Why stack of Doom was never a problem... patches were optional...

[Lazy sweeper]

Hallo. Today I want to make the argument for why stack of doom were never a problem.
In the beginning, before mandatory updates, there was a period, when patches were released.
I remember like it was yesterday the day I installed a patch that made Ai build armies in Civ III.
This lasted for a few months. Ai would come at you not just in stack of doom, but with armies also.
You had to go out to war immediately and try get an army before iron, to even stand a chance getting to the medieval age...
That how brutal it was...

So having people saying that stack of doom was bad, because they could lose one or two cities, and thus lose the game makes me cry.
You guys would not stand a chance at Civ 3 with armies enabled to even get out the Ancient-Classical age.

Civ VII armies could have a chance to be game changers, rising the difficulty bar yet again where it used to be.
But we need optional patches along with it. Not mandatory patches.
I can't but repel the idea of spending a good chunk of money on Civ VII, maybe enjoy it for a while, before
someone will come out crying the Armies are too OP, or some other ... and then a patch comes out, it's mandatory, and from then
on the game could feel a massive slop. Once again.

It's a small change, but it has to be done. Please.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Stacks of doom didn't have tactical aspect in combat, 1UpT has it, so generally it's better for gameplay. The only problem of 1UpT is that AI looks stupid, which hurts immersion somehow. For some people it's more important, for some less, but in any case the actual strategic value is not affected - AI is still able to provide challenge even if it's with numbers, not smart maneuvers.

P.S. Just a reminder - AI is not a real opponent, it's a game mechanics, just like any other. It's designed to provide challenge in the first place.

P.P.S. I've beaten Civ3 on highest difficulty level in my time and still think stacks of doom are really bad.

 

[AD1730]

Stacks of doom were bad. But, I am surprised that they haven't moved on from 1UPT to something else. I think a supply mechanic would work well. Different types of terrain could support different amounts of units. This would also be a potential place for more differences between civs (i.e. Arabia gets extra supply on desert until x technology is discovered).

 

[Evie]

Bold of you to assume those of us who dislike stacks of doom weren't around for Civ III.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think Civ VII could return to stacks of doom (as an option). Just devise mechanisms for commanders to battle without unpacking the troops inside them.

 

[fantsu]

SoD's are the only way to make tactical and strategic realistic game. It was silly back then to remove those, but we have to go back in time before Civ V and its release. It was all about console sales and bringing Civ to more casual players. And it worked, sales are up and players got used to simplified system.
I think its ok now. Civ isnt supposed to be a real war game or grand strategy, its about fun and good times. More of an simple board game, like Monopoly, not a fulltime hobby like EotS, WiF or CNA.

 

[UWHabs]

Stacks of doom didn't have tactical aspect in combat, 1UpT has it, so generally it's better for gameplay. The only problem of 1UpT is that AI looks stupid, which hurts immersion somehow. For some people it's more important, for some less, but in any case the actual strategic value is not affected - AI is still able to provide challenge even if it's with numbers, not smart maneuvers.

P.S. Just a reminder - AI is not a real opponent, it's a game mechanics, just like any other. It's designed to provide challenge in the first place.

P.P.S. I've beaten Civ3 on highest difficulty level in my time and still think stacks of doom are really bad.

There's 2 completely separate issues in the OP, but the SOD answer is this. Yeah, SOD "worked", because the AI is good at getting masses of cheap/free units and posing a challenge to the user, but they're not good at carefully planning where to deploy all their troops. It was boring to just shove 10 catapults, 6 spearmen, 6 swordsmen, 3 horsemen, etc.. all on the same tile, double click them, and then just throw that at a city. The only "planning" is just to make sure you have enough of each unit to protect the strongest units, and then ram your suicide catapults against the enemy.

As for patches, that's more that life is different than it was 20 years ago. It's a lot easier to force updates on people, and for the developer, it's better to make sure everyone is forced onto the newest version so you don't have people complaining about problems that are already fixed. As long as they don't deploy a patch that breaks a game in progress, I'm happy to keep things updated. If something I don't like comes in a patch? Sadly, either have to live with it, or see if someone else has a mod that patches it out.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

I'm 100% favorable to optional patches and being allowed to disable auto-update in Steam (or any other place in my OS for what it's worth), but that's basically where i stop being in agreement with OP!

