Opinion Post
I never realized how much I hated army stack systems until I played games without them
I've been playing a lot of 4X games over the last month, and I've kind of been struck by this feeling as I've been diving into various titles. The first 4X game I ever played was Civilization 2 (at a very young age), followed Heroes of Might & Magic V, which I consider my actual first 4X since I played it as a teenager. Following that, I played a ton of Total War, then a ton of Age of Wonders, with some Endless Legend and Civ 5 sprinkled in. All of which is to say that army stack systems are very much something I've kind of accepted as part of the genre for a while now.
Yet as I'm replaying Old World again side by side with Endless Legend 2, it kind of dawned on me that I kind of hate the concept of army stacks. From a design space aspect, I imagine these stacking systems are largely done to conserve system resources (especially in the case of Total War) and prevent stability issues. But now as a system army stacks have begun to feel like they're doing more harm to the strategic experience than anything. It is preposterously frustrating to get attacked on the corner of one of your partial stacks, so instead of fighting with the strongest parts of your army (which often have hero units) you now have to fight using only a portion of the forces you deployed.
It feels incredibly game-y and feels more and more dated as a mechanic as time passes. One thing I enjoy about 4X as a genre is that on some level it simulates the deep economy of a state/society to some degree, with strategic resource realities to grapple with and cost efficiency considerations for armies. The notion of "best in slot" units kind of flies in the face of strategic warfare as a whole, since it's not like supply lines are being simulated or something. A great example of this I can think of is from Age of Wonders 4; there is a "Tome of the Horde" that makes tier 1 units easier to produce and more effective, but it's impossible to actually 'swarm' your opponent due to the army stack limit. Same issue with the Necrophages in Endless Legend 1+2, the war usually goes to smaller numbers of elite units who are better at winning individual fights.
But yeah. How does everyone else feel about the army stack concept? It feels more like a technical limitation than something meant to enhance gameplay.
Stacks are good. Having to click and move every unit one at a time is cumbersome. Ever play civ 6? Hardest part of the game is moving your army when it gets big.
Stacks make sense in most games I've played. In civilization, a single tile can represent dozens or hundreds of kilometers. Obviously the whole army fits in one tile. In Master of Orion (or any space game), a location represents a whole star system or planet, and again, obviously you can fit many thousands of ships there.
This. Stacks are good. They just need to have a good interface and good balance.
Allowing retreat and proper logistics to prevent the stack of doom.
I think Humankind did it well enough tbh.
This was the one big thing Civ 7 made solid improvements on, being able to stack units for moving long distance and then unstack them for combat gives best of both worlds
No, not always, see how Shadow Empire has stacks, but an army might be spread out over multiple hexes (sometimes with multiple armies still stacking !), and how often you end up in situations with wide fronts.
So you're saying that stacks are good because they solve the problem of "I have too many units to click". But they aren't the only solution to that problem.
So that's not really a reason why stacks are good, its just a reason why games that flood you with too many things to click are bad.
That's how all game design decisions work. Doing something has advantages and disadvantages over doing something else lol. Design space in some cases is limited, including this one. You only have two ways of representing armies, either as a single entity, or multiple entities in a stack. So them solving tedium is an advantage, because there's no other alternative.
Anyway, stacks have other distinct advantages over single entities.
You can design battlefields that are more tactically involved compared to fighting on a large map, this is because battlefields will serve only one purpose, instead of serving both overworld design needs and battle needs.
While not a given, it does allow for far more skill expression and battle complexity, because unit interaction is a given, whereas single entities have to function pretty much by themselves. Even 4X wargames like Gladius/Zephon that are designed around constant combat, have very simple units compared to something like AoW4.
It allows for deeper RPG and army fantasy/identity elements. Heroes are much deeper as a result, because they directly interact with the army, in ways single entities can not. You can design a summoner stack, with a mage hero, a melee and buff stack, etc.
There's actual opportunity cost involved, because slots are limited, you can't just shit out units like there's no tomorrow. Of course, this also makes it more sensible for balance (weaker units tend to get outpaced and it favors doomstacks - the latter being an issue for single entities as well), but it allows for actual buildcrafting and more decision making.
TL;DR they're more tactically involved, more complex and less tedious to manage.
Don't tell me this. I'm about to release a demo for a 4x centered around Call To Power stacked combat! So I guess I respectfully disagree!
