I've watched a few minutes of e3 2016 footage and read a couple articles, done a google search, and I still haven't found a straight answer to this question:

Is Civilization 6 a One Unit Per Tile game? (Like Civ 5 was) Or is it actually sensibly designed this time around?

Someone. Anyone. Help.

One unit per tile. Sorry, if you want stacks of death you won't find them here.

Edit: I stand corrected. Apparently some recent news I haven't seen mentioned forming 3 units of the same type into a group, or combining support units with main units. I also saw someone mention the ability to move armies in formation now, but what that means I have no idea.

Source evades me, but I recall hearing that you could combine units to effectively have more units per tile. For example, you could combine artillery and mobile infantry into a squad that would still occupy a single tile, but it won't be a free-for-all "cram as much as you want wherever you want" situation.

Let me be clear: stack of doom is bad, too.

I just want to be able to retreat units at the front line and replace them with fresh units from the back. 1UPT makes this unnecessarily complicated at best and impossible in bottle neck situations.

I don't think this "combine arms" thing helps either since it sounds like you're merging units.

Sigh... just give me a 2 or 3 stack limit w stacking penalties for crying out loud. Fuck.

From what I remember hearing it's one combat unit per tile, but they're putting in more utility units (akin to great generals).

Death stacks were real silly... Maybe if they put a unit cap on the stack of like 2 or 3?

I always felt like the AI managed stacks better than I ever could.

As far as my understanding:

One unit per tile

Sometimes 2 units per tile or more - support units will be able to share a tile (I imagine this applies to Generals or Great People, You could probably stack and escort Scouts or Settlers, maybe siege units could be part of a stack?)

No more death stacks.

Ye, I seem to remember the example I heard was that you could support a unit with something like a battering ram. So maybe the entire siege line of units now become supplementary instead of combat units on their own.

@ares42: that would actually be really nice. I wouldn't mind not having to awkwardly maneuver my siege through the army just to get them within range.

Kinda wish they had gone with the Endless Legend system of having army stacks to move around the map that spread out into 1upt combat when you actually get in a fight with another army. Makes moving around the map a lot more convenient and preserves the tactical combat.

Death stacks are kind of silly but moving single units around is incredibly tedious and also very difficult for the AI to handle.

Hearing Alex talk about the game on the Beastcast without mentioning 1UPT or what conducting war is like... it's infuriating.

@fitzgerald said:

Hey man, some of us like playing solitaire Civ, where you peacefully speed towards a science/culture victory and hope no one else nukes you into oblivion or beats you to it. Alex is my people.

For real though, the one disappointment I have with Civ V is that even after all the patches and expansions, the AI was completely atrocious at combat positioning and never made any kind of sensible formations. They were only a threat on harder difficulties because they got so many handicaps that if they want to attack your they have completely absurd military production and will gradually crush you with their (poorly organized) sheer numbers.

@duluoz said:

I'm so close to liking the combat system in Endless Legend, but it's so weirdly finicky. Instead of just taking control of one unit at a time when its their turn, and saying "ok, move 3 spaces over to this hex, then attack this guy", instead you have to vaguely queue up all of the commands for all your units, and then half your orders will be invalid because you specifically wanted your tanky warriors to move to a certain hex to block enemy movement, but before they could get there some other unit moved to that one space, so instead of doing the closest approximation to your order your tanky warriors will instead run the fuck off in some random direction to go attack whatever unit they feel like, leaving you completely exposed.

I've tended to favour the races that just have disgusting long range units and just try to take advantage of units while telling everybody else to just hold position and maintain a front line, because actually advancing tanky warriors or low-health cavalry is a positioning nightmare since you have no way of knowing which of your move orders will be invalidated.

Alex seems like a Civ V man through and through. I played a lot of Civ IV, but Civ V is my game. I completely forgot that you used to be able to stack units, and I never would have remembered if I didn't stumble upon this thread. I am guessing Alex is in the same boat as myself.

Seems like it's 1UPT in the preview build. I watched a streamer accidentally move a GG into danger when he retreated a worker into a city and they swapped places. Though the preview build also let another person move a military unit on top of a military unit of another civ when he tried to auto-move into an unexplored tile. Civ 5 refuses to route an auto-move that way, so that's gotta be a bug related to the Civ 2-style rough terrain costs.

Hopefully this thing has workshop support day 1.

This is how I have played all but one (I wanted the military achievement) of my Civ games. Climbing the Science or Culture trees are far more interesting to me than the combat and managing military units

It's not explained ANYWHERE in the game but you can queue up move -> action by holding Ctrl. It completely fixed my frustrations with the battle system.

The other thing Endless Legend has going for it over Civ, at least for me, is that EL games progress at a really really fast pace. I can complete a standard pace game in about 4 hours, while a standard game of Civ is at least 8, and more often than not 10 or 12 hours. I heard they were focusing on making it faster for online play, so I hope that's the case.

Also, I was under the impression Civ 6 would let you stack 2 or 3 of the same unit. If it's still completely 1UPT it's going to be highly disappointing.

@dstopia: So it seems to be 1UPT with some notable exceptions:

Civilian units: You can protect and even link up civilian units like Great People, Settlers, Builders. Civilians cannot stack on the same tile however.

Support Units: Battering Rams have been the only unit of this type I've seen (but I've heard of medics) You can link support units to other units. The battering ram allows melee units to attack city walls and actually do some sizable damage, otherwise you are doing a severly reduced amount of damage

Armys/Corps/Fleets: It seems you can combine several of the same types of units into a "corp/army" once you research the appropriate technology. It doesn't add the full power of each unit together but it has been described as "boosting the unit to the power of the next tech upgrade up) for example, they added two infantry corp together and it increased their strength from 70 to 80 instead of from 70 to 140. You can straight up build a corp version of a unit or you can later combine the two units manually (I don't know if you can separate them later)

I watched dozens of hours of let's plays by this time, and yes there are corps and medics. The 1PT was a problem in Civ5 because of the death machines the cities were. They seem squishier this time around. Also not all units exert zone of control in all terrains anymore. So warfare should be more dynamic.