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Granted we're on the same side here, but THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH.
Death stacks. Death stacks? Death stacks!
According to the complaint, the problem with this game is that it allows you to combine several units of disparate types all in one area and attack with them in the same turn.
You know what we call that in the real world? A mother fucking ARMY. In other words, it's just how things actually work.
Yeah, you know what, it is troublesome when an ARMY shows up at your door and your defenses weren't ready for one. So what are you gonna do? Prepare, or bitch about it? Here I'm imagining any great military commander of yore whining that he lost because his opponent utilized (implicitly, fake and gay) 'death stacks'. Honestly! 'March divided and fight concentrated.' This is central to warfare in the human experience.
And it's not like the game is un-self-aware about this! In fact several mechanisms exist to moderate the power of
death stacksarmies. For one, a much smaller defensive force can almost always hold against one in a fortified position given rough technological parity. So, again, reality. For another, multiple classes of units exist just to punish the behavior of packing too many units in too small a space. Siege weapons, early on, and later we have things like bomber squadrons. Enormous, ruinous collateral damage. Sure, put all your units on that square. Pack 'em in. See what happens.Also, the sheer logistical challenges of actually getting all those units to one place at one time seem to go almost wholly unappreciated. It's not an easy thing to do! And concentrating your military at one point on your frontier means that a whole lot more of your land borders go undefended. Do you have the roads and railroads and bridges to get them back to defend if necessary? There's a lot of tradeoff and investment considerations here!
When we do get to aircraft, there's a whole consideration about also sending along fighter squadrons to maintain air superiority and protect your armies from enemy bombers. So now you've got firefights blazing across the sky while you try to establish forward airstrips to keep control of the heavens and avoid getting your entire army wiped out before it achieves its goals. This is GOOD. This is RIGHT. This is FUN.
Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series. V was a mess in general (terrible game design mostly across the board) but what really killed it for me was the ridiculous traffic jams and archers shooting across the English Channel. I don't want a cutesy pegboard-style tiny-scale European board game-esque microcosm of tactical combat played out on the apparent scale of a continent. I want vast armies clashing! Oh, sorry, the swordsmen can't get to London because some (allied) archers are hanging out in Northumbria. What the fuck.
Anyway, the very existence of the (craven, weak, and effete) term "death stacks" fills me with disgust. Civ4 is by far the best game in the series and when the primary salient complaint about it has to do with modeling reality well and generating interesting logistical and defensive considerations, because, apparently, a bunch of losers failed to prepare adequate defenses and got caught with their pants down when a lizard-brained AI managed to show up with something resembling a coordinated assault, which was entirely foreseeable, and rage-quit in protest at their pretense of being a brilliant mastermind strategist being exposed as the comforting, but baseless schizophrenic fantasy that it was, well, I, I disagree.
Do yourself a favor and stop repeating the phrase 'death stacks'. It's unbecoming.
Based and IV-pilled.
God favours the side of the big battalions, the whole point of war should be about building a big strong army. And if size doesn't matter, it just removes a potential opportunity cost, it removes strategy from the strategy game. If I don't have to choose between universities or musketmen, what's the point?
Anyway, the Advanced Civ mod is quite good, the AI gets quite cunning tactically and strategically, they somehow made it run significantly faster too.
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I don't think that people complain about army stacks in Civ IV (and earlier) because it's unrealistic, or too hard. It's because it's motherfucking boring. There's no gameplay at all there. Figure out your army composition, mash it into the other army. Yawn.
I started Civ with IV, and I still have a lot of fondness for it. I think it has a lot of soul, and they tried (and succeeded!) to capture historical details in a way that V or VI just never did. I still play it sometimes. But there's a reason that I never, ever went for domination victory in IV whereas I actually do in V and VI. It's because military sucks ass as a game mechanic without the one unit per tile system. It might be more realistic, it certainly is easier for the AI to work with, but it's way less fun and that's ultimately why people didn't like it.