From the developer side: nothing about unit stacking makes things "easier" on the game. If anything it's the opposite case. Games like Civilization 4 would slow down in the late game in part because each turn the AI was dealing with 300-400+ units. Removing stacking and reducing the total number of units on the map at any given time is the real performance shortcut the modern studios are looking for and use, calling it "game design" but it masks real technical problems.
Like picking the best defending stack (your endless legends bug/issue); This is a problem that's side-stepped by not allowing unit stacks.
Awesome. Does your game have great AI? And great pacing? I’ll be following it with interest if the answer is yes to both (CTP2 failed on the latter big time imo).
Heavily focused on better and more responsive AI. The pacing is being put through the wringer right now in our playtest.
Lately the game's been kicking our ass; both the AI (almost too hard for some of my players right now) and as a time sync (we need sleep before we want to stop playing).
I'll share a lot more soon. Screenshots/videos are waiting on a UI update we're working on to get the polish to our standards.
With regards to performance I was thinking more of the tactical battles than the world map. On the map the stacks definitely improve system performance, but if you allow more stacks to fight in a tactical battle, those all have to be rendered which is why a series like Total War ever since Empire has a limit of only up to 40 units per side in a battle, which sounds like a lot but late game it's pretty common to have army groups of more than 2 moving around together
Honestly it depends as unless you're on a low-end PC or laptop playing a new modern 4X game you won't have FPS issues during the turn, its when the turn flips to the next one that you see major problems.
Most 4X games are not GPU bound. Pushing tons of triangles out isn't usually the problem. You might think that "less models on map = less work/more performance" but GPUs are way better at what they do than CPUs are; and not all of the games logic can be done on the GPU. The problem is CPU computation and the O(n) cost-complexity at minimum for each AI to handle each individual unit. It needs to ask questions about every unit, every time. Questions like "Is this unit in the right stack group?".
Multiply this by 100's or 1000's of individual units. It won't matter what's rendering on the screen cause the CPU is too busy thinking about each of those units instead of preparing the next frame for the GPU. If the game logic is not multi-threaded; every single unit has to be "looked at" by the AI one at a time. Sequentially. Which is quite slow.
Yes we do. I'll put your username down in on a short list of people we'll ping when the private demo playtest is ready. We're going to have a small group of people help us track down issues before our public demo, which we plan to have released for Steams' Feb 2027 Next Fest.
From a design space aspect, I imagine these stacking systems are largely done to conserve system resources (especially in the case of Total War) and prevent stability issues.
No, it's mostly to reduce tedium. It has been a long standing complaint that managing individual units is incredibly tedious.
It is preposterously frustrating to get attacked on the corner of one of your partial stacks, so instead of fighting with the strongest parts of your army (which often have hero units) you now have to fight using only a portion of the forces you deployed.
It's on you to make sure that your partial stack isn't somewhere where it's dangerous. It's a strategic choice to send a partial stack and a risk you have to be willing to take.
It feels incredibly game-y and feels more and more dated as a mechanic as time passes.
It's not more or less gamey than having a single unit. Both are abstractions of what it means to have an army.
One thing I enjoy about 4X as a genre is that on some level it simulates the deep economy of a state/society to some degree, with strategic resource realities to grapple with and cost efficiency considerations for armies.
In one case you have more individual units, in the other you have more stacks. I don't see how they don't equally simulate that.
Dunno, this feels like not enjoying a system due to bad balance in some games (EL2), and saying there's something wrong with it. Stacking armies works perfectly fine, it's the implementation that counts.
Good points on reducing tedium and maybe just not enjoying the systems. I would like to comment on this part though:
It's on you to make sure that your partial stack isn't somewhere where it's dangerous. It's a strategic choice to send a partial stack and a risk you have to be willing to take.
Protecting partial stacks within an army cluster often feels like an out of place finicky tactical component on the strategic layer. This is especially true in games where new units spawn from the outcome of battles or it is reasonably expected there is reinforcement stacks when on the offense due to each battle being limited on the number of stacks that can participate.
It also reduces the chances of an ultimate best stacks vs. best stacks battle, which I personally think would be the most fun outcome of two armies colliding. The focus tends to instead shift to being a war of attrition by picking off relatively weak stacks and mechanically roping in better stacks to less favourable battles. Maybe that's a matter of enjoyment preference, but I would prefer to save that tactical fun for the actual battles.
I would appreciate a system where attacking a stack means you could be engaging with any combination of adjacent stacks. (Of course if you sent a partial stack off on its lonesome on the map, I fully agree that's on the player).
(Note: My recent experience is heavily weighted by Age of Wonders 4)
Age of Wonders, not just 4 though it's at its worst in 4, is definitely the most guilty of this, where it's very easy to cheese battles by essentially cutting enemy armies into smaller sections by attacking the stack. People act like doing that makes you like Napoleon doing defeat in detail when really it's just a super easy and obvious exploit of the system, like, the entire army is there, the game just isn't letting them deploy due to arbitrary limitations placed by the developers
I'm not sure I understand the point well, but at least in AoW4, up to 3 stacks can join the battle. Maybe I'm misreading, but it sounds from your post like that isn't possible. In practice, even if you have random weak units, or if you constantly generate units, you can still get them into battle along your main stack. And from my experience, you rarely generate more than 3 stacks worth of units until the late game.
Now if you still exceed that earlier, for whatever reason, you send the extra units to defend chokepoints, mobilize new units to create new stacks, which you can then use defensively as garrisons, offensively to clear resources, or even as a backup for your 3 main stacks, as units die in battles.
carpets of doom are much more tedious and simulation-wise even more idiotic than stacks. Btw when battles are more streamlined it allows you to spend more time actually strategizing and not just spending 95% of the gameplay repeating the same tedious tactical manoeuvres ad nauseum
it's interesting that Civ 4 had waypoints/rally points (available only by keyboard hotkeys though) and later in the series they just didn't bother. HOI 4 has great unit movement system but you can still micromanage everything if you want and play a billion hours long campaign
For Total War games it, isn't a technical limitation, it's a reflection of how the world was. Ancient armies just didn't take up much space compared to the scale of the map, and it'd be ridiculous to model ancient warfare as WWI style continuous fronts.
I think you're overgeneralizing based on EL2's fairly bad implementation of stack size limits. That game has some fairly major problems with cheesing favorable battles because of the way they've implemented combat, specifically the 2-stack limit, the fact that city militia count toward your 2 stacks, and the %-based combat bonuses AIs get at higher levels. These issues are less a result of a stack-based framework than Amplitude trying to keep battles small and easy to manage, and imo overdoing it.
I really hope they go back to a reinforcement system more like Humankind, which had its own issues, but at least didn't push you to build doomstacks quite as hard as EL2 does.
EL1 had a reinforcement system, too, and yeah, I agree that EL2 overdid it when trying to reduce tedium. But then that game currently has many issues unfortunately
The problem is to win through attrition you need to inflict enough attrition.
The more numerous unit swarms tend to be the more weaker army stacks, in equal numbers they are always going to lose and might not even be able to inflict enough attrition.
Those kind of swarm strategies is only viable in rush builds where a army stack isn't as strong yet to be a iron wall that the weak army crumbles into.
Not that I particularly like non-stacking games but it is indeed a problem.
I don't think he was talking about throwing multiple waves of weak armies at the same stronghold, but rather, attacking the enemy in more places at once than the enemy can effectively defend.
As in, if you have one doomstack, three cities, and the enemy has three swarms, you can only defend one city.
Stack limits prevent you from outnumbering your enemy if you went with a quantity over quality approach with your army. It actively punishes that playstyle
Because if they catch one of your stacks (most games like this prevent retreating) they'll kill it while taking no losses, then go kill the other one lol
No, I mean if they initiate a full stack vs full stack battle with you that reaches the battle size limit, the "denser" stack can often wipe out the weaker stack without taking any losses since the numerically superior army wasn't allowed to engage with all its forces
What Civ 6 does is basically saying that the maximum stack size is 1 unit. How does it make it better instead of worse, if your problem is the arbitrary 6-unit stack limitation in AoW4 and being attacked on the flanks of your army group?
How else would you do it then, especially in games with tactical combat like HoMM, Total War, Age of Wonders, Master of Orion, etc? In these games, the tactical combat layer happens on a separate map when two armies meet. Depending on the game, stacks either have a max size or not. Some games allow reinforcements from neighboring tiles to join in - Total War certainly does, so you absolutely can swarm an enemy with two or three full stacks, at least in the classic TW games (I don't like the modern ones that much so I play them less).
The alternative is to have 1 unit per tile systems like Civ 5 and later, which moves the tactical combat layer straight onto the strategic map, but honestly I like that a lot less. It limits the amount of units you can use much more because of the limited amount of space, and it feels far more abstract and gamey than any stack system I ever encountered. What do you mean this 10 kilometer stretch of land can only hold one unit of bowmen? And why can they shoot across 20 kilometers with their bows? Warfare in Civ 5 and later becomes incredibly crowded and if you have a lot of units and the production capacity to make more, frontlines stretch across entire continents, which only feels appropriate from WW1 onward but can happen as soon as antiquity.
