New Unit Building balance.

[rhenric557]

Someone else may have had this idea prior to now but I've yet to see it anywhere. In order to give a balance in the game for Civs with large militaries, make all units in the game have a pop cost. Get rid of the rioting with drafting, this would only give you the negative affect of a weaker unit. Differentiate the unit's population cost according to size. My point by trying this is to see if you can limit the military size to that of the civilizations size. Of course you could give the units the ability to join a city, which I would do.
By doing this you could add a little more realism to the game. The people manning these units have to come from somewhere by the way.
I have yet to try this but I am courious to see how it works and how the AI deals with the change.

[Sava]

I think it would be kind of useless unless they had to be supported by food from the city. Otherwise, you could just build units out the wazoo and let the city pop grow. It's the whole Aqueduct, mass worker idea.

[Sean]

But the amount of people required to man a division of tanks is very small compared to that of a general population! I am sure part of the production cost can be viewed as a pop cost.

[Pythagoras]

Originally posted by Sean
But the amount of people required to man a division of tanks is very small compared to that of a general population! I am sure part of the production cost can be viewed as a pop cost.

Not to mention bigger civs would have an even bigger edge!

[candidgamera]

Rhennic:

Posted a couple times on this and am doing it now in the mod I play. In one game I think I was watching the Romans build a city to oblivion, though. But, I really like the feel of it from the player standpoint. Still doesn't seem to stop the unit diarhea, or utter disregard for your borders (note to Fireaxis: make it like wheeled vehicles stricture and EU: no declaration of war, no right of passage then its just like a no road mountain to a catapult). Willem pointed out he's using unit maintenance cost to control unit numbers effectively, combined with free unit costs to balance out not making it too hard to build enough to develop & defend cities.

My scheme, can't remember it all perfectly but:

legionaires: 1, but they build roads and forts.

muskets, pikes, rifles, frigates, ironclads: 1

infantry, tanks, fighters, destroyers, Aegis, subs, nuke subs: 2

mech inf, mod armor, panzers: 3

carriers, F15s, stealth bombers, bombers, battleships: 3

What it forces is subsidizing the later game colonization effort from the center of your empire, and a balancing act for the player, you can only build stuff so fast or it overly cuts your big cities down to size. I like it too because it directly reflects if the people are in the military they aren't producing for the economy.
Here's where maybe change Women's sufferage to a small wonder, and its effect might come in as an economic benefit that mitigates the cost of units - women going to work in factories - certainly more realistic and historical in some ways than its effect now.

the other thing to do with this is let them add this pop to cities, kind of a different disbanding option.

am really looking forward to using it with increased maintenance costs and if the coding will let me, changing free units for cities on republic and democracy.

republic: cost 2, free 0/1/1

democracy: cost 3, free 0/1/2

Sava:

Been thinking of how that could work, but would have to be something Fireaxis does for us. Would go with the above, and make a nice "civ" mechanism use of workers. Been thinking of formally writing it up for some time. Well here it goes now:

Basically units having pop cost are still part of the city they were built at once built. Second, workers from other cities can go to a city starting to build a pop cost unit and be consumed. Like trainees showing up for bootcamp. Change disbanding in a city to getting the workers back, becoming civilians again, and a reduced shield award to the city. If you disband outside city then you just get the workers back. Of course you can straight build a unit with a city and just let the city suck the pop loss. Which by the way should occur when you commit to building the unit. If you then change to a building you get the pop or workers back. This would all be a selection dialog box at start of building. Would make you think about how many units any one city could sustain.

Now you use this to make war weariness concrete: even when the workers are away they count as part of the city for "keeping people happy" purposes, and show up on the head display of the city, over to the right probably. When they win battles they count as double heads stacked up/down in the display, when they lose, or the wars long they count double unhappy same way.
(This is concept here not necessarily hard numbers)
plus war weary civilians are marked on the new display.

Food:
Food would work different too than now and tied in to the above. If you have a granary in the city you would be able to put some of your excess food rate into a "national food pool" to be consumed by units shown over at the right of the food display, where the extra is now as another subdivsion. Import from the "the national food pool" would be to the left. Again selectable dialog boxes. Also would want to have a mechanism to be able to cede some bread slices directly from the food display of the city to a national food bank. Haven't quite got my head around how to reflect storage in granaries that isn't used up - where this could get messy. Perhaps a separate bin to the right of the current one - when its filled thats all you can store and food production goes back to the city, and whats stored goes away at a certain rate over time - a little like spoilage in RT2. All the national food bank stuff requires being on the trade net or nets of course.

