military units cost pop

me_irate · April 12, 2001, 23:14

I was wondering what you guys think about this idea. im not sure i like it, but it would add an entire new demension to the game.

In the real world civs make peace to save human life, but i have found that it doesn't bother me if a military unit dies, because all it was is shields. It has no other use but to fight and die. But if military units cost population points, wars would not only become more costly but rarer. This would be accurate in real life terms. A unit in civ is not only a single person but an entire army, this army isn't just built it must be recruted from the population. As of now it just apears from thin air or is produced by shields. This very reason is why Sweden isn't a superpower now. Back in the late 1700's early 1800's they were powerful with the best weapons and best generals, but there failing was a low population. The cost of population would make civ much more realistic.

Also it wouldn't neccesarily have to be a whole pop point which is 10s of thousands of people, but maybe 1/3 pop point per unit.

SerapisIV · April 12, 2001, 23:20

It makes sense to me in the early game, but as the game progresses, in modern times, even in WWII it was a small portion of society that actually fought. Most casualties were civilians. Except for Germany at the end, but that's kind of an extreme case.

King Richard · April 12, 2001, 23:28

I'll have to agree that units reprecents a small fraction of the population of a city. We don't know how many people one unit reprecents, but it can't be much.. What could be a solution is to lower the culture-points each time a unit is killed. How's that?

Daniel Frappier · April 13, 2001, 01:20

Instead of having a unit cost 1 population wich i agree is a lot and too much why not have a unit cost maybe 1 or a few unit of food.

In Civ II each unit of food was representing 1000 peoples so it kind of make sense.

Gramphos · April 13, 2001, 06:09

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel Frappier on 04-13-2001 01:20 AM
Instead of having a unit cost 1 population wich i agree is a lot and too much why not have a unit cost maybe 1 or a few unit of food.

I like it. Not to mush to offer for a good soldier.

Zanzin · April 13, 2001, 06:18

Food would represent the supplies required for troops, population points would represent the depletion of the popultion. Both should be implemented in my opinion.

In the medevial ages they could only fight wars every 20 years or so, because that's how long it took for a generation of kids to grow up to fighting age!!

Anyway, it would prevent the computer from building obese amounts of units without having to properly support them. I'm for it's implementation, mainly because it propells the realism aspect.

SerapisIV · April 13, 2001, 11:12

The computer building "obese" amounts of units without support is just an example of the AI cheating in CivII. I've never heard of the AI being able to do that in a patched-SMAC game.

me_irate · April 13, 2001, 11:32

The main purpose for this in my opinion is to make it more realistic. How often do empires get destroyed and assimilated entirely into another civ. Not very often. The reason for this, while defeating a civ is a much smaller matter, invading them and capturing there cities is much more difficult. And the loss of less because of this is tremendous. Why did't the US go to Baghdad in the gulf war, because the loss of life would have been to great. But very seldom in a civ game does a war end without one empire having conquered and obsorbed the other empire completley. That is the main reason in my eyes to this, to make wars more coslty, thus being more realistic.

SerapisIV · April 13, 2001, 13:56

quote:

Originally posted by me_irate on 04-13-2001 11:32 AM
The main purpose for this in my opinion is to make it more realistic. How often do empires get destroyed and assimilated entirely into another civ. Not very often. The reason for this, while defeating a civ is a much smaller matter, invading them and capturing there cities is much more difficult. And the loss of less because of this is tremendous. Why did't the US go to Baghdad in the gulf war, because the loss of life would have been to great. But very seldom in a civ game does a war end without one empire having conquered and obsorbed the other empire completley. That is the main reason in my eyes to this, to make wars more coslty, thus being more realistic.

The reason we didn't go to Baghdad is because it would've been political suicide, our intervention in the Gulf was to remove Iraq from Kuwait, not decide which nations should keep their government and which shouldn't. Even if we wanted Hussein out, which we did, we couldn't overtly do anything without losing the support of most of the Arab world of who's support our supply of cheap oil (relative to Europe) relys on.

I think that the increased assimilation difficulty should be made by having conquered cities very difficult to keep subdued and out of revolt in the industrial age onward. In the ancient eras, conquest was generally very possible. And still somewhat true through the 1300s. Japan was a group of small civs that was eventually unified through warfare, in the Hundred Years war, the various regions of France that were fought over rarely revolted, they were fought over, conquered repeatedly. It would be very difficult for a nation to conquer another. But this is a relatively recent phenomena when compared to the full 6000 years of history involved in Civ