Then I'm not sure you understand what a total war is because Carthage certainly never experienced one. Wars of conquest are not new; total war, where the entire population is mobilized for war, first appeared in the twentieth century. Some historians have pushed claims that the American Civil War was a total war, but this is not widely accepted. The population was not mobilized, and civilian targets were strictly off limits (yes, including during Sherman's greatly exaggerated March to the Sea). The Civil War was unusually ideologically motivated, in which sense it might be thought of as a proto-total war, but it was fought strictly conventionally.
Depending on the nature of the war they absolutly DID have conflicts where you saw total mobilization
Rome’s response to Hannibal’s invasion being one, and Gaul trying to resist Caesar being another (where a sizeable percentage of the total population ended up dead, especially military age males).
Anyway this is sliding OT for this thread.
Because it is a game, it was not in the original version but the forums pushed specifically for a flipping mechanism. Without this mechanism people were truly walking all over other civs with impunity, here was a mechanic that could get around people that have a 5 hundred year science advantage and stopped people being able to use “COMPLETELY ABSENT” which you did. Using caps to emphasise something that this mechanic fixes made me smile, and also explained your rationale a bit. It also got rid of the AI walking up to your civ and placing a city in between your cities.
Flipping is an absolutly stupid gamey mechanic having no basis in reality. There was a reason in earlier versions of Civ there was a push against it and it became an option you could turn off.
If AI are placiing cities between yours, you are too spread out AND are doing nothing to secure your borders. Unlike flipping, this does have a basis in history, and it helps balance out the forward settle strategy.
Live by the forward settle, die by the forward settle.
It is in no way realistic. But what game is? I did not play colonisation or civ II because it was realistic, it’s a turn based game piggy backing off history. The more like reality it is, the longer and more complex it will become.
Any game or work of fiction is going to have to do a balancing act on the user’s suspension of disbelief. There are always going to be tradeoffs
That being said, the premise of this game is Building A Civilization, so the various mechanics et al should have a fheme of historical basis.
Flipping has none. It’s also a terrible enfuriating mechanic in and of itself.
Most things have a rational answer, it just not the one you want.
A mechanic that is terrible AND has zero basis? Ansolutly Do Not Want.
It is hilarious how much this game improves both in terms of SoD and actual playability if you turn all the expansions and fheir attendant broken and dumb mechanics off. The AI even gets better.
Not per se. It worked quite well already in the original PanzerGeneral under MS-DOS (i486CPU!). What matters much are the available movementpoints per turn; in that game: infantry on foot 2 and 3 / vehicles typical 8-10 (afair) / a quick Antiair unit surely 14 ... possibly restricted by terrain & weather.
See also:
Having both UPT. and low movement allowance is a hilarious synergy of suck. It makes just moving an army a tedious sliding tile puzzle
As far as hex wat game design goes, Panzer General is VERY much the exception, so citing it actually underscores how rare it is to not suck
Civ is using kind of a dumb downed version of the classic Hex based war game.
The heyday of the Hex War Game was arguable the 50’s to the 90’s. Board game design of that era rapidly converged on stacks of 2 to 4 units with movement allowances of 2 to 9 for a VERY good reason; this was the sweet spot for player useabliity and enjoyment. You took whatever conflict you were making your game around and adjusted the map scale, time scale and unit size to fit that window.
As well as being a Synergy of Suck, 1 UPT also makes warfare in this game hilariously unhistorical. You did NOT see continious fronts in warfare and actual crowd management being an issue in warfare at the scale of this game outside of Europe in the 20th century.
Warfare for most of human history consisted of isolated stacks manouvering around trying to find a time and place for battle that was favorable, and one of the biggest concerns was keeping your stack fed and denying the same to the enemy.
Isolated sfacks is both more manageable and more historical.