[R&F] Upgrading units

[BarbarianHunter]

I will also put in my tuppence here for a new Industrial Era Wonder or even (should be added to the game anyway) National Wonder:
General Staff Academy. - think the US Army's War College, the German Kriegsakademie, the Soviet Frunze Academy: the Highest Level military school to train the top people and their staff officers - only one per Civ.

If you are talking about limiting the number of units based on some function of population and encampments, then this too sounds fun and could add an additional layer of strategy to the mid and late game. Maybe buildable once per civ like a govt plaza but requires an encampment with a military academy. Provides some degree of raising the unit cap (be it corps/armies or straight units), as well as great general points and production bonuses.

 

[acluewithout]

A lot of very interesting ideas and discussion here.



The limitations of 'Heavy Cavalry' and similar units wasn't population as in a Force Limit, but the fact that the units were so incredibly expensive for the society of the time to produce and maintain. A single 'war horse' or destrier could cost as much to raise, train and feed/maintain as several families of farmers, let alone the cost of armor, weapons, and the other 'knightly' paraphernalia. The rule of thumb in Dark Age Europe was that it took 5 - 10 families to support one part-time spearman-equivalent (shield, spear, no armor).

On the other hand, Pre-Renaissance Armies could be pretty small. The largest permanent 'unit' in ancient Egypt or Sumeria/Mesopotamia seems to have been about 600 - 700 men - barely the size of a single Renaissance Era Pike and Shot Battalion! The 'Great Army' of Vikings that ravaged Saxon England was all of 300 men or so - a couple of companies of modern infantry.

Even larger, professional 'armies', the limitation was not manpower, but cost. The Imperial Roman Army, including auxiliary units that weren't often really 'Roman', peaked at about 500,000 men - in an Empire that had at least 50,000,000 inhabitants (and I've seen estimates as high as 100,000,000). That's less than 1% of the population 'under arms' when the average in the World Wars of the 20th century (Modern-Atomic Eras) was 8 - 10% of the population. But the cost of the Roman Army was one of the major factors that crumbled the Empire, largely because the tax collection was so inefficient that they could not get enough Gold out of the economy to pay for the government and army.

All of which means that perhaps the 'population cap' should be a soft one: in the Ancient Era, you can have 1 military unit per population point, but each unit in excess simply means that a population point cannot work a tile - your economy would be much less efficient, but Recon units would not count against the cap (scout units represent, I think, a much smaller number of men than a 'normal' combat unit). I don't know about other players, but I generally do not have more than 3 - 4 combat units before I get my second city up, so in most cases I'd be losing at most 1 - 2 tiles of working: not optimal, but survivable

Add the possibility of hiring Mercenaries with Gold, which should have been part of the game from the start, and by the time you reach the Classical Era Gold should be the real cap instead of Population..



As I posted earlier, rather than a hard limitation on Upgrading, the Upgrade Cap should be 'soft' - and some Upgrades, like all the naval and air, should be virtually as expensive as building new, because in every one of those cases you are building an entirely new set of equipment/weapons from the hull up and retraining the crews in entirely new tactics and techniques (rowing to sail-handling, close combat and catapult-firing to artillery firing, sailing to steaming, etc.). The reason for Upgrading here is not to Save Money, but to Maintain the Promotions ('Naval Traditions' - to quote a British admiral in WWII: "You can rebuild a fleet in a few years, but it takes centuries to build the tradition of the Royal Navy.") Same thing with many of the land combat Upgrades, but there the cost should reflect the relative cost of 'merely' replacing all the weapons and equipment versus the cost of retraining the men in entirely new techniques.

So, Knights to Tanks is a perfectly viable Upgrade (see the German 1st Cavalry Division becoming the 24th Panzer Division in 1941-42, or the US Army's 1st Cavalry Division becoming a mechanized/armored division in World War Two and then a Helicopter unit in Vietnam), but it's really, really expensive: you not only have to manufacture very expensive equipment and weapons (the original 'heavy metal') but also completely retrain the officers and men in entirely new, technically complicated techniques and tactics. Even Cavalry to Helicopters might be less expensive, because while the equipment is very expensive, the tactics are very similar - you don't have to pound new ideas into the officers' heads, which is expensive and time-consuming.
Some other examples of 'variable Upgrade Costs':
1. Spears to Pikes - dead cheap. The weapons are not that expensive to make, and the tactics are practically identical: Phillip II's Pezhetairoi did it in less than a generation, which is less than a turn in the Classical Era!
2. Bows to Crossbows - assuming we're talking about the metal-prod crossbow, the equipment is actually very expensive: it required the making of very metallurgically sophisticated spring steel bows and metal trigger mechanisms - actually more metallurgically complex than the early muskets! On the other hand, training crossbowmen took a few weeks compared to years for a good bowman, so the initial cost in Gold would be high, but the maintenance cost for Crossbowmen might actually be lower than for Bowmen, or the same.
3. Swordsmen to Musketmen - as mentioned, muskets were actually metallurgically simpler than fine steel armor, weapons, and mechanisms, so the initial Upgrade Cost is really low. BUT gunpowder weapons require manufactured powder and shot in continuous and increasing quantities, so the Maintenance Cost should Skyrocket: 200% at least, representing the 'tail' of carts and wagons trailing behind the unit hauling gunpowder and lead bullets by the ton to keep the unit viable. It is not a coincidence that modern banking and international Loans became common at the same time that gunpowder became a necessary component of European Armies - the need for Gold to keep an army in the field went up astronomically in the late 15th - 16th centuries.

I've said it before but it applies to the Upgrade/Unit Cap problem specifically: if you look at what the actual, historical limitations and conditions were and replicate them in the game, you are much more likely to have a good game than if you try to make factors up - there are always Unintended Consequences that don't become obvious until people try to play the game...

One possibility, since Production is such a problem in the mid-late game, is that disbanding a unit in a city would, by putting men out of 'uniform' and back into the workforce, provide a Production Boost for X turns, or possibly a one-time 'shot' of Production based on the size/type/original cost of the unit. That would give you a real good reason to get rid of obsolete units because there would be a useful result from disbanding them. Of course, this could be 'gamed' just as Chopping is now, but if there was a Minimum Period of X Turns after flooding the city with workers before you could do it again with any effect, that could be minimized.



Right now, the combat/military units in Civ VI are not well thought out at all. On the one hand, there is no relationship between the Military and the rest of the Civ: production, science, culture, religion, population are all utterly unaffected by the size and type of your military force. Once produced, they are apparently untethered from anything else happening in your Civ.

Then, of course, there is the little problem that having produced a truncated Tech Tree that you can burn through in about half the Turns allotted to a normal speed game (250 turns out of 500) they also had to produce Upgrades that take place an average of 2 Eras and up to 4 Eras apart and leave Obsolete Units scattered about the map for most of the game. Coupled with the increased cost of late game units not compensated for by Production Increases, and almost every battle after the Ancient Era involves units from different Eras, sometimes the equivalent of a 1000 years apart. As a military historian, it totally breaks any immersion I might have in the game, and as a Gamer, it makes me boiling angry to have paid good money for such a poorly designed, untested game system.

While my first reaction to this was precisely the encampment based 'support' measure, I will point out that while this was present in Civ5, that entry had a much more practical limit of our militaries- upkeep. Units were not nearly as expensive as they can become now (a missile cruiser didn't cost no 8 gpt, kids) and had a varying cost between 0.5 to ~6-7 gold per unit per turn depending on how long the game has gone and how many units you owned. But gold was much, much more scarce. You simply could not field large armies without either a lot of cities developed with trading posts, or more pointedly in the early game, a lot of international trade routes. Which, if you went to war, you would lose by default or could lose via plunder. I think the upgrade question is tied to both poor balance on the numbers but also a symptom of the gold economy in Civ6.

Gold as a tile yield is about 2:1 for production when it appears. Purchasing is, as pointed out, about 4:1, with upgrades being absurdly cheap around 1.5:1 without the card. But we have a ton more gold than production to begin with, so even these ratios aren't exactly holding firm (if you're generating goldrod in every game at 5:1, then a 4:1 ratio for purchasing is 'cheap' but 6:1 would be 'expensive.') In Civ5, all 3 gold buildings ended up netting you +6 gold and +75% gold to that city (About 10gpt per city inherently.) Maintenance on buildings was also pretty expensive- the barracks and armory would cost you 1+1, a workshop would eat up another 2, a library and university (supremely important) was yet another 3- you got nickel and dime'd pretty fast. So you had to have luxury tiles, trade routes, road networks, etc, to fund any sort of military. The net of this is that having a reduced gpt means that your gold balance - what you use to actually pay for upgrades- is also much constrained. Plus, civ5 used an upgrade formula roughly 2*(upgraded unit prod - old unit prod) +10, or about 2:1.

Civ6 obviously, as others have pointed out here, inundates any players following the 'get a trade route for every city' strategy with a flood of gold. Which is not inherently bad, but gold costs may need to be inflated to account for it. I actually think they tried to account for it a little in removing the trading post as a basic tile improvement that yields gold. But the fact that approximately no one uses anything but internal routes on harder difficulties, and still has no gold problems, should point to an overabundance.

Now, the economics set aside for a moment- I really think the intention of making unit upgrading so easy was to ensure that the AI could always have a modern military. Many players experience fighting an AI with obsolete units, but this has more to do with a disparity in science than a gold shortfall. I've long thought about making a very in depth quantitative post about why unit upgrading is brokenly strong, and why professional army is absurd, but you fanatics seem to have already beat that dead horse. The big thing around gold upgrading that production hard building doesn't allow is location; you can upgrade on any allied tile, so the unit is where you need it, rather than at an encampment far away. And upgrading is instant, building takes turns. This distinction would matter if gold was scarce. But gold isn't scarce, so upgrading is the default move. The upgrade scheme also confers an advantage of efficiency: you're only paying the base cost of a unit once.

An example: units range in cost by about 10x over the eras. (many unit lines go from about 65 to 650 ancient to information, dig up one of my posts about it.) A heavy chariot costs 65, modern armor runs 680. Let's say you build 10 H Chariots as your defense force for the game. You're in 650 production. Upgrading them to modern armor will eventually require ~10 units*0.75*(680-65) gold, or 4600 gold. Question: is this a lot? (You'll get similar numbers for melee line units.)
Over the course of the game, no. This is a pretty tiny amount.

I actually miss the very strategic gold game play of Civ 5 where managing your gold income was extremely important, maybe as much as your science. I'm not sure it's good that gold is acting like faith: a bonus yield that is in practice only positive, and we spend our ever growing pile of on "boosts" for our empire, like buildings, units, great people, etc. I think it should be more of a knife edge- an empire with strong gold income isn't the default, it's something you have to sacrifice other areas for. In exchange, you can afford to rush buy or upgrade what you want. Besides, ambitious generals among us could always visit some rich, unprotected cities to relieve them of their plunder...

(Sigh. I try very hard to come up with intelligent things to say, then you guys come along and blow me out of the water. I really need to work on my history and maths.)

Yeah, the whole gold thing is a bust. Faith too. I don’t mind in the early game focusing on production, but mid and late game gold and faith should matter more.

And by “matter more”, I mean both have more impact on the game but also require more work to manage. I really dislike how gold and faith always just increase and accumulate. There’s no need to really manage your finances other than in the most trite ways.

I’d happily drop any requests for unit caps etc if we had some sort of economy management. Civ’s “boardgame” design probably limits how complex any management could be, but I think there could be something more done.

A few random thoughts:

- I really think the Faith for Harvesting and Faith for Appeal should be policy cards, not pantheons. If you don’t pick a faith pantheon, and don’t build holy sites, it’s two hard to get faith in the game. Having Faith for Appeal be a policy card would also boost the value of appeal.

- Your gold per turn should fluctuate more. Perhaps not truly randomly, but based on what’s going on in your economy. Perhaps lack of happiness should drain gold, maybe wars, maybe ages. Just something so you have to react to expenditures. Relatedly, you should be able to borrow money from Allies. You already can technically, but it needs a more explicit mechanic. Maybe you should be able to borrow from city states too.

- Units and buildings should not have flat costs. They should vary a bit based on circumstances eg government tier.

- No sliders, but some policy cards that give gold should also give some negatives - eg to happiness or growth (tax).

- You should be able to spend gold and faith to “buy” certain policies or projects. Or buy happiness. Or buy science.

- The overall strength of your gold or faith economy should impact global happiness or productivity. If you’re going to run a massive surplus, there should be some upside.

- Having negative gold should probably have a more soft impact rather than just losing units. eg unhappiness, reduced science. Lots of countries run at a deficit (indeed, it can be a good sign if your country actually can run at a deficit). Running negative gold should not be game over, just like Dark Ages aren’t.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

(Sigh. I try very hard to come up with intelligent things to say, then you guys come along and blow me out of the water. I really need to work on my history and maths.)

The best ideas on these Forums come from the interaction between the posters - even the best single post can be improved by somebody else's thoughts - and thank you for starting this Thread.

Yeah, the whole gold thing is a bust. Faith too. I don’t mind in the early game focusing on production, but mid and late game gold and faith should matter more.

And by “matter more”, I mean both have more impact on the game but also require more work to manage. I really dislike how gold and faith always just increase and accumulate. There’s no need to really manage your finances other than in the most trite ways.

I’d happily drop any requests for unit caps etc if we had some sort of economy management. Civ’s “boardgame” design probably limits how complex any management could be, but I think there could be something more done.

A few random thoughts:

- I really think the Faith for Harvesting and Faith for Appeal should be policy cards, not pantheons. If you don’t pick a faith pantheon, and don’t build holy sites, it’s two hard to get faith in the game. Having Faith for Appeal be a policy card would also boost the value of appeal.

- Your gold per turn should fluctuate more. Perhaps not truly randomly, but based on what’s going on in your economy. Perhaps lack of happiness should drain gold, maybe wars, maybe ages. Just something so you have to react to expenditures. Relatedly, you should be able to borrow money from Allies. You already can technically, but it needs a more explicit mechanic. Maybe you should be able to borrow from city states too.

- Units and buildings should not have flat costs. They should vary a bit based on circumstances eg government tier.

- No sliders, but some policy cards that give gold should also give some negatives - eg to happiness or growth (tax).

- You should be able to spend gold and faith to “buy” certain policies or projects. Or buy happiness. Or buy science.

- The overall strength of your gold or faith economy should impact global happiness or productivity. If you’re going to run a massive surplus, there should be some upside.

- Having negative gold should probably have a more soft impact rather than just losing units. eg unhappiness, reduced science. Lots of countries run at a deficit (indeed, it can be a good sign if your country actually can run at a deficit). Running negative gold should not be game over, just like Dark Ages aren’t.

In regards to Gold, Borrowing, costs, etc. may I humbly refer you to The Next Expansion: a Few Suggestions
Which pretty much sums up all I have to say at the moment on those topics, including borrowing money and even possibly going bankrupt.

 

[acluewithout]

In regards to Gold, Borrowing, costs, etc. may I humbly refer you to The Next Expansion: a Few Suggestions
Which pretty much sums up all I have to say at the moment on those topics, including borrowing money and even possibly going bankrupt.

There’s a lot of good stuff in your post. I hope people click through the link.

I don’t have very clear thoughts on what I’d like to see on the economic side. There’s a limit to how complex the game can be, particularly given its game board design (which I really like). I also think FXS preference for having only carrots and no sticks is right - it’s not fun being punished. For example, I don’t like a lot of the ideas around making strategic resources expendable - I get how that would be more realistic or strategic, but I think the simplicity of current system is better overall (albeit late game strategic resources should maybe be important to things beyond just building units).

My main thought is that early game your empire wide economy doesn’t need to matter much - it’s fine for each city to just be its own thing and just churn out units and buildings with production. But as the game progresses, the game should be about what your empire can achieve not individual cities. That then favours gold and faith over actual hammers, and also tweaking the impact of big standing armies late game.

Relatedly, you should come under more and more pressure to actually keep your empire functioning. I think improving how trade and finance work late game would really help with that, particularly if it interacted with governments and ideologies. Representing modern ideas like global finance with some buildings (stock exchange) and some cards (e-commerce) really just doesn’t cut it.

 

[kaspergm]

I think one thing that has long been a problem with civ games (it was in 5 and 6 at leas, don't recall before that), and which plays into this discussion, is that overall it puts too little emphasis on internal roles of military. You can easily run a big empire with a relatively small number of units stationed around your borders and with basically not military presence internally. That obviously skews balance because your gold income will generally scale with number of cities, while military expanses does so to a lesser degree. I think if there was a stronger link between loyalty, happiness and production/corruption and military presence, you'd have a stronger need for a larger standing force, and that would help balance things out.

 

[MrRadar]

I do not enthuse about hard capping units at all. In Civilization this always creates some feeling of arbitrariness, it probably requires a lot of effort of thinking up a system, which is tricky to balance, and which is probably not worth it because it does not add "fun gameplay", but rather diminishes it by adding complication and frustration. And it smells too much of the Paradox territory anyway.

As for the upgrading of units, what if FXS borrowed an idea from their own game - BE, and adopted the system of free and automatic upgrades of all existing units upon getting the technology (and having the strat resource, if necessary)? Gone this nonsense of the Professional Army card, and... nothing important lost from the gameplay viewpoint, but much less frustration from "AI is pushing around catapults in Modern Era".

Now, there would be a bit of spare gold left to add to the heaps of it already lying around. I'd simply suggest an opportunity to use it by making you pay for the ammunition: to "tax" the unit action, on top of the current unit maintenance. Each use of a unit in attack should cost a proportion of its base strength. In your own territory, this could be reduced, based on some sort of "own resources, simpler logistics, etc." and could be further lowered with some "Homefront" policy card, but warring outside their borders players would see money evaporate into thin air at such rates, that would make them think twice, if all this is worth it. Of course, there should be some "War Bonds" card, offering ~25% or so economies to the warmongers... at the cost of -1 amenity per city. Something along these lines.

Making war costly, as it is in RL, making you actually pay for your wars would make the choice between peaceful development and acquisition by conquest much more relevant: you can either buy infrastructure, or pay your troops for an opportunity to capture it - the "peaceful builder/conquering warmonger" dilemma would finally be there. And it does not require a lot of coding efforts, just add gold consumption for unit actions. And most probably you won’t be building more units that you could afford to actually use – there's even some kind of soft capping the unit number.

