I think main the problem with this is AI. The human player knows when they're going to be in a war, because the AI is fairly predictable, and because the human knows when they are going to start a war. Whereas the AI can't do a very good job of knowing when they're going to be in a war, particularly against an unpredictable human player.
So a human player gets a *much* larger gain from such a mechanic than the AI does.
Firstly let me thank you for the constructive comments on my suggestion.
Unfortunately the AI is often the main problem with mechanics like this. I am waiting to see the changes in the AI programming in Civ5 and am somewhat hopeful that the multiple levels of AI described will deal with this sort of situation much more effectively than previous incarnations.
In fact...when you get to the last paragraph you'll see that this is on my mind too, and why I actually think this sort of mechanic could help with that.
If you want a smaller army with lower maintenance, then disband units. It doesn't seem fair to be able to rapidly rebuild the strength of your army for free, this feels like an exploit.
As the Allies found in WW2, it takes a while to scale up your army, and its incredibly expensive to do so.
Doesn't seem fair to who? If all have the ability how can it be unfair assuming the AI can handle it?
Regardless, I was not suggesting that the strength of the army would be rebuilt rapidly; healing from 50% damage takes several turns and the unit cannot move or be used in any way whilst this happens. Clearly the rate of recovery from reduced readiness would have to be subject to play balancing.
I'm not sure how the scale up costs for WW2 are relevant as that would appear to be the opposite case where the allies had to build the new armed forces from scratch...Surely a 'partially mothballed' fleet/airforce and a large contingent of combat-unready, slow to mobilize/deploy and poorly supplied reserves that simply needed to be activated and brought up to readiness would have been significantly faster and less expensive.
Which is why, as I understand it, after the lessons of WW2 this approach was adopted by the allies during the cold war and continues to this day.
My concern with Civ5 is that disbanding units will not really be a sensible option; there seems to be a focus on a smaller number of longer lived, harder to kill units. Disbanding units in this situation would not seem to be the optimal solution so I was looking for something better. Trading some readiness for budgetary gains is a fairly simple decision; scrapping units and having to rebuild later involves far more future planning and understanding of the opportunity cost of future lost building production etc. and would I suspect be just as difficult a decision for the AI. (Has the AI ever disbanded units??)
What's opaque about unit maintenance? You get X units free, based on your population and civics, you have to pay for any units over that, and you pay more for units in enemy territory.
Poor word order on my part...the key word (which was next after the truncated quote) was inflexible. Inflexible as in there is no way to control unit costs without eliminating expensive and valuable discrete units rather than reducing the combat-readiness across the board. The opaque comment was more directed at the lack of easily accessible information regarding how many units I have, how close I am to the various thresholds, etc.
If you want alternatives; Victoria (Paradox game) has an interesting system, where you can pay for and build "reserves". Expanding your reserves has a resource cost, but no upkeep cost and they do not appear on the map. When you mobilize your reserves, it has a big diplomatic consequence for all your neighbors (and they may immediately mobilize their reserves), and it takes some months for your reserves to be deployable. Finally, deploying your reserves directly reduces your economy, because you have taken population out of your cities, and if those reserves die (rather than demobilizing) then that population is gone forever.
I am familiar with the Victoria system and I think is works quite well within the context of that game but it is probably a little too much for Civ where even the modest changes being proposed in Civ5 are freaking some people out.
From a design perspective I was looking to simply extend an existing mechanic that is well understood to give it an additional dimension. Adding a military slider would also have a pleasing symmetry as the other primary victory routes research and culture (and economics as rumoured for Civ5) have their own sliders...but the military option does not.
The sliders, together with civics are the main empire-wide tools players have to specialize the overall shape of their empire's policy to target a particular victory condition...it has always struck me as odd that while civics clearly have options for all approaches the sliders are lacking a specifically military control.
In addition I have another somewhat clandestine reason for proposing this sort of mechanic and it relates to the subject of getting information to the AI. I am very keen to see the somewhat skewed view of espionage presented in Civ4 replaced with one that focuses more on intelligence gathering. This is an area where the AI is at a significant disadvantage because although the Civ5 engine knows the AI's plans in great detail it cannot read the player's mind. With this in mind I am constantly looking for decision points and settings that the human player chooses that could be turned into useful intel for the AI about the human players intentions and playing style. This struck me as a very simple and yet valuable opportunity to create such a data point while also introducing some pleasing symmetry and additional high-level control over the empire's budget.