First, i DID play Civ3, not as much as 4 or (especially 5) but i discovered Civ with 3 and liked it enough that i'm still here today. However i never liked stacks of doom, or rather i realized when 5 came out how much i disliked them, even thought i never realized it before. Yes, they were not an issue, as long as there was nothing else. People in the middle ages didn't miss an automobile, because they had no idea it could even exist, that doesn't mean we could go back to horse-driven carts nowadays and be happy with that. I know for sure i couldn't go back to stacks of doom and be happy with that.

My issue with stacks of doom is that there was basically no tactics involved in combats. Wars were resolved in one "i have the biggest" (stack of doom you dirty minds!) contest and that was it. When Firaxis unstacked combat, they introduced tactical combats in Civilization and made war far more interesting. Did it make the AI worse? Yes it did, because with tactical combat you have to be smart to win and "AI" always meant "Artificial Idiot", and that's not about to change in the foreseeable future! We might have AIs capable of building phrases by adding words together, but they are still totally unable to understand what the hell they are telling us! The more you allow players to think, the more they are at an advantage over the AI, but that's not an excuse to remove any opportunity to use our brain and force us to become as stupid as a computer! "Winning" (against the AI) was never really the goal for me, and i think a lot of Civ players don't really care either, we just have fun building our empire and progressing our goals and AI opponents are just part of the world, like barbarians, city-states and natural disaster, they can provide opportunities or be a nuisance, but they are not "opponents" so there is no "winning" against them.

Now, with all that being said i do wish the AI wasn't as bad as it is, not because i want a "real" opponent (i would play MP if i did), but because it's just a sad sight when Alexander (or any other well known conqueror) goes to war against another civilization (mine or another AI) and just gets slaughtered due to it's inability to simply move his units through rough terrain. I've also regularly been an advocate of "limited" stacking and think commanders will be a wasted opportunity if all they do is serving as "conveyors" for military units. However some videos seem to indicate that it might be possible, under some conditions, for units packed with a commander to attack. I wonder how that will work, it might become the "limited stacking" i've been waiting for since Civ5 but balancing that ability in a game that's still mostly about single units combat won't be easy. I can only hope Firaxis does it right and it's neither a return to stacks of doom or a curiosity we'll use once and then forget about. Time will tell, not just time until the game is released, but time until some patches are released and the balance is improved because we all know the game will be poorly balanced on release and patches will slowly improve it (i still wish those were optional and someone who prefers the unbalanced state could keep playing that way thought)

 

[aelf]

Civ 7's commander system seems to be solving the problem with SoDs without going extreme 1UPT like Civ5 did. Civ6 had a nascent system with layers where different types of units (e.g. military, siege) could be on the same tile, but it was still too limited. Let's see how it really feels in Civ7, but it looks good. Not sure the AI would be any better with it, though.

That said, I disagree with those who say that SoDs meant no tactics. The combination of units in each stack, which order they attacked (it mattered, IIRC - just sending the whole stack in was something akin to autoresolving combat) and how you moved the stacks were tactics.

 

[CivKirk64]

Stacks of doom are bad because they aren't fun. Not because I'm a noob that can't handle them.

If I'm more of a turtle-er that doesn't want to think about going to war ever game, I had no choice but to make sure I had my own stack to counteract the AI just building only spearmen and rolling in with 40, while I'm busy building granaries and theaters.
It isn't fun just waiting 5 minutes to find out how many Spearman would run against your units in a city.
There isn't any unit composition or terrain based strategy with stacks because stacks can fit through the smallest pass just as quickly as a scout.

 

[aelf]

Lots of people had fun Civ4.

In any case, you don't need your own stack to counter the AI in a defensive war. You just need enough units, whether they form an SoD or not. The important thing is having enough collateral damage sources.

 

[No. 2 Bunger]

Stacks of doom didn't have tactical aspect in combat, 1UpT has it, so generally it's better for gameplay. The only problem of 1UpT is that AI looks stupid, which hurts immersion somehow. For some people it's more important, for some less, but in any case the actual strategic value is not affected - AI is still able to provide challenge even if it's with numbers, not smart maneuvers.

