Upgrading ... again

[cabert]

You wanted opinions, here is mine .
Upgrading should be banned totally, for the player and for the AI.
How do you convert a bow to a rifle, anyway?

I can see a small retribution in hammers or gold (probably gold) for disbanded units being brought in after currency, to allow you to get rid of old units.

Sure, you'll mourn those veterans, but I just don't see how a guy who learnt to destroy city defenders with his mace suddenly knows better to thorw grenades at city defenders, while other grenade launchers never can learn this.

 

[axident]

I would quite like to see a system where you can reinvest the hammers to build a new unit. Say you want a longbowman, and at the moment you have an archer. You would begin to build a longbowman, as per normal, and then you would move the archer to that city and 'upgrade' the unit. This would destroy the archer, 75% of its hammer cost would be added to the longbowman, and when the longbowman is finished, its has all the promotions of the archer. That way, upgrading would be like building a unit from scratch, but a lot faster and without loosing promotions.

Civ2 used a system where you could disband a unit within one of your cities and get half the shields back, which you could then spend on buildings or units within that city.

 

[Bradlius]

.... I just don't see how a guy who learnt to destroy city defenders with his mace suddenly knows better to thorw grenades at city defenders, while other grenade launchers never can learn this.

For me upgrading's not really about retraining with a new weapon or tactic, it's about maintaining an esprit de corps. Take the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. Created during the US Civil War, they fought in the Indian Wars in the late 1800's including a huge defeat at the Little Big Horn under Custer. They fought in the Mexican War, then in the Pacific during WWII. By then they had converted to a tank unit, and during Vietnam, they added helicopters to their arsenal. It's not quite exactly upgrading as Civ would have it, but the unit adopted modern weapons and tactics while maintaining a special esprit de corps that would certainly qualify as an upgrade, enhancing the unit's abilities and demoralizing its opponents.

 

[OTAKUjbski]

How do you convert a bow to a rifle, anyway?

That thought is a little too linear, imo. You're not converting a bow to a rifle. You're converting a bowman to a rifleman.

The form and philosophy of firing bows and guns are virtually identical -- it's just their technological distance that makes it seem strange.

Similarly, you don't convert a horse to a helicopter. You convert a ground cavalryman to an air cavalryman. The formations and tactics are virtually identical ... you're just putting the man on a different mount.

Now Maceman to Grenadier ... absolutely no correlation. I have no clue how to link those two schools of combat.

Otherwise, I agree with 90% of the posters in this thread about the cost of upgrading being absurd.

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I think an alternate manner of upgrading based strictly on should be added to CivIV:

A Military Academy enables a city to devote its production directly towards paying the difference in necessary to upgrade a particular unit.

So, if you want to make your Maceman into a Mechanized Infantry in a city pushing 125 into military units, ( 200 - 70 ) / 125 = 2 turns to upgrade.

This may seem cheap compared to the current system, but because the unit has to be IN the city with the Military Academy, it makes it impossible to upgrade right outside enemy territory a turn before crossing the border. I think this is more than enough balance to at least make it worth looking into. IMHO.