Xanthir wrote:Have you ever played a Civ game? A single turn represents anywhere from 100 years to 6 months of time (depending on era), and the world is gridded out to a giant scale. A single "unit" (a) represents a large corp, and (b) isn't actually trying for realism, but for good gameplay that gives the *feel* of war. One turn worth of "battle" (usually a single fight, taking 2-3s to animate) is meant to represent an entire war theatre over a long-term conflict; even in the quickest turns, it's still months of fighting. A "big" war (on the scale of our world wars) is still usually only 15-20 units per side in Civ 5; most conflicts (representing significant wars we'd record in history books and teach to youngsters in school) involve 5-10 units per side or so.
Yes, I've played a couple. I won by building a very fast spaceship that overtook a rival's spaceship en route and got to the next star sooner.
If a single unit's meant to represent a corps, then "rams," "scout cavalry," "archers," "spare uniforms" and so on should be upgrades for a standard unit, and if a turn takes 100 years so should "midwives" because it takes a long damn time to march from one city to the next. Every fight I've seen is "unit a attacks unit b and one of them is completely destroyed without inflicting any damage at all on the other." That's not how
six months of fighting between 25,000 Russian soldiers and 25,000 Axis soldiers in 160 square miles of territory goes. The bombers and fighters parts certainly didn't feel like six-month turns
or like
historical air war.
To me, it never gave the feel of war. It gave the feel of something between chess and accountancy.
For me, personally, if they can't do the world map and the units' nature better than that they
shouldn't try to map the whole world and put all those unit types onto it.
Age of Conquerors does pretty well with multiple unit types and upgrades to weapons and armour
fighting for part of the Yucatan peninsula or Black Forest. Empire / Overlord did pretty well as a WW2 game with randomly-generated maps, just one type of city (O, X or * for friendly, enemy or neutral), destroyers (D), submarines
(well, submersibles) (S), troop transporters (T), cruisers (R), aircraft carriers (C), battleships (B), fighters (F) and armies (A). That was it. Armies. Everything hit for 1 point, except S, which hit for 3. A, F and O were 1hp, S 2, T and D 3, C and R 8 and B 12, every took a city a number of turns to produce (A 5, F 10, D 20, S 25, T 30 etc) and fights were "one or the other scores a hit until one unit ceases to exist," which could leave a damaged ship still functioning or still functioning but moving at half-speed (with reduced carrying capacity if it was T or C). That worked. There was no way to use four A at once against a single X but it worked.
Civ had some really weird systems where a city was constantly losing resources to sustain a unit that was far away beyond several other cities, which couldn't contribute at all, and there were no supply lines. Also, that stage of the game thing meant you could be halfway through something and suddenly find you needed to abandon the whole plan because someone on the far side of the world had invented a steam engine and was using it instead of donkeys to extract copper ore from his mines.