Too Many Military Units (Back to Civ III)

[Roland Johansen]

We shouldn't try to explain things in this game with real world mechanics. There is no indication how many men are included in a unit, so you can't in any way compare the number of men in a unit with the number of men in the cities. A warrior unit could be 10 men in which case, you should be able to control many of them with size 1 cities. And if a unit of warriors would be one thousand men, then you should not be able to control many of them with size 1 cities. But there is no way that you can put a number on the number of soldiers in such a unit.

There are many things that are completely wrong with this game if you start to use real world comparisons. We should just try to get a fun game that is a very abstract representation of the real world development of civilization.

The fact that I spoke against the argument that "armies are too large for the population size" doesn't mean that I like to move hundreds of units, just that I think it's a bad argument. I don't want to become part of this flame war. I've presented one way (in my previous post) to get around the problem of micromanaging hundreds of units. You can have both many units and not a lot of micromanagement. Of course, we'll have to wait until civ5 for such ideas as mine and several others that would reduce the micromanagement.

One can change stuff in civ4 by increasing the maintenance cost of units, but one would probably need to rewrite the AI a bit to get it to use that well and there would also be problems with the relative low cost to build an army. So that would mean that modern units should cost more hammers. Don't expect Firaxis to do that. If they didn't undertake such a dramatic step in the expansion pack, then they certainly won't in a patch. Everyone of course can mod the game to his/her own liking. There won't ever be perfect agreement on how the ideal civilization game should look like.

 

[polypheus]

A possible solution that has not been mentioned here would be to simply double the hammer and gold support costs per unit. This is what the game does to prevent unit spam at the slower game speeds, like marathon.

Hammer costs wouldn't necessarily be a great idea. Time would go by too quickly while you're slowly building up unit after unit and would lead to units getting obsoleted quickly if hammer costs were disproportionately high compared to research progress.

Having gold support increased non-linearly is probably the best and simplest solution and also the most realistic. You should be able to support decent sized armies but if you want to produce uber-armies then you'd now have to lower science/tech to near zero and suffer the consequences of that since excess units have premium costs. That means no uber huge standing armies lasting for thousands of years (which nations have ever been able to afford to do that?

One idea (but perhaps too complex) would be for military units to cause the Civ2/3 "corruption" effects. Remember in Civ2/3 how cities would suffer corruption which would cause certain number of food and commerce and hammers to be wasted. Well if we implemented that, it would represent that all the "wasted" food, commerce and hammers were going to support your military and the more units the more "waste" so to speak. It wouldn't outright cost population points but obviously if you build too much then people would start to starve as the "waste" becomes too much. Nor would you be able to build much civilian infrastructure as hammers are "wasted" on maintainence. This model would be much more realistic and much more modelling the true costs of military and would tie it to population. (The "waste" is simply part of your civilian population supporting the military even though not part of it).

 

[Bursk]

There are some good ideas in this thread e.g. the one above me.

I recently played an Aggressive AI game and things were fine up until the gunpowder era, when the number of units in the game got ridiculous (large map, epic speed, nine Civs). I know that Blake says this is the proper way to play the game, but I don't like it this way.

I do think that each Civ should defend itself properly and have the capacity to build a reasonable number of units, but the constant unit spam I saw in my game was just crazy, and made warfare extremely tedious.

 

[Uncle_Joe]

Any form of significant increase to solely the support costs is not going to be good for game balance IMO. That puts the burden purely on the commerce rather than on the production and thats bad. The game currently forces you to balance production and commerce fairly well. Some Civs are better than one than the other.

If the 'true cost' for a large military comes from the upkeep, then the balance is shifted to the financial style civs. They dont need as much production to keep up since the other civs wont be able to afford to mass a big army anyways without falling behind and trying to use Macemen on Riflemen and the like.

Any form of cost change has to go from both ends IMO...production costs AND maintenance costs. Otherwise its simply too easy to 'solve' the equation to optimize force levels.

