Naaah! They're going to Facebook it all so your "friends" can help you;
"Oldskald is fighting Bismarck; click "like" to help one of his units win!"
Why was 1UPT necessary?
- Thread starter thenooblet22
- Start date
Naaah! They're going to Facebook it all so your "friends" can help you;
"Oldskald is fighting Bismarck; click "like" to help one of his units win!"
So the work around to the current flat tile yields will be solved by what you are doing in Farmville?
SammyKhalifa
Deity
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2003
- Messages
- 6,308
But what is bad with 1UPT? I contend that either system can work, the only reason for all the 1upt complaints is because it is different.
Androrc the Orc
Emperor
That is not true at all! Time and again actual reasons have been posted; sure, you can disagree with them, but they are still well-thought reasons none the less!
The reason is strategic gameplay. It allows strategic elements such as lines of defence and orders of battle simliar to what real battles would use (archers in the back, infantry in the front, cavalry making quick charges and retreats) and generally copies most wargames in the 1up approach. Its a different game than civ4, lets move past why it was changed.
DavidPBacon
Chieftain
- Joined
- Aug 24, 2007
- Messages
- 97
This is tactics, not actually grand strategy. Civ is a game where you should win a war not because you are Montgomery, but because you are Churchill.
Anthropoid
Grognard fantome
The idea of "archers in the back row of hexes" on a map where a whole city fits in one hex is so absurd and out of whack as to be laughable.
Let us assume that hexes are 50 miles across or even only 20; it would seem to need to be in that ballpark to actually account for the spacing of cities.
Now we are going to have archers 20 miles behind a line of infantry and they are going to strategically support the infantry by shooting at the enemy over the tops of the infantry?
ROFLMAO!! Its like it was designed by a 7 year old!
Limited stacking (e.g., max of 3 or 4 units per hex without penalties for overstacking) with special dynamics for combat in which there is at least one supporting ranged unit for the melee would've been one way to represent "strategic gameplay."
Let us assume that hexes are 50 miles across or even only 20; it would seem to need to be in that ballpark to actually account for the spacing of cities.
Now we are going to have archers 20 miles behind a line of infantry and they are going to strategically support the infantry by shooting at the enemy over the tops of the infantry?
ROFLMAO!! Its like it was designed by a 7 year old!
Limited stacking (e.g., max of 3 or 4 units per hex without penalties for overstacking) with special dynamics for combat in which there is at least one supporting ranged unit for the melee would've been one way to represent "strategic gameplay."
Absolutely. This is the whole point. 1UPT is intended to add tactical structure to the game.
Even the presumably reasonable compromise of limited multi-unit stacking is a problematic idea because it is directly contrary to this intent.
And 1UPT in a very slick design move eliminates in one stroke the need for the horrible stack control interface which was one of the worst parts of Civ 4.
Dralix
Killer of threads
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2001
- Messages
- 2,407
Are you going to apply the same analysis to everything else that is based on the hex? Like unit movement, or improvements? What kind of a farm or trading post is 20 miles wide? Once you carve the world into hexes, realism goes out the window.
Anthropoid
Grognard fantome
I agree that the time-space scaling aspect of the Civ games has always been absurd. Stack of doom was one extreme of one dimension of that flawed game design; 1UPT is just the other extreme. There are plenty of games which achieve an acceptable balance between realism and abstraction without resorting to such extremes.
To answer your question, yes, the abstraction of "A Library" or "A Farm" always annoyed me too. I was able to suspend disbelief for a long time, but eventually I couldn't stop asking myself things like "why does it take 500 years to build _one_ library in the capital of my bronze age empire?" The answer of course is that "A Library" is in fact meant to represent the culmination of a complete library system, including not just the buildings, but the traditions, the social institutions, the people, etc. There are lots of those abstractions in the game, and it is annoying the way they are disneyfied; always has been. But abstractions such as "A Farm" (really "a farming system") or "A Library" taking up as much space and time as they do not represent fundamental breaches of reality.
"An Archer" unit standing in "A hex" (a unit of space in which an entire city can fit) but not able to stand in the same hex as "An Infantry" unit cannot be accounted for by any such abstraction. The fact that an entire city can fit within one of those hexes tells us it is a large space, i.e., something like 20 miles across. But even if it is ONE mile across, it is still a breach of reality. Archers did not stand one mile behind the infantry they supported, and in many periods in history may not have stood 100 yards away from them. These distinctions in spatial arrangement are suited to a tactical scale map, not a strategic scale map on which an entire planet is represented.
