That stack of doom ...

[Saurus]

1400 A.D ... My friend and ally, Catharine, suddenly knocks on my door ... -May I come in? I took some friends with me also.
They are standing there next to you city in a nice, large stack.

5 war elephants
3 catapults
4 knights
5 grenadiers
2 pikemen
1 maceman
+ all the other units witch is also in the stack but witch I am not allowed to see.

This has been discussed before but I feel it is time to do so again because this is an issue that needs serious attention in the upcomming patches.

The problem is that there simply is NO WAY of destroying this stack!

Frist: Cannons are still too far away on the tech tree.
Second: Neither Catapults or Cannons does coltheral damage to more than the few first units at a time and that's not enough. They are supposed to be the counter to the "stack of doom" but in truth they counter only very small stacks and not stacks of doom.
Third: Whitout knowing how many units there actually is in the stack makes it in any case impossible to take required countermeasuers in cases I would have had more units around.

I had 6 catapults I was able to throw against this stack during the first turn.
The first cata damaged 6 units marginaly.
Only after five catas it seemed that all units in the stack had taken minor damage.
The turn after, after having smashed a total of 8 catas against this stack, the stack stood there at about 90% strengt.
No Russian units have died and all specialist-defenders are still there in the stack so no other units can be used against the stack.

True Doom-stacks (stacks with 20+ units) are (at least during the middle ages) still as much unkillable than they have always been in previous civs and that takes away a lot of then fun in the game.
I have lost so many games to theese huge doom-stacks. Catas and Cannons just don't damage enough units to make up for the job they are supposed to do.

Siege-units should always damage ALL units in a stack .. nost just the few on the top of the pile.
There should also be a unit in between the catapult and the cannon. Maybe with an attack strenght of 8 or something.
As it is now, it is still the one with the biggest stack that always wins.

[Blake]

A catapult will still do way more than it's hammer-cost in damage to full stacks.

The way to deal with stacks of doom, is you either destroy them outright or you retreat while building more forces.

It is fortunate that the AI tends to very heavily garrison captured cities, so the idea is to let the SoD take a fringe city (don't even defend it, just pull your forces out, except perhaps one city defender), it is likely at least 8-12 units will stay back to garrison, some more will split up to pillage the tiles around the captured city (because the AI is retarded) and perhaps another stack (but much smaller) will advance from the city. Use catapults to smash the new stack and the specialized counters to kill the pillagers, then hit the captured city with a tonne of city raider catapults followed by city raider swords/maces etc, there is no defense against city raiders and whenever possible you should fight enemy city-busters when they are tied down on garrison duty.

The AI will also be much more likely to accept a peace deal after it's taken something from you, which gives more time to regroup.

Now if you don't have enough cities to lend one to the invading forces then you're kinda screwed. Either expand enough so you have buffer territory you can afford to lose, or keep an unreasonably large standing army.

And always remember the old maxim:
"The best defense is a good offense"

[MattPilot]

THere needs to be an overcrowded penalty, to encourage spread out stacks

I know some mods have it, but i haven't found one that only addresses this one issue. I don't really want that other stuff some mods offer.

[Saygame]

In impossibly irretrivable military cases, I look for an enemy of the attacker, not at war, whom I can gift my city to. Often the attacker razes cites and by gifting it, the city infrastructure remains totally intact to possibly retrieve again in the future. An enemy of the attacker gaining my city control often doesn't have open borders so the advantage is the enemy is set back afew squares. Additionally, it often takes the wind out of the attacker's sails for a few turns or sometimes a long time. And I get the advantage of a potential increase in friendship AND an isolated town easy to take back in the future AND precious time to gear up for the invasion.

It helps having a diplomacy chart (see my thread on spreadsheet tools) to quickly determine the best candidate for the gifted city. Course it all depends on the ability to gift the city in the first place. As a builder I frequently use this tactic surprisingly well when my military is low and gets caught off guard.

[Unimatrix11]

How about simply implement a maximum number per square limit (Call to Power had it) - that should fix the problem and is also more realistic in my opinion... I think 12 or 15 might be a good number and maybe Cities and fortresses should be an exception to that rule. Would give fortresses a bit more of a use, too...

[Willem]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
How about simply implement a maximum number per square limit (Call to Power had it) - that should fix the problem and is also more realistic in my opinion... I think 12 or 15 might be a good number and maybe Cities and fortresses should be an exception to that rule. Would give fortresses a bit more of a use, too...

Since you can't see more than 20 units in a stack anyway, that number would seem the most logical.

[Son of David]

Are you seriously proposing changing the rules because an AI beat you in a war?

That seems to me a little drastic.

[MattPilot]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
How about simply implement a maximum number per square limit (Call to Power had it) - that should fix the problem and is also more realistic in my opinion... I think 12 or 15 might be a good number and maybe Cities and fortresses should be an exception to that rule. Would give fortresses a bit more of a use, too...

Now i've only someone could make such a mod, the world would be perfect.


I would also agree that a number lower than 20 would be a good choice.


Although the question begs, only 20 friendly units, or 20 units combined regardless if friendly or neutral?



I'd prefer all units, not just friendly. That could lead to some interesting blockades.



So, who is up for the mod task?

[axisworks]

What difficulty level were you playing at?

[Unimatrix11]

@Son of David: i had never problem wih a SoD (i play on Prince), but still would like to see a unit-per-square limit.

