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Comment by jltsiren | Hacker News Reader

Normandy was not a death stack. The actual landings involved 156k troops facing 50k troops over 80 km of coastline. That's maybe 2x as many troops as in a major ancient battle, stretched over a frontline 20x as long.

WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.

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How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? It's about 80 km wide[0].

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-...

It depends on the map. In the Civ 6 Europe map, the area where the Normandy landings took place was 3 tiles. You could have three units attacking in the initial wave against 1 defending unit, with various ranged units on both sides. At that point in the game, the units could be corps or armies, which would make the overall scale of fighting about right.

> How big do you think a single square in civ takes up?

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.)

That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.

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

> That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.

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.

> Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference.

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.

I agree that the assumption makes no sense, but the calculation offering an 80mi diameter elsewhere in the thread is, in fact, based on distributing the Earth's land area across the number of tiles in a (Civ 6 huge, IIRC) map, calculating the area of each tile based on that, and then calculating the distance across the tile based on the area.

That might be an interesting mechanic. Allow unlimited stacking but make artillery pieces hit every unit in the tile. Civ kind of has that mechanic with nukes, but they have all sorts of other implications that make them impractical in most games.

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

The idea with the followup attacks is that it prevents someone from building an "army" out of a lot of cheap units just to roadblock strong units. By limiting battlefront size you still need to split your stacks to flank enemies or even attack on multiple fronts. Ranged units would be very vulnerable to melee, and artillery would be mostly strong against cities but would do damage to everything in the stack. Units inside of cities or fortresses would be protected against artillery and take very little damage.

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.

> That might be an interesting mechanic. Allow unlimited stacking but make artillery pieces hit every unit in the tile. C

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.)

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