To answer your question, yes, the abstraction of "A Library" or "A Farm" always annoyed me too. I was able to suspend disbelief for a long time, but eventually I couldn't stop asking myself things like "why does it take 500 years to build _one_ library in the capital of my bronze age empire?" The answer of course is that "A Library" is in fact meant to represent the culmination of a complete library system, including not just the buildings, but the traditions, the social institutions, the people, etc. There are lots of those abstractions in the game, and it is annoying the way they are disneyfied; always has been. But abstractions such as "A Farm" (really "a farming system") or "A Library" taking up as much space and time as they do not represent fundamental breaches of reality.
"An Archer" unit standing in "A hex" (a unit of space in which an entire city can fit) but not able to stand in the same hex as "An Infantry" unit cannot be accounted for by any such abstraction. The fact that an entire city can fit within one of those hexes tells us it is a large space, i.e., something like 20 miles across. But even if it is ONE mile across, it is still a breach of reality. Archers did not stand one mile behind the infantry they supported, and in many periods in history may not have stood 100 yards away from them. These distinctions in spatial arrangement are suited to a tactical scale map, not a strategic scale map on which an entire planet is represented.
Instead of having some complicated system of different tile capacities depending on terrain, why not have a straight, across the board five units per tile. Or three. Or whatever. It prevents a giant, Civ4-esque stack without gumming up the works. Or go back to the Civ1 system where everything on the tile could potentially die.
I have no real problem with the 1UPT except that it doesn't feel epic enough for Civ. Honestly, I think this would have worked much better for Colonization. On an unrelated note, I think the Civ5 engine would have made a better Colonization than Civilization.
I have no real problem with the 1UPT except that it doesn't feel epic enough for Civ. Honestly, I think this would have worked much better for Colonization. On an unrelated note, I think the Civ5 engine would have made a better Colonization than Civilization.
Anthropoid
Grognard fantome
Based on numerous discussions with the wise old sages over at the Matrix Games forums, I would say this: to be able to talk about this intelligently, we'd first want to have some really reasonable ballpark numbers for how big a "hex" or tile or whatever division of space we're talking about is. Second, we'd want to know how many people, animals, and how much chattel/vehicles, etc. we are talking about when we refer to "a unit." Most good wargames define these parameters quite explicitly. For example in the TOAWIII game (if memory serves) some maps are 15km hexes, some are 50km hexes. The 15km scenarios involve companies, the 50km hexes involve battalions or divisions (if memory serves . . . sheeze, might need to install that on this rig . . .). Actually it seems I'm a bit off on my memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operational_Art_of_War
The real constraint in piling up tons of "units" in a small space is not that they won't fit, it is that they cannot be sufficiently supported, the get in one another's way as far as manuevering, and traffic jams occur. TOAWII represents this by allowing a certain number of units to stack without penalty (e.g., 3 or 4) but with more added there are penalties to performance (attack/defense strength, e.g.). Overstacked hexes are particularly more vulnerable to firepower (bombing and artillery . . .
Geeze the more I talk about it the more I realize how long its been since I played that game!
the question was why 1upt.
bottom line answer is that the lead designer of civ6 was a fan of hex bassed WWII strategy games particularly Panzer General. for this reason he hoped to incorporate the tactics of such games into civilization.
i think at crux of why the designers loved it and much of the community does not is because the designers knew how they WANTED it to be played and played it that way in play testing and it worked good enough. but they did not truely take into account how the players would actually play it assuming that the players would come around to the way they intended the game to be played.
bottom line answer is that the lead designer of civ6 was a fan of hex bassed WWII strategy games particularly Panzer General. for this reason he hoped to incorporate the tactics of such games into civilization.
i think at crux of why the designers loved it and much of the community does not is because the designers knew how they WANTED it to be played and played it that way in play testing and it worked good enough. but they did not truely take into account how the players would actually play it assuming that the players would come around to the way they intended the game to be played.
Anthropoid
Grognard fantome
Which would've been a highly laudable goal, had their been a strategic map on which units could be highly stacked up, and when battles initiated, a tactical level map, on which stacking was much more constrained, even 1UPT.
See Forge of Freedom and Crown of Glory Emperor's Edition for good examples of how this two-tier map system can be readily operationalized, making a game a fantastic blend of grand strategy and battlefield tactics.
Personally that's where I think the spacial argument breaks down. Cities should grow not just culturally, but physically.
Games which break battles down to tactical level maps become exceptionally tedious during lopsided battles. The AI may handle the larger battles better, but the game is otherwise tedious enough as it is with all its performance issues.
The Civilization franchise has always purposely avoided the approach of expanding battles into a tactical minigame. The objection is that doing this is too distracting from the main, strategic, game.
This has been a core design principle from the beginning and is not likely to be abandoned.
