to play around with and the enemy has one then that definitely counts as a large material advantage.

Now that's just crazy talk.

I'm assuming here that the only reason they would remove infinite movement is because they realize the strategic issues with it, and have decided to impliment changes which makes it easier to manage the units.

Sure, but keeping something is not "changing the game". You were talking like keeping the rail model we use now would "change the game".

You've misunderstood me. I was talking about how infinite movement affects quite a bit more than simply the micromanagement issue. Therefore it "changes" things in the game that are unrelated to the problem it's trying to fix.

Maybe, maybe not. How do you know with all the other things people want to see that there will be any room for added complexity over something as relatively trivial as rail movement?

Again, the added complexity is not a given...

Who is to say it's unpopular? A few (how many is quite questionable) people on this board don't like it, I wouldn't exactly say that's going to be any indication of how succesful it would be with the general public.

Quite a bit more than a few.

Here's a thread over at Apolyton where I posted a poll on this issue. You'll notice that almost 2/3 of voters wanted infinite movement gone period.

And an identical thread at CFC, without the poll. The replies tend to lean in favor of the elimination of infinite movement.

Maybe. But I think it would be alot more rational to assume it had something to do with too many units, too many cities, and too much territory that all looks the same.

Being that none of us are the "normal people" who play the game, all we can judge the game on is is how balanced and well-constructed we believe the game is.

Doesn't mean you've picked the right element for change. Not everything needs to be changed. Would you like to turn it into a realtime game because keeping it turn based ("it's been around, it's fine") doesn't cut it? Change for the sake of change is ridiculous. There has to be an overall advantage for a change, and it has to come out on the plus side. You can't just implement a change and not consider its drawbacks and leave it up to magic to compensate for them.

Doesn't mean it's the wrong element either...

And I hope you have enough respect for me and my ideas not to lump them into the category of turning Civ into an RTS. Just because you don't personally believe in what I'm saying doesn't mean it's "change for the sake of change."

Of course, the micromanagement can be reduced. But I don't think finite rail movement is going to do it. That's going to increase micromanagement. If you don't believe me, start up a game, and take out railroads. Call me back when you've got to Modern Armour and tell me how it's going. If retarding unit movement to a crawl is going to reduce micromanagement, you should have a really fun late game.

There are obviously problems with the way things work now, but I'm not advocating what we have now, just with infinite movement removed.

Like I said, stack movement is *already* fully implemented, at least after PTW. It hasn't helped much, ask anyone. It's more beneficial to move your units individually because it creates a delay to gather them into stacks, and they therefore arrive later. If there is a benefit to micromanagement, it sucks, because then if you don't do it you know you're not getting the most out of your turn.

Uhhhh, hasn't helped much? I use it all the time, and most of the players I know do also.

The stacks should be formed before the battle begins. Sending units into battle piecemeal is asking for them to get killed. And that's as easy as a rally point or again, goto.

Notably, gathering forces into stacks would also be ten times harder without railroads.

Getting units to where they belong when you're not at war is as easy as a goto and then forget about it. It's once the war starts that things get messy.

First up, same problem with gangs as there is with stacks. Second up, queing would be a nightmare, the same as automation is now. When you get some new improvement to build, you'll have to go around and un-automate all your workers. Also there is no way to remember what you've got in queue for every worker so you will get lots of workers moving to tiles to do tasks, that are already finished. More waste, that micromanagement will reduce (and thus players will micromanage to get the most).

There could be a new screen which tracks all workers, what their jobs are and such. You could be assisted in managing them through options that allow you to automatically change units that are in a certain region, or are doing a certain task, or whatever. You would also have access to each Worker's queue, and there could be an overlay screen which shows everything that's planned to be done in the next 1 turn, or 3 turns, or 10 turns.

You're thinking in terms of Civ 3. I've already said that changes need to be made in order to accomodate the removal of infinite movement. And the changes I propose would help the game with or without infinite movement.

Second up, the improved Worker AI already exists. Advanced Unit Actions were implemented with PTW (I'm beginning to get the feeling you've only played Vanilla here) that allow workers to be automated to specific tasks, like build irrigation only, build roads only, build at this city only, etc.

Guess you've missed the part where I said I've played over 100 Conquests MP games... I'm hoping you've read the other parts of my posts more carefully.

The automated Worker AI has a very poor selection in which tiles to improve. By "improving" it I mean making it better at selecting which tiles to improve and when. Of all tasks, one as automated as this (the AI should be able to calculate the optimum tiles to work, and how to improve them) should definitely be better than it is in Civ 3.

