Veteran Units

[zeace]

I liked the experience model in Masters of Magic (oh the memories...)

Every unit got one XP per turn. It got 4 XP for fighting a small battle, 10 for a large battle, and even more for huge battles and for taking cities.

Obviously it took hundreds and then thousands of XP to qualify for upgrades so just parking a unit in a safe city was not an effective way to make a great unit, but at least the spearman who was guarding your capital would be an elite unit by the end of the game.

I especially liked this model because heroes started the game incredibly weak, but quickly became very powerful. Sometimes you decide to leave you green hero in the capital for 30 turns so he could get his first upgrade for free. Obviously there's a lost opportunity cost there, but it did prevent him from getting killed by a dozen halflings with slingshots (damn I miss the slingers...)

In civ you could implement a similar idea. Every unit gets one XP for free every 50 turns. If your first warrior survives until the end of the game, it will be a very elite unit even if it never fought anything tougher than a lion. At the same time it doesn't dramatically change the strategy. There's still a good reason to disband old units (even an elite warrior sucks against tanks), but it reflects the value of vetran troops.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

I always thought it was too expensive to upgrade units - I seldom have the cash in the early to middle game, so I just build new ones.

The old units come in handy sometimes to quell revolts in newly-captured cities deep in enemy territory. I'll occasionally use them for suicide attacks as part of an attack on a strong defensive point.

Once they get REALLY old... the ones with 0 XP get deleted. The ones with 10-20 XP will sometimes get upgraded. Anything over 20 XP gets kept as is, usually because it has or is close to some interesting or useful promotion that I don't want lost via the upgrade.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

The interesting thing about obsolete units is that there is no middle ground. If you want to upgrade that city raider III axeman to a rifleman, it'll cost you plenty, and you don't have the option to bump him up to maceman or musketman (instead of rifleman) if you're short of cash. And you have to ask yourself sometimes whether you'd rather upgrade one obsolete unit, or 2 or 3 "just-slightly-out-of-date" units, to a modern one.
...
Well, I for one would rather have 2 or 3 modern units and one obsolete one, as opposed to 1 modern unit and 2 or 3 "just-slightly-out-of-date" ones. Simply because even a slight strength advantage can be an overwhelming advantage in the combat odds.

[ZEE]

Originally posted by Six Thousand Year Old Man
Well, I for one would rather have 2 or 3 modern units and one obsolete one, as opposed to 1 modern unit and 2 or 3 "just-slightly-out-of-date" ones. Simply because even a slight strength advantage can be an overwhelming advantage in the combat odds.

very true words... and ones that every civ'er should take to heart. tech is the key. to ME anyway, obsolete units are fodder unless i see an immediate use for them. upgrading your elites can not only improve the units themselves, it raises your power standing in the world. and THAT is a huge deal to the AI...

[snoopy369]

I'm not sure from a gameplay standpoint that anything I have seen in this thread makes sense.

Why, from a gameplay standpoint, would allowing disbanding units for hammers be beneficial?

Benefits:
* You get some hammers back from old units

Harms:
* Hard to balance # of hammers received
* Allows cheap rush building in small cities, unless the # of hammers received is trivial, in which case it's irrelevant
* Increases imbalances [strong get stronger]
* Discourages using one's units properly. IE, making units obsolete into nothingness (rather than giving hammers back) essentially forces a player to use his units or lose them, which encourages more action, which is generally a good thing.

Disbanding units for shields was one of the worst abuses available in the old versions of Civ, and the fact that you can't anymore is a very good thing.

[Strudo]

The thread was never suppose to be about disbanding for hammers anyway. I was suggesting that units that have been around for a long time should be given an xp bonus simply because they have been around for so long.

Regardless of anything else, I would rather upgrade my units throughout the game, but when an archer unit is still level 1, it's hard to justify an upgrade when a new unit will be built at level 2 or 3, with the only cost being a few turns that I otherwise would be building something cos there's nothing else I need.

I think it's kinda wastefull that in those cases I just delet the unit. I'm not suggesting that I should get something for deleting the unit, just I'd rather have it that upgrading the unit was a more viable option.

[Strudo]

Originally posted by Six Thousand Year Old Man
The interesting thing about obsolete units is that there is no middle ground. If you want to upgrade that city raider III axeman to a rifleman, it'll cost you plenty, and you don't have the option to bump him up to maceman or musketman (instead of rifleman) if you're short of cash. And you have to ask yourself sometimes whether you'd rather upgrade one obsolete unit, or 2 or 3 "just-slightly-out-of-date" units, to a modern one.
...
Well, I for one would rather have 2 or 3 modern units and one obsolete one, as opposed to 1 modern unit and 2 or 3 "just-slightly-out-of-date" ones. Simply because even a slight strength advantage can be an overwhelming advantage in the combat odds.

OK, but consider that you have built that axeman in the first era when you got Bronze Working, and you promote him the City Raider III. By the time you get Macemen at Civil Service he's already been through 2 era boundries, and would have another 2 promotions. I would argue that 2 or 3 new Macemen might not be as useful as a City Raider III Combat II Maceman. With this type of progression you might not wait until riflemen to upgrade your units either. By making it worth while developing units, it might encourage people to use them.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Strudo
The thread was never suppose to be about disbanding for hammers anyway. I was suggesting that units that have been around for a long time should be given an xp bonus simply because they have been around for so long.

Regardless of anything else, I would rather upgrade my units throughout the game, but when an archer unit is still level 1, it's hard to justify an upgrade when a new unit will be built at level 2 or 3, with the only cost being a few turns that I otherwise would be building something cos there's nothing else I need.