@Willem: 20 is okay with me, too

@MattPilot: for realism sake i'd say it's total unit number - also that would avoid exploits. If it's 20 (or so) per player, two allies could outnumber a single player any time (except at cities and fortresses - though i am not sure if they should really be an exception, since a) in terms of realism it doesnt make much sense and b) cities are tough to conquer already - so maybe rather drop these exceptions)

Unit-number-limit could allow for a new tech though. Something like advanced military logistics (maybe after military tradition ?) raising the number from, say, 15 to, say, 20...

In regards of coastal cities: ships and land/air-units should have a seperate limit each (so 20 ships + 20 land/air-units). In case of naval-transport, only the ships should have a limit, of course, not transported land/air-units. Nukes should be an exception and not count towards any limit, as well as workers, missionaries, spies, scouts, explorers and settlers (just to avoid unneccessary stack-shuffling just because there is a worker on the plot - capturing worker etc.).

If you like these ideas, you will have to find somebody else to mod it though (or hope it comes with a patch/x-pack), because i have no idea how to do it.

[Blake]

Ugh... no unit limit per tile. The problem with unit tile limits is that your stacks need to do the shuffle when things get crowded. (ie you're trying to move a stack through a pass defended by a large stack... cue shuffle).

A much better idea is to not expect 5% of the stacks hammer cost in catapults to do anything.

Collatoral is absolutely sick vs stacks. Example.
Stack of 10 Grenades. (100 hammers each)
Attacked by 10 Catapults. (40 hammers each)
You can expect that once the rocks stop flying the grenades will mostly be reduced to half health, one or two may be dead, and a couple catapults will have retreated. So to reduce the grenade stack to mop-up strengths (ie no losses of real units) you expend 6-8 catapults, about 25% of the cost of the stack. Cannons are even more sick.

Just make sure to use at least 15% of the stacks hammer cost in kamikazi collatoral if you want to see an effect...

[Blake]

Also, another point I'd like to make is that Collatoral units are not a counter to larger stacks specifically, as in they don't get more effective vs larger stacks. Rather they are a counter to combined arms on defense, like take a stack of spearmen and axemen - you can't get your horsemen or swordsmen to have a fair fight. Well that's where collatoral comes in.

So the point is that siege are equally effective against all stacks - or at least stacks of 5+ units. If they didn't have a damage cap (ie damaged all units in a stack) it would be quite problematic. This is mainly so they CAN be more effective against the smaller stacks against which they are (also) meant to be used. If catapults could do collatoral to 10 units, they'd have to be priced as such and would then be too expensive to use against small stacks...


Imagine that catapults do damage all units in a stack, such that they are twice as effective vs a stack of 10 than a stack of 5.

Well now attackers have a problem, when sieging a city it's not really realistic to approach it from more than 3 tiles. The largest economical army that could attack a city would then be 3x5, 15 units, larger armies would get too decimated by collatoral. That would mean that any city defended by a certain quantity of catapults would be impervious to attack.

So to fix that it would be nessecary to introduce tile limits so games don't deadlock, lets say 15 units a tile. Then the city can be defended by 15 units, while the attacker can bring along 45 units... and then we have an attacker bias!

I suppose we could go on to add a larger unit cap for cities, but in the end it's a darn sight easier and more natural to just have capped collatoral and no tile limits, so players can bring along and defend with as many units as they desire to...

[Unimatrix11]

How about you may not use your last movement point to move on a square which holds 20 units already... If a square is occupied by more than 20 and you wish to end turn, then the program would tell you to move some units from that space first... so you could still pass through heavily occupied spaces - you just couldnt stack them up at the end of your turn...

[PaganPaulwhisky]

Of course you aren't going to kill that stack by throwing all catapults at it, but saying that its impossible to destroy a stack like that is not true at all. In fact it's pretty easy and I've destroyed much bigger stacks than that. If you are letting a stack like that run you down than you are not building enough units yourself. You should at the very least have a nice reserve of knights / macemen / grenadiers to punch that stack after the collateral damage gets done.

Furthermore, if she has grenadiers than cannons are not far off at all (should be one tech away). I often beeline to steel for this reason as cannons are just devastating to the comp.

The reason you lost the war is because you were not prepared to fight it, not because of any flaw in the combat system. If you have lots of units then that stack goes down.

[Unimatrix11]

I'd still like to see real frontlines happening instead of stacks. Blake said (his post came while i was writing mine) that a units-per-tile-limit (we need an abbreviation i guess) would bias the defender of a city, cause he wouldnt be able to stack as many units in it, as an attacker could, if the attacker approches from three tiles. Well in that case, the defender would need to build a frontline, spreading out his defense to more than just the city-tile. I think that would be nice.

On colletaral damage: I agree with what you said on that, Blake. My reason for being pro a units-per-tile limit is not that i have an issue with the so called stacks-of-doom, but with the huge stack style of warfare as practiced in Civ4 itself. It might be realistic for upto industrialization, but with the advent of mass-production and mass mobilization frontlines appeared and a stack-limit could accomplish just that.

BTW: fortresses of course need to be an extra terrain layer and not destroy other improvements on the tile except forests and forests should only give a 25% defense bonus, and fortresses 50%. Also they should reduce colleteral damage done to units in them by some degree...