What video games have you been playing? ΚΔ (24)? More like ΚΔ,Ζ,ΤΞΕ!

[Sommerswerd]

I love the hero units in Total War: Three Kingdoms, but I am fine with not having the in Total War: Rome 2.

I love the hero units in Warcraft 3, but I am fine with not having Hero units (in multiplayer mode) in Starcraft 2.

I just think Civ could be enhanced by adding an RTS option to combat, so that folks that want to fight a tactical battle could do so, without necessitation the unit/tile spam of 1UPT.

 

[Farm Boy]

Civ is a pretty bad wargame. Stacks of doom were silly, but they let me worry about building and productivity, shoving the combat into a concentrated feature*. If it was intended to tamp down the effectiveness of warring vs other strategies, which I think maybe it is... did it work?

With 1upt I spend a lot of time outpositioning the AI's scripts. Which is more fun in different games.

Mostly I just miss being able to automate workers even if they're terrible at it.

*a stack of doom is still, player time wise, a battle of productivity and tech decisions in a more fundamental way than the tile combat system.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I just think Civ could be enhanced by adding an RTS option to combat, so that folks that want to fight a tactical battle could do so, without necessitation the unit/tile spam of 1UPT.

Hey, you know what this just made me think?

Maybe commanders in Civ 7 could be a way of bringing back Stacks of Doom.

Right now they say it's just for transporting troops without having to tediously move each unit.

But what if they went on to offer a Stack of Doom combat option, where the computer just resolved a single battle between your commander and the troops inside of it and the other player's commander and the troops inside of it?

Either kind of player could play his or her favored kind of game.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Civ is a pretty bad wargame. Stacks of doom were silly, but they let me worry about building and productivity, shoving the combat into a concentrated feature*.

With 1upt I spend a lot of time outpositioning the AI's scripts. Which is more fun in different games.

*a stack of doom is still, player time wise, a battle of productivity and tech decisions in a more fundamental way than the tile combat system.

Stacks of Doom also made for a much cleaner, visually appealing map. 1UPT is silly, because it necessitates unit spam all over the entire map and just makes the map into an eyesore.

Hey, you know what this just made me think?

Maybe commanders in Civ 7 could be a way of bringing back Stacks of Doom.

Right now they say it's just for transporting troops without having to tediously move each unit.

But what if they went on to offer a Stack of Doom combat option, where the computer just resolved a single battle between your commander and the troops inside of it and the other player's commander and the troops inside of it?

Either kind of player could play his or her favored kind of game.

Stacks of Doom had a slight tactical element, which was order of attack. You had to decide which units in the stack to attack with in what order, because it could have huge implications in how successful the battle would be for you. If you just moved the entire stack into combat, it would auto-resolve instantly, but you might lose way more units than you had to, or maybe even just outright lose the battle and most of your stack. On the other hand, if you attacked one unit at a time (or certain groups of units at a time) you could minimize your losses and win more decisively.

There was also tactics in which type of terrain you would attack from, as it would enhance you defenses against counterattack. There was also tactics involved in chokepoints, impassable terrain, amphibious attacks, surrounding maneuvers, etc. Stack of Doom didn't remove tactics from the game.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hey, you know what this just made me think?

Maybe commanders in Civ 7 could be a way of bringing back Stacks of Doom.

Right now they say it's just for transporting troops without having to tediously move each unit.

But what if they went on to offer a Stack of Doom combat option, where the computer just resolved a single battle between your commander and the troops inside of it and the other player's commander and the troops inside of it?

Either kind of player could play his or her favored kind of game.

I wouldn't trust the company to do something so logical

 

[Voidwalkin]

Personally feel the bonuses are too much. It's increasingly asymmetrical. All about compiling the most busted bonuses together.

This is happens to successful franchises. Fans come to expect more cool unique stuff, and before long, the symmetry that allowed for strategic depth and nuance is pretty much gone.

7 appears to be approaching this phase. Paradox somewhat adapted to this problem by having a separate team for balance on Stellaris that did continuous work, but I don't see any such structure for 7. Some strategies and synergies are gonna be so busted relative to the AI avg I expect I'm gonna have to permanently go sub-optimal, but I'll still feel more like a god than a leader.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Stacks of Doom had a slight tactical element, which was order of attack. You had to decide which units in the stack to attack with in what order, because it could have huge implications in how successful the battle would be for you.

No reason you couldn't duplicate that with commanders. Or all of your other stuff, actually.

 

[Farm Boy]

Stacks of Doom also made for a much cleaner, visually appealing map. 1UPT is silly, because it necessitates unit spam all over the entire map and just makes the map into an eyesore.

Guilty admission time, the city and development tiling has grown on me, but yeah. Setting up archer gauntlets for the war elephant march is pretty fun, but not as fun as a dawi killbox(strike one from the book!) or schwettily timed slaaneshi hug(boy are they getting <ahem> now).

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm... Fear and Hunger is really hardcore. You barely can save and die very easily.
Decided to erase it.
It was pretty dark, though. Might watch some let's play of it instead.

 

[Sommerswerd]

No reason you couldn't duplicate that with commanders. Or all of your other stuff, actually.

