Units are people too!

[Gregurabi]

Something's always bothered me about the Civilization unit concept. Military units should not be built in factories. Military units are people!

When you wish to build an army for your civilization, you should require people, and you should require weapons and other gear. The people should come from your population (perhaps not a whole "population point" -- that's another strange concept as it stands). The weapons and other materials should be manufactured the way units are currently done. Then in order to actually build an army (what we call a "unit" in the current gaming system), you would have to put the people and the equipment together in a city which has a military training base (similar to a Barracks in Civ1/Civ2 but not identical). The training would require some time -- and the more time you invest in the training, the stronger your army would become.

This is VERY vaguely similar to a concept from Colonization in which your "people" are actually individualized, with different educations (including soldiers), and require guns and/or horses to become fully equipped military units. However, I thought it rather silly that when your mounted units lose a fight, they simply lose their horses and can either fight as a ground unit or go get new horses. *That* idea is right out -- but the education/training thing is something I liked.

When you take people away from their farms and businesses and put them in the armed forces, you make a trade-off which affects your civilization's prosperity beyond just raw production. I think this is an important consideration which is missing from current Civ games.

[Scooter]

This sounds exactly like Lords of the Realm II. Basically, you chose what weapons to produce, depepnding on what resources you have, and then you cand build an army using those weapons and people from the populous.

It was good for that game because it did not require toomuch micromanagement in the strategy portion of the game. You could afford to micromanage your military. I do not like the idea of incorporating this into Civ3 however. Civ is a strategy game, not a military simulation. Micromanaging my cities is fine. Micromanaging my Civ is fine. Please, please don't make me micromanage my military down to the unit. As the ruler of my empire, I simply say "Make me some tanks" and it get's done. I don't say "Make some tank bodies, 2 treads, a bunch of wheels, a turret, a 105mm gun, a small arms gun, find some men, train them, etc, etc."

"And give me sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads".

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"BEEFCAKE, BEEFCAKE!!!

-E. Cartman

[Theben]

I can agree to allowing a % of a popualtion point going towards a unit, but not the rest.

[yin26]

Gregurabi,

Can you please re-post this in the UNITS thread so we can organize the list easier?

Thanks.