 

[polypheus]

We shouldn't try to explain things in this game with real world mechanics. There is no indication how many men are included in a unit, so you can't in any way compare the number of men in a unit with the number of men in the cities. A warrior unit could be 10 men in which case, you should be able to control many of them with size 1 cities. And if a unit of warriors would be one thousand men, then you should not be able to control many of them with size 1 cities. But there is no way that you can put a number on the number of soldiers in such a unit.

I agree that it is not directly possible to tie unit numbers to population points. For one thing pop point are not linear. For another, as you say, one unit could represent one person or thousands.

One can change stuff in civ4 by increasing the maintenance cost of units, but one would probably need to rewrite the AI a bit to get it to use that well and there would also be problems with the relative low cost to build an army. So that would mean that modern units should cost more hammers. Don't expect Firaxis to do that. If they didn't undertake such a dramatic step in the expansion pack, then they certainly won't in a patch. Everyone of course can mod the game to his/her own liking. There won't ever be perfect agreement on how the ideal civilization game should look like.

I think that right now the basic problem is that military costs are too cheap relative thus allowing everyone to build overwhelming number of units and degenerating the game into "Intersil Empire" game. I think that the "corruption" model would be very accurately reflect the true cost of military and make it very crippling to have massive military standing armies lasting for too long in food/commerce/production. But that is too complex for patching.

I think that having military costs be higher and non-linear would probably achieve most of the effect and could be done easily. The AIs would have to be modded obviously so it wouldn't all become North Koreas but this should not be too difficult. Each Civ simply builds up to the optimum number of units and depending on personality and circumstances, builds more or less always keeping in mind the cost in terms of military cost vs total costs, etc.

 

[polypheus]

Any form of significant increase to solely the support costs is not going to be good for game balance IMO. That puts the burden purely on the commerce rather than on the production and thats bad. The game currently forces you to balance production and commerce fairly well. Some Civs are better than one than the other.

If the 'true cost' for a large military comes from the upkeep, then the balance is shifted to the financial style civs. They dont need as much production to keep up since the other civs wont be able to afford to mass a big army anyways without falling behind and trying to use Macemen on Riflemen and the like.

Any form of cost change has to go from both ends IMO...production costs AND maintenance costs. Otherwise its simply too easy to 'solve' the equation to optimize force levels.

I more or less agree with that. I think then that the Civ2/Civ3 style corruption model would be best. Each military unit "corrupts" the food/commerce/production to represent maintainence. There would not be any gold/unit maintaince any more.

This would be more realistic and better model the costs of maintaining an army. It costs food, commerce and hammers to maintain it. It represents having to shift population from civilian to military pursuit (the "waste:" isn't really waste, its just your people no longer 100% devoting themselves to civilian efforts).

And it would importantly balance it so that finacial civs that have low production to have their production wasted to such low levels as to cripple them as well even though they have the money to support the army.

 

[martin031]

God forbid that a game be challenging. I guess people these days only care about "PWWWNING".

Why, why throw out a statement like that? I do not think that anyone was complaining about the challenge aspect of too many units. It slows the game down to tedious levels and provides less strategic planning. Plus, heaven forbid your computer is a couple years old and you do not want to have huge delays between turns.

 

[bonafide11]

I find it funny that people are talking about the armies being unrealistically large. Unrealistic? How so? How do you know? There's no way to compare the size of an army in Civ to the size of an army in real life. It's not like there is some sort of conversion where 1 marine in Civ = 10,000 marines in real life, so a stack of 10 marines = 100,000 marines. It makes no sense to try to compare the size of the armies in Civ to the armies in real life.

 

[CTH]

Well, my last big war was against the mongols, I was ahead in tech and had built tanks for a long time. To make a good long war story short, when the mongols was destroyed I had built around 150 modern armors ( or upgraded tanks) and I had killed more than 1000 (!) mongols, there 250 was cavalary. That is a pretty big army. I was lucky that I had superior units, if I had waited until the mongols had a possibility to upgrade to some more modern kind of uni, I think I would be pretty dead...
sometimes the numbers are just silly.
And BTW I won the game on Spacerace

 

[polypheus]

I find it funny that people are talking about the armies being unrealistically large. Unrealistic? How so? How do you know? There's no way to compare the size of an army in Civ to the size of an army in real life. It's not like there is some sort of conversion where 1 marine in Civ = 10,000 marines in real life, so a stack of 10 marines = 100,000 marines. It makes no sense to try to compare the size of the armies in Civ to the armies in real life.