Commanders, at least as I understand them currently, don't alleviate unit spam all over the map.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Not currently, no,

but,

you load all of your troops into it, it walks to the battle site and unloads the troops for 1UPT combat. What if instead of unloading, your stack inside the commander just had a combat with the stack inside the enemy's commander?

All I'm saying is that commanders are a potential vehicle for giving SoD-style combat as an option, for those players who might prefer it.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Really excited about the new Fields Of Mistria update, but evidently it caused some issues (deleting farm items), so I'm delaying until there's a fix pushed.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Not currently, no,

but,

you load all of your troops into it, it walks to the battle site and unloads the troops for 1UPT combat. What if instead of unloading, your stack inside the commander just had a combat with the stack inside the enemy's commander?

All I'm saying is that commanders are a potential vehicle for giving SoD-style combat as an option, for those players who might prefer it.

What if the enemy doesn't have their troops loaded inside a "commander" and instead just has them spammed all over their territory? Is there going to be some benefit to having the units inside the commander, other than movement logistics? Because if not, why not just bring back the SoD? Why the extra unit?

There are certainly tactical benefits to moving units separately in the 1UPT system. I have a lot of questions for how the commander is going to work in practice, but I guess we will just have to wait and see.

The way you are describing the functionality of a commander sounds alot like a transport... sort of like a Civ 4 galleon, but on land instead of in the water. I actually miss the water transport system of Civ 4 and I don't particularly like that units just insta-transform into boats whenever you move them onto a water tile.

Where did the boat come from? The army certainly wasn't carrying a boat around with them. Where did the boat go when they disembark back onto land? Why can't I, as an opponent, burn the boat so they can't escape?

Total War: Three Kingdoms uses a version of this (and pretty much disables Naval combat, other than mandatory auto-resolve with minimal animation), but you have to embark/disembark at designated pier/port tiles. Total War: Rome 2 uses distinct transport ships and warships, like Civ 4. I wonder if the commander in Civ 7 will also double as a giant naval transport.

One other thing that is nagging me about the commander system, is how the unloading works. So lets say I see a commander unit approaching, presumably loaded with units. Can I just swarm a bunch of unit spam around the commander unit to prevent it from having any tiles to "unload" its cargo onto?

Again, I know we just have to wait to see how it works, but I'm not that optimistic.

 

[Kyriakos]

Not currently, no,

but,

you load all of your troops into it, it walks to the battle site and unloads the troops for 1UPT combat. What if instead of unloading, your stack inside the commander just had a combat with the stack inside the enemy's commander?

All I'm saying is that commanders are a potential vehicle for giving SoD-style combat as an option, for those players who might prefer it.

So it is a potential solution to a problem they created themselves. Besides, if in the future all of the units 'inside' the commander unit can fight as one, it would still be not the civ system prior to (afaik) Civ5. It would be the typical system for games like Europa Universalis.
Which still would be an improvement over 1UPT.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm, I ended up watching various runs of Fear and Hunger (also one of its sequel).
The sequel is... broken. Of course so is the first game, but at least not as much (you can become virtually unkillable in the sequel).
Anyway, Fear and Hunger was interesting. It has so many bugs, however, that people end up gaming the system (eg not fighting anyone apart from the bosses). I did once replay it, and had a decent thing going, although I was still unaware of the various free spells - and still was pretty difficult to defeat.
The art is good, eg here is Joan of Arc or rather the girl from Berserk D' arce.

I was only playing as Enki, though.

 

[Smellincoffee]

So, I opened the Fields of Mistria update on Summer 27, to learn that the one new festival happening on Summer 28 needs me to complete a quest. Another year, I guess.

 

[Kyriakos]

For those who may be interested, I now posted my view on Ara: History Untold.

 

[Voidwalkin]

So it is a potential solution to a problem they created themselves. Besides, if in the future all of the units 'inside' the commander unit can fight as one, it would still be not the civ system prior to (afaik) Civ5. It would be the typical system for games like Europa Universalis.
Which still would be an improvement over 1UPT.

Random thought provoked: Paradox has a brainpower edge on Firaxis.

Compare AI ability in a Pdx to Fxs game. Paradox moves faster, innovates, and is generally less dogmatic. They'd have handled the combat AI problem of civ far better. They'd relentlessly address the issue and eventually stumble upon a solution, roughly, where FXS was content to release endless new civilizations while the core of the game was basically busted.

 

[Kyriakos]

Random thought provoked: Paradox has a brainpower edge on Firaxis.

Compare AI ability in a Pdx to Fxs game. Paradox moves faster, innovates, and is generally less dogmatic. They'd have handled the combat AI problem of civ far better. They'd relentlessly address the issue and eventually stumble upon a solution, roughly, where FXS was content to release endless new civilizations while the core of the game was basically busted.

I am not too sure. Victoria III has been impressively controversial with (up to then) loyal Victoria players

 

[Voidwalkin]

I am not too sure. Victoria III has been impressively controversial with (up to then) loyal Victoria players

OOC what are these complaints?

Found Victoria 2 too arcane economically.