The current selection of options is quite limited. All you've got is basically clean up pollution, road-to, etc. There's nothing that allows you to "mine all tiles within the radius of city x," or "connect all nearby cities by road" or "chain irrigation to point y." There are quite a few possibilities that aren't being tapped right now.

I know, but what I'm saying is that solutions have to be simple and carry their own weight, without assuming that other parts of the game are going to become any more simple. Likely alot of new features that we haven't even thought of are going to be included in the game, which is going to require more "room" in terms of complexity and demand that existing features, be simplified, not made more complex.

Soren has already said that he plans on keeping the complexity of Civ 4 at about the level of Civ 3, while focusing on reducing micromanagement and "unfun" things like pollution and riots. If anything, Civ 4 will be more streamlined, and a concerted effort will be taken TO streamline things that are already in Civ - like Worker tedium.

Trust your own judgement. Remove railroads from an Epic game on Martha Singer's World Map, or at least a Huge map. Play it out.

I have played those maps, many a time. If you want to play on such a large map, then you should be willing to accept the fact that there's going to be more to take care of, and by extension, more to micromanage. There are always improvements to be made, but you have to accept some things for the way they are.

I'm thinking you would start moving about 5 units in the days of rifle and cavalry, up to about 30 by the end of the game (when you've researched everything). Presumably, this will be almost enough to move newly produced units (but not quite). Old units will already be sitting around fortified; why would you need to "babysit" them? In peacetime, you'll move your units to your borders and to dispersed reserve forces kept back behind your borders, but within striking distance by road. In wartime, you'll be able to use a limited amount of strategic movement, bringing in a few of your newly produced units in as reinforcements or evacuating a few troops from a front, but not that many. Certainly not an entire army. Why is this realistic?

5 units up to 30 huh... doesn't scale with map/civ size I'm assuming? So you get 5 units to move by rail at the start of an era whether you have 3 cities on a tiny map or 300 on Marla's World Map?

The babysitting comes in during wartime. In both your AND my suggestions there is no babysitting to be done during peacetime, because you simply send units to where you want them. Whether that's instantaneously, or on goto - no need to interrupt or worry about them if there's no war, after all, so no micromanaging them.

Well, for one thing, consider the Normandy example. If I land some massive force on a coast line, and the enemy can only respond with a few nearby units, either he has to maintain massive defences everywhere (what were you saying about the bigger army always wins? less micromanagement?) or coastal assaults are way too easy, when they should be extraordinarily difficult. D-Day was no cakewalk. Some limited response - at least the ability to organize local reserves cleanly and easily, and from a national perspective - gives the defender a chance to mount a reasonable defence.

The defender does have a reasonable chance. The first turn any unit within a 10 (or whatever) tile radius can get to the beaches. In two turns every unit within a 20 tile radius can. Keeping proper reserves is important, as defending the beaches with a long coastline is foolish. If you don't have enough units 20 tiles away from the beaches then you deserve to lose whatever you lose in the SINGLE turn after the landing of the enemy!

If other areas reduce micromanagement, I think people would like to keep the savings and not simply raise it back up to the same level again by adding complexity in other areas.

If you deal with the micromanagement issue properly, then removing infinite movement shouldn't add much anyways.

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

Dammit, quit editting your posts.

Say what you want to say and be done with it.

frekk said:
Fundamentally, theres no real telling if a RR movement point system is even going to prevent the shifting of massive forces. 10 pts is absurd, because Cavalry go that fast on a road, and people aren't going to want to reduce roads to a crawl as well (!). 20pts is probably more realistic for it to be bothered with in the game at all. But you can probably ingather a pretty huge army from 20 tiles in all directions. Alot more than 5-30, I think. Instead of having one massive central reserve, you'll have ... two. Maybe 3, at most.

Where did we head back towards the realism issue again? I thought realism wasn't important?

Under a rail capacity system, your rail response will be quite finite. In peacetime, you'll organize local forces which can respond by road (6-9 squares away). So there's more strategy to assigning forces to your fronts, and to protecting your fronts. You won't be able to match an invasion force with rail alone because presumably, he will have spent some time gathering his forces and very likely can match your reinforcements by bringing in his own. Also, if you deplete other fronts to wage war on one, you will not be able to rebuild them fast enough to counter a threat, so forces at a front will stay at a front for the most part.

Finally, I cannot see why infinite capacity is any more realistic than infinite moves. Can you explain that? The only difference I see between the two is that a limited capacity infrastructure is alot easier to manage. Your new units go out to the front swiftly, no fuss no muss, but you cannot move your entire army on the rails. Isn't that the real problem, moving the entire army, in terms of gameplay? And in terms of realism, I don't see either model having any advantage over the other. Capacity was always the major concern in moving forces by rail, bar none; good old "rolling stock".

