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wrylachlan
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I brought up in another thread the idea that maybe the balance of civ3 in terms of unit costs/power needs to be looked at for civ4 with an eye towards lowering the total number of units in the end game.
Unless civ models a unit for every single soldier or artillery unit (massively unwieldy), units will always represent a group of soldiers. A Warrior unit might represent 5,000 warriors, or 10,000, or 100,000. The choice of how big a group a single unit represents is a balance decision based on gameplay.
If a given civilization is capable of supporting 100,000 soldiers, the decision of whether to group them into 1, 10, 20, 100, or 1000 units is based on maximizing the fun. Having only 1 unit to move and attack with isn't necessarily fun for a civ with 5 cities. The enemy takes an undefended city, you go around and take one of their undefended cities. Rinse repeat. No one has enough to mount a defense.
On the other hand, 1000 units for a 5 city civ would quickly become unfun through the sheer tedium of moving all those units.
Put into civ terms, the choice of shield cost of units results in a given number of units being generated. By changing those shield costs, you can either increase or decrease the amount of units in play.
When new techs get you new units, those new units are more powerful. But they also cost more. What's important is that the ratio of their increased performance to increased cost is greater than 1. I'm going to refer to this as efficiency.
For instance, if a warrior costs 20 shields, then it takes 200 shields worth of warriors to kill 10 enemy warrior units. If I discover a 2/2 unit that costs 50 shields, I would have no need to build it, because it is actually less efficient. It would take 250 shields worth of that unit to kill 10 enemy warriors. On the other hand a 2/2 35 shield unit would be worth it, because it is more efficient - only 175 shields to kill 10 enemy warriors.
Obviously there are other factors than just A/D that effect the efficiency of a unit, like zero range bombardment, movement(retreat), special abilities, etc. But the point still stands that for balance reasons it is necessary for each new unit to be more efficient than the last.
But efficiency is seperate from cost. If the next unit after warrior was 2/2 35shields, the efficiency increase would be approximately 12.5%. But a 4/4 70 shield unit would be essentially the same. The only difference is that the TOTAL NUMBER of 4/4 70 shield units would be less.
To come to some sort of meandering statment of purpose: I believe that the costs and power of units should be rebalanced in such a way that there are fewer total units in the end game. The way to achieve this is to increase both the relative power and relative cost between successive units on the tech tree, while keeping the efficiency difference the same.
It has been brought up that some people think there are too few units in the early game. I haven't really seen this as a problem, but it would be an easy balance decision to decrease the cost of early units, while steeply scaling both the cost and efficiency as you get further into the ancient age. This would cause an early explosion of military units, then a plateauing effect so that the numbers don't become unwieldy.
On a side note, I think that Firaxis limiting itself to multiples of 5 for shield costs is something that makes balancing the ancient age very difficult.
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05-02-2004 00:27
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