The main point is that the number of units that can be built and supported overwhelm the game and render it an updated version of the classic "Intersil Empire" game. Anyway FWIW, according to the demographic statistic, you would notice the soldiers and total population shows that each unit is about equal to a population point. Not that those numbers mean anything but that's how Civ4 interprets it which means most nations would have majority of their citizens in the military or even overwhelming majority.

I guess lots of people love playing Civ4 as an updated Intersel Empire because that's what the game degenerates to when most cities are just doing nothing but spamming military unit after military unit and you're doing nothing but moving military units around and attacking all game long. It's funny how people degenerate a game that is supposed to be so rich and complex in modeling Civ advancement and progress into a simple wargame which came out 20 years ago.

 

[darko82]

Playing a game is all about having a fun! Many units are just much better than few units. I was really disappointed first when Civ4 came out becasue war was silly and ridiculous when a Civ attacked me with one or two units just to pillage for a while. THAT WAS CRAP AI! I believe that greatest fun comes from having a challenge or the feeling of being endangered, which in case of many units is true.

 

[Socratatus]

Well I can`t agree, I quite enjoy it. And I`ve had long periods of peace. But good thing there`s a CIV3 for you to go back to.

 

[polypheus]

For younger people who have never heard of Intersel Empire, I will briefly explain it. Its a game like Civ with cities over a grid map. Each "Civ" starts with one city. All the rest of the cities are "neutral" (think barb cities except they are always empty and can be conquered easily). You can only conquer not build cities and each city can build a variety of modern military units. Then you just spam them over the map and fight until you win and take over the world.

Don't get in wrong this was a REALLY fun game when I played in on my ancient Commodore 64. But its REALLY REALLY silly that here I am playing Civ4 would supposedly tries to model civiliation being played like this ancient Intersel Empire game.

That's why there's commerce and science, war weariness, diplomacy, happiness, health, etc. etc. But the game mechanics are really out of whack when players (human or AI) are allowed to build hundreds of military units. I'm not saying there should be fewer wars or no wars. I'm saying that I don't want to be playing glorified Intersel Empire.

 

[Kranden]

they should make a civ mod that removes military units! And then we can all sit around a campfire and sing coombya!

I don't know i've never seen it as a problem that enemies had too large of an army. Nothing I cant usually deal with even if I do lose a few cities i can create a good defensive and take them out.

The problem is if you lower the number of maximum units AI makes without hampering the Player you will just spam TONS of units and wipe the whole world out without breaking a sweat. Too few units also means that a well upgraded unit is ALOT more powerful than he normally would be as he cant be taken out by a large force in a well defended position, and the fact that cities are alot harder to siege in the early game means that fewer units would make it near impossible to take a well defended city.

 

[polypheus]

The problem is if you lower the number of maximum units AI makes without hampering the Player you will just spam TONS of units and wipe the whole world out without breaking a sweat. Too few units also means that a well upgraded unit is ALOT more powerful than he normally would be as he cant be taken out by a large force in a well defended position, and the fact that cities are alot harder to siege in the early game means that fewer units would make it near impossible to take a well defended city.

Obviously you have to change the game mechanics so that both humans and AIs can produce fewer military units. My suggestion is to use the Civ3 corruption model. Beyond perhaps a few free units, military units cause loss of food, hammers and commerce representing the true cost of maintaining a military. So if you want to play Sparta or North Korea or USSR style then the game should realistically model the consequences. No nation in the history of the world succeeded with over half its population (according to Civ4 demographics window) in the military over thousands of years.

I'm not saying it needs to be limited to be like one unit per city. But HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of units is just ridiculous. It totally degenerates the game.

