A potential cure for "stacks of doom"

[04048]

Civilization V's elimination of unit stacks was a big deal when 1st announced, and now has people asking developers of 4x & TBS games whether they are going to have "stacks of doom" in their games or not. 

 

I just got this idea while falling asleep last night. A potential solution to "stacks of doom": pincer attacks.

If a stack is attacked in the same turn (or simultaneously, depending on the game design) from more than one direction, it receives a penalty relative to the #/positioning of attackers, as well as the size of the stack. 

This represents the difficulty of arraying a large army, with its greater reliance on baggage trains and camp followers, against harassing tactics. The alternative is not stacking (putting army in a column). 

 

Thoughts? This just came to me. 

[Gaizokubanou]

Throw away stacks with 1 unit each just to get the 'pincer' bonus would break this.

[itsamoose]

I've played a couple board wargames that address this issue a little differently. First, when one unit attacks another, units within it's zone of control (usually one hex) get their power added to the calculation. Next, and I think this is the crucial part, losing units are removed from the board for that turn only. The next turn, the player can replace those units on the board at their resupply zone. I think the stacks of doom issue is a result of both the combat mechanics and the economy of a civ game, where when a unit is killed they are gone and you must go through a lengthy process of rebuilding them. The pincer idea might work, but it sounds like a rule that is a little too specific to some emergent behavior and could likely create other undesirable scenarios, or be entirely inconsequential outside a specific design.

[Gaizokubanou]

The pincer idea might work, but it sounds like a rule that is a little too specific to some emergent behavior and could likely create other undesirable scenarios, or be entirely inconsequential outside a specific design.

 

Yeah that's excellent point.  For it to work it is probably going to be weirdly specific and complex for genre as wide as 4X games.  In 4X combat should be kept light because even without deep combat it is just so easy for fighting to draw the focus of the game away from everything else.

[itsamoose]

Yeah that's excellent point. For it to work it is probably going to be weirdly specific and complex for genre as wide as 4X games. In 4X combat should be kept light because even without deep combat it is just so easy for fighting to draw the focus of the game away from everything else.

To piggyback on that, I would like to see civ style games take a broader approach to their resource systems as opposed to adding in more/different ancillary systems. I've never designed a civ game, so this might be a horrible idea, but I think you could model this in such a way that in creates a butload of emergence. For example, in civ you either have a resource or you don't, kind of like how a military unit is alive or it is destroyed. There isn't really a middle state, for example off active duty or routed. Similarly something like food can go bad, water contaminated, economies booming and busting, etc. Often in these cases I find the resources themselves aren't very flexible, so you have to start creating all kinds of additional resources to handle different systems. So you can have situations where lots of people are converting to my religion because I have a lot of religion points, despite the fact that most of my population is starving (as opposed to say Christianity spreading as a result of the wealth of Christian nations). This may result in a horrible game design, but I like the idea of a civ game where I'm more focused on the inner workings of my civ as opposed to focusing on others.

[Gaizokubanou]

CiV actually does have that to a small degree.

 

Say you have 4 iron and you build 4 swordsman (think conversion ratio is 1 to 1).  If you lose iron but still have those 4 swordsman, they get insufficient resource penalty but are still on the map.

 

Also the new HP system kinda have in between state of alive-dead, as unit's HP dictates its combat effectiveness (takes more damage and deals less damage (beauty of this system is that from user end's view, it is so deceptively simple but backend calculation actually handles wide variety of scenarios very well)).

 

Neither of those are as big as samples you were thinking about, but something is there and I think those worked pretty well.

 

And my favorite example of this is units near border diplomacy trigger... where if you station units near AI's border, they ask you to remove them (or you can declare war in same screen) and if you don't, hostility goes up.  It is probably my favorite example of Civ design that just ties all elements of the game (tiles, military, diplomacy, economy) together in such simple, elegant and fluid (the aspect you were thinking of I think?) way.

 

I guess it's that fleeting ideal of simplest design for the most complex system that us designers are looking for in a nutshell

 

Following opinion is getting very off topic so gonna put this in spoilers 

Personally I would be interested to design a civ-themed game where you actually don't have competing factions... instead you are managing entirety of humanity and somehow get it to progress while minimizing internal conflict.  Progress would happen through exploration, meeting and trade of diverse groups but that also drives up desire for conflict so trying to walk the fine line of isolationism-imperialism would be interesting way to recapture the idea of humanity as single unit instead of seeing conflict as necessity cause it's us vs them.