Military units - too much micromanegment

[Stuff2]

I've said it before and i'll say it again.

After a while in civ2 or SMAC you end up with having so many units that you get a headache.
In SMAC ofcourse there is an option of letting the units take care of them selves but that only leads to stupid Ai-moves and alot of uneccessary moves wich eat up alot of processor time for no use.

But it's the moving around every single unit that annoys me most of all. In civ2 I usually end up having around 20 - 30 howitzers and maybe 30 mech. infantrys. It is very timeconsuming moving every unit to the right spot. And although i conquer city after city it feels a bit boring. IMO civ2 is not a wargame. If i had wanted to simulate tactical and strategic warfare i would rather play something else (maybe warcraft or something).

Something has to be done about this, and the solution is not MORE special abilities and weapons for units. On the opposite. The solution is Less detail in waging war.

There are some options for those of you who aren't ready to replace the current 'unit-system':

- Stacked units that can be moved around as one unit.
- Nearby units help fighting units
- Unit automation

Personally I would like to see something totally different.

Instead of units you have military presence.
This means that a city (Or a region/province/whatever) has a number of armys that are spread out over the cities/provinces territory. (i would prefer provinces since it would be silly not being able to defend your borders beacouse they are simply out of range from your citys radii).

There are some basic option for your military to do. The tasks they are given are divided between the soldiers and warmachines in the province. When you want to invade another province you simply give that order.
Your soldiers will simply move into foreign territory. The squares that they capture will become a new province or part of the old one (where you can send units). During a battle the following things happen. The loosing side retrait and the winning side takes more squares. Also, both parts loose soldiers both killed and injured. I'll give an example of orders for the military:

Defend province
Defend provincial borders
Defend foreign border
Attack foreign province
Send troops to xx
Send troops to front, all sqaures where ground fighting recently has taken place.

[Riv/\ /\En]

You, my friend, are a turtle.

While it is true that micromanaging gets a little tiresome, keep in mind that you are getting the whole experience of running a Civ- not just the parts you like. I, for one, like using my strategic abilities to deal with a situation that would warrant my defeat should I simply have a "military presence"

[Blomman]

I don't agree with anything you say. Micromanagement even down to the military would be a great plus to CivIII. The ability to design the units in a tactical way that you need is both realism and great gameplay enhancement.
The system you suggest, is going back to the stoneage, to games like risk (nothing bad about the game, it is a great game). But it is not Civ and have never been.

[Steve Clark]

For all of you that thinks micro-management in a complex strategy games is a tedious thing, how about when you start a new game it gives you an option of whether you want to conquer the world, go to some planet or whatever winning methods you can choose...and then have the game do it for you? Why bother with all of these units?

I'm being facetious (no fooling, huh?) but these are the same type of arguements as wanting to make Civ into a game like Risk or Allies & Axis or other simplistic game models. While I don't want this to be anything like Sid Meier's Quartermaster, the basic concept of all TBS games is that you have individual units under your control. Take away that and it wouldn't be a TBS game. Oh, I get it now, you want Civ 3 to be one of those mindless, RTS click-fest game. Sheesh.

[DarkCloud]

Stacking units is a good Idea, say you stack 2 chariots; you can only stack like units. The unit becomes one and has twice the firepower. This would be represented by a small two on the screen.

Steve Clark-

RTS games are not necessarily 'mindless' as you so claim. Take AoE or Shogun: Total War for example.

[Adm.Naismith]

Stuff2, I agree with the headache for too many units movement but removing units really drive to a game that is, well... unexciting.

So cut out spy units for an intelligence missions screen, throw away caravans for the trade screen, merge resources and production to a regional level instead of cities, use stack of units...

But Caeser, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Churchill, really ordered to patrol the border without knowing any more details from their generals?

I don't think so.

But we know games where micromgmt must be avoided to any cost, because can't be afforded in time: RTS
Shouldn't we learn some lesson about units multiple orders and AI help?

Patrol border (with or without assigning a path) can be useful, if AI help to proper react if enemy detected during patrol

New units goto path after building (to define route from inner cities to frontier)

Free hunt into delimited area (search and attack for every enemy units in a delimited zone)

Back to repair facilities if damaged more than xx% (useful for units into free hunt or exporing)

They aren't all good suggestion, I know, but simply a way to shift some efforts into a strategical initial turn, then be free to left units alone more often than not.


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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant

[Steve Clark]

Let me clarify my flippant comment about mindless. It is a relative thing obviously. I think it has been said here or somewhere else, that in order for RTS units to be able to perform pathfinding and engage other like units based on a simple set of attributes (like in AoE and Shogun), it must dedicate the resources to do that effectively. The trade-off is that each of those units cannot have more than a couple of attributes (usually firepower and range). If we are asking for military units to have many complex attributes and stacking/zoc/command functionalities, it is best to implement those in a TBS game where movements and engaging is simplified.

