Very old topic...

[Unimatrix11]

So i still think warfare in Civ is a lot less fun than it could be. People keep pointing out that it is not a wargame, but OTOH you can see them same people write, that this game is basically about conquest. While i´d like to be able to say the former was true, the later is closer to the facts IMHO. But then the fun in making war should be maximized and i think, and have, for more than 2 years now, always thought, there is one little tweak that could accomplish a lot into that direction. And that tweak would be a unit-per-tile limit. Personally i hate how everything is about SODs in wars. While this might be realistic (and dont get on me with realism vs. fun since this is all about the fun) in ancient and medieval times, you still never see a frontline develop even in modern times. So i am gonna make my first poll (hope i´ll do it right) to see, what people think about this. Of course textual elaboration in the topic will also be very much welcome.

A unit-per-tile limit could, btw, be influenced by generals, civics, techs, leader traits and so on, adding another tactical level.

[Nikomakkos]

Just give a good reason why there should be a limit on numbers of troops per tile. I can't think of any. I think it would suck immensely. I think it would be a sort of thing that would bug me when I'm playing, and thus diminish the enjoyment.

Ok, possibly this might somehow be used to enhance game play. Like something you mention in the end of your post. But it damn well better enhance it then, because if it'll just be that, a limit on the number, and nothing else, it'll just be a nuisance. That's my prediction anyway.

I do however wonder how a civic could realistically add to the number of troops you can have in one place. The Make-slimmer-troops-by-eating-more-veggies civic?

And the general, what would he do? "Huddle closer together now, boys. Don't be shy." The gay general. :P

[Theben]

I'll have to disagree. Although there is a realism element here, it could only hurt the AI, which already sucks at warfare.

This was discussed fairly in depth in the CivIII List of Ideas (which no one likely remembers now but me). Diodorus Sicilius, who was and still presumably is a war historian, had an excellent set of suggestions. Even so it didn't limit the # of units per tile, but had a Command and Control rule that changed with GGs, terrain, and technology.

[Unimatrix11]

Okay, it could be a ´soft limit´ were beyond a certain threshold, each unit in a stack would just fight worse. The point about it realism-wise is not the corpulence of the soldiers, but the maximum size of an army that is organizable (beside the point that, yes, there is a limit on how many people you can supply over a single road). You cant have a million man in an army. Well you can, but if you do, logistics are bound to get out of control. Thus troops fight worse. Gameplaywise I just think having SODs with troopcounts in the 100s just sucks.

My gaming-buddy and i are actually on the brink of droping Civ because the more often we play, the more we realize, that winning is a matter of expansion - via war. And war just isnt fun in this game. Actually its pretty lame. You just send your stack in and slug it out. As Sid says, good games are about interesting decisions - but in Civ-war there really are hardly any.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Theben
This was discussed fairly in depth in the CivIII List of Ideas (which no one likely remembers now but me).

Oh, I remember The List. Fondly. I still have it stored on my computer. Good memories.

And quite cool: I just mentioned it in another thread, before seeing you mention it here.

[TriMiro]

I think there should be limit, but a very high one. Say 20-30 units per tile.

SOD of the size of 100+ are just ridiculous. I was playing OCC and this stack of 100+ Cavalry entered my land, it took forever for my bombers and modern tanks to deal with them (collateral damage). The stack just fortifies on a hill (Cavalry does not benefit from it) and were trying to heal and I kept on bombing.

[Seedle]

In one of the many "what you want in the next civ" threads that have appeared here, someone who wasn't me suggested that you could have unlimited units per tile, but heal rate would decrease the more units you had, and eventually, your units would take damage rather than heal (it was flavored as disease.) Terrain/promos/tech all played into this, with jungle increasing disease rate, medic promos decreasing it, and medicine and such raising the disease threshold. I felt it was an elegant, flavorful solution that increased game play choices and was much better than a hard cap.

edit: Oh, and invalid poll.

super-double-edit: the thread I was referring to Kind of came up in a discussion between wodan and Heraclitus. Maybe others contributed later, I didn't reread the whole thread.

[Theben]

Originally posted by Nikolai
Oh, I remember The List. Fondly. I still have it stored on my computer. Good memories.

And quite cool: I just mentioned it in another thread, before seeing you mention it here.

It's still archived. My main memory is me trying to finish compiling and formatting 5 or 6 topics at the last minute b/c everyone else bailed. Man that was a long weekend.

[Kuciwalker]

Artillery = your unit per tile limit, far more elegantly than any sort of cap.

