Stacked Units

[Inverse Icarus]

would someone care to explain this "stacked" unit concept, and the 1 army (stacked group) per 4 cities?

has the term "stacked" been given a new defination since civ 2?

[manofthehour]

Stacked came around with call to power. If you remember from CIV2 1 unit could take out your hole attacking force by only fighting one unit. The armies are one fights, gets injured and lets the next strongest unit take over.
See the IGN preview for more.

[Inverse Icarus]

never played CTP. just heard it sucked by the oldies in the civ2 zone.

[imgod2u]

I liked the battle concept in CTP and CTP2. If you had more units in your "army" or "stack", you could attack more. And the type of units are good for certain things (catapults and artillery could bombard units, but without flanking units or infantry, they fall easily to cavalry or other flanking units). This certainly puts a lot more consideration to war. No longer could one lone armor division hold back an entire invading force.
However, CTP and CTP2 didn't put enough into these battles. I rather like the battle system of Birth of the Federation, where you could direct what your ships do in the course of a battle. A good commander could win a battle that would normally be lost. This idea wasn't incorporated into CTP or CTP2.

[SerapisIV]

Originally posted by imgod2u
However, CTP and CTP2 didn't put enough into these battles. I rather like the battle system of Birth of the Federation, where you could direct what your ships do in the course of a battle. A good commander could win a battle that would normally be lost. This idea wasn't incorporated into CTP or CTP2.

I doubt there will ever be a battle mini-game. Imagine how many battles there'd be? Especially in the end-game. Hopefully if the stacked combat evolves into a staple of Civ games, Civ4 might have it. At least in the near future MOO3 is planning such a system, though greatly simplified over BoF

[imgod2u]

Birth of the Federation worked just fine with it. The main thing about having this type of mini-battle system is that instead of spreading your forces out, you can concentrate them all in one army and march to the enemy. That way, you'll be fighting on fronts, not individual skirmishes. Of course, you'll need to leave defensive units at home, but the enemy will have to consider where your main army is before they decide to attack your cities. So really, there would only be one or two major battles during each term, the others would just be skirmishes that wouldn't last long.

[SerapisIV]

It'll be real interesting to see how many battles actually occur in Civ3 now that armies can be created. If the game evolves into having much fewer battles it becomes much more reasonable to have a battle mini-game. Having another game to program AI and balance is a whole other can of worms.

[Grumbold]

CtP had the battle resolution screen (with no active control from the player during the battle) for every fight from start to finish. It wasn't intrusive IMO and because often large numbers of units would move and resolve combat simultaneously it is ultimately faster than having to move and fight all units individually like Civ II.