Chieftess said:
Personally, I don't like having to worry about too many units, and which units to build for a given situation. (i.e., I don't want 5 types of tanks, or 10 types of swordsmen/medival infantry) What's the point in say, building 8 WWI tanks, then getting WWII tanks, building 5 of those, then you get modern tanks and build 10 of those?
Weapons and armor were imporved upon because of competition, not always peaceful research.
Precisely. The main point is
exactly that. He/she with the superior technology... almost always wins the day. See also: Cortez versus the Aztecs, the Gulf War, the Europeans colonizing the world, and so on.
If you were to take, for example, a WWI tank, say, a Renault FT-17 (1917) and pit it against an M-60 (1960), the FT-17 would very quickly be a pair of smoking treads. Nevermind pitting a P-51 Mustang against an F-22 Raptor, or what have you. In Civ3 terms, assuming everything concurent, that means in the Modern Age, after about 30 turns of research, you should have a near complete combat edge over somebody who went off and researched something else.
Plus it also introduces some options: do you go with the lower-quality, quantity army? Or the lower-quantity, higher quality army? As is there's no way to replicate (intentionally or not) something like the Cold War in the Modern Age. You'll both have just about the same thing unless the AI's just hopelessly behind. It's all a numbers game "I have 3 to his 2 so I win."
With diversification, it could open up a question of more "I have 2 to his 3, but my troops are each worth 1.5 of his" situation. Without the tried and true "I have Artillery and the AI is too dumb to use it, so I'll win even though I'm behind" strategem.
The point is this: towards the end of the game, you should have to spend a good amount of money upgrading your forces to keep them relevent, or you should fall behind. That is the way it's worked throughout history (Poland had the finest Cavalry forces in the world - didn't do much against German Panzers).
Unit diversification should
really only come into effect in the late Industrial ages and forward into the Modern Age, but it
should be in place. I don't mean you should have a whole bunch of variants of a given unit, but you
should show the evolution of units. (Bolded for Emphasis)
Humankind has technologically advanced more in the past 100 years than all of human history before that combined. That should be represented somehow, not just packaged up in fewer techs than the Ancient Age and about as many units. The jump from Tanks to Modern Armor is about as night and day as going from Horsemen to Cavalry. Nobody would find that acceptable.
Basically, the message of the Modern Age should be "Upgrade and R&D, or become militarilly irrelevent" because that's pretty much what happens regardless in-game and real-world. It's not "bad realism" either because if the game goes on that long, you're either milking your culture or shooting for the UN, where you're trying not to tick people off and playing nice, or conquering the world, in which case it won't make much of a differene.
Even so, it should only be about 3-4 unit representations at most (Say, WWI -> WWII -> Cold War -> Modern Era, applied to Infantry, Tanks, Planes, and probably some other things).
You could cut down on this some with the new promotions systems, but something beyond "You instantaneously learn how to make Sherman tanks!" and "You instantaneously learn how to upgrade these to Abrams tanks!"
really needs to be put in place.
And where are my jet bombers? "Yeah, we figured out how to put these things on those worthless fighters, but not the things you can actually use to blow stuff up with."
Anyway, that's my rant. I'm not expecting it to happen, but damn if I won't mod it in once some good unit models come out. At least they're implementing penalties for older units against modern ones - that's a step in the right direction at least. Death to
!