Well, again, you just elided a huge number of complicated and involved tasks and decisions under that sentence. I mean I could do this with any game, right? "Just do the correct things needed to win and then you win the game. Boring."
Are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?
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Speak for yourself. It is perhaps a little boring, but significantly less so than moving a hundred units one by one because they cannot occupy the same space together.
Well, obviously I am speaking for myself. ;) But I strongly disagree with your statement there. I fully admit that moving a large army in the 1UPT system is tedious. But that's a small percentage of the time spent, and the rest gives you very engaging gameplay. Whereas the old army system never gave you engaging gameplay. It's a clear upgrade in my eyes.
Honestly, if one could mod Civ IV to have the unit mechanics of the newer games that would probably be the ideal Civ for me. The stacking army system just plain sucks and it's the only serious blemish on an otherwise great game.
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What of HoI's combat width?
Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.
Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.
Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.
I deny it. What is true is that in wars where the human player is the aggressor, there's often one decisive battle followed up by a slow roll over the now-mostly-defenseless territory. And so the tactical considerations for that battle are going to be minimized, in that they only need to be figured out once. I.e. a well-researched and -implemented invasion can accomplish a lot by choosing a favorable initial battlefield, yes.
Which is how Civ4 works, yes. Literally with artillery and bombing and the 'collateral damage' mechanic. Your units standing shoulder to shoulder will get absolutely shredded by AOE damage if you're not taking steps to prevent that, and first-line enemy defensive cities usually have multiple artillery units in them for this reason. Even the AI.
That's true of NuCiv, sure, but it's not true of Civ4.
I'm with you, civ4 has a ton of tactical depth to its combat system, and I get annoyed when people don't see it. I think the main problem is that a lot of new players don't like seeing their catapults die (which they usually do when used for collateral damage), so they never really figure out the 'collateral damage' system. They also seem to feel guilty about using nukes in the late game, for some reason. Notably the AI does not share that guilt, and will freely use catapults or nukes all over the place.
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I do think you're not alone in missing 4, I hear that a lot but I always chalked it up to 4 being the most featureful and having insane levels of content in the base game compared to any modern release.
I was too young to dig deep into the combat so my memory of it mostly comes from the later instalments.
What I remember of 4 is that the combat was a slog in the late game because everyone had so many units you couldn't make any progress.
I guess that's actually a pretty decent portrayal of modern warfare, ironically enough.
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Death stacking is a derogatory term for a common theme in GSGs and RTSes that the best strategy to beat the AI is just to have a huge blob of units that overruns one's enemy like a horde of ants eating a hot dog. The idea is that games should heavily discourage this beginner strategy. It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.
Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass. It's not fun. It may be more 'realistic', but games like EU4 and HOI4 do it better. CIV's combat usually amounts to out-producing one's enemy rather than elaborate strategic maneuvers, which is fine, but let's not pretend the IV combat system was deep or anything. It wasn't. It was the garnish on top of a city manager.
BTW, and I mention this sincerely, there's a 'move all' button that a lot of people seem to manage to miss.
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Maybe I'm a scrub*, then, but that's exactly what I enjoy. I'm not a micro fan. I don't want to care about my APM. I want to build infrastructure, and then crush my opponent witb superior logistics and production.
*No maybe about it. I'm terrible at RTSs, but I love me some late game tech trees
Yeah, the complaint that IF you manage your nation well enough to invest in logistical infrastructure and research and production while hindering your opponents from doing the same, while navigating politics and making the best of the (inevitably awful) start location you rolled, and put a lot of thought into sophisticated combined-arms deployments while spinning a whole bunch of other absolutely-vital plates and taking care to avoid getting penned in and AOE-wrecked—
That IF you do all that, you're more likely to win than they are—
Well, it just doesn't strike me as credible. And neither do the people who make such a complaint. And somehow I'm sure that this is a window onto what is basically wrong with the world, and why democracy needs to be acknowledged as the hideous mistake it was.
