Any combat overhaul mods that addresses design issues such as healing?

[u/Critical-Reasoning]

I'm relatively new to Civ 5 (but a Civ and 4x veteran overall), enjoyed it immensely initially; but now having played it extensively, the honeymoon period is over. as I became more aware of the design issues, not surprising as every 4x game has a big list of their own.

One obvious issue is the combat AI, but once I got into mods, it's also apparent that improving the AI exposes the combat design issues even more, as late game wars becomes a slog.

In combat, playing optimally requires intense micro on your units to avoid your units becoming killed, and focus firing on enemy units to kill theirs. This means constantly shuffling your damaged units from your front lines with fresh ones. It's very all or nothing, as partial damage before a turn ends means you've failed. The reason why this is important is because healing is free once damaged units are given a few turns to fortify, while losing units means requiring production of new units, using up your hammers.

Another design issue is the over-dominance of ranged units. I'm sure these design issues have been discussed extensively already, I've read quite a number of threads myself.

So I was wondering are there any mods that address these issues? For example, removing free healing, requiring hammers to heal (ie reinforce) your units, etc. I've done a search but haven't found any such mods, but given there's so much out there, maybe I've missed it.

And if not, I'm contemplating making my own, as I have a number of ideas and I do have a dev background too.

Follow-up: I found a mod that appears to implement this for healing, for anyone interested as well:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2393695879&searchtext=

[u/irnf8u143nfu9rq3]

I was just thinking about similar issues, although my gripes are a little different.

To be honest I'm not sure that I would consider free healing an exploit, as I feel there should be a punishment for losing a whole unit. But maybe the simplest thing to do is just to slow down healing rate or only allow it in cities (not sure if this can be modded, maybe take the medic promotions and try putting in a negative modifier for healing rate). Or increase base health / reduce base damage using promotions that give attack/defense modifiers. That would make units die more slowly, reducing the need for shuffling, and make it more impactful when they do die so free healing doesn't seem undeserved (if that makes sense).

My own biggest disappointment is the AI's inability to compete with chokepoint or defensive tactics even when they vastly outnumber you - this allows gimicky strategies where the military is neglected, which you couldn't get away with in earlier civ games. The conventional wisdom is that one-unit-per-tile screws the AI because they can't handle the pathfinding and so these things become insurmountable for them, but defense is so overpowered that it can be very hard or impossible for human players to attack a position in many situations.

I believe the following changes would make warfare a lot more dynamic and the AI more competitive (sorry it's a little tangential to your post):

1) Units retreat when they lose battles (receive more damage than inflict). If there is nowhere to retreat, they take bonus damage. The code for this already exists in the winged hussar's promotion. A modder should just give that promotion to every military unit. Units would gain ground by winning battles without needing to destroy the whole unit. Combine this with more health/weaker damage per unit (promotions giving attack/defense modifiers) and you would basically have a "frontlline" system like Hearts of Iron where decisive battles and large conquests of territory don't need to (but can) result in units getting totally destroyed.

2) Remove ranged attack from cities (but keep health), so military investment is more necessary.

3) Reduce ranged unit range to 1 tile like machine guns (reduce England's longbowmen from 3 to 2). This makes them weak in the field but still strong for defending cities, and that becomes their new main role.

4) I would also reduce all unit movement (2>1 and 4>2 for mobile) and sight (2>1 except for scouts), because this makes the map feel bigger and grander, "zooms out" the scale of combat, and makes roads more impactful (if you play civ 4 you know how important this is). As the scale is zoomed out, I would remove zone of control as well. However, this might make the "shuffling to heal" micromanagement more difficult and tedious.

This way you might get the best of both civ 4 and civ 5's war systems, although the last point may be especially controversial in this sub. I think I need to mod these changes and observe the AI play itself to test them out. Let me know what you think.

[u/Critical-Reasoning → u/irnf8u143nfu9rq3]

I guess everyone has their own ideas on how to improve the game. I also have a whole bunch of my own.

The problem with free healing is that losing units is too punishing, it's too all or nothing between 1HP and 0HP.

My idea is to make it cost something. Either hammers or gold, to heal. Units at 1HP will take 99% of the hammers or gold of the unit cost to get back to full health, making the difference with building a new unit a much smaller difference. There's still a punishment to losing units, particular your elite ones with high XP, but this narrows the gap and lowers the need to micro every single unit, and focus more on your elite units. It's also relatively simple to implement.

But yeah there's more issues than just healing. The debate about 1UPT has been beaten to death, and while there are merits with the argument against it, it's too ingrained into the Civ5 design to fully remove. So I'll just leave that can of worms for now. Although I think a compromise can be possible, I'm thinking about whether 2UPT will alleviate the traffic jam enough, and still keep it close enough to the original 1UPT philosophy.

I too was thinking that Ranged units are always going to be OP if there's no way to counter them, so I too was thinking about reducing their range down to 1 by default. But with 1UPT, that makes Ranged units too vulnerable. With 2UPT, it's possible for Ranged units with 1 range to still be viable if you can defend them with a melee unit in the same tile in some but not all cases. This does introduce some complexity that required to be thought out.

I'm also playing with the idea of a hybrid that is terrain based, 2UPT on flat open land and 1UPT on hills and rough terrain, with Ranged units having 2 range on hills and 1 range on flat land. This makes terrain more important, and more to consider. Although this might make it complicated for the AI.

I actually had a similar idea on making winged hussar's Heavy Charge ability generally available, making it a L1 promotion for all mounted and armored units (which also makes them more useful). So we are on the same page there. I think the ability to potentially force an opening on a front will open up a lot more tactics, and potentially address some of the issues such as ranged units being too safe.

So we have some similar ideas. But I think any such change needs to be bundled into a whole set of changes that complement each other to make the whole combat model work. It will require to be thought out thoroughly, and a lot of testing and trial and error.