Army Size

[Deathwalker]

How about, not just linking an army to support from a city, but also limit it to the size of your population dirrectly, like the real world. Also when armies die you loss population, so you cant have constant armies coming out from a city.

[The diplomat]

Thanks for posting.
I offered a "recruitment" system as a 'new idea' in the EC3 which deals with what you just brought up.
I feel that the civ2 way of building units is wrong because it does not sufficiently take into account population. Civ2 seems to make armies only a matter of industry. If you have a strong industry, then you can 'pump out' units as often as your support allows. Building an army requires people and that needs to be implemented somehow in civ3!
a recruitment system changes the way you build units. A recruitment system requires that the apropriate amount of pop be moved from the civilian sector to your army in order to create a new unit. If your army is 1000 men strong, then you have to move a 1000 men from work into the army.
One of the benefits of this system is that it improves how units are disbanded. Instead of losing the entire unit, you simply send the men back to work, but keep the weapons, if you need the unit back, you can recruit the men back into the army. There are many other advantages to the recruitment system.


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No permanent enemies, no permanent friends.

[Par4]

I support the Diplomat's recruitment idea. I like it a lot. If I was around when the EC3 voting was going on I would have voted for it. Maybe we could have a baby boom too. Like if an army of over 1 million returns home you get a pop boom! I'm kinda serious about this, well no not really but think about it

I think you should have to maintain recruitment all the time, it wouldn't cost anything but because men age you need to and if you start losing men in battle you won't have to go back and press "recruit" or whatever all the time.

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-Ming Tsai

[UltraSonix]

I respect the Diplomat's recruitment suggestion, but I think that's going a bit over the top with realism. I personally think that the current system of just building units works fine, because units are linked with the city through shield support. If the city is small, it won't have many shields and so can't support a large army anyway.

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No, in Australia we don't live with kangaroos and koalas in our backyards...

[Par4]

Maybe a national pool of people, you could draft for war, recruit if low on men, or just let the people join. Whenever a battle happens or something some men die and some men replace them when the division(or whatever units represent in civ) repairs. Also during a war with a draft most men & women should leave after the war and return home. Units require men to be built, but they come from the national pool so it shouldn't be hard. Support would come from depending on what we have raw materials food etc.

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I use this email
(stupid cant use hotmail)
gamma_par4@hotmail.com
Don't ask for golf tips
Your game will get worse
HappyLand
There is no spoon
-The Matrix
Let's kick it up a notch!!
-Emeril Lagasse
Fresh Soy makes Tofu so silky
-Ming Tsai

[Steve Clark]

There have been a number of threads here talking about aspects of wargaming for Civ3. This is somewhat off-topic, but in following the new wargame, Combat Mission, I came across this manifesto that gives good insight to state of wargames and how they are developed and marketed. www.battlefront.com/about/about_festo.html

I think this is relavant to Civ3 in that wargames are now developed and marketed in a whole different way than mass market games, which Civ3 strives to be.
[This message has been edited by Steve Clark (edited June 21, 2000).]

[DarkCloud]

I agree about when your army is destroyed a certain percentage of your population dies, say .5 points, because the unit WAS recruited.

[DarkCloud]

Shadowstrike-

You could solve that problem by having city sizes 1.5, 2.0, 3.5, etc.

A national recruitment pool I think would be a good idea. Cities would produce the arms and then you arm the men. However a people-based army (other than the current production-based) would mean that Civ3 would have to leave the 1pop=10k people, 2=30k … - system,otherwise you can’t represent losses. But I have the slight fear they won't do that. A more simple way would be to limit the number of units simply on the empire’s population, but this would unbalance the game in the different eras. In the ancient turns you have so little population that you could have only very few units, while in the modern era you could have almost limitless. To solve this ancient and medieval units could require less population.


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Wernazuma

Comrade of the aztec peoples republic

[Mithrandir]

Hmm, there should also probably be automated infantry(with the associated advance(robotics?)). These wouldn't take up any population, and they wouldn't kill any of your people when they die.

[Shadowstrike]

This is a good system. However, implementing it would have to move population from units to masses, that is instead of 1 or 23 (I'm random) you would have to have populations like 0.5 million or 10,000 to deal with.

[Shadowstrike]

But the cost for using robotic inf. should be proportionally higher. It is more costly to build a fighting robot then to outfit and train a soldier. Robots are also hard to construct so maybe a robot factory improvement must be built before building robots?

Then again, robots should have far more hit points then human troops and should have other such advantages.

[Adm.Naismith]

I agreed times ago about the link between population and army (future robotics soldiers apart).

I underlined that the limit in many wars was that you can't lost unlimited army and replace it simply by some "production" feature.

If you lost a main army, you lost an important part of your workforce, and also a main component of your population growth.

That is where Ultrasonix miss the point (sorry, guy ), because in CIV/SMAC, if I lost a unit i free more resources to build a new one for the next war, when in real world I also lost some resources (workforce, at least), making unit replacement more difficult.

Wernazuma idea of simply linking number of units to total population is smarter than himself is thinking because old armies where not very large if matched to WWI ones, if not because they use lot of slave/prisoner to add soldiers or workforce at home (and so another concept I like to see in Civ III - slavery - fit nicely in the game model ).

Warmonger must be warned: to chose gun instead of butter can't be sustained forever, so can't work too long use slavery and conquered city production (because of that "raise and fall of civilization" problems that should be added to the model too).

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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant