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Civ was completely changed after Civ 4. The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack". Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: sch

Civ was completely changed after Civ 4. The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack". Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: schwerpunkt) And almost every major conflict involved a decisive battle with two death stacks on each side. The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. This is the moment Civ became a completely different game. The last true Civ game was Civ 4.

npinsker 2y ago
I haven’t played much Civ — is there some reason that preserving that particular mechanic is important? It doesn’t seem obviously desirable (or undesirable).
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Civ 1, 2, 3, 4 all played the roughly the same. Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted. In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    A single giant blob of every unit you have moving as one is about as unrealistic as you can get with respect to war logistics and strategy.
    - 29athrowaway 2y ago
      No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pharsalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pharsalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae
      - morgante 2y ago
        All of those battles involve battlefield tactics, and in several of them the numerically inferior force won — exactly the opposite of "death stacks."
        29athrowaway 2y ago
        The Civ series is not the Total War series. The level of detail of battles is meant to be low because it's focused in wars not battles. You are not a war general you are a head of government. There are still plenty of tactics in Civ 4. Units have different bonuses depending on terrain and other factors. You have to plan where the combat takes place and what types units you want to use. Some unit types have collateral damage (catapult, trebuchet, cannon, artillery, mobile artillery, etc.), and there are similar mechanics with air units, cavalry, etc. The game is not short of battle tactics just not the board game inspired mechanic of Civ 5+.
      - focusgroup0 2y ago
        At random, I picked and read Battle of Pharsalus. The Deployment section explains in detail how, through meticulous troop positioning and clever tactics, Caesar was able to defeat the overwhelming force of Pompey.
      - HideousKojima 2y ago
        Stalingrad was won because the Soviets flanked and cut off the supply lines supplying the German 6th Army, not because of one death stack defeating another.
        29athrowaway 2y ago
        And in Civ 4: - you can destroy roads (needed for some resources) - you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource - you can use diplomacy to deny a resource - you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      On the other hand the “solution” has to be create a carpet of units creating traffic jams, just a different set of annoying and unrealistic logistical problems.
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        That’s what I thought. But Humankind’s solution of moving stacks around that get spread out for combat solved this very elegantly imo.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Moving to one unit per tile didn’t add a logistics or strategic component. It jumped all the way down to a tactical one, you suddenly care about individual units flanking each other. IMO it was sort of more “honest” from a realism point of view to just admit that the simulation is not that accurate at the unit level, you smash the stacks into each other and assume the officer corps of each army is handling flanking. It is hard to say which way is more fun really. Seems like a matter of preference. I like tactical games better anyway, so IMO the new way is an improvement. But, realism? Not really.
      - jncfhnb 2y ago
        That’s why Humankind’s approach is great. Stacks are fine for macro movement. And then actual battles take place with one unit per tile and tactics considerations.
- senkora 2y ago
  I preferred it because I considered the point of Civ to be building up your economy/tech such that you were superior to your opponents, and then using that economic/technological advantage to out-produce them in military and defeat them that way. The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though. Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.
- recursivecaveat 2y ago
  Imo one way it was desirable was it was much easier for the AI to play (most people only play against the AI). It has never reeeally gotten the hang of routing and positioning units around in a 1-unit-per-tile model. Consequently they struggle to pro-actively fight each-other even.
- drawkward 2y ago
  You've got it right: it comes down to personal preference.
throwawaymaths 2y ago
even unit stacks were janky. for me the last true civ game was CTP 2
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Ironically Call to Power 2 is not a Civ game because their Civilization license was lost so they had to remove Civilization from the name.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    yep, that was the joke!
jncfhnb 2y ago
The problem isn’t really the existence of death stacks so much as the fact that the map is too zoomed out for _any_ tactical nuance. This creates extremely unrealistic game-y mechanics when you have two opposing stacks of 50 guys and one guy moves right while the other guy jukes and runs into a city that’s not defended. I actually love Humankind’s approach where you have a fairly chunky stack and the stack gets spread out over the map into individual units during combat where you do some short term tactics that pulls in all surrounding units as reinforcements with temporary combat only movements.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  You can pick the world size. Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    “Put everyone in a single stack” is not an interesting tactic or knowledge check imo.
    - dmoy 2y ago