Stacks keep things a lot tidier, and you actually get proper army engagements where unit compositions and combined arms matter.
I think in both cases the answer is in presentation. When you take a game like Old World for example, the map is much more "zoomed in" compared to something like Civ, so you can believe that 10-20 ambiguous "units" defending a city seems more sensible than a unit of knights in Civ occupying the same geographic space as a natural wonder.
In Age of Wonders, I wouldn't design the game in such a way that there is a limit to how many local units can join a fight. The specific issue I have is more to due with battle size limits than with the concept of units being grouped into stacks. As someone else put it in this thread, moving 6 units with a single click is better than moving all 6 of them. The issue I have is that in some systems the limit of the size of a stack, and how many stacks can join one battle, feels too small relative to the number of units one can produce. Games are often developed around this limitation such that it is difficult to concentrate that many troops into one location in the first place due to financial constraints, and for much of the game the situation can be fine and playable, but late game when you have multiple armies and are about to crush your opponent after a series of attritional battles where you depleted their reserves, it's frustrating to then have to continue "fighting fair" because the battle itself is locked to a specific size.
I also wouldn't dislike it so much if there was some kind of rationale to it, like "your stack can only be so big because your current leadership pool can only manage so many troops," but usually the stack is kind of just taken for granted as an acceptable division of units. Another way it could be handled is to have stack efficiency, that is, if you want to dump more units into a stack than the limit, you can do so but there are penalties. Old World simulates this perfectly because of the Orders system, where if you have a big military, it is less efficient to move around and comes at an administrative cost to your economy to use them.
I don't mind fighting on the map itself, the problem with Civ 5 and 6 to me with 1 UPT is that the maps themselves are too small for the number of troops being produced, which reduces the amount of opportunities for maneuver and interesting tactical gameplay, especially when units crawl across the map at a snail's pace. I get the complaints about Civ 5 and 6, believe me lol but I also don't care much for the arbitrary restriction in a game like AoW4
I would agree with your criticism regarding battle size limits. Having several stacks surrounding one enemy stack should allow you to bring all of them into a battle, otherwise what's the point of going for mass? The later Age of Wonders games are guilty of this, but interestingly enough this wasn't the case in the original. In AoW1, stack size is still 8 IIRC but if you and the enemy have multiple stacks next to each other, they'll all join the fight from different directions based on where on the strategic map they are. The series has regressed in some ways tbh, AoW1 is still my favorite.
AoW3 and Planetfall both allowed up to 7 stacks in a fight due to the reinforcements being dependent on their hex grid location, so if you brought 5 stacks to your opponent's 2, you could overwhelm them with mass
Don't know about AoW4, but in AoW3 everyone around the tile of combat join in. So at max you can have 42 (y units on initial and 6 surrounding tiles) participate in combat. And it feels kind of natural to me. Every gamehas a max distance for reinforcement.
Why should your army engage in combat multiple tiles away?
As for picking flanks - it is called strategy, and there are different answers to that, for example, do not send stacks into frontline that are not ready. Or have multiple stacks grouped to ensure reinforcements.
if you want more units on Aow4 you can just keep summoning them on the battlefield.
You can have a lot zombies poppup from dead units. have units that summon other units. cast spell that summon more units or clone your own units and have item that summon you unit at the start. you can even convert enemy units and capture them because game is like Pokemon.
I don't think it's strictly a technical limitation, though that may very well depend on game - it is, and in my opinion was always a balance limitation.
Because games when you always steamroll or get steamrolled are no fun to majority of players.
Army stacks are equalizer here - You can bring at most 3 armies for combat, and so can enemy. So the single combat is done on equal'ish field.
It's because managing individual units is incredibly tedious in most games, so stacks make sense in that regard. Also, swarming can be a pretty low-depth strategy, IMHO. I'd rather see combat reward positioning, composition, and tactical decisions than simply having the biggest number of units.
It sounds like your primary complaint is with systems similar to Age of Wonders 4 (AoW4). For reference this has a maximum number of units per stack of 6, a maximum number of stacks per combat (per side) of 3, and battles take place on a separate tactical map on a separate (much shorter) time scale. Thus each side is limited to 18 initial units. There's also a tactical map limitation of 63 active summoned units total (both sides draw out of the same pool). All of these limits are fairly hardcoded into the game and not really moddable.