P.S. Just a reminder - AI is not a real opponent, it's a game mechanics, just like any other. It's designed to provide challenge in the first place.

P.P.S. I've beaten Civ3 on highest difficulty level in my time and still think stacks of doom are really bad.

Playing Civ 4 for the first time after 5 and 6, I think it's a bit of an oversight to say 1UPT creates more decisions and has no downsides, and is therefore better (setting aside the assumption that more decisions is actually better). The need for enough space for these little tactical battles required the map scale to be redefined heavily in the direction of less density, which I think is one culprit behind Civ 5's weird 4-city-nations and 6 and 7's massive endgame urban sprawl. To me, Civ 4 feels a lot better to play because it can commit to one scale that feels more consistent with the idea of building a civilization on a world stage, rather than a coalition of city-states on a couple of islands—and that sense is lost with 1UPT. So: 1UPT definitely has benefits, but it asks for a lot from the rest of the game, and that's not free.

(another thought along these lines: no matter how much the game leans back towards efficiency with stuff like commanders, as long as they need a map scale in which an archer having a two-tile range makes sense, the games will have to be fundamentally different from a stack-based game. They seem happy leaning into this with districts and such, but to me, it's a loss.)

 

[Acken]

That ship has sailed a while ago. At least they make an attempt in civ7 to make moving armies easier with commanders.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Bold of you to assume those of us who dislike stacks of doom weren't around for Civ III.

How many of you did win on deity WITH the patch that enabled Ai to form armies?
I didn't assume anything. You need to play Civ 3 with those settings. Steam version will not work.
You can't reverse the last update IMO...

I only won ONE deity game ever, with Rome, and an early army made of one elite Archer, and two legionaires.
Persia kept war on me for throughout the entirety of the game.
I couldn't break Persia. They would slice me up like butter and only because of superior tactics I was able to survive.
I managed to conquer the rest of the world thanks to other armies, but never beat up Persia.
I controlled every nation before the industrial age kicked in, otherwise they would have come after me with tanks armies and it would have been over.
the point is, how many of you managed to win a single game with the most brutal settings ever.
I only did once. The next patch update took away armies and deity was now a joke compared to before.
Civ IV never reached the level of brutality of Civ 3. Armies did not exist in Civ IV.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

Civ 7's commander system seems to be solving the problem with SoDs without going extreme 1UPT like Civ5 did. Civ6 had a nascent system with layers where different types of units (e.g. military, siege) could be on the same tile, but it was still too limited. Let's see how it really feels in Civ7, but it looks good. Not sure the AI would be any better with it, though.

That said, I disagree with those who say that SoDs meant no tactics. The combination of units in each stack, which order they attacked (it mattered, IIRC - just sending the whole stack in was something akin to autoresolving combat) and how you moved the stacks were tactics.

One way of dealing with SOD was to lure them into a pit, a bottleneck, with your pikeman and other strong defensive units positioned on the mountains, and then close them inside.
Ai would try to deal with this by elongating the support line with a continuous line of infantries so retreat was always possible.
Trap the SOD inside the 'cauldron' and then start slaughter them with bombardment.
When, with civ IV, they removed the units movements on mountains, they broke the game tactics, and now SOD was almost impossible to contrast.

Civ 7 will still prohibit units movement on mountains tiles, so even a partial SOD, will not work. This is a big issue, SOD from civ 3 to civ 4 are two completely different beasts.
Devs could introduce more mountains terrains types. Some impassable, others passable.
Some mods would even allow founding cities on mountain tops. Add lamas and other resources to mountain tiles.
100% mountain defence bonus for either cities and units was massive and beautiful. It could be re-introduced.
Inca and Tibet, Switzerland, Austerrich, would make much more sense with mountains cities enabled.
In Italy there are medieval towns built on top of mountains peaks. These were 'Heretic' centres inside the papal state territory.
All of them had been burned to the ground, and there are Myths of ghosts still inhabiting those ruins.
Whole population was burned alive in stacks... that's how nice Christians were with their own people...
Almost every religion in the world has monasteries built atop mountains peaks.
In game archers and bombardment units could bombard mountains top, but in reality, verticality and height difference make it impossible.
Now, imagine you could build a city or a district atop a mountain, and around it's all water but a single, plain tile, with a 5 layers of height difference.
And you have only ONE unit possible on the tile. You can't bombard it unless you have bombers in flight age, or modern Artillery or Battleships.
Only a SOD could ever try conquer it, unless some engineers could build dirt ramps like the famous roman siege of the jews last stand, it's impossible.
SOD could add more level of complexities with the new vertical system, if done right.
Even just a couple of city states, like Lhasa and... Machu Picchu? That could be built only on mountains top, would make for a much more interesting game in terms of tactics.
Both China Tibet invasion scenario and the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire scenarios would also be empty without mountains cities and garrisons...
Hannibal, Napoleon, etc crossing of the Alps would be impossible and a whole lot other scenarios would be impossible to replicate correctly.
In Civ 4 Carthage African Elephants could cross mountains, but there was no Hannibal scenario... guess why...
In Civ 3 you could make a working Hannibal invasion scenario just with the Editor...