Or to use the model of one of my current games, Combat Mission, you plot your movements as you would in a turn and then watch it perform and react. They accomplished this because it only had to model a handful of units on the screen. There are not enough computing power on the desktop to do that with the number of units in a Civ-type game.
[This message has been edited by Steve Clark (edited August 16, 2000).]

[Youngsun]

Of course Civ is not a wargame but how can we talk about history without talking about wars? A war is a significant part of human history and nobody can deny that. My play style is rather perfectionist one but I do enjoy raging a war and commanding units.

Why I think Civ is so unique and fun? because it is like my childhood revisited and I used to play with toys and such with absolute power over those whatever they are. Civ made it possible to do that again but this time with the power of PC. How marvelous! I want to feel I'm in control(I always do)

Many units? Why not stack them as a group so you can move 3~4 field armies instead of moving 20~40 division? Just like MOO series, no matter how many spaceships(~thousands)you have you can assign them as fleet and you never get tired of controlling organised fleets.

Micromanagement? I do want to micro manage my mil units. There are certain area which need reduction of micromanagement but not all aspects of the game should be automated or simplified.(no point of playing)

[Tiberius]

I don't think that micromanagement is the worst element of Civ. In the beginning, who doesn't like to micromanage his 3 or 4 cities, 3 legions and 2 settlers? Like Youngsun said, it's nice to be in control. The problem is that in the late game there is too much micromanagement.
This is a problem that can be solved with automation options: build queue for cities, stacking for millitary, automated trade routes for caravans, new commands (like patrol border or defend region) and so on.

I'm very much against Adm. Naismith's proposals (well, he's not alone with those ideas) to eliminate spies, caravans and settlers. I just can't understand: why should we remove every unit that is not a military one? I can imagine only one explanation: those who are proposing this are warmongers. If you care about trade you care about caravans.
Caravans are trade units while phalanx and armors are military units. Why cut out only the trade units? Cut out every unit from the game! Let's play Civ without units

[Adm.Naismith]

Tiberius, I'm not strictly against non combat units, and surely I'm not a warmonger.

My point is: if micromanaging lots of units is (and surely it is) boring and time consuming some misure must be taken to reduce this.

Because of AI limits, I can't encourage too much automation, and someone else already suggested that to have better AI performance we must keep it focused on relevant topics, not wasting time driving diplomats and caravans here and there.

So, if I must chose units that CAN be substituted by a dedicated decision screen, widening the game feature, I must vote for Caravans and Diplomat/Spy. While army historically patrolled and moved to battlefront, caravans limits too much the trade on the timescale (look, a century to start a trade route!) and on traded goods change by time (salt!, who cares more of salt caravans in modern times?).

Diplomacy by messenger is too slow and limited (linking it to a trade screen will open more possibility), but spying by Mata Hari and James Bond unit style is really funny. Spying has always been a mix of merchants ears, diplomats eyes, greased hands and so on. A carefull organization more than some bunch of heroes walking in enemy territories.
They can, IMHO, be substituted with better results for CIV playability.

Also settlers as wandering nomadic let me feel more as an american far west myth (look at the settler icon ), but I can't think of a better substitute, if not embracing a complete different model of city borning (aggregation of villages from existing local population, as others better explained times ago). I don't know if this model can or can't work, but I know is quite controversial and have very low chance to be implemented by Firaxis, so we can forget it and be happy .

That said Tiberius, I'm quite sure Firaxis will take every proposal with a grain of salt (if it look at them at all ), so you shouldn't be so angry with me

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Admiral Naismith AKA mcostant

[Stuff2]

I still think that moving around units is a pain. And it's silly that nearby units don't help eachother. I'll give an more detailed description of my idea.

This is how i want it to be.

The whole map is divided in regions (if there are political provinces in the area they count as regions, but even if they are no political provinces the map is still divided in regions if this idea will work.

Instead of having a bunch of units moving around each square u have a bunch of military units within your region (not on a specific square but in the region/province).

Waging war is easy. Every region can have certian tasks FE defend, attack, Air attack, Air defence, scout e.t.c.

And also movement and recruitment. Movement between regions that is.

The tasks are shared bye all the military units within the region, (except movement orders). This is done automatically in that way it is best done. FE there will be no ground troops participating in the Air attacks and so on.

During battle the winner takes some squares and the looser has to retreat. The new squares will automatically be a new region (where u can send units) or a part of an exististing region of yours. The computer will calculate how things goes. youre job as a leader is simply what to do and how many to do it, not exact strategic plans. One extra thing about battle, This is still carried out from a square to square basis (except air-bombings and geurilla warfare).

