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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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