Also, a few turns of cities staying in revolt after capture should be brought back, and all their territory designated as "neutral" in the meanwhile. It all instantly becoming "yours" is a bit too much of a help.

 

[acluewithout]

I think one thing that has long been a problem with civ games (it was in 5 and 6 at leas, don't recall before that), and which plays into this discussion, is that overall it puts too little emphasis on internal roles of military. You can easily run a big empire with a relatively small number of units stationed around your borders and with basically not military presence internally. That obviously skews balance because your gold income will generally scale with number of cities, while military expanses does so to a lesser degree. I think if there was a stronger link between loyalty, happiness and production/corruption and military presence, you'd have a stronger need for a larger standing force, and that would help balance things out.

I think loyalty is quite well balanced with military from the angle of loyalty - basically, I think it’s good you can’t sort out loyalty by having a tonne of military (making loyalty irrelevant). But I’d never thought of it the other way around - ie is not well balanced with loyalty, because there’s not enough for military “to do”.

Overall, Civ never gives you the feeling of really building the good old “military industrial complex”. That would maybe require looking not only at military mechanics, but also Civ’s problems representing governance (as opposed to just governments), industry : productivity (and specifically the industrial revolution), and economy (particular finance and trade).

... and there I was thinking all the game needed was for Spearmen to be cheaper and for England to get a couple of free trade routes.

 

[Zuizgond]

Considering the poor focus on AI capabilities, I suspect the low cost of upgrading units is to help AI.

 

[MrRadar]

Overall, Civ never gives you the feeling of really building the good old “military industrial complex”. That would maybe require looking not only at military mechanics, but also Civ’s problems representing governance (as opposed to just governments), industry : productivity (and specifically the industrial revolution), and economy (particular finance and trade).

Did you have a chance to play pre-V era games? I'd say, earlier instalments give you that feeling well enough, and Civ IV even has governance rather than governments - the civics system.

 

[acluewithout]

@MrRadar Civ VI is literally the only video game I play, and even then I don't get a lot of time to play that either!

I really like the idea of Civ IV. I could live with unit stacking and even (the horror) sliders. But squares and no districts would be maddening.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

I do not enthuse about hard capping units at all. In Civilization this always creates some feeling of arbitrariness, it probably requires a lot of effort of thinking up a system, which is tricky to balance, and which is probably not worth it because it does not add "fun gameplay", but rather diminishes it by adding complication and frustration. And it smells too much of the Paradox territory anyway.

As for the upgrading of units, what if FXS borrowed an idea from their own game - BE, and adopted the system of free and automatic upgrades of all existing units upon getting the technology (and having the strat resource, if necessary)? Gone this nonsense of the Professional Army card, and... nothing important lost from the gameplay viewpoint, but much less frustration from "AI is pushing around catapults in Modern Era".

Now, there would be a bit of spare gold left to add to the heaps of it already lying around. I'd simply suggest an opportunity to use it by making you pay for the ammunition: to "tax" the unit action, on top of the current unit maintenance. Each use of a unit in attack should cost a proportion of its base strength. In your own territory, this could be reduced, based on some sort of "own resources, simpler logistics, etc." and could be further lowered with some "Homefront" policy card, but warring outside their borders players would see money evaporate into thin air at such rates, that would make them think twice, if all this is worth it. Of course, there should be some "War Bonds" card, offering ~25% or so economies to the warmongers... at the cost of -1 amenity per city. Something along these lines.

Making war costly, as it is in RL, making you actually pay for your wars would make the choice between peaceful development and acquisition by conquest much more relevant: you can either buy infrastructure, or pay your troops for an opportunity to capture it - the "peaceful builder/conquering warmonger" dilemma would finally be there. And it does not require a lot of coding efforts, just add gold consumption for unit actions. And most probably you won’t be building more units that you could afford to actually use – there's even some kind of soft capping the unit number.

Also, a few turns of cities staying in revolt after capture should be brought back, and all their territory designated as "neutral" in the meanwhile. It all instantly becoming "yours" is a bit too much of a help.

While I respect the sentiment, I pretty much disagree with all of this.

A military unit cap need not be arbitrary. It should be tied to the existing mechanics, notably the district system. The cap then rises with game play decisions, and a society that focuses on military over other competing uses of resources gets the benefit of that.

Automatic upgrading of units would compound the current, in my opinion poorly thought out, approach that rewards investing in a military in the ancient era and then being able to ride those units for the remainder of the game. It should not be cheap, and certainly should not be free, to upgrade Knights to Tanks.

A cap need not be "hard" either. My view is that units above the cap should cost what they cost now, production wise, but units below the cap should cost significantly less to produce, say 25% of the current production costs. The reason for this ties directly to the next point.

Rather than moving further from the costliness of war in RL, a cap system based on a nation's military infrastructure would better reflect historical reality. Empires lost armies on a regular basis, but as long as their infrastructure remained intact, those armies were quickly replaced. Think about ancient warfare in the Mediterranean, with the Rome - Carthage wars as a good example, where armies would be destroyed regularly, but the ability of the nation to continue to wage warfare was not materially impacted. Or think about the Napoleonic Wars, where every nation (other than Britain) replaced their armies 2x to 3x over the course of the wars. As long as the infrastructure remains in place, armies should be cheap and easy to rebuild.

Fun is an impossible measure to argue, as its a personal thing. For me, the current system is not fun, as it's not fun to see a City State lose its military and be unable to rebuild it. It's not fun to see the AI continually lose units, knowing that the cost of replacing those units will prevent the AI from pursuing victory effectively. Deciding how big of a military I want to support, however, based on who my neighbours are and what type of game I want to play, deciding between how much to put into navy versus army, those sorts of decisions to me would be fun, would vary game by game, and most importantly should provide AI opponents who can hang around and be an obstacle for the full game.

 

[BarbarianHunter]

While I respect the sentiment, I pretty much disagree with all of this.

A military unit cap need not be arbitrary. It should be tied to the existing mechanics, notably the district system. The cap then rises with game play decisions, and a society that focuses on military over other competing uses of resources gets the benefit of that.