There are some benefits from this system.
- 1 unit or 30 units, it takes almost the same amount of time
- The Ai-player has an equal chance
- Air-tasks can be more like in reality
- It's easy to incorporate recruitment and supply in it (if you are a math genious).

Also. You can decide how much damage a unit can take before it retrait.

You get feedback from your units every turn. And with that feedback you can make decisions. For example:

You get the report from the borderpatrol between x-region (yours) and the y-region (the evil mongols).
"Mongol troops are crossing border" with
-"let them come" (So we can stab them in their back)
-"attack them"
-"Cut supply"
-"Retrait all men" (to forts and cities)
-"fetch units from another region"

Loosing squares to another side means, less squares to defend (meaning more units defending it).

I don't see how this idea is making the game boring. Instead of moving unit x to square x,y i do things that is easy to understand. Like defending, attacking, bombing e.t.c.
During this events the computer calculates killed, injured, destruction e.t.c.
This system makes it easy for your computer opponents to start war. And it's also esier to make smart AI (when the AI have the option of giving military orders instaed of just moving around units).

Sure it's bit like risk in a way maybe. But i think it's needed to totally change the way military is handled, unless we want a painfully slow game where every turn takes two hours.

And those of you who don't agree can buy CTP2

[Stuff2]

I'll clarify my idea a bit more

Defence. There are several defend options that you can give (it's all bout how many men you think you can spare).

1. Defend villeges, cities and fortresses
2. Defend border
3. Defend supply lines
4. Defend every square

What the system is actually is doing is calculating how much defence there will be in every square of the region.

Attack. I haven't figured out this one yet.
It should include bomb raids, paratrooping (drop men behind the front and stab them in their back). And ground attacks aswell.

Piracy. This category of task is mostly about
pillage, cutting supply lines, piracy.

There have to be some other categories aswell like transportation, geurilla warfare, nukes, biological and chemical warfare.

[Talon438]

Stuff is a heritic we must burn him to cleanse ourselves he and his mad followers will ruin civ. Chant with me heritic... heritic... heritic... , ok I'm done but seriously micromanagement is fun (RTS games don't suck just RTS civ games)

[Tiberius]

Adm.Naismith,

I'm not THAT angry of you. I'm just worried that eliminating spies, settlers/engineers and caravans we'll lost a part of Civ's fun and magic.

I can play without those units, of course. But, for example, building TIs with settlers/engineers is much more fun than building them through "Call to Power"s Public Works.

It's true that in the late game there is a real pain to micromanage all of your cities, spies, caravans, military units and engineers, but in the first, let's say, 5500 years, I like to micromanage, and I'm sure there are a lot of civers like me. I like to put my settlers on work, my caravans to explore enemy territories, my phalanx to guard my borders, and so on.

I agree that an advanced diplomacy screen and a trade screen, with a lot of options, would be nice. After all trading in Civ2 was a joke. But don't remove the caravans and engineers! I like them! At least make them an option, in a .txt file.

quote: I'm quite sure Firaxis will take every proposal with a grain of salt (if it look at them at all)

I can only agree here with you. Let's hope they know what they're doing and they're doing it well, in our benefit

[Tiberius]

I have an idea, a compromise. I still think that automating units is a solution, but if the AI can’t handle it, here’s another possibility.

In the beginning of the game, when micromanaging is yet fun, use units (engineers, caravans). Later in the game, with a certain discovery, they’ll become obsolete and could be replaced by some advanced screen.

Example: use caravans starting with the discovery of trade and until the discovery of corporation. Then remove them completely, and make all the trading through a trade screen.

To talk about units too, I think that armies (stacked units with a commander/general) and some new commands (like defend border, high alert and such) would be enough to improve the battlesystem.

[Youngsun]

Stuff2

Your suggestion will take my virtual toy soldiers away from me no way!

There is a genre for your taste such as Risk and Axis & Allies. Their AIs if not the best better than CIVII's but for better AI's sake, changing the genre of the game doesn't make sense to me. "Fun" first "better AI" next period. If I wanted torture my brain I would play chess with my friends.

Again why civ is so fun? Almost infinite freedom to move around artificial globe with building cities wherever you want or send your armies wherever you like which are not confined by regions or countries. That was the most attractive part of Civ feature to me you know?

Also I see CIVII has much simpler option for unit command.

Do nothing(stay)or fortify->defend
Move->Attack/scout/board ship/land/engage trade/begin spy activity.

But ,as you pointed out, "air combat/resolution" seriously need more upgrade. I'd like to discuss with you on this area if you want.
[This message has been edited by Youngsun (edited August 18, 2000).]

[Shadowstrike]

You call him a heretic, and yet can't spell heretic?

Seriously though, once we start automating everything, we can just boot up the game and walk away, letting the computer do everything. Do we want that kind of game?