Deggit

"Seth MacFarlane is a hero to the atheist community. Not only did he bravely say 'There is no God,' but he created The Cleveland Show to prove it."

• me if Seth and I are ever at a roast together

I think Civ5 shows why you cannot have military strategy and military tactics in the same game. (Here "tactics" is things like Napoleon outmaneuvering the enemy at Austerlitz, and "strategy" is things like the USSR building the right tanks for years before Germany invaded.)

To see why they are incompatible consider a case where your civ is invaded by a much larger AI.

If a small group of units can hold off an arbitrarily large enemy using the right maneuevers and tactics (Civ5) then there's little point to all the infrastructural effort the AI put in to build his large army.

Conversely, if 30 units always beat 10 units (Civ3&4), then there's not much point to modeling all the maneuvering on the battlefield because even the most gifted tactician can't change the outcome.

In other words one of these factors will always dominate. If strategy can beat tactics then by definition tactics cannot beat strategy.

edit: to restate that better: in a game where strategy reliably beats tactics, that necessarily means tactics reliably loses to strategy.

It comes down to asking, which is more relevant to civ as a game genre, strategy or tactics? And I think the answer is clearly strategy. The military subsystem interacts with the rest of the game in strategic terms. It's all about opportunity costs, building a unit means not building a temple or lab, researching a military tech means not researching an infrastructure technology and so on. The stack of doom is a natural phenomenon and the only "problem" is it took too many clicks to manage compared to the gameplay relevance of what was in each stack. The answer was to simply make stacks an explicit gameplay element - "armies" would absorb "units" as you built them and you would only have to think about 5-10 "armies" on your map at a time. I think Civ5 went in the wrong direction. Tactics dominate and the strategic tradeoffs become less relevant.

Civilization series is ultimately a game about producing things... units, buildings, cities, technologies. The game is about snowballing your capacity to produce and prosper. A too-tactical focus takes away the whole point of the game. Playing battlefield general is fun, but when I play a civ game I want my civ to rise or fall because of the broad opportunity tradeoffs I made that define my civ's "character." I don't want to be able to battlefield-micromanage my way out of a war that I should lose because I didn't do like Stalin and order tanks built 10 years ago.

edit2: A lot of people have suggested examples of games with a strategy overview screen and separate "tactical" screen or simulation for resolving battles. The application of my point here is, the easier it is for a small army to beat a large army in the "tactical screen", the less the size of the armies ultimately matters on the "strategy screen" level. The more reliably tactics can beat strategy, the less strategy matters and vice versa. For example if you have some maneuver or army-composition tactic that you know will reliably run circles around even a much larger AI enemy, then by virtue of that very fact you start to care less about outproducing / outrecruiting the AI because you know you can beat the AI at the tactical level instead of the strategic level. This is why a tradeoff between strategy and tactics is inevitable.

Those poor, poor runners.

One skull for each runner who didn't fetch hazelnut gelato. RCP's a tough company.

That hurt me

Some splash damage on that burn, I apologize

Redditor for 1 day. nice AMA you're running here.

EDIT: lol some of the top comments registered 4 hours ago.

With Victoria gone, gaming IAMA has never been easier I guess.