      There was a year-ish period of sc2 which was death stacks, I think at that point I went back to watching sc1 lol I agree, it's not fun or interesting
- bigger_cheese 2y ago
  I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units). There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective. The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this. Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)
jldugger 2y ago
> The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack". It's clear to me that the designers wanted to include flanking as a mechanic, and other positioning elements of warfare (ranged attacks, zone of control, etc) thus stacks of doom had to go. If you want to be pedantic about it, Normandy was 5 separate beaches in a 50 mile stretch, and involved paratroopers behind the beachfront ahead of time. And the game does model concentration of power to some degree, in the form of armies and corps.
int_19h 2y ago
One thing that bugs me the most in Civ7 is that there's no option to continue playing after the victory condition is achieved, anymore. Nor can you disable some victory conditions if you don't want them.
- jmb99 2y ago
  This seems to be the biggest (gameplay) complaint across the web, so I would be shocked if it’s not addressed in an update fairly soon.
jltsiren 2y ago
Normandy was not a death stack. The actual landings involved 156k troops facing 50k troops over 80 km of coastline. That's maybe 2x as many troops as in a major ancient battle, stretched over a frontline 20x as long. WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.
- coryrc 2y ago
  How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? It's about 80 km wide[0]. And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart. [0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-single-tile-cover-in-civ.499093/post-12554910 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    It depends on the map. In the Civ 6 Europe map, the area where the Normandy landings took place was 3 tiles. You could have three units attacking in the initial wave against 1 defending unit, with various ranged units on both sides. At that point in the game, the units could be corps or armies, which would make the overall scale of fighting about right.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.) Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)
ProjectArcturis 2y ago
And the AI was totally incompetent at maneuvering tactically. They had to massively outnumber you to even have a chance at taking your city. And they really haven't learned anything since!
sien 2y ago
Civ 1 and Civ 4 got highest ratings on Metacritic . https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civilization-game-ranked/13/ https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civiliz...
- JojoFatsani 2y ago
  Civ 4 is cheap on steam. I decided to buy that and go back and run a campaign on there while I wait for VII to mature a bit.
  - 01100011 2y ago
    Yeah but it's mac and windows only, no?
    - Delk 2y ago
      Natively, yes. I seem to remember it ran fine on Wine years ago, though. ProtonDB gives it a gold rating.
    - 29athrowaway 2y ago
      It works on Proton just from Steam with no modification.
    - sien 2y ago
      It doesn't run on macOS either these days.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Civ 4 Colonization is a lot of fun.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
Fair argument, but death stacks (however realistic) were boring. There was no gameplay there, it was just "mash your stack into the other stack". Perhaps the 1UPT system wasn't the right answer, but they needed to do something to make warfare be an actually interesting part of the game.
- frakrx 2y ago
  They were never boring for me at all and there was lot of strategy and planning involved in troop composition of such stacks. Civ4 was a game about research, development and relationships between civilizations and not an turn based strategy game like latter iterations try to be.
smallstepforman 2y ago
I only play Beyond the Sword, the new Civs are not for me. Civ4 is a logistics game, as is real life.
frakrx 2y ago
Why do people hate 'doomstacks' I dont get it. It is a 4X game about civilizations after all not a turn based military strategy. There is also startegy involved in doom stack composition and you can beat a much larger doomstack with better troop composition. But like in real life of course, with all things being equal bigger doomstack will defeat smaller one. How realistic are armies of a few thousands man spread across half a continent like in latter Civ series.
muzani 2y ago
I actually loved Fall From Heaven II[0] as a Civ mod because of the latter civ style handling of archers and such. Somehow Civ 5 onwards utilized that style, but didn't really bring over all the tactical complexity of FFH2. Sadly there has been no other mods that caught my attention the same way FFH did. [0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4) https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4)
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Civ was completely changed after Civ 4. This is true, but it was also completely changed after Civ 1, Civ 2, and Civ 3 (and, for that matter, Civ 5 and Civ 6.) > The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. Civ III radically changed stack mechanics by eliminating "defeating the strongest defender destroys the stack" (it also added ranged units), Civ IV radically changed stack mechanics by adding in collateral damage from certain attackers (it also got rid of ranged units, replacing them with first strike or archery, and collateral damage for artillery.) Each of these changed the game as radically as Civ 5s one-unit-per-tile (which also so substantial changes with Civ 6's Corps/Army and Fleet/Armada mechanics, and Civ 7's different Army/Fleet/Squadron mechanic.) The idea that Civ 4 was the single point that changed everything is silly.

npinsker 2y ago

I haven’t played much Civ — is there some reason that preserving that particular mechanic is important? It doesn’t seem obviously desirable (or undesirable).

