Info from German magazine article

[Felch]

What if we want to put aircraft on submarines? Are we stuck with just playing SMAC?

[Provost Harrison]

They kind of have to if you want to put aircraft on carriers and missiles on submarines.

[thyrwyn]

The word was one military AND one civilian unit per hex. New word is that air units and missiles are separate and may stack (though we don't know how many. . .).

[Djglide]

"one unit" per tile

Even though it says one unit per tile, you still can have the same as a stack.
as long as you specify what the unit make up is.

Say you have a horse resource and iron and make use of 80% of the horse resource for the unit and 20% spearmen/Iron resource that makes the whole unit. with all of its subsequent advantages and disadvages of horsemen and spearmen?

Whats a unit anyways?

[Robert]

I think it has already been confirmed elsewhere that there are different types of units, and that only units of the same type (ie. non-combat, ground armies, airforce) cannot share a hex.

[Dinner]

"just one unit per hex! (the magazine makes no distinction between military and non military units)"

OMG, there goes the idea of having a warrior escort your settlers or workers. This was the worst case scenario in my mind.

[Jaybe]

Absolutely, Spence! They could provide an endless supply if they constantly disclosed how things currently stood. Especially if they did NOT tell how such things replaced which old ones.

[SpencerH]

We demand a new smidgen of disinformation from Firaxis now dammit! How else are we to maintain the speculation fest?

[Ming]

Yeah... but who knows for sure at this point.

We can only hope more info on the combat system starts becoming available. It's really hard to talk about specifics when we really having nothing specific to start with

[Brizey]

Sub game combat worked for MoM and HoMM pretty well. MoM had a hard cap on units per tile, which could make choke points interesting.

[Blaupanzer]

Units related to social policies sounds too good to be true? Sounds very interesting for sure, but implementation would be the proof here. Fanatics down one path, Mech Walkers down another -- can seem like social engineering -- only certain paths will win.

[Kolbeg]

,,"Civilisation tree": This tree has a lot of astles, called "Social Policies". These astles contain certain paths, one of them is the path of "Tradition". Each of these astles gives a civ a certain advantage (per example special units). A civ can follow one of these paths strictly and make a deep progress in that tree on that path, but the civ can also follow parallel several different paths but doesn´t make such a deep progress in each of these paths." - CivFanatics.com

Wow! This sounds to good to be true!

[Donegeal]

Bump. Re-read to OP for my info on 3 hex radius.

[vulture]

What if, when you have a battle, you zoom in and have a "sub-game" which takes place in the same turn?

Hmm, same problem exists on unit movement. So, we would have to have a "unit movement" phase of each turn.

Here's how a turn sequence would look:
1. units/buildings/etc. which reach completion appear
2. players can edit queues etc.
3. each player can move a unit one tile
4. check each unit to see if it attacked another unit
4a. if there's a battle, go into a battle sub-game, with rounds of combat, until one wins
4b. repeat 4 until every unit checked
5. if any player moved a unit, repeat 3 (need to be careful that units that are fortified / pass on moves get a chance to "awaken" if an enemy enters sight range of the player's empire)
6. players can edit queues etc.
7. next turn

It sounds like one of those ideas that sounds great on paper, and horrible when you see how it plays after it's been implemented.

There's an interview with Sid somewhere where he talks about one of the first and most important lessons he learned in game design: don't try and make two games in one. Make one game and make it good. This was after his experience in some stealth type game years back, which involved lots of mini-games with differing mechanics. The problem was that they took long enough that when they were over and you returned to the main game, you had lost track of what you were doing, what the story was and so on, and the whole thing collapsed into a disjointed mess.

If a battle on a sub screen - and I mean the whole combat between all the involved units, not a single 'round' - can be over in 30 seconds or so, then you might get away with it (it becomes more or less a pretty graphical representation of abstracted combat resolution). If it is a complex battle that will take 5-10 minutes, then practicality aside, Sid is going to rule it out without any further thought, judging from his previous comments.

The problem with civ is that you are trying to do so many different things that you have to be extremely careful that one of them doesn't come to dominate the game play (modern era wars already do that in civ IV - you can go from 1 minute turns in peace time to half hour or more turns if a war breaks out with lots of units involved). SO war has to be massively simplified, and made so that it doesn't immediately weigh the game down with hugely long turns the moment a war kicks off.

[wodan11]

The "time frame" has always been a problem with Civ, and will probably continue to be so. It's tough to play turns, and keep elements of the game consistent when the time frame of the turns changes, and the shortest length of a turn is a single year.

What if, when you have a battle, you zoom in and have a "sub-game" which takes place in the same turn?

Hmm, same problem exists on unit movement. So, we would have to have a "unit movement" phase of each turn.

Here's how a turn sequence would look:
1. units/buildings/etc. which reach completion appear
2. players can edit queues etc.
3. each player can move a unit one tile
4. check each unit to see if it attacked another unit
4a. if there's a battle, go into a battle sub-game, with rounds of combat, until one wins
4b. repeat 4 until every unit checked
5. if any player moved a unit, repeat 3 (need to be careful that units that are fortified / pass on moves get a chance to "awaken" if an enemy enters sight range of the player's empire)
6. players can edit queues etc.
7. next turn