Automatic upgrading of units would compound the current, in my opinion poorly thought out, approach that rewards investing in a military in the ancient era and then being able to ride those units for the remainder of the game. It should not be cheap, and certainly should not be free, to upgrade Knights to Tanks.

A cap need not be "hard" either. My view is that units above the cap should cost what they cost now, production wise, but units below the cap should cost significantly less to produce, say 25% of the current production costs. The reason for this ties directly to the next point.

Rather than moving further from the costliness of war in RL, a cap system based on a nation's military infrastructure would better reflect historical reality. Empires lost armies on a regular basis, but as long as their infrastructure remained intact, those armies were quickly replaced. Think about ancient warfare in the Mediterranean, with the Rome - Carthage wars as a good example, where armies would be destroyed regularly, but the ability of the nation to continue to wage warfare was not materially impacted. Or think about the Napoleonic Wars, where every nation (other than Britain) replaced their armies 2x to 3x over the course of the wars. As long as the infrastructure remains in place, armies should be cheap and easy to rebuild.

Fun is an impossible measure to argue, as its a personal thing. For me, the current system is not fun, as it's not fun to see a City State lose its military and be unable to rebuild it. It's not fun to see the AI continually lose units, knowing that the cost of replacing those units will prevent the AI from pursuing victory effectively. Deciding how big of a military I want to support, however, based on who my neighbours are and what type of game I want to play, deciding between how much to put into navy versus army, those sorts of decisions to me would be fun, would vary game by game, and most importantly should provide AI opponents who can hang around and be an obstacle for the full game.

Sounds like an interesting variant I'd like to try at least once. Hopefully FXS feels the same way and will write some code & run a few playtests to see if it actually is fun, or just a major pain.

I like the idea about unit production under the cap costing less (your 25% may be a bit much though). You would surely have to restrict the ability to outside an active war zone (like the wall repair function), or limit the 25% production value to times of peace. As an archer popping up from a city every other turn is already annoying enough that I’ve switched to epic/marathon speeds for most games.

 

[Socrates99]

I do not enthuse about hard capping units at all. In Civilization this always creates some feeling of arbitrariness, it probably requires a lot of effort of thinking up a system, which is tricky to balance, and which is probably not worth it because it does not add "fun gameplay", but rather diminishes it by adding complication and frustration. And it smells too much of the Paradox territory anyway.

As for the upgrading of units, what if FXS borrowed an idea from their own game - BE, and adopted the system of free and automatic upgrades of all existing units upon getting the technology (and having the strat resource, if necessary)? Gone this nonsense of the Professional Army card, and... nothing important lost from the gameplay viewpoint, but much less frustration from "AI is pushing around catapults in Modern Era".

Now, there would be a bit of spare gold left to add to the heaps of it already lying around. I'd simply suggest an opportunity to use it by making you pay for the ammunition: to "tax" the unit action, on top of the current unit maintenance. Each use of a unit in attack should cost a proportion of its base strength. In your own territory, this could be reduced, based on some sort of "own resources, simpler logistics, etc." and could be further lowered with some "Homefront" policy card, but warring outside their borders players would see money evaporate into thin air at such rates, that would make them think twice, if all this is worth it. Of course, there should be some "War Bonds" card, offering ~25% or so economies to the warmongers... at the cost of -1 amenity per city. Something along these lines.

Making war costly, as it is in RL, making you actually pay for your wars would make the choice between peaceful development and acquisition by conquest much more relevant: you can either buy infrastructure, or pay your troops for an opportunity to capture it - the "peaceful builder/conquering warmonger" dilemma would finally be there. And it does not require a lot of coding efforts, just add gold consumption for unit actions. And most probably you won’t be building more units that you could afford to actually use – there's even some kind of soft capping the unit number.

Also, a few turns of cities staying in revolt after capture should be brought back, and all their territory designated as "neutral" in the meanwhile. It all instantly becoming "yours" is a bit too much of a help.

What if rather than having a per action cost they just double maintenance outside of your borders and triple maintenance in hostile territory. It's simpler.

I do like tying more specific bonuses to encampments though and have seen great suggestions in the thread. Wouldn't mind if they were more impactful.

 

[MrRadar]

Rather than moving further from the costliness of war in RL, a cap system based on a nation's military infrastructure would better reflect historical reality.

But my whole point was indeed to move much closer to the costliness of war in RL via "cost per action" system, without further complication, while making peaceful development much more attractive and leaving player to find their own unit "cap".
Well, maybe no free upgrades then...

What if rather than having a per action cost they just double maintenance outside of your borders and triple maintenance in hostile territory. It's simpler.

Yes, that would be a solution as well. And it was like this in Civ IV already Unit maintenance in hostile territory was costlier. The cost of just having a unit and having it in action should differ greatly. But since Civ V, there's no difference, and the instant territorial flip after conquest would somewhat undermine this solution. In Civ IV the conquered city staying in revolt and surrounded by foreign territory under cultural pressure meant you stayed in hostile territory longer while on conquest, so it worked better.

And I am all for making Encampments relevant. What if cities without them could only build some sort of basic units - just some sort of levies, draft infantry, for territorial defence and garrisoning purposes mainly, maybe they even could have some strength penalty until their first promotion? And only cities with encampments could produce real combat units, and their buildings would not only give those tiny drops of production and faster xp gain, but also significantly cut unit production costs.

There could be further big production bonuses or even requirements of having Encampment and Industrial zone in a city to produce anything mechanical: tanks, artillery, mechanized infantry, as well as Harbour + IZ for ships and Airport+IZ for planes. Or at least for that city with an encampment/harbour/airpot to be in range of a factory/power plant.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Upgrade Costs, Unit Cap and Maintenance Costs for units are, to me, representing very different things, but I agree with the previous posts that all need to be severely 'tweaked' in Civ VI.

Upgrade Costs, I think, should represent the real cost to, in most cases, form an entirely new military unit keeping only the traditions and basic 'institutional' knowledge of the old unit. You don't have to train a whole new crop of sergeants (or File Leaders or Centurions) and officers, but in most cases, you have to provide all new weapons and equipment and train everybody on how to use it. The Upgrade costs should vary enormously depending on what unit is converting/upgrading to what type: as I've mentioned before, spears to pikes is dead cheap in cost of equipment and training time, Quadirime to Frigate is massively expensive in the same things.

