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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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It is silly that you can have a huge number of units in Civ.
Consider the United States of America. Suppose one unit is one army division. How many army units does it have? Not all that many, and it's a superpower.
So it makes a lot of sense to reduce the number of units, or at least combat units, that any nation can field at any one time.
First of all, of course, is to make it a lot more expensive to build. Secondly, construct a different maintenance schme for units. Third, make it impossible to rush build combat units. Afterall, you are mainly training personnel. It doesn't matter how much $$$ you spend, you can't make more time. Forth, maybe a hard limit? I am not really in favour of this idea, though.
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CerberusIV
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And if each unit only represents a battalion, rather than a division?
The point I do like is about rushing units. I'm not sure it shouldn't be possible but, like drafting, the unit should only be conscript level with 2HP if you rush it.
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MrBaggins
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This whole premise sounds a hell of a lot like a thread I started in the CTP2 Source Project a month or two back...
quote:
*SNIP*
The second thought I had was about Unit upkeep, and the associated GDP. In CTP2 if you have 25% of your upkeep going to military upkeep, its a slight drag on your production, but nothing significant. You produce 25% slower. Since warmongering usually gains production, its usually moot anyway.
In the real world, a 25% military GDP is significant... or massive even. Thats the kind of military GDP which tore the USSR apart (around 120-170 billion roubles or about 13-19%)
There is a definite disparity, here. You can't solve it by just increasing production costs. The societial effects of high military GDP's go beyond that.
A solution, I thought, would be to have comparitive food and income upkeep costs for units... 50%, say, of the production cost. Thus a nation spending 100 production on units would also have 50 less food and gold.
Having both growth and science penalties, as well as production, might serve to both more accurately describe military expenditure, and be a game balance also.
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Food and income upkeep should, of course, be separate from regular shield upkeep, but thats not clearly mentioned here.
Food upkeep would abstract rations and reinforcement of units. Gold upkeep would abstract wages of troops and/or maintainance of high tech units (like Stealth Bombers, Carriers or Nukes.)
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Plotinus
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Part of the problem is of course the fact that there is too much emphasis on military matters, especially later in the game. If there were other things to allocate your budget to, it might be a bit more realistic, and also interesting. What about variable funding for education, health, etc...
And there's no way to tell what each unit represents. Nowhere are we told how many people are in them. Notice that, unlike Civ1, the name of each unit is the name of an individual within it - "Legionary", "Archer", etc. For all we know, an archer unit is just one archer.
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MrBaggins
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* MrBaggins laughs
"If there were other things to allocate your budget to" ?
* MrBaggins continues to laugh
So THAT'S the reason why we have wars... because we've got nothing better to spend the money on.
I agree with the sentiment a bit... but this isn't SimCity thats being played here... its a definably competitive game.
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:34
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quote:
At the current scale, though, an army unit is very big. I was, in fact, giving it benefit of the doubt. Realistically, I think the unit should be army/corp sized. |
If the uS military is small today, it is due to the cost of units and thier power..
If we were to say each unit was about a division 10K, or mybe legion sized 5K, think about how many units would have been mobalized in a WW2 scenerio- some battles on the eastern front included dozen's of divisions.
The fact is that modern states can field massive armies.
The obvious solution to this is to make the cost of units much larger, or have variable costs, and to have units have to correspond to the population numbers in some way.
Th, of course, we could change the combat system so that if you go on the offensive, you have the ability to combine your units into armies.
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lajzar
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Japan
Jun 2003
time: 14:34
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North Korea currently has 500,000 men under arms, or did have as of around 1980, and it's economy hasn't changed a awful lot since then. Scaling this up, it suggests that the USA could raise an army in the low tens of millions if it truly felt the need, and China maybe a hundred million.
Of course, this would mash the economies quite efficiently if done over a long period, as any North Korean will testify. But I hope it amply demonstrates:
- Any stacking limit lower than 100 or so would make these armies impossible
- Conscription makes huge armies possible
- Any stacking limit in 3 figures isn't going to make any meaningful difference to game speed.
Right now, the system I favour is:
* No stack limits
* CTP style army combat.
* The number of units permitted in combat starst at, say 4, and slowly rises as appropriate leadership techs are researched.
* Attacker chooses his attack stack, up to the unit limit imposed by the leadership techs.
* The AI chooses the defender stack, with the following two rules:
* If the number of units present is equal or lower than teh stack limit, all units are included.
* Otherwise, units are chosen randomly one at a time, weighted according to the defence factor of the units, until the stack limit is reached.
* This encourages the defender to choose the composition of defending stacks carefully to optimise combat performance, while allowing stacks to pass freely.
* Primitive example: Most of the defending units have been chosen by the ai. But there is one more free stack slot, and 2 units, a warrior and a phalanx. The phalanx, with its defence factor of 2, is twice as likely to be randomly chosen by the AI to fight as teh warrior with its defence factor of 1.
* If the attacker wins the fight, it only occupies the tile if all defending units have been destroyed.
* If the attacker wins, all defender units (including those who didnt fight that battle), as well as tile improvements, city improvements (if city), population (if in city radius) have a chance of suffering collateral damage. Note that population loss is limited to 1 in city radius zone, but could be several population points (especially in high pop areas) in a large metropolis.
* The above collateral damage rule encourages defenders to fight away from cities, which otherwise have many defence bonuses. It also discourages excessive stacking, as units beyond the stack limit will be damaged while being unable to fight.
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MrBaggins
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I think you're missing a couple of points lajzar...
Civ units are abstract.