I think it's kinda wastefull that in those cases I just delet the unit. I'm not suggesting that I should get something for deleting the unit, just I'd rather have it that upgrading the unit was a more viable option.

That's certainly an interesting idea, but I think it would be difficult to implement in a way that can be balanced easily. You'd have to have some sort of hammer->xp equivalence, but at the same time do you want a unit having the same XP addition to a medieval unit as to a modern one?

I suspect it could be doable via a mod - given the GG in warlords, you could probably do it via that functionality; give every unit GG ability but only a couple of XP instead of 20.

However, ultimately I think you'd end up with people building units to give lots of XP to one superpowered unit. One of the reasons GG don't give a ton of XP ('only' 20) is that units with 60 or 70 xp are just too powerful...

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

Originally posted by Strudo


OK, but consider that you have built that axeman in the first era when you got Bronze Working, and you promote him the City Raider III. By the time you get Macemen at Civil Service he's already been through 2 era boundries, and would have another 2 promotions. I would argue that 2 or 3 new Macemen might not be as useful as a City Raider III Combat II Maceman. With this type of progression you might not wait until riflemen to upgrade your units either. By making it worth while developing units, it might encourage people to use them.

I don't wait until Riflemen to upgrade my units as a general rule. But I build a lot of units, and money is never unlimited, so decisions have to be made as to which units get the upgrade.

Giving away free promotions by era would encourage people to upgrade units, to be sure, but the upgrades are still too expensive for people to upgrade all (or even many of) their units. All that free promotions by era would accomplish is moving the threshold for upgrading up a bit.

And I'm not so sure that 2 or 3 new macemen aren't better than one Combat II, CR III maceman. Bearing in mind that the new macemen will probably be starting with a couple of promotions, anyway. In straight-up combat, it's hard to imagine one unit besting two of the same type more than occasionally.

Inevitably, the most modern units (with the most interesting promotions - i.e. Cavalry with Blitz to Choppers) get promoted, just due to expense issues. The axeman gets left behind time and again, until it's so late in the game that promoting it would be prohibitively expensive.

[ZEE]

once again, i agree with STYOM,

considering the AI is cheap when it comes to selling tech, early game promotions can drain your budget, for a few units that will be as strong as 2 or so newer ones. save your money for over-driving your economy... like "I" do...

[rah]

There's usually that point late in the game when you're on a roll and you know you have enough of a tech lead to overrun the map and taking cities left and right combined with cranking the science down a bit, i'll spend the money to upgrade those poor axemen that have been faithfully serving for centuries in my back cities in case i've miscalculated the number of SODs that could be at sea.

[zeace]

I hate that when I upgrade a powerful unit, his XP drop back to 10. My problem is that from now on XP is almost useless to this unit as it will probably never get back to it's old XP level. This means it's a waste to use it to mop up defenders (You'll give the free XP to a different unit). But it is too strong to be wasted softening up strong defenders. So instead it just travels around with its SOD looking pretty. Because of this I seldom upgrade. I'd rather have 2 green troops who are good for mop-up or for sacrificing to soften solid defenders.

But I want to upgrade my glorious units...

What if the lost XP was used to discount the cost of the upgrade? Say every XP that you lose in the upgrade reduces the cost of the upgrade by 50 gold. Now really strong troops are cheap to upgrade so you'll do it every time. And you want to give your very strong troops some mop-up opportunities so that they'll be cheaper to upgrade next time too.

I think this would be way more fun than abandoning them to guard some inner city.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

I vividly recall a very early game where I had a Knight or Horse Archer unit with 20-something xp. I upgraded it to Cav, but didn't notice that it dropped back to 10 xp at the time.

Then, I upgraded it again when it got back to 25 xp (this time paying attention - "hey, I could have sworn that cavalry had more xp!"), thinking that it would be easier for the chopper to get that last xp. Ooops.

I think it had earned its way back to 16 xp when the game ended. That probably would have been my most-decorated unit ever (I'm guessing it would have had 40-something xp, overall, counting all the wasted ones).



Having learned my lesson, I usually prefer to upgrade units with 10-12 xp, or ones approaching 10. I hate wasting xp unnecessarily. And when it is irresistible to upgrade a 17+ xp unit (again, blitz choppers), I do so with the expectation that this is it, and it'll never see L6.

edited: don't try to post while on the phone

[Jaybe]

I'm okay with the upgrade system as it is.
Would people prefer that an upgraded unit loses all of its battlefield promotions, keeping only those it was trained with??

[Tattila the Hun]

Originally posted by Six Thousand Year Old Man
I vividly recall a very early game where I had a Knight or Horse Archer unit with 20-something hp. I upgraded it to Cav, but didn't notice that it dropped back to 10 hp at the time.

Then, I upgraded it again when it got back to 25 hp (this time paying attention - "hey, I could have sworn that cavalry had more hp!"), thinking that it would be easier for the chopper to get that last hp. Ooops.

I think it had earned its way back to 16 hp when the game ended. That probably would have been my most-decorated unit ever (I'm guessing it would have had 40-something hp, overall, counting all the wasted ones).



Having learned my lesson, I usually prefer to upgrade units with 10-12 hp, or ones approaching 10. I hate wasting hp unnecessarily. And when it is irresistible to upgrade a 17+ hp unit (again, blitz choppers), I do so with the expectation that this is it, and it'll never see L6.

You mean xp, or exp, right?