There's something to be said on this topic about League of Legends and other games like that, but I've only a glimmer... something about stat-checks and outplay potential.
Just different genres. I for one like games where the player can end up in unrecoverable situations not due to reaction time, but poor decision-making.
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Man, you occur to me as being like one of those guys who complains about 'capitalism' and then when someone tries to dig down into what you mean, it turns out you're actually just describing reality.
Well, first of all, all else being equal, isn't that exactly how it should work? And if a game were indeed that simple, and someone were still complaining about it, my analysis wouldn't be that it's a bad game, it's that either he doesn't care for it (valid) or he simply sucks at it and is whinging to cover for his wounded pride (invalid).
But this doesn't describe Civ4 at all.
A lot of things can come into play to add depth and complexity to a (realistic) system wherein, all else being equal, the side with more units wins. Including but not limited to:
And you'll notice that not only does Civ4 do all of these things, but I could jump into any of those items and talk more about additional complexity within them to make it even more interesting and fun.
So, in summary, the complaint that Civ4 has a 'death stack' problem is, by your own definition, entirely invalid. Therefore I conclude that you have no basis upon which to call it a bad game, only that you personally don't care for it.
(...Or.)
Are you a Civ multiplayer person? I think that probably explains it. Civ multiplayer is just so different of a game from Civ single-player that it's impossible to talk about the subject without mentioning the elephant in the room.
I play GSG-type games as single-player experiences. (Mostly because my internet was dogshit for the longest time.) And, in my experience, the Civ AI has always been dogshit, unable to comprehend the multivariate functions of its own systems.
IT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE that those elements are present in Civ 4. I never got to experience them properly. I concede the point that the Civ 4 combat is not as two-dimensional as my hot take would imply but the game itself does a bad job of demonstrating it for the player. EU4 also has very bad AI, but the cheating is in such a matter that it has the pretense of emulating skillful play, and not just modifiers given to the AI just because.
(Yes, I know the AI gets buffs in Paradox games. But the buffs in Civ are much, much larger comparatively, to compensate for a lack of historicity and other railroady mechanics.)
The base game of CIV is piss easy, even on Deity: the AI is too incompetent and cowardly for the job of containing the player without obviously ganging up against him. You don't need to know any of that to win single player civ (although it will make your game go faster.) But that's not even the worst part of it!
The inability of players falling behind to catch up means that in Civ games, there is an obvious winner very early on, deincentivizing participation in casual play and ensuring a negative experience for the majority of players. This is the real reason why Civ sucks. No matter how clever you are tactically and keeping all of those modifiers in mind, the bigger blob will always win. I'm not going to fight to the bitter end for days for a predestined conclusion: I'm just going to quit before the birth of Christ.
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Appreciate the rant, but I'm gonna keep using it. I think it's awesome, and my primary enjoyment of the game is overcoming all the challenges you listed above and finally assembling an unconquerable death stack that end an entire civilization before it's exhausted. Maybe it's taken on a more derogatory tone since Civ 5, but I'm taking it back god damnit! I think it sounds awesome. You might as well be telling me to stop saying "head shot".
Yeah, the stakes here are low enough that any principled objection I could (and would) make would obviously be silly.
But since I apparently felt like dying on this hill today (defensive bonus btw) I'll superciliously argue that the analog here would be 'clicking on heads' instead of 'head shot'.
In fact there are games where head shots include a lot of setup, deep thought, consideration of range and windage, etc. plus a whole bunch of skill, and conflating that with 'click on head' is inappropriate.
But clicking on heads is even more awesome! It's like you have reached such a level of zen with the game, so mastered the physics and situational awareness, that all the ephemera melted away and you are literally just clicking on heads.
I mean, I get what you mean. Coming from a person who's never played an FPS, it sounds reductive. But if master Counter-Strike 1.6 players talked about clicking on heads, I wouldn't want to play a team game against them.
Yeah, clicking on heads is fine, it's just not my thing.
Also, my thing is better.
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