Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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You can't place 4-million tanks in one area in the real world.

But you can shove 4-million tanks onto a single square in Civ4. That's the stupid part.

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In the real world (WW2 and older battles anyway), soldiers spread out, trying to out-flank each other and gain terrain advantages. You can't just "stack" your entire army on top of itself. You have to deal with terrain, chokepoints, and movement logistics.

"The battle of the Bulge" was a thing, because terrain and battle-line formations matter in the real world. (Well... at least historically. I'm not sure if it matters as much with today's jet fighters and super-carriers). The USA lost tens of thousands of troops, because holding the line was incredibly important. (And the Germans similarly sacrificed tens of thousands of troops in the hope that they get a breakout offensive)

Except movement-logistics are boring and tedious (see Civ5 / Civ6 endgames). Allow unrealistic stacking but remove any tactical advantage from it (ie: Civ2), so that the game is a bit more fun to play.

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Anyone playing Civ4 will inevitably draw their units together into a singular death-stack. The entire concept of "fronts" is almost completely devoid in Civ4.

> And the Germans similarly sacrificed tens of thousands of troops in the hope that they get a breakout offensive

And if they got a breakout offensive, the allies would have produced another million tanks. In civ terms, the game was over before Poland, if you want to find out why the allies won you have to figure out why the US had all those good production cities cranking out tech and troops when the Germans didn't even have a decent tile with oil.

My point: Civ4's tactical combat simply isn't rich enough to represent things like the Battle of the Bulge, where a breakout offensive could give the Germans a fighting chance for a few more weeks.

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And yes, tactics are ultimately secondary to production. That doesn't change the fact that the Romans had to fight the Gauls while outnumbered in Battle of Alesia or Carthage's Battle of Cannae.

These sorts of events aren't really going to happen in Civ4. The tactical engine and decision making in Civ4 is just too shallow to have something like that ever occur.

So Carthage were going to lose against the superior Roman production eventually. That doesn't make Hannibal's win at the Battle of Cannae any less interesting.

Yeah got it, civ 4 is not a combat simulator, it's an economy and diplomacy simulator.

With 9 classes of units, and ~89 total combat units in the game, I would argue otherwise.

Combat plays a strong role in all Civ games. Not least of which because of barbarians forcing you to defend yourself (which are impossible to diplomacy with).

You're going to be spending a non-negligible amount of time in any Civ game (from 2 through 6) building up a standing army, even if only for defensive purposes. Ideally, that aspect of the game should be fun.

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