Need good military mod recommendation

[poorlaggedman]

Im pretty fed up with Civ 4's weak military side.

I like big maps and controlling numerous cities and technologies advancing reasonably slow. Or either troops not taking so long to advance to the enemy so that 3 technologies were researched in that time frame (even on marathon speed).

I was thinking about total realism but im not (?) sure if i want all the other crap.

I keep fluctuating from playing Civilization IV and Midieval Total War. I love Civ IV's depth and strategy but I hate it's military side. I love Total War's military complexity. Im not expecting anything remotely as good for military but FFS, the military side of Civ IV is boring.

The best I can think of for changes would be a vastly improved chance of retreat (for ALL units) as well as faster movement speeds. Maybe some earlier siege weapons or even ( ) the ability to lay siege to a city. But i'll settle for faster movement speeds.

I cannot stand playing Civ IV vanilla anymore.


Im so sick of sitting in suspense waiting to see if a pack of lions wipes out my warrior unit... Or having no tactics or antyhing involved in battles. Just blunt force and superb timing expecting to take massive show-stopping casualties to take any city.

Thanks

[snoopy369]

Have you tried playing RTW (road to war)? It's BtS though (as most mods are now); and honestly warlords/BtS really did enhance the military stuff.

[poorlaggedman]

My bad i forgot to mention i have BtS. I'll look into the RTW. Sure didnt notice much new stuff with BtS though. Nothing sufficient

[poorlaggedman]

Im not really interested in a pure WWII mod. I was looking for something more general gameplay

[snoopy369]

At the end of the day, Civ is not a military tactics game; it's a strategy game which is not even all that focused on military. If you want a military tactics game, you definitely need to play MTW or similar.

You could consider Rise of Nations ... that made the attempt of combining Civ with tactics. Or GalCiv2, if you don't mind playing in space. RoN was a good game, but I'm not sure it accomplished its goal; and GalCiv2 is ... its own game, and may well do what you want, or may well go the opposite way entirely; I don't know it well enough to know its strengths, but it is different from Civ on the military level.

[poorlaggedman]

I played a demo for RoN back in the day and I remember the default speed being rediculous. Thats not really what i had in mind. But Im seriously abotu to give up on Civ IV. Solving battles by a chess match would be more entertaining than the way it is. You dont even have any influence on which enemy unit you fight. Its just a stack of units with no collective abilities. Its the sorriest representation of combat in any game ive played in a decade. I really was hoping for more with the new Civ, even a slight improvement.

Im not talking about flashy crap. I'd never have this problem if a unit was some sort of representation of actual numbers and battles actually involved some sort of statistics or something.

If anything Civ 4 went backwards without being able to stack your units with a leader. And i've given it plenty of thought over months of playing and learning how to win. Its garbage

[snoopy369]

It's just not what you're interested in. A lot of us (like me) play Civ because of the fact that we do NOT want to play a tactics game. Civ is, fundamentally, a building game; it involves military because it has to, but it's not, and never has been, the point of Civ. You have to balance having some things with not having other things, and if you added tactics to Civ you'd have a game that took twice or three times as long, and irritated most of your fanbase.

Basically, if you want a tactical simulation, don't play civ. Play another game that's more up your alley. You don't have to like every game out there - or even very many of them. Most of them aren't made for you, they're made for a different kind of game player; finding the one that is 'for you' is the mecca of every game player, and when you find it, you will rejoice.

You might check out some of Paradox' games, like Europa Universalis series. There's a forum called 'Other Games' (most of the way down the main page) where some folks who play Paradox games might give you the direction in which to go. They make a lot of military-tactics games that also appeal to Civ players, so they might be what you're looking for.

[Theben]

There's a mod that incorporates the changes of RtW into a mod for regular play (by Dale, the same author). I don't know how well the AI handles it though.

[Felch]

Perhaps you could see about incorporating flanking into the game. Here's my idea:

For every square adjacent to the defender with a mountain or allied unit, the defense gains 10%. For every unit adjacent to the defender that has a unit allied to the attacker, the attacker gains 10%.

That makes mountain passes even more strategic, and encourages armies to have their flanks covered. It forces the player to balance between a stack of death, and a more realistic battle front.

Galactic Civilization 2, by Stardock, has another clever way of making stacks more interesting. Ships have a logistical requirement related to their size, and technology allows you to form fleets with more and more logistics. So you have to put a bit more thought into the composition of your fleet, like going for a lot of little ships or one big battleship.

You should check out Dale's mod, it's got a lot of cool ideas. Then, you wouldn't even need to make your own mod.

[Blaupanzer]

Poorlaggedman, while Snoopy is right about which games appeal to which players, you are welcome to stick around here as much as you'd like. Civ is a conciously abstract game in terms of science and technology, city development, military interaction, and economic markets. If you want the military model to be abstracted in some other way, suggest your ideas. If you just want to make that part more concrete (tactical perhaps), that's not what attracts the rest of us to this game.

If you've got the machine for it, try the latest version of Europa Universalis. The uniforms and tactics in that one are very pleasing.

[wodan11]

The Wolfshanze mod is the absolute best I've found. It's about all I play these days (except for the occasional theme game or FFH or something).

If you haven't tried it, you're missing out.

[phungus420]

Originally posted by wodan11
The Wolfshanze mod is the absolute best I've found. It's about all I play these days (except for the occasional theme game or FFH or something).

If you haven't tried it, you're missing out.

Great mod for sure. I created WolfRevolution because I really like the Wolfshanze enhancements, but can't play civ without Influence Driven War or Revolutions. If you like the Wolfshanze mod and/or the Revolutions mod, you should really give WolfRevolution a try.

[joncnunn]

Back to the original post, if you haven't tried "Marathon" before, you might want to try it; that setting makes units realitively cheaper than normal vs units. (Now if you haven't tried Epic either, you might one to play that setting first since Normal to Marathon would be a huge jump)