[Nikomakkos]

Yeah, your opponents option of catapulting your stack is a factor against the stacking. It works, it balances. The game is perfect as is. The best game in the whole universe. The only possibly conceivable way it could be any better, is if it somehow inexplicably was better somehow.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Artillery = your unit per tile limit, far more elegantly than any sort of cap.

It would, against huge stacks, IF collateral extended to the whole stack or at least a proportion of it, say a quarter or a third. As it stands, 6-8 units taking damage requires very large numbers of artillery against very large stacks.

Personally, I don't use huge stacks. I prefer multiple (3-4) stacks. The AI doesn't seem to counter them as well as a single stack.

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Theben


It's still archived. My main memory is me trying to finish compiling and formatting 5 or 6 topics at the last minute b/c everyone else bailed. Man that was a long weekend.

Believe me, I know the feeling. I had quite some to do with The List for Civ4. Lots of job. But it was fun.

[Unimatrix11]

BTW: Civ4 already has a unit-per-tile cap - for airunits. Which makes sense IMO and isnt that bothersome really.

I remember the desease discussion. Yeah, a model like that would be fine, too.

Another idea (maybe in addition to that), that would make a stack-limit unneeded would maybe be some kind of need for supply esp. for modern units. So if a modern army gets encircled or otherwise cut off its supply routes back to the homeland (hard to model for amphibious action i admit), it would just fight very worse (and 2MP units would be reduced to 1 or somesuch - see Strategic Command II for example) - thus frontlines would develope.

[Tattila the Hun]

Not sure, but I'm wondering if a support from adjacent stacks might be doable. If anyone ever played Pacific General, in it, you would move a number of troops adjacent to an enemy unit, and then attack. The adjacent units would support the attack, in civ-terms, give extra percentages to the attacker. This would, like artillery, give an incentive to using multiple stacks. Might make that medic-adjacent healing promotion usefull, too... Not too sure, how easy it would be to program the AI to understand it.

[Unimatrix11]

If anyone ever played Pacific General ?! Hell yeah! I remember, i made a really nice Stalingrad scenario (starting nov. 15th) on the map of the original Panzer General. AI vs. AI (which sucked btw, esp. on the attack, in the whole 5-star-series), the results where actually pretty close to reality (doesnt seem to matter too much if you pit Manstein vs. Schukow or dumb AI vs dumb AI). Me against buddy, buddy exloited the fact that i forgot to mark Astrachan as soviet, before i noticed it. Man, was i pissed. He knew exactly, that this was due to oversight and spoiled the whole match by buying Tigers there and attacking Stalingrad from the rear. Gosh - its been a while. And unfortunately i also lost the scenario file somehow...

Yeah, well, sorry for the sidetracking... just had to. Now to your idea: Anything that helps fighting the stacks is welcome in my eyes, as long as it can be justified somehow realistically and is feasable. It seems there are a lot of ways to do this and so i must admit, that my poll indeed was off target to some extent: This isnt really so much about a units-per-tile limit, but about fighting the universal usage of SODs. EDIT: I like the idea, cause it lets the saying ´march devided, hit together´ come to life. One could mark an army (see below) who one wants to attack and then choose all the own armies (in adjacent tiles) one wants to participate in the attack.

So this thread turns into some kind of brainstorming about all sorts of ideas that do that. I´d like to mention one more:

One could build armies - empty shells - which would have to be filled with troops. Troops outside cities fight really bad, when not in an army and only one army per tile. Armies would have a soft cap of maximum troops in them. Troops would be counted in, say, 1000s of soldiers. Any city could built at least that much of the simplest kind in a single turn. Now when an enemy army comes close to your city you could still at least build some troops before they attack. In Civ4 it can happen, that you see the enemy approach, but you just dont have enough time to finish that axeman and you dont get none of it at all, even when its half-finished, by the time the city gets attacked. Cities could hold a garrison in addition to an army, number depending on buildings, like barracks (kinda like airports in Civ4) and city-size. Cultural influence would be downgraded to only play a minor role in combat (like say +20% at the most), and the bombardment would rather lower the city´s maximum-garrison-without-combat-penalty (and/or attrition losses, see paradox-titles) number. And zones of control shoud be back, too. I think the result would be a decent number of armies in the field from a certain age on - not one, but not 100s either - mabye like two dozens tops, spread out forming fronts. Manageable yet realistic, since the armies would remain the same for a long time and it would be them, you´d move around.

Just another idea. Or rather a more shaped version of a soft stack limit.