Unit Cap represents the 'trade off' between having most of your able-bodied men standing around with weapons and having them working at economically productive jobs. This can be a serious drain on the economy when each individual worker is not very productive because, for instance, he has only stone and bronze hand tools to work with: ancient Empires like China, Rome and Persia struggled to put even .5 to 1% of their population into the military, and teetered on the edge of economic collapse to do even that. The Cap was not, is not, and should not be Hard. Nations 'stretched' the Cap when they had to: the Romans raised an entire Legion of slaves in the Punic Wars, normally unthinkable. By 1943 most Soviet factories were being worked by women and children, who normally would not have been more than a fraction of the industrial workforce. Stretching the Cap should come with penalties, but it should not be absolutely prohibited. The gamer/AI should have to make (hard) choices.

Maintenance Cost is just that: what does it cost in gold, production and other economic factors to keep a bunch of men away from their homes and 'ordinary' jobs fighting the enemy, wherever he is. Right now, this is a Fixed Cost in the game, but it shouldn't be: for most of history, an army supported itself by simply stealing whatever wasn't nailed down wherever it went - and prying loose what was nailed down, and taking the nails, too.
Extra Maintenance Cost for being outside your own territory is only correct and accurate in the Industrial Era and later, when armies had to be supplied from home with ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and a host of other 'maintenance'. Pre gunpowder, pre-motorized armies didn't need fuel or ammunition and 'pillaged' any food they needed or wanted from the territory they passed through, especially if it was hostile or 'neutral' (neutral = Pillaged By Both Sides in most cases)

So, a couple of specific notes on all this beyond what I've posted before:

Maintenance Cost per unit should go up dramatically once units are using gunpowder weapons: Musketmen, Pike and Shot, Cavalry, Caravels, Bombards, Field Artillery, and just about every unit past them.
Maintenance Costs should go up dramatically again when units start also requiring Fuel: all Aircraft, Tanks, Artillery, Battleships and all later naval units, etc.
In both cases, it is not enough to have the Resource: oil or nitre, but to turn it into useable form (gunpowder, refined fuel) and transport it to the unit. This is the cost that goes up dramatically the further the unit is from the source of supply, and in extreme cases (supporting units across an ocean or in the utterly resourceless Tundra terrain in WWII) could as expensive as 'building' the unit itself.
Some specific units have extraordinary requirements for Maintenance: the indirect fire Artillery of the Modern Era and later, to be effective, uses tons of ammunition: by percentage, in a WWII infantry division the artillery ammunition by tonnage amounted to 3 - 4 times more than all the infantry, machinegun, mortar, and other ammunition requirements. Maintenance Cost for Artillery and Rocket Artillery should go up accordingly.
Keeping aircraft, tanks, and helicopters running requires, compared to anything that went before them, massive quantities of lubricants and spare parts. For a particularly egregious example, to keep 3 German Tiger heavy tanks in combat required the manufacture of the equivalent of a 4th Tiger tank in spare parts every single year - 25% of the Production cost in spare parts' maintenance alone!

Pillaging should be natural way to reduce or remove Maintenance Costs, with increasing costs in Loyalty and other factors as the game goes on. Pillaging, in fact, was the normal way to 'supply' an army before the late Renaissance/early Industrial Eras, when supply convoys, magazines, and an entire supply/maintenance infrastructure became common. It might be a very good idea to repurpose the current Supply Convoy as a Industrial Era Support Unit which reduces Maintenance Costs for units stacked with or adjacent to it - at the same time that the average Maintenance Cost, with the introduction of gunpowder, should go up significantly.

Finally, just a thought: instead of Maintenance Costs for units being entirely paid in Gold, after a certain point much of the 'maintenance' in fact, is Production Cost: producing and transporting spare parts, fuel, ammunition (artillery ammunition, again, absorbed a huge percentage of industrial production in both WWI and WWII). So, perhaps during or after the Industrial Era, Maintenance Costs start to include an increasing Production Points component - after all, you cannot buy artillery ammunition and spare transmissions for heavy tanks on the open market, they have to be manufactured by the same factories that would normally be producing civilian goods: the real cost to society is in Production, and only indirectly (not producing civilian goods that can be sold for profit) in Gold.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

My views are motivated by a belief, based on many decades of reading history and playing wargames, that the cost to replace a destroyed army is almost nothing at the strategic level represented by Civ. Lose a Legion? Replace it with recruits from this year's crop of young men. It isn't instant, it takes time to recruit and train them. But it is effectively cost free in the context of Civ decisions, once you've already made a production allocation to a society that can maintain X amount of troops in the field.

For me, personally, I'd like to see all civs be able to field a reasonable sized fighting force, regardless of whether they won or lost the previous war, because historically, that's what the rise & fall of empires looks like to me. Prussia lost effectively its entire army in 1806, was forced to pay reparations, and still fielded a larger and more powerful army in what would be, in civ terms, the very next turn. The loss of the XP from losing a veteran unit and having to replace it with a raw recruit is sufficient penalty, to me, for losing your field army. Plus while you're reorganizing your enemy has time to rampage across your countryside/attack your cities until their own war weariness forces them home. But your new army should be back in the field in one or two turns, not ten or twelve as it stands currently.

I agree with the prior post regarding maintenance cost. It's primarily a post-gunpowder issue, and really a post mechanized army issue, and could be represented by production not just gold. Civ 2, I believe, was based on this system, and it worked well.

From a game design perspective, my bottom line is this: if you lose one war in Civ 6, you've lost the game if you're an AI civ or playing multi-player (humans versus the AI get a free pass because you do almost anything against the current AI and still win the game as long as you survive the Ancient Era). And that's primarily because of the excessive cost of producing military units. You shouldn't have to do anything in the Classical Era to field a spear army, just be a functional government: every human society of that era could put a sizeable percentage of its able body men into the field at a moment's notice. How well trained, equipped, and led they were is where the differences lay, and where prior player decisions should show up.

 

[kaspergm]

My views are motivated by a belief, based on many decades of reading history and playing wargames, that the cost to replace a destroyed army is almost nothing at the strategic level represented by Civ. Lose a Legion? Replace it with recruits from this year's crop of young men. It isn't instant, it takes time to recruit and train them. But it is effectively cost free in the context of Civ decisions, once you've already made a production allocation to a society that can maintain X amount of troops in the field.

