I do think Civ designers need to hire a person with experience making actual tactical games. Some of what was forgiveable in V, the first tactical game, is extremely frustrating to still exist in VI. Like how is there no status effect system with poison, stuns, immobilizes, etc to make combat interesting? Huge missed opportunity.
Opinions Number 2: Tactical
What Civ designers need is someone who understands historical warfare at the tactical/operational level. NOT the popular conceptions, which are almost all muddleheaded, ignorant, politically expedient, or just flat wrong, but the actual events and effects. Then we might just begin to get 'combat' in Civ games that is combat (and combat units) instead of fantasy wish-fulfillment.
For starters:
Pikes are not anti-cavalry defensive weapons, they are Attack Weapons against anybody dumb enough to stand in their way. Opponents from the Romans to the Renaissance said the same thing: if a pike phalanx is charging at you and you don't have another pike phalanx to oppose it, Get Out Of The Way Or Die. They also happen to be pretty good against cavalry, but being infantry in front of them doesn't do a thing to save your butt when the pointy ends are all pointed at you.
Muskets/Musketmen were NEVER separate units: within 25 years (about 2 - 5 turns in Civ Time) after the first reasonably reliable hand weapon (arquebus) appeared, the first unit combining muskets and pikes (and halbards and crossbows, to be completely accurate) appeared. The hoary old Civ Staple Musketman needs to be retired.
At Civ scale,
Machine-guns,
Antitank Rockets,
Mortars, and all the other Modern Era silliness are not separate weapons, either. The machine-gun was integrated into infantry right down to battalion level at the beginning of World War One in all European armies, and down to company level by the end of the war, with lighter machine-guns down to platoon or squad. Mortars were down to battalion/company level, and man-carried antitank rockets when they first appeared were issued down to battalion or even platoon level. If you seriously think that the Civ VI Infantry unit represents a company with separate machine-gun, antitank and mortar units, then I don't know what game you are playing in your head, but it ain't a strategic game covering 6000 years of history/fantasy.
Great Generals do not add a few combat points to units, they make it possible for units and an Army to do things that the other army Cannot Do. And that ranges from being better organized, like Napoleon's
Corps de Armee, to attacking or defending more effectively, like anybody led by George Thomas, Narses, or Rommel, to moving faster and over terrain considered impossible, like Suvorov or Alexander. Great Generals should have both more variety and be far, far more dangerous and unpredictable. Imagine yourself a Darius going up against Alexander, or 'the unfortunate General Mack' against Napoleon I, and you get an idea of how dangerous.
Units are not the same in all Civilizations.
2 Cases in point:
Cavalry. It is very expensive to raise and maintain, cavalrymen have to spend a lot of time on their horses even in peacetime to keep man and horse well trained enough to go to war. Therefore, all civilizations rely on men on foot for most of their army. Except those 'civilizations' composed of men (and women) who spend all their time on horseback in the course of their normal daily lives. For them, light cavalry, at least, is dirt cheap and easy to raise in hordes (literally, the root word of 'horde' means 10,000 horsemen). This includes such Civ staples as the Mongols, Lakotah/Souix and Turks (at least at first) and such 'newcomers' as the Huns and Scythians, and such 'outliers' as the Khazars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Commanche, Xiongh-nu and anybody else with broad plains around them and horses in the distances. Hungary and Poland fall into this category for much of their existence, as well: the Austro-Hungarian Empire originally had a special term for Hungarian Infantry: 'Heyduken', because the standard Hungarian warrior/solder was on horseback - the original Hussari, among other types.
2nd Case: "Standard' infantry. In most Civilizations in most times, it was the peasant farmer with whatever weapons he could scrounge: a spear, a converted hoe, flail, or axe, a sling. But, some civilizations made a point that those who wanted a say in the state had to defend it (this concept may date all the way back to the original Indo-Europeans), so in a number of Civs, the 'standard' was pretty high: armored Hoplite spearmen in Classical Greece, the Centuries of armored spearmen and swordsmen of early Republican Rome, the ferocious spearmen and swordsmen of Classical Gaul and Germany.
Which means that the Civ design of a few 'standard' units all costing the same and acting the same and the occasional Unique Unit is Bass-Ackwards: Most Civs had Standard Units that were unique in one way or the other, if in no other way than in the cost to the Civ to form the units and to lose them from their 'economy'.
Almost every unique unit in the game is not, in fact, Unique:
The Redcoat was originally modeled on the Dutch infantry of the 1680s, then adapted its tactics based on t he American Experience in the American Revolution. Dutch, Prussian, and the infantry of the new United States were all virtually identical in their tactical methods - the relative effectiveness was a product of training and leadership of individuals ideal units, not the language they were speaking or the country they came from.
Hussars were only originally Hungarian, by the middle of the 18th century every army in Europe had them, and frankly the best of them were Prussian and French, not Hungarian.
Phoenicians may have invented the Bireme and the Trireme, but the Classical Greeks adopted both and, it can be argued, perfected the trireme ramming style of naval warfare.
and so on and on ...
**END RANT** *RESUME NORMAL AT T-MINUS THREE, TWO, ONE*...