If you want huge armies, no need to have 50 units in a stack... just have parallel oversized versions of whatever infantry... that is "supersized" units with more hits (equal A&D) and more firepower. They'll behave just like numerous smaller units... without the overhead.
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MrBaggins
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quote:
Originally posted by Shogun Gunner
Regarding modern warfare, I believe the civ model corresponds to firepower or kill power (whatever term you use). Since the attack factor of simliar units between two different civs does not change, it must be the number of soldiers and technology that is the variable.
Simple example: a Warsaw Pact (Polish) era infantry division versus a NATO (United States) infantry division. In civ terms, they are both 6-10-1. However, the United States fielded better trained solders, with better equipment, so in reality its a better unit than the Polish counterpart. Since both attack and defend at the same strength, the civ model suggests it's really a US infantry regiment (usually two or three in a division) versus the Polish infantry division.
So, Poland is forced to field three times the number of combat troops to reach the same "kill power". |
Use Veteran Levels then.
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wrylachlan
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I see these as totally separate issues - total number of units, and how those units do combat.
You can have a micromanagement nightmare with combined arms combat just as easily as with individual unit combat. The deciding factor is implementation. In fact if you had the implementation suggested above where you announce an attack, then have to select checkboxes in a pop-up to indicate which units attack, you would have more micro than performing the individual attacks with a single keystroke. Arguable more satisfying because of depth of strategy, but still more clicks necessary.
And I agree that the way to limit units in the late age involves some sort of variable support cost so that MA cost significantly more to support than say an archer.
edit-
It also requires a change to the build cost of units (see my Total Number of Units thread). If you increase the upkeep without increasing the unit cost, even warmongers end up building fewer units, which leaves them with a ton more shields for buildings, erasing the differences and trade offs between strategies. Thus if you reduce the amount of units by increasing the upkeep, you have to make sure that the units cost more shields to keep the war vs. builder balance.
Last edited by wrylachlan on 21-02-2004 at 02:59
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:34
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If people want, there are two simple ways of cutitng down the number of units right now:
1. Make modern era units cost pop. point to make, like workers (I assume you can edit this): if drafting one pop. point leads to one unit, why don;t regular units cost one population point? If you can add the "join city" option, after you moblize your population for war, you can then "bring them home"- making units cost population points forces the players to economize. Now, this would only apply to units after nationalism (ie. after you can draft people)- meaning you can still make war in the medeival period, but war in the modern age goes up exponetially. This doea you you have to limit the ability to update defensive and offensive units going into the modern age. Also, triple, quadruple or more the cost of units you have to pay for to 3, 4 or 5 gold each to represent the realities and costs of modern war.
Both those ideas right now would cut the number of units drastically.
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lajzar
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Japan
Jun 2003
time: 14:34
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quote:
Originally posted by wrylachlan
I see these as totally separate issues - total number of units, and how those units do combat.
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Whereas I see these are being intrinsically linked. In a system which allows stacked combat, you can typically expect a battle to be conducted to the limits of the stacking allowed. CTP typically had 9 times as many units due to the ability to involve them all in a battle. Civ 3 has a slightly different dynamic because there is no penalty for have huge stacks.
quote:
You can have a micromanagement nightmare with combined arms combat just as easily as with individual unit combat. The deciding factor is implementation. In fact if you had the implementation suggested above where you announce an attack, then have to select checkboxes in a pop-up to indicate which units attack, you would have more micro than performing the individual attacks with a single keystroke. Arguable more satisfying because of depth of strategy, but still more clicks necessary.
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Not really. Since I am also proposing that defender units that aren't involved in the combat due to the command limitation can suffer collateral damage, you have a very good reason not to stack beyond the limit of units that can actually fight in the battle. Sure, you can stack 100 units if you want to, but if your command limit is 10, and those 10 (drawn randomly when defending) happen to lose, all of your stack takes some damage. That is a painful loss with big stacks.
quote:
And I agree that the way to limit units in the late age involves some sort of variable support cost so that MA cost significantly more to support than say an archer.
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Yes, this is something that really ought to have been implemented in Civ3. If it could be implemented as long ago as MoM, why not now?
Last edited by lajzar on 21-02-2004 at 05:20
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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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quote:
Originally posted by GePap
If we were to say each unit was about a division 10K, or mybe legion sized 5K, think about how many units would have been mobalized in a WW2 scenerio- some battles on the eastern front included dozen's of divisions. |
Agreed. In fact, if you look at the order of battle, there were in fact dozens of divsions. When you consider that those were the biggest battles in WWII, that is not surprising at all. Germany put most of the troops there, and so did the USSR.
quote:
Originally posted by GePap
The fact is that modern states can field massive armies. |
Only conditionally. That is, you cannot field large armies without taking away from other areas.
quote:
Originally posted by GePap
Th, of course, we could change the combat system so that if you go on the offensive, you have the ability to combine your units into armies. |
Something like a combined arms bonus?
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wrylachlan
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quote:
Originally posted by lajzar
Whereas I see these are being intrinsically linked. In a system which allows stacked combat, you can typically expect a battle to be conducted to the limits of the stacking allowed. CTP typically had 9 times as many units due to the ability to involve them all in a battle. Civ 3 has a slightly different dynamic because there is no penalty for have huge stacks. |
I think your analysis is flawed. The reason that CTP has a different number of units than Civ3 isn't the combat model, but the cost balancing vis a vis the total economic output. If you were to mod CTP such that the units cost the same percentage of Total Shield Production that they do in Civ3, you would find that the total number of units would be very similar.
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18-02-2004 16:06
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