Click to expand...

It's becoming more apparent that you're not actually reading all that I'm writing, because I already said that I do think a capacity limit is also a good idea in addition to a distance limit.

Aussie_Lurker · Nov 21, 2004

Hi Frekk and Trip. I tried to read through your posts-TRULY I did-but there simply aren't enough hours in the day

! For my sake could the two of you PLEASE summarise, in point form, the kind of 'transport model' you would like to see in the game-and how you would see it working in the case of combat?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

rhialto · Nov 21, 2004

Me too. That is just waaay too much to read.

frekk · Nov 21, 2004

Rail Capacity Transport Model

-Rail capacity limits the number of units that can be moved in a given round.
-Rail capacity determined by playtesting, but low enough that you couldn't move very much in a single round.
-Infinite movement, limited capacity (as opposed to limited movement, infinite capacity).
-Rail Capacity represents how many locomotives you have and the kind of technology you have. Different advances would help to increase it, eg a "Diesel-Electric Engine" advance or it could be tied to existing advances.
-Possibly, Government might affect Rail Capacity (large bonus for Fascism for instance). It might also be scaled to map size.
-Small countries have the same Rail Capacity as big ones, dependant on technology. This is to reflect the fact that huge empires always have infrastructure problems. It also limits the ability to overwhelm smaller countries with sheer numbers as you will both have the same Rail Capacity. It can still be done, but takes planning.
-Units that don't use Rail Capacity don't get any movement advantage for being on the tracks. It's treated as road.
-Excess Rail Capacity will be vital to the economy. Any unused Rail Capacity generates revenue. Using Rail Capacity to its limit every round will be prohibitively expensive, but moving units will not cost money out of the treasury per se. You just won't make any money.
-Total Rail Capacity will not be high enough to defend or attack using a flow of units on the tracks. In the era of tanks and infantry it might be 10-15 points, perhaps less. Forces for an invasion - or defensive forces - will have to be built up slowly, over time, with much planning.
-In war, if a border collapses due to invasion, you'll be in serious trouble, but not necessarily doomed. If you have more than one front you'll be doomed if your defences are weak and you're relying on railroads to supply defensive reinforcements. If you can only move a limited number of units you'll be forced to choose where they go. Pulling forces from defences on other borders will be difficult because you will not be able to build them back up there again in one, two, or three rounds, and if they are then also attacked ...
-If you are expanding into enemy territory, you'll use your rail to transport new recruits from the homeland to the front, but the advance of your main force will occur by road and overland. Rails will just help somewhat to replenish your forces, but rails alone won't sustain an advance - you'll have to build up a large force during peacetime.
-In peacetime, you'll be building up defensive forces and attack forces using your rails. This will take time and planning because you'll have to choose where, and if you choose wrong, it won't be possible to change easily. It will take many rounds to correct. Also, using too much rail will hurt your economy.

frekk · Nov 21, 2004

Rail Capacity Interface in the Game

-Rail Capacity Remaining displayed in the side box, where the Treasury and global warming and all that is, but also visible when a unit is displayed in that box.
-When Rail Capacity is available and a unit is on the tracks, a small Entrain button appears in its options (just like the current buttons for Fortify, Sentry, Load, and all that). Clicking on Entrain changes the graphic of the unit to a locomotive (the type, perhaps, would change according to Advances), and allows it rail movement, at the cost of 1 Rail Capacity.
-As soon as the unit leaves the tracks or engages in combat, it loses the locomotive icon and its rail movement is considered to be over, there is no need to "unload". If guerrillas/insurgents have been changed in the game as some have proposed, and you can't see them all the time, then if one surprises you on the track you are in trouble, fighting at a severe penalty.

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

Aussie_Lurker said:
Hi Frekk and Trip. I tried to read through your posts-TRULY I did-but there simply aren't enough hours in the day ! For my sake could the two of you PLEASE summarise, in point form, the kind of 'transport model' you would like to see in the game-and how you would see it working in the case of combat?

You wimp.

Writing most of those posts takes over an hour each, and you disrespect me so?

Fine then, here's my full proposal, no fluff.

Changes to Rail

My proposal is simple. It does away with infinite movement in favor of a flat movement rate for all units, regardless of their move points. This number would be somewhere around 10-15, but would be playbalanced. It may or may not scale slightly with map size, so, for example, a tiny map would allow units to move 10 tiles, and a huge map would be 15. However, the hard limit is still in place.