 

[dagriggstar]

Persia kept war on me for throughout the entirety of the game.

This by itself sounds like a horrible experience. Poor soul spent probably 20 real life hours just moving units around a map.

The better argument imo is the civ 2 system where early production is so low it a actually hurts your economy if you only build units. Like the optimal units per city in 2 is probably like half what it was in 3.

 

[aelf]

One way of dealing with SOD was to lure them into a pit, a bottleneck, with your pikeman and other strong defensive units positioned on the mountains, and then close them inside.
Ai would try to deal with this by elongating the support line with a continuous line of infantries so retreat was always possible.
Trap the SOD inside the 'cauldron' and then start slaughter them with bombardment.
When, with civ IV, they removed the units movements on mountains, they broke the game tactics, and now SOD was almost impossible to contrast.

That's not true at all. Again, collateral damage is king. Against that, you have to split up the stack or losing everything.

Unless you grossly outnumber the enemy and can absorb the damage. Drill units might work too if they can kill the siege before the siege can shoot.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

I don't really understand the premise of the thread, but in terms of stacks; I always knew that they were more nuanced than I gave them credit for, and there is certainly a tactical element to warfare in Civ IV, I just never really understood or tried to learn it because I didn't find it particularly engaging.

For me, we can't go back from 1UPT, but I completely accept that it comes with problems that have still only been partially addressed: carpets, map scale, and AI being the main 3. I have high hopes that Commanders will make a significant difference to the first and third, but I still don't think they've got the map scale right, I worry that the world of Civ VII will feel quite small.

As for Civ III deity AI being hard and the game turning into a constant war - no thanks. I want the game to be difficult but not because the AI is hyper aggressive from turn 1.

 

[GeneralZIft]

Civ7's system is the best one I've seen so far, period. I'm used to 1UPT since my games were Civ5 and Civ6 but there's no denying that being able to move units as a group with a commander is much better and even more so than the terrible Civ4 stacks, or the Humankind system, or any other system I've seen to be honest.

I'll miss the unit promotions, and the immortal commanders are rather confusing (iirc they respawn), but this system is the best of all worlds for sure. Excellent job in my opinion

 

[stealth_nsk]

Civ7's system is the best one I've seen so far, period. I'm used to 1UPT since my games were Civ5 and Civ6 but there's no denying that being able to move units as a group with a commander is much better and even more so than the terrible Civ4 stacks, or the Humankind system, or any other system I've seen to be honest.

I'll miss the unit promotions, and the immortal commanders are rather confusing (iirc they respawn), but this system is the best of all worlds for sure. Excellent job in my opinion

While I generally agree, I have to say it looks best on paper. We don't know yet how well this would work in real life:
1. I don't know yet how natural it will be to gather units around the commander. With limited speed and rough terrain ending movement, this could require some dancing, depending on how the actual maps will look like and how the roads will go.
2. I don't know yet how well unpacked unit placement will be. We know generally it places melee units in front and ranged ones on the back, but it depends a lot on how front and back are defined in the particular combat situation. Also, I foresee some issues with side units going to the front line and back units reaching fire position, this could eat an additional move.
3. I think we haven't seen reinforcements in action yet, and I don't know how useful they'll be in the actual combat pace.

Overall, I must admit I have a very vague sense of how all this will actually play.