how one would go about adding Civ3-style Great Leaders

[Kuciwalker]

For the sake of consistency with Civ4, call them Great Generals (GG's) instead of Great Leaders.

The simplest way to implement Great Generals to be essentially similar to Civ3's Great Leaders in a way that fits in decently with the Civ4 model would, IMO, be to have a national bank of "Great General points". This would be basically the same as each individual city's bank of Great Leader points, but when filled it would create the GG in the capital city (or in a random city). Every time a unit earned experience points, they would be added to the national bank. The GG would, if added as a specialist to a city, give some bonus (probably +1) to the experience of all units produced in the city. Its other special function could be to create Civ3-style armies, though that would be significantly more difficult to implement.

Civ3-style armies would require the SDK Firaxis has yet to release; I'm pretty sure implementing GG's in this model at all would require it, but I don't know the full power of the XML files.

[Mylon]

Huh? Did I miss something in the brief period I played Civ3? I don't recall great leaders or anything particularly different about combat.

[Kuciwalker]

Yes. If an elite unit won a battle it would produce a Great Leader, which could be used to create an Army, into which you could load three units and they would fight as a single unit (effectively just creating a unit with a lot of hp). The mechanics changed a bit in Conquests.

[gdijedi7]

Um, I don't know. Armies were very powerful, I think perhaps too powerful. Is it really a good idea to bring them back? They only showed up in Civ3, and they were dropped for Civ4. I think there may have been a reason.

[Tiberius]

Kuciwalker

Great Generals are definitely missing. Maybe armies were too powerful, but I'm sure we can find other cool uses for the generals. Examples: create a Military Academy (experience for newly created units +2), discover a military technology, add him to the city as a superspecialist (+1 production, +10% defence bonus) or maybe even some field applications: all units on the same tile with the general would receive some kind of bonus.

Generals could be of course created also as an ultimate promotion. The last promotion level would be the same for all units: the general.