For me, personally, I'd like to see all civs be able to field a reasonable sized fighting force, regardless of whether they won or lost the previous war, because historically, that's what the rise & fall of empires looks like to me. Prussia lost effectively its entire army in 1806, was forced to pay reparations, and still fielded a larger and more powerful army in what would be, in civ terms, the very next turn. The loss of the XP from losing a veteran unit and having to replace it with a raw recruit is sufficient penalty, to me, for losing your field army. Plus while you're reorganizing your enemy has time to rampage across your countryside/attack your cities until their own war weariness forces them home. But your new army should be back in the field in one or two turns, not ten or twelve as it stands currently.

I agree with the prior post regarding maintenance cost. It's primarily a post-gunpowder issue, and really a post mechanized army issue, and could be represented by production not just gold. Civ 2, I believe, was based on this system, and it worked well.

From a game design perspective, my bottom line is this: if you lose one war in Civ 6, you've lost the game if you're an AI civ or playing multi-player (humans versus the AI get a free pass because you do almost anything against the current AI and still win the game as long as you survive the Ancient Era). And that's primarily because of the excessive cost of producing military units. You shouldn't have to do anything in the Classical Era to field a spear army, just be a functional government: every human society of that era could put a sizeable percentage of its able body men into the field at a moment's notice. How well trained, equipped, and led they were is where the differences lay, and where prior player decisions should show up.

I think you bring up some interesting points here, but if we should take that logic to the end, it would have to work something like this: Instead of separating military units and city population, these two should be seen as one big pool of population. So that you have to choose for each population whether you want that person to work in the city or to work as a military unit instead. So in times of war, you can re-locate your citizens into new military units, at the cost of food and production (and other yields), which is actually quite realistic.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

My views are motivated by a belief, based on many decades of reading history and playing wargames, that the cost to replace a destroyed army is almost nothing at the strategic level represented by Civ. Lose a Legion? Replace it with recruits from this year's crop of young men. It isn't instant, it takes time to recruit and train them. But it is effectively cost free in the context of Civ decisions, once you've already made a production allocation to a society that can maintain X amount of troops in the field.

For me, personally, I'd like to see all civs be able to field a reasonable sized fighting force, regardless of whether they won or lost the previous war, because historically, that's what the rise & fall of empires looks like to me. Prussia lost effectively its entire army in 1806, was forced to pay reparations, and still fielded a larger and more powerful army in what would be, in civ terms, the very next turn. The loss of the XP from losing a veteran unit and having to replace it with a raw recruit is sufficient penalty, to me, for losing your field army. Plus while you're reorganizing your enemy has time to rampage across your countryside/attack your cities until their own war weariness forces them home. But your new army should be back in the field in one or two turns, not ten or twelve as it stands currently.

The problem you describe here is due to the Game Scale being a very sliding, even slippery one. On the one hand, it purports to be a game at the Grand Strategy level: country-spanning decisions about religion, economics, politics, technology, civic policies and beliefs. On the other hand, the 'combat scale' is tactical: if the time scales were in any way coordinated, no battle would last more than a fraction of a turn, most wars before the Modern Era would last at most 2 turns, units would be raised, trained, die and be replaced all in a fraction of a turn. At the extremes of temporal disconnect, in Game Terms all of World War Two, the most widespread and destructive war in human history, would last about 7 turns. In those 7 turns, (again in Game Terms) the Civs Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Poland and Holland were all conquered completely, and the USA built the largest mechanized army in the world, and an air force and navy that were each larger than those of all the other combatants combined, and developed and applied the Technologies for the Atomic Bomb.

In addition to the utterly schizophrenic time scale, the ground scale between cities and states and their armies is equally slippery. Even the earliest ancient cities were never so small that an archer could shoot from one side of the city to the other. Units represent, to have any meaning at all, very different sizes and amounts of men and weapons in different time periods. The largest permanent units in ancient armies (Egyptian and Sumerian and Chinese that we have some records of, anyway) seem to have been 600 - 700 men, which in Industrial Era and later is barely a single battalion. If the 'unit scale' were standard, the game could not be 1UPT after the Renaissance, because even a small force would be stacked 50 units high in any tile! (50 battalions would represent about 1 Corps d'Armee in Napoleon's Industrial Era Army)

But, I've played (board) war-games and even games with miniatures that tried to keep things on a strategic scale, with 'units' that represent entire corps, armies or Army Groups. They don't work very well as games, because most of the interesting stuff gets lost: no tactics, no strategy, just one blob rolling over another blob. Also, the time scale is still skewed, because while it might take weeks or months to deploy an Army Group into the combat theater, the actual combat operations hinge on decisions made and acted on within a few days or even hours.

Bottom line, a Grand Strategy/Economic/Political game like Civ will always have a major disconnect between those factors and the military side of the game, because the interesting military stuff happens at an entirely different time and ground scale.

I agree with the prior post regarding maintenance cost. It's primarily a post-gunpowder issue, and really a post mechanized army issue, and could be represented by production not just gold. Civ 2, I believe, was based on this system, and it worked well.

Hah! Thank you for that, I'd forgotten the Civ 2 system completely - been too long since I even looked at that game...

From a game design perspective, my bottom line is this: if you lose one war in Civ 6, you've lost the game if you're an AI civ or playing multi-player (humans versus the AI get a free pass because you do almost anything against the current AI and still win the game as long as you survive the Ancient Era). And that's primarily because of the excessive cost of producing military units. You shouldn't have to do anything in the Classical Era to field a spear army, just be a functional government: every human society of that era could put a sizeable percentage of its able body men into the field at a moment's notice. How well trained, equipped, and led they were is where the differences lay, and where prior player decisions should show up.

