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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn’t really the existence of death stacks so much as the fact that the map is too zoomed out for _any_ tactical nuance. This creates extremely unrealistic game-y mechanics when you have two opposing stacks of 50 guys and one guy moves right while the other guy jukes and runs into a city that’s not defended.

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.

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I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units).

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 think the issue is that people actually want to do tactical fighting with flanking and concentrating attacks, but the scale is quite odd. Zone of control is a good game mechanic but it’s very game-y; I can’t pass this guy who’s standing a city’s distance away from me?

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).

Civ 5&6 apply zone of control well, I think: you are able to move past enemies, but it takes all of the unit's move points. So the advancing is slow and dangerous.

Ok sure but let’s zoom out a bit.

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.

> 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.

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)

In Civ I there were resources, for example jungle tiles could have "gems", hills had "coal", grasslands had "game" etc. There was also another resource "luxuries" which is what I think you are talking about, you obtained these via establishing trade routes between cities, or by creating specialized citizens (entertainers).

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.

That's kind of the niche Age of Wonders occupied, a civ-lite strategic layer and xcom-like tactical layer. Too bad 4 is hideously bland (I'll blame paradox and focus group testing for that)

The problem is that Civ has never modeled military logistics.

That gap means death stacks are magically logistically-supported.

But fair, as that's not the kind of game it wants to be.

You can pick the world size.

Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.

“Put everyone in a single stack” is not an interesting tactic or knowledge check imo.

There was a year-ish period of sc2 which was death stacks, I think at that point I went back to watching sc1 lol

I agree, it's not fun or interesting

I have to agree: Humankind has a much better base for combat.

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