Also flank attack against artillery (siege weapons are immune to collateral damage from other siege weapons, but flank attacks performed by cavalry units act as a counter). Combat in CIv 4, is a lot more complex and deep than it is usually given credit for. I never had a problem with stacks; in fact, I just called them "armies", because that's what they are.

Well, basically... why did you allow the AI to have that much more military units in play, and not have them yourself?

I usually played heavy turtle, so trying to make do with as few units as possible. Might be why I never found stacks to be an issue - I was always outnumbered anyway, so had to figure out ways of negating that enemy advantage.

Right? Civ V made it that much more difficult to actually use counters, because you either had to take at least several turns of a detour and hope to time your unit arrival in time, or just grind through frontline units to get to the chewy back support.

At least with a stack you had plenty of "rock-paper-scissor" choices, and you could force specific defender by the order of attack of your own units.

I haven't play much of Civilizations (mostly Freeciv). But I think of Civ V as "Civilizations with hexes".

How well do the official Civilizations play on LAN? Are network games enjoyable?

wow can't believe people defend stack of doom combat, it was so terrible! It was so lame, just suicide all artillery on a stack and poof! I played thousands of hours Civ4, but 5 is so much better, I am so glad they adopted the Warlock - Master of Arcane Panzer General style of hexes and combat, war is now interesting. Flanking as a counter, you gotta be kidding me lol!
Plus 5 is so much more varied because of the unique leader abilities and terrain improvements.
Only reason to still play 4 is Fall from Heaven.
Haven't tried 6 yet, but apparently they took the city building from Warlock now,too, so that looks good.

Uh. When you have a tile the size of a country, and realise that you can only fit one tank on it, something breaks a bit, immersion-wise.

And if "one unit of tanks" means filling a country's space with so many tanks that there's no room for pedestrians between them, it doesn't make it any better.

So yeah, I prefer to see the Civ map's units as symbols rather than actual giant horsemen the size of a city which itself is the size of a country.

Uh, after a hundred games of Civ I really couldn't care less about immersion (after 3 games really).There are so many things that break immersion, buildings the size of a city, animals the size of a city, villages the size of a city, who cares. I want good gameplay, not wars that are decided in a single round by 2 gigantic stacks of both nations military units.

All these exemples are the same thing. If you take them as a symbol, a sign that "there is a herd here", "there is a city in that area", "there are catapults in this region", they function as strategy over a map. It's only if you realise "there is a big giant archer in that region therefore there is no room to fit a catapult there" that it becomes absurd. Artificially preventing different weaponery to face the same immense area simultaneously. Stacks do at least stay consistent with the scale of your world. It's basically Total War on auto-resolve. Using the same map for different scale logics (hey joe, push your tank away, my soldier has to step through Belgium) is pretty counter-intuitive.

There are different approaches, you can draw the world on a chess board, you can play risk, you can play Total War, Civ 3 or Civ 5, but they don't offer the same feel, and "not understanding how omg how anyone could even" enjoy this or that one is a bit narrow-sighted.

But considering the scale (time and world size) of the game, that's exactly how a real-world battle between two armies would translate.

Hate to break it to ya, but Civ never tried to be as realistic as possible. It's still a game. Yup, those spear-men sure are tank killers! Behold the Statue of Liberty, the Colosseum, and the Great Wall all in the very same grand city! (Talk about things that aren't realistic. Tsk!)

whatever dude, it's a strategy game, gameplay is more important than realism or immersion. btw it is a really strange complaint, I never heard this about Panzer General or History Line.

yeah but it is not "a" battle, it is nearly ALL battles of the entire world war

Neither General titles nor Battle Isle changed the way they handled units mid-franchise.

For that matter, your claim of improved gameplay after Civ V switched to single-unit-per-tile goes right against my own experience (and preference) where the stacks were superior. At the least, they allowed mass-unit-production to be a viable tactic without being constrained by simple "board" layout limitations (i.e. only so many hexes you can place an unit to attack). City assaults certainly turned in more of a grind because of that, never mind your horde of units stuck in the back unable to attack.

It's something obviously subjective, but the reasons for your personal preference that you listed were rather questionable, as evidenced in a bunch of posts back.

Mmmaybe because in these games the tiles are not supposed to be 5000 km wide ?

But indeed, you didn't see people post about how they can't believe anyone enjoys them and how objectively lame and terrible it is. Weird. It's as if chess and rts enthousiasts didn't care much to show how each others are wrong. Or as if most of them enjoy different gameplays simultaneously.

Life is full of little oddities like that.

Because changing a good system to stacks of doom would have been madness!

It is still a viable tactic, you just can't stockpile endlessly anymore. Ever heard of roads? I rarely had my units "stuck" in the back in Civ 5, only really slow units.
And you're the one always on about realism, it is more realistic to have slow units like cannons getting around slowly, hah!
They were not questionable, they are reasoned very well. You on the other hand seem to be of the "I'm tired of civ, so all the new ones suck" type of player. Every series has those. It is amazing that Civ has continually gotten better despite the likes of you!

Is this supposed to be witty? Nevermind, I'll just continue with your problem: Immersion. How immersive is it, that you can only attack the strongest unit in a stack of doom? Is this how a battle goes? An archer fires into a huge army and only hits the units that are best defended against it? Doesn't that destroy your immersion?
I think its much more immersive to have these units spread out and to be able to attack any target that is in range.

Why don't you guys just admit that a proper strategic battle system like the one in Panzer General is really much to complicated for city builders like you. :D

No, it's just that the GOG forum software works funnily with links.