As it's a "heroic fantasy" setting, this tends to emphasize bands of heroes, or small groups of elite units led by heroes, as the primary means of applying military force. Hero units focused on summoning and/or necromancy with bodyguard units is a secondary option. Once you get past the early game, or at least the mid game, swarm armies are a hassle to manage and not efficient in upkeep or attrition. That is at least somewhat by design: the game is about heroic fantasy, and not designed or intended to replicate Gettysburg, Somme, or D-Day. Sieges are on the scale and inspiration of the siege of the Hornburg, not the siege of Stalingrad.
Some other 4x stack systems of note:
Master of Magic (MoM), original and rebuild: Stack size of 9, maximum stacks per combat (per side) of 1. Summoned units come out of the same max; so a full 9-stack can't summon any units in combat until at least one of them dies. Defending cities can have what amounts to a single reserve stack, that will fill in units as the original units die.
Civ 1 and Civ 2: infinite stack size, one stack per side per combat; loosing side looses the entire stack.
Alpha Centauri, Civ 3, Civ Rev, Civ 4, Civ 4 mods: Infinite stack size, one stack per side per combat; loosing side looses the main unit and various combinations of collateral damage to the rest of the stack. Some units (artillery-ish or cavalry-ish) are designed primarily to do collateral damage and hopefully retreat. Some units (assassin-ish) are designed to strike against units other than the most defensive.
Civ 5 and Civ 6: Stack size of 1 ("1UPT"). Effectively the strategic map becomes the tactical map. Crowding is a significant factor and juggling individual units takes quite a bit of time in the late game. Somewhat mollified by the "corps / army" system, which permanently welds two or three identical units into a single super-unit, and by the very late game introduction of mega-units (in vanilla 6 the controversial "Giant Death Robot" (GDR)).
Civ 7: Units can be "packed for transport" into a leader, but must be deployed with a stack size of 1 (1UPT) for combat, which is similar to Civ 5 and Civ 6.
Master of Orion 2, Stellaris, etc.: Fleet sizes are limited not directly by number of ships, but by a number of command or fleet size points; smaller ships require fewer CP than larger. E.g. in current Stellaris, 16 fleet size points could represent one Titan, two Battleships, four Cruisers, eight Destroyers, or sixteen Corvettes. This allows some limited quantity vs. quality tactics; but with fixed ratios, optimization tends to still favor larger ships due to the likelihood that they will be damaged (and thus repairable) rather than destroyed outright (and thus requiring rebuilding from scratch).
Elemental universe, including the various early games and the current Elemental: Reforged: Mobile stack size varies with technology and various other factors, starting around 4 and going up to 9. Cities can hold 9 to start, and may have additional automatically-generated defenders, so they have a defensive advantage in the early game. Tactical map limitations on summoning have varied with game version, but at its most restrictive was one summoning spell active per summoner (note, however, that some summons can have their own summons, so it could still get pretty crowded).
Looking at things overall, I think that most 4x games are at a scale where multiple units should logically be able to fit in the same tile (square, hex, region, etc.); and for practical UI/UX reasons, it's sensible to have groups or stacks that can move together with a single click.
The majority of stack implementations have combat basically being one stack vs. another stack, whether on the world map / abstracted, or with a tactical map (sometimes with the option to auto-resolve).
AoW4's limitation of fairly small stacks of 6, but up to 3 such stacks in adjacent tiles in a combat, is an unusual and somewhat artificial limitation. In particular, with a sub-hex grid and larger provinces, it would make sense for either all the units in direct combat to fight, or all the units in the same province to fight.
I agree, its one of my least favorite things about the Age of Wonders series.
I understand that battles with extremely large numbers of units would be unpractical, but I don't understand why they don't just let you contain an entire viable army into a single tile. Instead, a full fighting force is forced to be divided across three tiles, and if you ever make a mistake while moving that hot mess you indeed open yourself up to having an enemy engage their 3-stack to only 2 or 1 of your stacks.
In Total War, I think it can't be helped as as you say its necessary to preserve system resources. Although I feel some aspects could be done better.
Edit: I should note I'm not opposed to the concept of many units being in a single tile, such as, say, in the old Civ games. Rather I'm opposed to arbitrary and cumbersome limits on such stacks, such as what the Age of Wonders series does.