Actually, the Ancient/Classical/Medieval military systems divided into those that have a 'government' organized enough to extract enough Gold from the population to pay soldiers full time, and those that simply relied on everyone providing their own weapons and showing up when called. The latter cannot be kept 'in the field' for long, or they will have no productive farm/craft to go home to. A game in which the military forces were based more firmly on the economic system that produced them can be done, and I think Civ VI (or Civ VII more realistically) could at least have a lot more 'units' that are the result of the adoption of certain Social Policies and Civics than Technologies, and even their Maintenance Costs be highly modified or negated by the Social/Political organization. After all, the so-called Feudal System was simply a way for the government (king) to avoid having to pay hard currency/coin for soldiers/warriors. Instead, he gave them land and serfs to work it and they in turn promised to show up with the required arms, armor, horses and training. The Greek hoplite, German/Celtic Warband of Comitatus/Oathsworn were the same thing: men provided their own weapons and equipment and showed up when called up. These are all 'no cost' units, but also Temporary. Taken away from productive labor or supervision too long, and the 'national' economy starts to crumble.

That aside for a moment, you are exactly right that the game's 'military scale' is so mis-matched with the political, technological, economic scales that you cannot fight and recover from a lost war. For that matter, falling behind in almost any aspect of the game is very difficult to overcome, because of the time required to 'move' resources to concentrate on a given area of importance. The result is a very linear and, frankly, boring game. I've played almost 1200 hours of Civ VI, started probably close to 500 games, and only finished about 6: the rest are usually quit in boredom between Turn 80 and 150. Given all the time and effort the designers put into the last half of the game, it's all wasted on me because they didn't produce a game that can keep my interest long enough to get to the last half of the game...

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

That aside for a moment, you are exactly right that the game's 'military scale' is so mis-matched with the political, technological, economic scales that you cannot fight and recover from a lost war. For that matter, falling behind in almost any aspect of the game is very difficult to overcome, because of the time required to 'move' resources to concentrate on a given area of importance. The result is a very linear and, frankly, boring game. I've played almost 1200 hours of Civ VI, started probably close to 500 games, and only finished about 6: the rest are usually quit in boredom between Turn 80 and 150. Given all the time and effort the designers put into the last half of the game, it's all wasted on me because they didn't produce a game that can keep my interest long enough to get to the last half of the game...

At the end, I think that mostly comes down to (a) an AI that is unable to effectively pursue victory or disrupt the human player's plans and (b) AI bonuses that are front loaded rather than escalating over time. If you had to react to the AI civs around you and what they are doing, the linearity might be solved.

Frankly, if the overall game was more enjoyable in its current state, I would happily play it rather than speculating on the types of changes that could make the game more enjoyable I'd like to see a more historically accurate representation of the base level of military power every established civ can project, regardless of its recent fortunes, but I wouldn't be worried about it if the current military system was fun to play with in its own right!

 

[acluewithout]

My views are motivated by a belief, based on many decades of reading history and playing wargames, that the cost to replace a destroyed army is almost nothing at the strategic level represented by Civ. Lose a Legion? Replace it with recruits from this year's crop of young men. It isn't instant, it takes time to recruit and train them. But it is effectively cost free in the context of Civ decisions, once you've already made a production allocation to a society that can maintain X amount of troops in the field.

For me, personally, I'd like to see all civs be able to field a reasonable sized fighting force, regardless of whether they won or lost the previous war, because historically, that's what the rise & fall of empires looks like to me. Prussia lost effectively its entire army in 1806, was forced to pay reparations, and still fielded a larger and more powerful army in what would be, in civ terms, the very next turn. The loss of the XP from losing a veteran unit and having to replace it with a raw recruit is sufficient penalty, to me, for losing your field army. Plus while you're reorganizing your enemy has time to rampage across your countryside/attack your cities until their own war weariness forces them home. But your new army should be back in the field in one or two turns, not ten or twelve as it stands currently.

I agree with the prior post regarding maintenance cost. It's primarily a post-gunpowder issue, and really a post mechanized army issue, and could be represented by production not just gold. Civ 2, I believe, was based on this system, and it worked well.

From a game design perspective, my bottom line is this: if you lose one war in Civ 6, you've lost the game if you're an AI civ or playing multi-player (humans versus the AI get a free pass because you do almost anything against the current AI and still win the game as long as you survive the Ancient Era). And that's primarily because of the excessive cost of producing military units. You shouldn't have to do anything in the Classical Era to field a spear army, just be a functional government: every human society of that era could put a sizeable percentage of its able body men into the field at a moment's notice. How well trained, equipped, and led they were is where the differences lay, and where prior player decisions should show up.

At the end, I think that mostly comes down to (a) an AI that is unable to effectively pursue victory or disrupt the human player's plans and (b) AI bonuses that are front loaded rather than escalating over time. If you had to react to the AI civs around you and what they are doing, the linearity might be solved.

Frankly, if the overall game was more enjoyable in its current state, I would happily play it rather than speculating on the types of changes that could make the game more enjoyable I'd like to see a more historically accurate representation of the base level of military power every established civ can project, regardless of its recent fortunes, but I wouldn't be worried about it if the current military system was fun to play with in its own right!

I might need to read all this again, but I think I basically agree. I also don’t think a lot is needed here in terms of units / military, although if you want to really work the economic side of Civ it could get very complicated.

Basically, what I think would work is this (more or less):

1. Your ability to field units should be based on the size of your economy. We could call that a “force limit” if we want and we could use population as a proxy for economy.

2. For the early game, this force limit wouldn’t be a big deal. Maybe some units don’t count against it, eg ranged and anti-cav don’t count or only heavy cab count, maybe you can increase it with certain infrastructure (not encampments, but maybe barracks), and maybe policies, governments, religion and great generals could also play a role. Your capital might have a base bonus to force limit. So, it would basically be like a cross between housing and loyalty.

3. You’d also maybe have ways around your force limit - levy city states, buy mercenaries, loan troops from allies.

4. Below you force limit, units would be very cheap. Above your force limit, troops are more expensive and your overall gold or hammers or some other yield per city might get reduced. So, you’d usually be able to quickly rebuild your army if you lose heaps of units but maintaining a truly huge army (for relative to the size of your population) would be hard.

5. Perhaps having a “wide” empire would actually make it harder to keep a high force limit, representing that in the background your military infrastructure is being spent holding your empire together.

6. Mid and late game things get more complicated. Maybe now more types units count against your force limit and or each unit uses more of your limit. worse still, now more advanced units have both high production and gold maintenance regardless of your force limit. You now also get force limit from things like factories and power plants and stock exchanges, and policies are more important too. You might also get force limit from having allies.