Armies/Great Leaders

[The Emperor Fabulous]

So I got CivIV for Christmas. I haven't had a chance yet to play it, because I haven't been back to my apartment in Boston yet. But I did spend time reading the manual.

My question: what happened to Armies? The manual doesn't mention them, so I assume they do not exist within the game. Why were they removed, balance issues or multiplayer issues, or something else? They were one of the best parts of CivIII, imho.

[Enigma_Nova]

There are no armies.
Now, a Spearmen has the same chance of killing a stack of 4 tanks as it does of killing one tank every turn for 4 turns.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Yes, well, that's all well and good.

But people here had a great deal of input on CivIV. Did the discussion of armies ever arise?

[Enigma_Nova]

Yes, many topics about great people were threadjacked with the fact that there are no Military great people.

[Willem]

Re: Armies/Great Leaders

Originally posted by The Emperor Fabulous
Why were they removed, balance issues or multiplayer issues, or something else? They were one of the best parts of CivIII, imho.

They didn't work for the AI, it never figured out how to use them properly. In Conquests, it didn't even build them. And they're kind of redundant now with the stack attack option. You can create a group and have them all attack at once.

[Enigma_Nova]

A battalion of 10 tank squads still attacks as 10 individual tank squads.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Enigma_Nova
A battalion of 10 tank squads still attacks as 10 individual tank squads.

True, it's not quite the same as Armies, but it will do as far as I'm concerned. In my Civ 3 mod, I had eliminated Armies altogether, since the AI didn't use them right. In fact, I had to mod it in just to get the AI to use them at all.

[Solver]

I still don't get how anyone can miss Armies. I think that they are one of the most botched Civ3 features. As I see it: Armies reward warmongers more, which was already a huge thing in Civ3, and, since the combat system in Civ3 was rather ridicilous, an Army was just an uber-powerful unit. Which meant it could take out any defender unless the Army was way less advanced. The AI would never use those things effectively, while they increased the can conquer anything with ease effect as a human.

[Enigma_Nova]

How did armies work? I never played Civ 3.
Or, you could just send me a copy of Civ 3 for ... uhh ... testing purposes only.

[Willem]

In Civ 3 you could put up to 4 regular units in this Army unit, and they combined all their hit points and acteed together, with some special abilities to boot. So basically it was just a super unit which the AI didn't build, or use properly if it did. In other words a cakewalk for the human player.

[Solver]

The Army was just a super-unit, yes. Basically three or four times as powerful as a regular unit in combat, and can attack multiple times per turn.

Then again, the worst balance issue in Civ3 has to be retreating, before patches. Your units were guaranteed to retreat if losing, which meant that you'd almost never lose Knights or Cavalry when attacking with them.

And my own Civ3 copy isn't complete, I don't even own Conquests.