One way for supply of units also could be simple too, whats the food by square on the land the unit(s) on that has pop cost, if its not enough then unit(s) needs supply from national food pool, the unit would have to be "on the net" to do so. No more 50 cav on square unless they have food from somewhere else or they die of starvation just like city dwellers. I love the way these hordes of troops wander around the jungle without a care in the world.

This all would want to have management/monitoring ability from the military advisor and domestic advisor screens

Was just thinking this would be an elegant way to reflect historic fact: ancient armies ate off the land, modern units and armies are bigger and need to be supplied. An armored division takes more to feed than Winfield Scott Hancock's II Corps, AOP.

I would tie this into something like Trip's suggestions on improved resource rules, too.

And yes, I own an unpunched copy of SPI's Campaign For North Africa and have played GDW's Fire In the East/Scortched Earth in all its glory a couple times not to mention SPI's War in the East.

Well there it is, ready for people to take potshots at.

[rhenric557]

Think of it this way if you'll attempt. The faster you build your military this way the slower your population will grow. As your population doesn't grow as fast neither will your tech advances, and your income is cut down. The back side is if you are strictly into gaining tech's your military will be considerably smaller. The point isn't so much to even the militaries of different sized civ's. It is to make it more important to balance your city growth with the growth of your military.
I understand that there are better idea's out there as to how unit support should be handled, but I have yet to see any that can actually be changed by any of us out here, right now.
Another aspect of this is that if you get into a long term war your population will dwindle making you or the other civs weaker as the war drags on.

[Sava]

I think certain types of units should only be able to be built from cities that have certain improvements.

Minor Wonder: Arms Manufacturer
allows any infantry unit that uses guns to be built in Empire which is connected by trade system. By infantry I mean (musketmen, riflemen, infantry, etc).

And then vehicle units should only be built in cities that have factories and MFG centers.

[Willem]

Re: New Unit Building balance.

Originally posted by rhenric557
Someone else may have had this idea prior to now but I've yet to see it anywhere. In order to give a balance in the game for Civs with large militaries, make all units in the game have a pop cost. Get rid of the rioting with drafting, this would only give you the negative affect of a weaker unit. Differentiate the unit's population cost according to size. My point by trying this is to see if you can limit the military size to that of the civilizations size. Of course you could give the units the ability to join a city, which I would do.
By doing this you could add a little more realism to the game. The people manning these units have to come from somewhere by the way.
I have yet to try this but I am courious to see how it works and how the AI deals with the change.

I tried that and at the early part of the game at least, I was being left in the dust. Apparently, the AI doesn't build that many military units the first part of the game, so I was coming across Civs that were twice the size that I was. And if you ever end up in a war with someone, all the rest of the civs are going to leave you far behind. Not a very practical idea I'm afraid.

[candidgamera]

Re: Re: New Unit Building balance.

Originally posted by Willem


I tried that and at the early part of the game at least, I was being left in the dust. Apparently, the AI doesn't build that many military units the first part of the game, so I was coming across Civs that were twice the size that I was. And if you ever end up in a war with someone, all the rest of the civs are going to leave you far behind. Not a very practical idea I'm afraid.

The operative part of what you said is "early game" on which I definitely agree with you. The pop cost units should be late game, modernish units. Pop cost to me reflects tooth vs. tail, tooth getting less as time goes on. There's more overall cost to a modern unit then itself basically.

Kind of think of it all as:
Early game expansion should reflect ancient world empire building and just fighting to exist and get big enough to continue to exist over time. Late game its paying the cost of building an empire through colonies. Comparing Rome/Persia/Greece to 1400-1700's circa Spain/Portugal/England and later 19th Century Euro colonialism.

[candidgamera]

Originally posted by rhenric557
Think of it this way if you'll attempt. The faster you build your military this way the slower your population will grow. As your population doesn't grow as fast neither will your tech advances, and your income is cut down. The back side is if you are strictly into gaining tech's your military will be considerably smaller. The point isn't so much to even the militaries of different sized civ's. It is to make it more important to balance your city growth with the growth of your military.
I understand that there are better idea's out there as to how unit support should be handled, but I have yet to see any that can actually be changed by any of us out here, right now.
Another aspect of this is that if you get into a long term war your population will dwindle making you or the other civs weaker as the war drags on.

The way I'd see it too. Guns vs. butter/science.

[Panag]

Originally posted by Sean
But the amount of people required to man a division of tanks is very small compared to that of a general population! I am sure part of the production cost can be viewed as a pop cost.

hi ,

and you can do this in the editor , give a certain unit a pop cost , when using mods , this aint bad , ...

have a nice day