The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".
Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: schwerpunkt)
And almost every major conflict involved a decisive battle with two death stacks on each side.
The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. This is the moment Civ became a completely different game. The last true Civ game was Civ 4.
I actually love Humankind’s approach where you have a fairly chunky stack and the stack gets spread out over the map into individual units during combat where you do some short term tactics that pulls in all surrounding units as reinforcements with temporary combat only movements.
Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.
I agree, it's not fun or interesting
There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective.
The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)
I haven't played Civ VII, and I don't think I played much of Civ II or III, but tile improvements is still a thing in Civ IV, V, and VI. In Civ I, the settler unit would do tile improvements and found cities, and at some point they switched to a settler that only founds cities and a worker unit that does tile improvements. In Civ VI, the worker only has a certain number of charges and then disbands, and they separated out road construction to happen with trade routes, but you still need workers to irrigate and add mines and whatever you need for special resources (in Civ I, there was one special resource and it was called resources; later games there's like spices and bananas and coffee and gold and what have you)
Maybe a better mechanic could be for units to be able to pass by each other, but it could cause attrition for the moving unit (representing the fact that the moving unit will have trouble foraging with all the entrenched defenders hanging around).
Tile improvements have used units (settlers in Civ 1, settlers/engineers in Civ 2, workers in Civ 3-5, builders and military engineers in Civ 6) in all version of Civ in the main franchise line until Civ 7, in Civ 7 non-road improvementsare created automatically by working a tile (and you can't change which tiles are worked once selected, while road and railroad are created by creating cities close enough [roads] or close enough and with rail station buildings [railroads].)
Civ 6 made roadbuilding automatic with trade route creation, but still required units for other tile improvements, including railroads.
Both sides have 10 guys. Let’s say one of them puts 10 in a stack. The other splits into 5/5 to tackle two nearby objectives.
In death stack civ games the 10 stack can just instantly swallow the 5’s without suffering much in the way of losses.
Alternatively you have two cities to defend. You have 9 units vs. their 10 and would win if defending from walls or lose if they fight in the field. Does it really make sense that you have no option but to let them take a city for free because you can’t split your defenses to any effect? Nah.
Humankind’s combat is simply far more elegant. If you attack the 5, the nearby 5 can reinforce them. The combat also takes time. So if a small force can hold off a large force at a defensible choke point or maybe a walled city you can buy time for your other troops to arrive at the battle. The focus on gamey movement points and timing of inputs is gone.
That gap means death stacks are magically logistically-supported.
But fair, as that's not the kind of game it wants to be.
WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.
And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart.
[0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...
On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.)
Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)
Part of the abstraction of the game is that the map for cities and the map for units are at different scales (despite being the same map), and scales change depending on what year you’re in
Well, if we are talking about games where the size of a square is a coherent question, they can only do that in Civ III; Civ 1/2 units have only attack/defense, units with weapons "better range" just goes into the attack/defense abstraction, whereas in Civ IV archery units get first strike, and artillery units damage city defenses, but, like all other units that can attack at all, they can attack only adjacent units. (Even the single use missile units in Civ 4 are just units with a lot of movement that are destroyed when they attack, not ones that have a "range" capability distinct from movement.)
Range units came back with Civ V, along with the introduction of hexes and the elimination of stacks.
This would make no sense; the top and bottom of the map are always land that blocks you from going that way. If you assume that you're on a spherical Earth, you also need to assume that the regions around the north and south pole don't appear on the ingame map.
Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.
Idea:
Unlimited stacking is allowed. Units are ordered in the stack based on melee attack power * current health. When stacks attack one another only one melee type unit and one ranged unit may attack any particular single unit on the other side. Both attackers and defenders work from the top down. If an attacker or defender destroys their unit then leftover attack power will be used against the next available unit, after all initial attacks have been completed, but that melee unit will take return damage based on the percentage of the attack they have remaining.
For example, side 1 has a stack with 3 warriors and 2 archers. Side 2 has 1 warrior and 4 archers.
Initial attack:
side 1 archer 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 2 archer 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 1 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
side 2 warrior 1 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 50% damage to warrior
side 1 archer 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 60% damage to archer
side 2 archer 2 vs. side 1 warrior 1: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 archer 2: 40% damage to archer, 60% attack remaining
side 2 archer 3 vs. side 1 warrior 3: 40% damage to warrior
side 1 warrior 3 vs. side 2 archer 3: 100% damage to archer, 0% attack remaining
side 2 archer 4 can not make it to the battle lines and does not take an action
Followup attacks:
side 1 warrior 2 vs. side 2 warrior 1: 3% damage to warrior (10% health, 60% attack), takes 3% damage in return
I think this could be an interesting way to do combat, but it is relatively complicated and the AI would probably be even worse at managing it.
Congratulations, you have basically invented Civ 4's collateral damage mechanic.
> Thinking about this some more it might be possible to make "doomstacks" that actually have some tactics.
Yes, it is. For one more fully developed example, see
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Combat_(Civ4)
(They have a different solution to modeling ranged capability -- in addition to the collateral damage effect of artillery, it includes the First Strike ability of archery and certain other units.)
It's clear to me that the designers wanted to include flanking as a mechanic, and other positioning elements of warfare (ranged attacks, zone of control, etc) thus stacks of doom had to go.
If you want to be pedantic about it, Normandy was 5 separate beaches in a 50 mile stretch, and involved paratroopers behind the beachfront ahead of time. And the game does model concentration of power to some degree, in the form of armies and corps.
Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted.
In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.
The level of detail of battles is meant to be low because it's focused in wars not battles. You are not a war general you are a head of government.
There are still plenty of tactics in Civ 4. Units have different bonuses depending on terrain and other factors. You have to plan where the combat takes place and what types units you want to use.
Some unit types have collateral damage (catapult, trebuchet, cannon, artillery, mobile artillery, etc.), and there are similar mechanics with air units, cavalry, etc.
The game is not short of battle tactics just not the board game inspired mechanic of Civ 5+.
- you can destroy roads (needed for some resources)
- you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource
- you can use diplomacy to deny a resource
- you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
IMO it was sort of more “honest” from a realism point of view to just admit that the simulation is not that accurate at the unit level, you smash the stacks into each other and assume the officer corps of each army is handling flanking.
It is hard to say which way is more fun really. Seems like a matter of preference. I like tactical games better anyway, so IMO the new way is an improvement. But, realism? Not really.
The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though.
Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.
https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civiliz...
This is true, but it was also completely changed after Civ 1, Civ 2, and Civ 3 (and, for that matter, Civ 5 and Civ 6.)
> The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic.
Civ III radically changed stack mechanics by eliminating "defeating the strongest defender destroys the stack" (it also added ranged units), Civ IV radically changed stack mechanics by adding in collateral damage from certain attackers (it also got rid of ranged units, replacing them with first strike or archery, and collateral damage for artillery.) Each of these changed the game as radically as Civ 5s one-unit-per-tile (which also so substantial changes with Civ 6's Corps/Army and Fleet/Armada mechanics, and Civ 7's different Army/Fleet/Squadron mechanic.)
The idea that Civ 4 was the single point that changed everything is silly.
[0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4)