Were "stacks of doom" really that bad?

[Blitzscream]

Let me just say first that I am a semi-veteran of civ and I would also obviously know about stacks of doom. I've played civ 5 a little bit and know that they wanted one unit per tile so to make warfare more realistic, but I'm not convinced I actually seen it as making it worst could some tell me what I'm not seeing?

 

[jdp29]

Yes they were. I never had the patience to deal with them.

 

[Callonia]

Yeah. They made cities the place of battlefields while fights barely took place in field. it was all about intercepting their sod with ur sod.

 

[blac]

There were no tactics involved at all, just push one stack into another and thats it

 

[Nares]

they wanted one unit per tile so to make warfare more realistic

I don't think they wanted to make combat more realistic.

I think they wanted to make it more engaging. They failed.

The bigger issue, however, is that they failed so hard in designing/implementing the rest of the game.

 

[bhavv]

1UPT wasnt to make it more realistic, it was to make it more strategic.
Unfortunately, the AI is too stupid with 1UPT, but crazy and insane with unit stacking in Civ IV

 

[CivFanaticMan]

Civ is about empire building. I don't want to be fighting the war, I want to be leading it. Tactical combat has some value, but it needs to be tweaked a lot.

I would rather have a better diplomacy system, than tactical combat any day.

 

[Nares]

Unfortunately, the AI is too stupid with 1UPT, but crazy and insane with unit stacking in Civ IV

The AI is bad mostly because it was programmed with poor goals.

Trying to get it to play the same "bait and range" approach a human would under the current ruleset was a poor design decision. The AI cannot handle 1UPT ranged combat. It can handle one of either 1UPT or ranged combat.

It would provide a far great challenge if it used only Posture: Steamroll, and abused the heck out of its research/production/maintenance bonuses, but that's not the direction the developers wanted to go in.

 

[Tealeaf]

SoD were always one of my least favorite things about the gameplay of Civ. Be successful in installing them in your cities and you don't have to really think about the AI might try to do to you. Run across one and watch your army melt. The only strategy involved was cranking out units and piling them up. That's it.

The one unit per tile thing does make for some frustating traffic jams, especially given that it's now too expensive to pave your territory with roads. I do think that the gameplay would benefit if we were allowed to stack two, and only two, units per tile. But still I like the current implementation is better than how it was handled in the past.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Stacks were always mind numbingly boring. Even when I hadn't thought of any other possibility, it never left me feeling satisfied. The only satisfaction from war was getting a great one-sided peace treaty. I know Civ isn't a war game, but war is part of history and it tries to represent that.

 

[Rusty Edge]

I would rather have a better diplomacy system, than tactical combat any day.

What the Fanatic fellow said.

 

[rbj2001]

1UPT is rubbish.

 

[SpearMan153]

I didn't find stacks that bad but then again I had all movement and combat animation turned off - with animation on: yes

I do find 1upt more fun

I really like that combat now happens outside of cities, actually I think there should be more incentive to wage war outside your own territory war (particular modern) should decimate your infrastructure buildings destroyed, population killed, improvements destroyed

 

[JohnnyW]

Infinite stacks with no penalties are bad.
1UPT is bad.

There must be a compromise:
1) Allow infite stacks with penalties (be it to combat strength, hp damage over time, whatever).
2) Allow limited stacks (essentially 1UPT where 1 unit is now 1 army, so I don't like this option). -perhaps also with penalties.

I don't think 1UPT works with the map scale of civ, so I did not add modifications of it as options.

 

[Montov]

1UPT is awesome, even if the AI is not that good with it. It created a new dimension of tactics in civ.

 

[Iranon]

Tactical tricks are certainly possible in Civ4, and for their own sake I find them more rewarding than in Civ5: I can focus on the positioning I care about instead of managing a traffic jam and the AI players aren't as painfully inept.
The problem is that the advantage good tactics give is rarely decisive in Civ4: crude use of stacks and refining your strategic/economic/diplomatic play tends to be a better use of your time if you want to improve.

 

[spider1]

I always try for the win other than through war. While I have won in the past with war playing Civ IV, it was a pain in the ass. It's just not how I play the game. To me, war is a part of the game, but it's not my intent going into it, it's a by product of the selctions you make in your dealings with other Civs. As a military policy in Civ, I prefer playing a defensive game while working to win through other means. This always means having an up to date and ready military, I just don't always use it to declare war unless they have something I desperately want and they won't trade for it.

As to the question at hand, I'm more than happy to say goodbye to stacks of doom.

 

[lschnarch]

Yes they were. I never had the patience to deal with them.

Yeah. They made cities the place of battlefields while fights barely took place in field. it was all about intercepting their sod with ur sod.

There were no tactics involved at all, just push one stack into another and thats it

The above collection of "arguments" against "SoD" shows why it was so unpopular.

a) "I really have to spend time, thoughts and preparation into war?"
Yes, you have to. That is something unavoidable when wanting to lead an empire.
b) "I really have to stop them? No auto-stop at my city with me happily blowing them away by my 24"-2000bc-rail guns?"
Yeah. SoD's had to be stopped. Which in turn meant you had to decide whether you could do so with one SoD of yours, or whether you would have to split your stack into two (or more) to be successful in stopping theirs.
Which lead to the tactical decision of how to compose any of your stacks. Which lead to the tactical decision of where to engage and where to just allow the enemy to take control. Which was based on strategic decisions about when, where and how many units to produce.
c) "I have never understood how to minimize my losses in a SoD vs SoD battle"
Too bad.
Fighting an enemy SoD involves quite some thought when you're interested in minimizing your losses.
The latter is quite important on the right difficulty level as you would like to keep your defenders or keep your attack going although you will have to heal, drop a garrison in the newly conquered city and so on.

In total, any unlimited stacking system of course has its flaws, too.
In direct comparison, it is much superior, though.

You avoid traffic jams within your own territory.
You avoid traffic jams due to any neutral unit sitting somewhere.
You gain the importance of having to build up a proper economy, enabling you to establish said stack in the first place.
You gain the same tactics on a vertical level which you have on a horizontal level now.
You avoid scale mismatch between tactical combat and strategic map.

 

[MkLh]

Infinite stacks with no penalties are bad.
1UPT is bad.

There must be a compromise:
1) Allow infite stacks with penalties (be it to combat strength, hp damage over time, whatever).
2) Allow limited stacks (essentially 1UPT where 1 unit is now 1 army, so I don't like this option). -perhaps also with penalties.

I don't think 1UPT works with the map scale of civ, so I did not add modifications of it as options.

Limited stack is not a compromise between 1UPT and SoD, rather it combines worst sides from both. There are no more tactics than with SoDs (you just put all your units in similar maximum sized stacks - there is never reason to use smaller stacks) but there are still jamming and logistical problems like with 1UPT.

The idea of penalizing stacks doesn't sound good either. It would probably lead to really tedious calculations and it's an artificial "solution".

 

[Bibor]

Stacks were horrible. Don't ever bring them back.

If you really want to get rid of 1upt it needs to be like Heroes' - a hero/general leading up to X units on one tile. When two armies clash, a tactical map opens up for combat.

But this is a hypothetical question, CIV5 uses 1UPT which can become great, once someone improves the combat AI.