29athrowaway 2y ago
Civ 1, 2, 3, 4 all played the roughly the same. Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted. In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  A single giant blob of every unit you have moving as one is about as unrealistic as you can get with respect to war logistics and strategy.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pharsalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pharsalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae
    - morgante 2y ago
      All of those battles involve battlefield tactics, and in several of them the numerically inferior force won — exactly the opposite of "death stacks."
      - 29athrowaway 2y ago
        The Civ series is not the Total War series. The level of detail of battles is meant to be low because it's focused in wars not battles. You are not a war general you are a head of government. There are still plenty of tactics in Civ 4. Units have different bonuses depending on terrain and other factors. You have to plan where the combat takes place and what types units you want to use. Some unit types have collateral damage (catapult, trebuchet, cannon, artillery, mobile artillery, etc.), and there are similar mechanics with air units, cavalry, etc. The game is not short of battle tactics just not the board game inspired mechanic of Civ 5+.
    - focusgroup0 2y ago
      At random, I picked and read Battle of Pharsalus. The Deployment section explains in detail how, through meticulous troop positioning and clever tactics, Caesar was able to defeat the overwhelming force of Pompey.
    - HideousKojima 2y ago
      Stalingrad was won because the Soviets flanked and cut off the supply lines supplying the German 6th Army, not because of one death stack defeating another.
      - 29athrowaway 2y ago
        And in Civ 4: - you can destroy roads (needed for some resources) - you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource - you can use diplomacy to deny a resource - you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    On the other hand the “solution” has to be create a carpet of units creating traffic jams, just a different set of annoying and unrealistic logistical problems.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      That’s what I thought. But Humankind’s solution of moving stacks around that get spread out for combat solved this very elegantly imo.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Moving to one unit per tile didn’t add a logistics or strategic component. It jumped all the way down to a tactical one, you suddenly care about individual units flanking each other. IMO it was sort of more “honest” from a realism point of view to just admit that the simulation is not that accurate at the unit level, you smash the stacks into each other and assume the officer corps of each army is handling flanking. It is hard to say which way is more fun really. Seems like a matter of preference. I like tactical games better anyway, so IMO the new way is an improvement. But, realism? Not really.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      That’s why Humankind’s approach is great. Stacks are fine for macro movement. And then actual battles take place with one unit per tile and tactics considerations.
senkora 2y ago
I preferred it because I considered the point of Civ to be building up your economy/tech such that you were superior to your opponents, and then using that economic/technological advantage to out-produce them in military and defeat them that way. The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though. Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.
recursivecaveat 2y ago
Imo one way it was desirable was it was much easier for the AI to play (most people only play against the AI). It has never reeeally gotten the hang of routing and positioning units around in a 1-unit-per-tile model. Consequently they struggle to pro-actively fight each-other even.
drawkward 2y ago
You've got it right: it comes down to personal preference.

throwawaymaths 2y ago

even unit stacks were janky. for me the last true civ game was CTP 2

29athrowaway 2y ago
Ironically Call to Power 2 is not a Civ game because their Civilization license was lost so they had to remove Civilization from the name.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  yep, that was the joke!

jncfhnb 2y ago

The problem isn’t really the existence of death stacks so much as the fact that the map is too zoomed out for _any_ tactical nuance. This creates extremely unrealistic game-y mechanics when you have two opposing stacks of 50 guys and one guy moves right while the other guy jukes and runs into a city that’s not defended. I actually love Humankind’s approach where you have a fairly chunky stack and the stack gets spread out over the map into individual units during combat where you do some short term tactics that pulls in all surrounding units as reinforcements with temporary combat only movements.

