Stacks: really newb question

[walkern]

Hey everyone;

I'm new to Civ, and I've got the Civ4 demo and am really enjoying it. I plan to get the full game soon; only 100 turns is maddening!

Anyways, I've been looking over the forums and I'm pretty comfortable with how the opening of a game flows, different techs to research, how to build opening units, etc.

Combat is fun, and obviously limited at this stage of the game, but I do have one question about stacks. I guess my question is: what's the big deal? I don't really see the advantage except for the fact that you just have a bunch of units on one tile. Combat progresses by unit, and I don't see any specific advantages of having lots of units on a single tile, so what's to be so excited about? Plus, it sounds like later in the game when you have artillery, a stack can be devastated by a single attack.

From what I've read in the forums, I must be missing something somewhere. Obviously, I don't have the manual or experience with previous Civ games. Thanks!

NW

[padillah]

You mean other than not being able to use more than 8 untis at a time? The quickest answer is stacks are about defense.

When a unit attacks the game will select the strongest defender and that's the combat. If you just had one unit per square that one unit would have to attack AND defend. It would quickly be overcome by even the smallest margin.

However, with a stack you can have units that are good defensively (like archers) and good offensivly (like swordsman) in the same stack and the archers can defend then, when it's your turn to attack you have nice fresh swordsmen to attack with.

There's also a stratagy of stacking weak First Strike units. That way any defense is met with a First Strike (albeit weak) and then moves on to the strongest defender (generally not the weak guy)... kind of like getting in a free shot before the fight starts.

So, they can be quite helpfull. The colatteral damage was put in to keep people from creating a "Stack of Doom". Imagine, if you will, a stack of 45 swordsmen. Is there really much that would stand in it's way for quite a few turns? Or, as in the example above, 20 archers and 20 swords. With the archers First Strike you'd be hard pressed to survive attacking them much less getting attacked by them. Add a couple of Combat I, II, or II and a few Woodsman I, or II and you've got a pretty unbeatable force. Thus collateral damage, which damages the entire stack so you may want to think twice about putting every single unit in one massive stack.

Tom P.

[dschur]

Stacks can certainly be dangerous with collateral damage units, but even though combat is 1v1, the computer does try to pick the best unit to defend...a couple of advantages:

1) Your 4 archer stack kills off an enemy, one archer drops to .5 Health. The enemy counterattacks, a full strength archer defends.

2) You have a Swordsman, an Axeman and a Spearman in your stack. You are attacked by a Horseman - Spear Defends; you are attacked by an Axeman, Axeman defends.

Sometimes it does do funky things when it ranks strengths of units, so this isn't perfect. I suspect that it doesn't always value promotions correctly. Also, you can't use old archer units as ablative armor to keep other units healthy, if you have a lvl 4 city killer Swordsman in the group, he will be picked to defend over the archer you'd probably prefer to lose

Sometimes its just an easier way to move a bunch of stuff around :-)

[Bobby Chicken]

I agree. Stacks prevent your units from being attacked when unhealthy.

[padillah]

Originally posted by dschur
Sometimes its just an easier way to move a bunch of stuff around :-)

But remember to "unbunch" them. I had three or four swords and an archer or two following a worker around for... maybe 25 or 30 turns. Just never noticed that they were all in one stack.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Tom P.

[Quillan]

The impression I get is that the computer doesn't rank strength vs strength when picking the defender; I think it actually figures out the odds and takes who has the best chance of winning. As an example, suppose a raw praetorian (ST 8) is attacking a stack standing on grassland. The stack consists of an axeman, a crossbowman (both with no promotions), and a longbowman with 3 bonus first strikes. The axeman would be 7.5 vs 8, the crossbowman 9 vs 8, while the longbowman is only 6 vs 8. However, the 3-4 first strikes it gets against the praetorian really makes it the best defender, so it's what the computer will probably pick.

[dschur]

Originally posted by Quillan
The impression I get is that the computer doesn't rank strength vs strength when picking the defender; I think it actually figures out the odds and takes who has the best chance of winning. As an example, suppose a raw praetorian (ST 8) is attacking a stack standing on grassland. The stack consists of an axeman, a crossbowman (both with no promotions), and a longbowman with 3 bonus first strikes. The axeman would be 7.5 vs 8, the crossbowman 9 vs 8, while the longbowman is only 6 vs 8. However, the 3-4 first strikes it gets against the praetorian really makes it the best defender, so it's what the computer will probably pick.

I agree with this entirely. My example was simplistic, but the "odds of winning" is what I think it uses to come up with those choices. Perhaps the "wierd" choices I saw represented mathematically logical choices that I did not recognize.

I guess what I miss is the "primary defender" choice. Wasn't this part of Civ 3? That is what allows the use of an obsolete unit with first strike as a kind of armor to the tought units.

[padillah]

Well, if you really want to know what happens during combat Solver and DeepO had a Combat Thread that explained it quite well and in depth.

I was just going for the noob answer.

Tom P.

And the First Strike units will always get an attack even if they are not the unit that's defending, that's why it's called "First Strike". It's not regarded as part of the defense.