 

[Hescumet]

There are lots of ideas on how to better balance the military aspect of the game. I personally like my mercenary idea but it is too complex for a patch

Yes and yes. I like the idea too, and would really enjoy to see it in Civ 5...

I find it funny that people are talking about the armies being unrealistically large. Unrealistic? How so?

The main point here is really that some people (including me) just don't like the micromanagement involved in moving hunderds of units around.It is NOT that we don't like the game to be warlike! In fact, this is one of the reasons I play peacefully in the late game, I just can't be bothered to shuffle that many units!

But obviously some enjoy just that. We could therefore implement it as an option "X Less, more powerfull units in late-game" ON/OFF.

How to do it?

Option A:

Increase production costs and maintainance cost per unit by factor say 1,5 in the mid-late game. The only problem I see here:

Hammer costs wouldn't necessarily be a great idea. Time would go by too quickly while you're slowly building up unit after unit and would lead to units getting obsoleted quickly if hammer costs were disproportionately high compared to research progress.

Good point, but: Right now after I researched artillery I built say 30 units to win an attack against inferior units. After the change I could in the same time, with the same maintainance cost built 20 artillery units. I think such a reasonable change would not lead to the effect that I couldn't keep production of new units up with the research rate ...

Option B:

Non-Linear maintainance cost of military units. Problem:

Any form of significant increase to solely the support costs is not going to be good for game balance IMO. That puts the burden purely on the commerce rather than on the production and thats bad. The game currently forces you to balance production and commerce fairly well. Some Civs are better than one than the other.

If the 'true cost' for a large military comes from the upkeep, then the balance is shifted to the financial style civs. They dont need as much production to keep up since the other civs wont be able to afford to mass a big army anyways without falling behind and trying to use Macemen on Riflemen and the like.

Any form of cost change has to go from both ends IMO...production costs AND maintenance costs. Otherwise its simply too easy to 'solve' the equation to optimize force levels.

Excellent point IMHO. I would therefore either go with option A or use a combination of option A and B:

Mid-Game units cost say factor 1,4 more to produce, modern day units factor 1,8 (one would have to really really carefully scale this), and are at the same time equally more powerfull. Plus at the same time a moderate scaling of maintainance costs is introduced, starting at say the point where a CIV has double the units it could support for free. At that point the next unit would cost 2 gold maintainance ...

I think this would be an improvement ... as an optional setting of course.

 

[DrLaban]

I haven't seen anything like hundreds of units and even though I'm not a pro I still play monarch and have had Boudica as neighbour etc; is it something special that provokes the AI to build armies of that size?

 

[pi-r8]

The main point here is really that some people (including me) just don't like the micromanagement involved in moving hunderds of units around.It is NOT that we don't like the game to be warlike! In fact, this is one of the reasons I play peacefully in the late game, I just can't be bothered to shuffle that many units!

But obviously some enjoy just that. We could therefore implement it as an option "X Less, more powerfull units in late-game" ON/OFF.

I really do think that this debate just comes down to your choice of style in how you want to play the game. Obviously the more military units are in the game, the more time you spend dealing with them, so the game becomes more warlike. Conversely, if you have very few units, you'll mostly be managing your cities (micromanaging them), and even if your in a war, It' will still FEEL peaceful.

For me, the war aspect of Civ 4 is the most fun, so I like having large armies to play with. I have a feeling, though, that most of the people arguing against large armies are builders by nature. Nothing wrong with that, I just don't like that people seem to be implying that fewer units somehow makes the game better or more strategic.

 

[Ariminio]

I couldn't agree more. Every game I play, no matter what settings, ends up with unit spam. Nearing modern age all I do every turn is build units, gather units, move units, and sometimes attack something. Its no fun. The first 2/3rds of a civ4 game are brilliant, but the last part..oh my. TEDIOUS.
I usually just end up quitting when the game reaches the point where all I do is build units and start a new one.

 

[aelf]

The amazing and terrible thing is the Unit Spammers now declare that it is the true way to play Civ and ask for more.