29athrowaway 2y ago
You can pick the world size. Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  “Put everyone in a single stack” is not an interesting tactic or knowledge check imo.
  - dmoy 2y ago
    There was a year-ish period of sc2 which was death stacks, I think at that point I went back to watching sc1 lol I agree, it's not fun or interesting
bigger_cheese 2y ago
I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units). There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective. The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this. Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)

jldugger 2y ago

> The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack". It's clear to me that the designers wanted to include flanking as a mechanic, and other positioning elements of warfare (ranged attacks, zone of control, etc) thus stacks of doom had to go. If you want to be pedantic about it, Normandy was 5 separate beaches in a 50 mile stretch, and involved paratroopers behind the beachfront ahead of time. And the game does model concentration of power to some degree, in the form of armies and corps.

int_19h 2y ago

One thing that bugs me the most in Civ7 is that there's no option to continue playing after the victory condition is achieved, anymore. Nor can you disable some victory conditions if you don't want them.

jmb99 2y ago
This seems to be the biggest (gameplay) complaint across the web, so I would be shocked if it’s not addressed in an update fairly soon.

jltsiren 2y ago

Normandy was not a death stack. The actual landings involved 156k troops facing 50k troops over 80 km of coastline. That's maybe 2x as many troops as in a major ancient battle, stretched over a frontline 20x as long. WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.

coryrc 2y ago
How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? It's about 80 km wide[0]. And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart. [0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-single-tile-cover-in-civ.499093/post-12554910 https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...
- jltsiren 2y ago
  It depends on the map. In the Civ 6 Europe map, the area where the Normandy landings took place was 3 tiles. You could have three units attacking in the initial wave against 1 defending unit, with various ranged units on both sides. At that point in the game, the units could be corps or armies, which would make the overall scale of fighting about right.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.) Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)

ProjectArcturis 2y ago

And the AI was totally incompetent at maneuvering tactically. They had to massively outnumber you to even have a chance at taking your city. And they really haven't learned anything since!

sien 2y ago

Civ 1 and Civ 4 got highest ratings on Metacritic . https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civilization-game-ranked/13/ https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civiliz...

JojoFatsani 2y ago
Civ 4 is cheap on steam. I decided to buy that and go back and run a campaign on there while I wait for VII to mature a bit.
- 01100011 2y ago
  Yeah but it's mac and windows only, no?
  - Delk 2y ago
    Natively, yes. I seem to remember it ran fine on Wine years ago, though. ProtonDB gives it a gold rating.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    It works on Proton just from Steam with no modification.
  - sien 2y ago
    It doesn't run on macOS either these days.
29athrowaway 2y ago
Civ 4 Colonization is a lot of fun.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

Fair argument, but death stacks (however realistic) were boring. There was no gameplay there, it was just "mash your stack into the other stack". Perhaps the 1UPT system wasn't the right answer, but they needed to do something to make warfare be an actually interesting part of the game.

frakrx 2y ago
They were never boring for me at all and there was lot of strategy and planning involved in troop composition of such stacks. Civ4 was a game about research, development and relationships between civilizations and not an turn based strategy game like latter iterations try to be.

smallstepforman 2y ago

I only play Beyond the Sword, the new Civs are not for me. Civ4 is a logistics game, as is real life.

frakrx 2y ago

Why do people hate 'doomstacks' I dont get it. It is a 4X game about civilizations after all not a turn based military strategy. There is also startegy involved in doom stack composition and you can beat a much larger doomstack with better troop composition. But like in real life of course, with all things being equal bigger doomstack will defeat smaller one. How realistic are armies of a few thousands man spread across half a continent like in latter Civ series.

muzani 2y ago

I actually loved Fall From Heaven II[0] as a Civ mod because of the latter civ style handling of archers and such. Somehow Civ 5 onwards utilized that style, but didn't really bring over all the tactical complexity of FFH2. Sadly there has been no other mods that caught my attention the same way FFH did. [0] https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4) https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Fall_from_Heaven_(Civ4)

dragonwriter 2y ago

> Civ was completely changed after Civ 4. This is true, but it was also completely changed after Civ 1, Civ 2, and Civ 3 (and, for that matter, Civ 5 and Civ 6.) > The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. Civ III radically changed stack mechanics by eliminating "defeating the strongest defender destroys the stack" (it also added ranged units), Civ IV radically changed stack mechanics by adding in collateral damage from certain attackers (it also got rid of ranged units, replacing them with first strike or archery, and collateral damage for artillery.) Each of these changed the game as radically as Civ 5s one-unit-per-tile (which also so substantial changes with Civ 6's Corps/Army and Fleet/Armada mechanics, and Civ 7's different Army/Fleet/Squadron mechanic.) The idea that Civ 4 was the single point that changed everything is silly.