> I understand that battles with extremely large numbers of units would be unpractical
In multiplayer I absolutely understand why this is a concern, but in single player it just feels limiting. In AOW4, it's made even worse by the maps that have 3 clearly defined lanes instead of being a gigantic hexagon like in the earlier titles...
Yeah from Empire onward the engine was plagued with crippling performance issues to where it just can't handle that many units at once. Medieval 2, though? It can have as many units on screen as there can be stacks in a battle lol
Some people in this thread are complaining about stacks making it easier to move units around, but like... that can be a QoL feature in many games, while still allowing you to fight with as many troops as you have. It's the arbitrary cap on battle sizes that start to annoy me after a while
I agree with you for the most part but I wish there was a healthy mix of 4x games with stacked armies and single-units. I almost exclusively play Old World and the game requires you to have early game armies of 10 - 30 units and after a while, even with the order system capping how many units can act a turn, my hand starts to hurt just from the constant clicking around.
I wish there was a 4x game that seriously minimized the number of clicks required in an intuitive way.
With respect, that’s a truly terrible take and potentially reveals a skill issue. Stacks are great - the real issue is not having a separate tactical combat layer which overemphasizes positioning and tedious micromanagement (as opposed to true tactical combat which is fun micromanagement).
Completely disagree with your comment here. Not every game needs a separate tactical layer, especially if it's done poorly, and for single player the AI is often unable to perform even reasonably well in that layer. I also don't know what point you're trying to make, obviously "fun" is better than "tedious" and positioning is one of the core concepts of tactical combat, and games without any useful positioning are usually extremely shallow or depend on predictable order of operations ability combinations, rather than creating dynamic situations that require critical thinking and game knowledge
the way i worded it wasn’t the best, what I meant was like in Civ 4 with no tactical combat, you have to think way too much about where you move your units because each unit is relatively weak without tactical combat as it can die quickly if it’s not in a good stack. Whereas with tactical combat you have much more potential for a smaller amounts of units to do some significant damage because the combat tends to last a good bit longer and has many more options that each unit can take. which means you don’t have to constantly worry so much about where you position your units before the combat starts. This is a big part of why I quit Civ 4
Yeah and that makes sense about Civ4 specifically. I think Civ 5 and 6 had the right idea, but the maps are too small and the units too slow for proper maneuvering. I was thinking more of something like Old World or like in RTS games where you get to decide how big a group of units you move around is instead, since in those games harassment attacks to attrition down a large ball of units is possible unlike Civ4
I get that it could’ve come across that way so that’s why I started off with “with respect.” No ad hominem intended from me even if the phrase “skill issue” tends to be used that way lol
I don't see how this is a problem here? If you don't like stacking unit you can just play as an stack of just 1
I like Aow4 because it so well designed you can get away with beating the whole game with just the Ruler you made at the start of the game. Playing like kinda reminds me Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
Always hated the army stacks in 4X, but I usually disliked other combat related stuffs in these games too.
However I could get behind the concept of army stack if it was something very limited (thus valuable too), like "+1 stack limit" as a faction trait or unit stat, so you could place 2 or 3 units per tile instead of 1 only.
That's not a technical limitation : distances on 4x are extra large, an hex is maybe a thousand miles. you usually don't spread your forces around several thousands miles, that makes no sense. You pack your army at the same place so that you can leverage their forces.
It breaks my immersion to have a lone canon alone in an area as big as a region.
I think the assumption is that your army has good generals who don't allow you to pick off individual units. And of course you don't have to move every single unit every turn.
Games do a lot of different variations on stacking rules... and there are good and bad games with each and every stacking rule!
Master’s of Orion 2 did it the best in my opinion. Bring your stack to a fight, and then you get a turn based chessboard of all the units in each side’s stack.
When I first started playing 4x games a while ago I didn't even know about stacks 😀 I was like what am I doing wrong? Now all of a sudden I got like 2000 hours into Age of Wonders 4
I've always hated doom stacks. I don't mind something like AoW or Total War where there's a stack limit, but old civ games where you can have like a hundred units on one tile are just unplayable to me
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u/keilahmartin 2d ago
Stacks are good. Having to click and move every unit one at a time is cumbersome. Ever play civ 6? Hardest part of the game is moving your army when it gets big.
Stacks make sense in most games I've played. In civilization, a single tile can represent dozens or hundreds of kilometers. Obviously the whole army fits in one tile. In Master of Orion (or any space game), a location represents a whole star system or planet, and again, obviously you can fit many thousands of ships there.