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

[Cannonballninja]

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

A thing about commanders that I haven't seen mentioned is, I think...they actually represent advances in military doctrine really well? An army with modern, experienced leadership can do things older armies could only dream of. And it also means your army is something you build to take advantage of the doctrine you've developed (with your choice of promotions!).

I'm sure you could push some of that into the tech tree, or - if you really wanted to - build out a whole system like the ones Shadow Empire and similar games have. But for making the development and specialisation of your very own military doctrine super accessible, CiVII's commanders look like a great approach.

 

[TheGrayFox]

Yeah I think those who enjoyed stacks of doom over 1upt are going to find themselves in the minority of Civilization fans at this point. Which isn't to say that I never had fun with stacks in 3 or 4 but I don't think I'd want to go back personally, even if the AI could handle the simplicity of stacked units better. I believe VII has made its best choice in compromising between stacks and tactical 1upt combat

 

[SuperFly47]

Stack of Doom has far less time spent managing wars compared to one unit per tile. I actually stopped playing Civ 5 because I would spend way too much time on managing units in war. I play Civ mainly for civilization building. If people want to focus on economy building but have war part of the game then Stack of Doom can be better.

 

[TreVor_ish]

Beating the horse produces no effects.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

Yeah I think those who enjoyed stacks of doom over 1upt are going to find themselves in the minority of Civilization fans at this point. Which isn't to say that I never had fun with stacks in 3 or 4 but I don't think I'd want to go back personally, even if the AI could handle the simplicity of stacked units better. I believe VII has made its best choice in compromising between stacks and tactical 1upt combat

Maybe not here, but that's mainly because message boards are used by Old People. The civ fans who are too young to have grown up with unit stacking, are all on reddit, youtube, twitter and other social media platforms.

I'm reminded of that joke about how you can tell someone's age by their favourite pokemon game

 

[Aquila SPQR]

I hated it with passion and when I learned AND mod had upt limit I almost never touched Civ IV without it, and you're now trying to convince me stacks of doom were never a problem? Ok, nice try.

 

[GoneFishingX]

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.

What a lovely strawman you've built. Literally no one has ever made that point with stacks of doom. This thread is filled with people's actual opinions about them and civfanatics has tons on convos about them. Please engage with those instead of misrepresenting the very valid criticisms of SoD.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

'Stack' is how army and navy is actually organized as per strategic deployments for this kind of 4X grandscale game. some constrains are needed to balance gameplay however,
also manual combat resolve is a no go.
Commanders-only promotions is way to go, and with this, field commanders can be specialized to match army arrangements.
And this could also means a possibility to have something like 'Horse Artillery' in addition to simple 'foot' field artillery without the need to make separate different units, (though it might be neccessary also because horse artillery trades firepower for mobility (the unit can keep up with 'all cavalry' army, but weaker attacks than foot fieldguns. since IRL they never use anything bigger than 6 pounder field cannons, while foot artillery has a caliber limit of 12 pounders (roughtly 12 cm caliber maybe?) )

 

[_hero_]

I'll never understand why people on here act like the only 2 options are SoD or 1UPT.

 

[aelf]

Whether SoDs were a "problem" or not depended on your preference or what you find fun. It creates a certain style of gameplay, but so does 1UPT. I can't say I enjoy the iteration of 1UPT as much, even in Civ6, but it has its upsides. Hopefully, the Civ7 iteration will be heavier on the upsides.

 

[Roald Amundsen]

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.

So true. Also where to place roads and build infrastructure so that you actually got the units where you needed was a big part of the game. The game was very tactical and strategic. It still is, but the tactics and strategic focus has changed.

 

[Lazy sweeper]

I hated it with passion and when I learned AND mod had upt limit I almost never touched Civ IV without it, and you're now trying to convince me stacks of doom were never a problem? Ok, nice try.

It was not a problem since civ III had Armies that actually worked.
Civ IV removed armies and introduced unit stacking collateral damage, so by IV, yes, it was a problem.
It was never a problem BEFORE they removed armies.