I believe frekk is also on to something with the rail capacity idea. I wouldn't be quite so harsh as he would because of the other limit, so the unit limit would be much higher. It would depend on BOTH technology and the size of the rail net. Perhaps there could also be a city improvement that increases capacity. The limit would allow roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of a civ's units to move each turn. Like the number of tiles to be moved, the exact limit and what changes it would be playtested in order to achieve balance.

Changes to the Rest of the Game

The key point to remember is that infinite rail movement was included in order to cut down on the micromanagement necessary to worry about all of a player's units and especially Workers. If you want to remove infinite movement (and even if you don't

) then you have to compensate to make things easier to manage.

Units

The micromanagement of units can be assisted through the grouping of units into actual armies units. They would move together and there would be an interface which would easily allow the creation, splitting and joining of "armies."

Additionally, you could put units into different "groups." This would essentially put every unit in the group on goto to a specific location. So in case you have a bunch of units on goto heading towards a border city that you end up losing, if they are all part of "Group 2" you could change the destination for "Group 2" to a location further back, and all of the units would automatically shift their destination. You could set things up so that certain cities automatically produce units that go into certain groups.

Finally, there would be a unit management screen that would overlay a new interface over the main map. It would display every unit, its type, its destination (if on goto) and so on. Units in special army stacks and units in groups would be given special prominence on the screen. You would have a variety of options that would display or hide units in certain groups, armies, and so on.

Workers

Workers are a bit more tricky. The use of Worker gangs would help, along with the ability to queue up tasks for units to do, so you could plan things out ahead of time and simply watch them run later on without babysitting a bunch of Workers and having to worry about what everone is doing. Obviously there is only so much you can do, so an improved automated Worker AI would help. The ability to set preferences like roading, irrigating, mining, and so on would allow players to customize certain types of tasks for Workers and less babysitting.

Like with military units, Workers would have their special overlay screen where you could see the locations of all Workers prominently, what their tasks are on the coming turns and their groupings. You could view and group them by task, be it a directly selected one ("Road tile x") or more general ("Road between cities in this region"). There would be other tools to help keep track of Workers on this screen, because there's more to do and I only have so much brainpower to put forward to a hypothetical project.

frekk · Nov 21, 2004

That's 20 proposals in one, a whole new game. To support this one change the whole game has to be reworked? Can't you just deal with a single topic?

Spatula · Nov 21, 2004

I used to care about rails.....now I'm not so sure

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

frekk said:
That's 20 proposals in one, a whole new game. To support this one change the whole game has to be reworked? Can't you just deal with a single topic?

No, it's not to support one change, it's to make the game easier to manage as a whole. Even with infinite RR movement it's already a pain to deal with all of the units and the Workers, especially later in the game. With or without infinite movement something new needs to be done.

rhialto · Nov 21, 2004

Am I the only one who is thinking we need a wikipedia style page to keep a proper track of all the proposals? A discussion board no longer quite seems like the right format.

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

There's some stickied threads, but that's not good for much (no offense

).

Aussie_Lurker · Nov 21, 2004

OK, thanks for that Trip and Frekk-that made things a darn sight easier

!
The first thing I can say is that, regardless of whether movement is finite or infinite, the 'capacity' idea is VERY good and should be included! The best solution, I feel, might be to leave infinite as the 'default' setting, but give the player the ability to set a movement rate in the editor (not 1/3 or 1/4, though, but a set mp as Trip suggested).

Also as Trip suggested, I do believe that the amount of capacity should depend on both amount of rail and tech level of the rail system. The only problem is how to do the former without leaving it open to rampant exploitation (i.e., lots of 'railways to nowhere' simply to garner extra capacity) The only way I can think to do it is to give RR's a cost per turn and/or make capacity only count IF the railway connects two distinct points (a city to a city, or a city to a specific tile improvement?)

Another factor would be to tie the value of unused capacity into the wealth and average population of the nation, thus preventing sprawling empires from overexploiting extensive rail networks, as quality of the empire the network connects will be of greater importance than the SIZE of the empire!

On this subject, though, I'm beginning to think that perhaps ROADS should have a capacity as well, one which also improves with each successive upgrade of your roads. Worth considering I reckon

!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Sirian · Nov 21, 2004

Trip said:
All we have to go on is what official numbers say. If they say 10 miles, then it's 10 miles. Everything else people can claim is merely what they have come up with and has no factual or official basis.

That's your story and you're sticking to it, eh? :lol:

Now I feel sympathy for those who shy away when I get into drawn out debates.

- Sirian

Jon Shafer · Nov 21, 2004

If Firaxis says its 10 miles, how can you prove that it's not?

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