Time to embrace unit stacking

[ThunderLizard11]

It's been discussed from time to time but devs have rejected. Is it time to go with the stack?

[Platoonist]

I don't think it's ever going to change. One unit per hex seems to be a fundamental aspect of the game's "keep it simple" design and resolution. It's also a major component of the philosophy behind its design which was to keep play light and fast. It bugs me most at sea where even small naval formations sprawl across vast swathes of ocean and ports can only service one naval unit (or more if you stretch the port over multiple hexes)

I've noticed a lot of modders leaning towards creating huge maps. That does mitigate the stacking problem a bit although creating such maps must be a lot of work.

[BiteNibbleChomp]

We discussed this a lot at the beginning of ACW's development - which, if there was ever a time it makes sense to add stacking to SC, that probably would have been it. Every change made to the game needs to answer two fundamental questions: why do we want to add it, and how will it work if we do?

The why isn't too hard to answer - as people have pointed out many times, even the largest ACW battles took place in the area covered by a single hex, so it makes obvious sense to represent them that way.
However, if we look at WW2 or WW1, armies in those conflicts weren't spread out in huge carpets of units four hexes (~100km) deep as they often are in SC, so the abstraction of having armies and battles spread out over a much larger area than their historical counterparts is hardly a new thing. It's a bit more salient in ACW, but if this abstraction is an issue, then it isn't an issue with ACW as much as the series as a whole.

The how... I still don't have a good answer for, and that's despite thinking about this for close to five years.
SC's combat mechanism assigns an attack stat and a defence stat to each unit, which depends on the specific type of unit they are fighting. For an ACW infantry division, this is 4 attack and 3 defence vs other infantry. In the absence of complicating factors (terrain, supply, research, HQs, previous damage &c), this means that an attacking infantry division will inflict 4 damage on its opponent, suffering 3 in return, with a +/-1 modifier applied at the end to keep things interesting. This is quite simple - I've just explained it in a line and a half of text - and works very well when one unit is fighting one other unit. But what happens when multiple units are involved in the one combat?
One option is to simply sum the combat stats - but that comes pretty close to "biggest stack always wins", obviously not how things always went in the ACW (otherwise McClellan wins the Peninsula campaign)
Then there's the question of how to distribute the damage - some types of units (infantry especially) should obviously absorb more damage than others (cavalry, or even support units like HQs or rail guns). Or experience?

Another option is to have smaller units combine into a "stacked" unit (one option I originally considered was having, when one division moves onto another division, a corps being formed with its own stats), but determining stats for these gets quite complicated as soon as the stack becomes two units of different types (say, a brigade and a division, or an infantry and a cavalry, or two infantries and an artillery). Does the stack now need a higher HP value? Which unit type does such a combined stack count as (ie should it suffer the "infantry defence" level of damage when it attacks, the "cavalry defence" damage, some combination of the two, or something else?). What about if a stack is damaged and then wants to split back into its constituent parts - how is the damage to be allocated (and could stacking and unstacking allow units to dodge penalties from damage of previous battles?)

There's other stacking mechanics we looked at too, but each one raised a lot of questions such as these. As soon as I did a couple of tests and found ACW worked fine without stacking, it was an easy decision for me to put stacking aside.

Could we do it in the future? I haven't ruled it out, and it's something we discuss again every so often. But something else to consider is that at a certain point, making fundamental changes to a game's underlying rules eventually leaves us with a different game entirely - if combat (ultimately the core mechanic of SC) no longer functions like it does in past SC games and instead is something more akin to say Civ 4 or Decisive Campaigns (just using two games that have stacking mechanics as examples here) - can we really call it SC any more?

I am not at all opposed to developing a game - SC or otherwise - with stacking in the future, provided we come up with a good way to implement this. Whether it happens, and what it might look like - those are both very open questions.

- BNC

[James Taylor]

How about for CEaW?

[OldCrowBalthazor]

I honestly never had a problem with no stacking with the SC games, including ACW, as its a Strategic Level game. For me its an abstraction with the single stacks anyways, as proper placements can yield combined arms tactics at particular battle spaces, both offensively and defensively. At the scale of WaW, stacking would be totally wrong.

Same goes with the naval element (in my opinion) with SC regarding the stacking issue. Sure, 40 vessels (or way more) would be together in one Task Force. But when playing the navy in SC, its always best to make psuedo-TFs anyways. Example a CV TF with 3 CVs, 3 CVLs, a few BBs,CAs, and CLs plus DDs in close proximity. It has a tactical feel when you do that. Of course the ships ar spread around like a pancake on the map, (even with the example given) and it isn't perfect, but thats the trade off.

As it is, to implement stacking would be fine like WarPlan, but I believe the game engine would totally have to be remade. Basically an SC-4, a new game entirely.

My 3 cents for what they are worth.

[Elessar2]

I've been following the WiF discussions on BoardGameGeek, and the core combat feature there is the do-or-die attack. Instead of many 1-1 battles like in SC, where losses in early battles can cause you to change your plans on the fly and thus avoid a lot of damage to your own units, in WiF you instead have a few huge battles where the roll of the dice can mean that the entire defending stack goes up in smoke, or if unlucky the entire attacking force can be flipped if not destroyed themselves. The active side tends to focus on a few key battles where the odds typically heavily favor the attacker, vs. little skirmishes all up and down the entire line.

SC thus tends to be much more deterministic, for good or bad, where at worst you can have Perfect Plans which will go thru if you have sufficient force available to just brute-force your way to success. You thus won't just be able to "overlay" a stacking system into the current game engine without a bunch of other changes. For my next build in my scenario I may toggle the Combat Losses from vanilla's default of 1 up to 2 across the board (maybe 3 for ships where combat often was even more unpredictable) just so things aren't so predictable.