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I never played Civ 3, but here's what a wiki says:

Army (Civ3)

Back to the list of units An Army is a group of ordinary units that move and fight together. To form an army, you must build the Army unit and then "load" other units into it. You can load up to three units, though The Pentagon increases this limit to four, if you have built it. Armies can be...

civilization.fandom.com

It sounds like an intriguing idea: needing to build a certain number of cities in order to create what's effectively a "super" unit with more hitpoints. This to me sounds like a good balance between going tall and wide. And disincentivizes early runaway conquerors.
Strange that they got rid of it...

 

[King of Prussia]

I never played Civ 3, but here's what a wiki says:

Army (Civ3)

Back to the list of units An Army is a group of ordinary units that move and fight together. To form an army, you must build the Army unit and then "load" other units into it. You can load up to three units, though The Pentagon increases this limit to four, if you have built it. Armies can be...

civilization.fandom.com

It sounds like an intriguing idea: needing to build a certain number of cities in order to create what's effectively a "super" unit with more hitpoints. This to me sounds like a good balance between going tall and wide. And disincentivizes early runaway conquerors.
Strange that they got rid of it...

I wouldnt say it was completely abandoned. They just changed how it something like that looks over different iterations. Civ Revolutions had an army system, and Civ 6s is both different but along the same lines with corps/armies. The commander system is a another idea off of that. Its a bit more decentralized after they deploy but they are still connected and get boosts for being near a commander.

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I forgot about the Corps system in Civ 6 but honestly that game was such a blur in my mind after playing probably less than 50-75 hours of it total
:/
It came far later in the game, though.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

I forgot about the Corps system in Civ 6 but honestly that game was such a blur in my mind after playing probably less than 50-75 hours of it total
:/
It came far later in the game, though.

A lame system adopted from mobile game Basically a no go, and FXis got it right in Civ7.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Corps and armies were supposed to be a solution for overcrowded map in 1UpT and on paper it looked well. It means if you could dedicate a lot of production into military, you could join forces for stronger armies and if not, you could keep separate units.

I haven't played large-scale late game wars in Civ6, so I can't say how good it is in reality, though.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Corps and armies were supposed to be a solution for overcrowded map in 1UpT and on paper it looked well. It means if you could dedicate a lot of production into military, you could join forces for stronger armies and if not, you could keep separate units.

I haven't played large-scale late game wars in Civ6, so I can't say how good it is in reality, though.

but Corps and Armies cannot be split up afterwards. and IRL both of the two consisted of different units of the same domain organized together. in one corps there can be a combination of Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery OR Infantry, and two types of artilleries (fields and sieges). FXis did not handle this well.

In addition, there should also be an order to train 'pre-organized armies and fleets' as well. one that begins with a commander + 2-3 units of assiciated types. and each of prebuilt armies has its own name.

 

[stealth_nsk]

but Corps and Armies cannot be split up afterwards. and IRL both of the two consisted of different units of the same domain organized together. in one corps there can be a combination of Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery OR Infantry, and two types of artilleries (fields and sieges). FXis did not handle this well.

In addition, there should also be an order to train 'pre-organized armies and fleets' as well. one that begins with a commander + 2-3 units of assiciated types. and each of prebuilt armies has its own name.

None of those things are required to solve the gameplay problem of overcrowded map. Those are wishes for historical simulation, not strategic gameplay.

 

[Taefin]

I most often felt that the corp/army mechanic in VI achieved the ostensible goal of reducing the number of units on the map as things began to feel overcrowded, and created a use for the industrial boost to production.

I wonder how VII will handle unit costs to ensure that battles don’t get too crowded once commanders are unpacked. If unit costs climb dramatically with eras, and with units from past eras are automatically upgrading, will stockpiling a bunch of antiquity units be dramatically more cost effective than building units in modern? This could contribute more than in VI to player snowballing, since players typically have high kill/death.