Armies

[tsnelson]

Armies on defense?

Could you use armies as defensive units?

Would it work to build defensive armies of Infantry, or Mech Infantry, and being fortified in the mountain square which is the only access point to your territory from your enemy civ. Sounds like a pretty defensive position to me!

Has anybody tried this? I don't get armies often enough to experiment with them.

Also, do armies count as 1 maintenance, or the full stack of maintenance? This would also be a helpful factor if it were the prior.

[Sevorak]

David Weldon,

For the record, I certainly agree with you on armies. The problem is, as I said, that in the editor and presumably in the Civ3 code, an army is treated as one kind of unit, with a flag on it that's either Blitz YES or Blitz NO. There does not appear to be a way to differentiate between types of armies.

Actually, something I thought up was to allow units to band together as armies at any time for a small cost (like Minor Army, 80shields), with no blitz, but to gain blitz with a leader or military academy created army. Then the first kind of army (our current army) is really a capability tradeoff for minimal cost, while the other kind that actually gains benefits (ie blitz) has to be seriously paid for.

-Sev

[007]

yes sure, if u fortify an army - noone will go through!!!, they will go around.
Besides, (if u fortified your spearman) sooner than u want there will be tanks & bombers, that are sort of hard to stop. What are u going to do with this army?

If Firaxis ever makes a new game, batal resolution got to be redesigned. After all, a single square cann't hold limitlen number of units.

the pool shows that there is alot of people who like armies.
SPEAK UP.
I want to hear atleast something good about armies!!!

[jack_frost]

I'd wager that the people who voted for armies are more along newbie lines.

Armies can be nice for spearheading early attacks. My first (and only army) army was all archer, and I gotta admit, it was useful for killing spearmen, and pikes and stuff - the first defender. Then my horsies could clean up the warriors or what ever else was inside.

But a) not being able to upgrade sucks.

b) wasting all those seperate attacks hurts alot if you need to take a town in a turn (which you almost always do in order to use their roads/rails to bring in reinforcements and attack the next town).

and c) it seems to me that what ever random number generator the game uses for combat is a little biased per actual combat. IE: Its more common to have a really good combat (your horseman kills a spearman with 1 or no damage) followed by a really bad combat (your longbow man dies doing no damage to a pike) then it is to have two close and even fights 3 damage taken 3 given. There are no hard numbers to back this, but I have seen ugly patterns like this crop up in other random number generators where certain number ranges occur more then others.

Anyway...have fun.

[dweez]

I see that nobody mentioned the small detail about armies that really annoyed me:
A well defended AI declared war on me. I know I will not be able to take any cities, so I decide to play havoc with his infrastructure. Do I have any units that have a chance to survive a few turns inside his territory? Oh yes, I have my one and only army. So I send it a long way into his land imagining my opponent on his knees once his precious railroads, fields and mines are gone, just to discover that... armies cannot pillage! Duh!
Isn't that just stupid?

[kmadel]

Originally posted by dweez
I see that nobody mentioned the small detail about armies that really annoyed me:
A well defended AI declared war on me. I know I will not be able to take any cities, so I decide to play havoc with his infrastructure. Do I have any units that have a chance to survive a few turns inside his territory? Oh yes, I have my one and only army. So I send it a long way into his land imagining my opponent on his knees once his precious railroads, fields and mines are gone, just to discover that... armies cannot pillage! Duh!
Isn't that just stupid?

Here is an idea that I saw elsewhere, use 2+ movement point units to do the pillaging, and then move the defensive army over them to defend them.

[Garth Vader]

Something else that would be useful would be to allow you to move units in and out of armies. That might make it worth it.

[007]

Garth !!

hey!!! That is such a simple and elegant solution.

Move units in and out!!!

u want to pilage? separate unit from the army and have your fun,

u want to attack a city muliple times with blitz bonus? separete from the army and strike

The units are too weak to atack next turn? Get them together into army and squizz out remaining HP.

want to upgrade the army? get ald unis out and new in.


all we have to do now is to lobby the change, so that
Firaxis let units move in and out from armies in the new patch

[gamma]

A tank army is not good, true. However, infantry armies can save your ass if your enemy can build tanks, mechinf, etc., and you can't. Especially if supported by artillery. That's what I'm facing right now.

Armies are a much safer unit for taking out enemy defenses. It tips the odds way over in your favor. I'll get some enemy infantry, tank, or mechinf unit fortified in hills or jungle, for instance. They're hell to get rid of. Even after pounding them down to one point with artillery, I'll send my best offensive unit in - infantry or cav - which often dies because it's a 6 vs. a 20 or worse. They win roughly 4 out of 5 rounds or better, meaning they often kill my full-strength infantry, and then they'll invariably get vet or elite status and an extra hit point, which I have to pound out again with more artillery before I can try the drill again with another infantry. Over time I'm using up 1-3 units for every 1 of theirs. Alternately, an infantry army with 4 units has to lose SIXTEEN times (they're all vets) before the enemy loses once. My guys can take four hits and still go, AND put up a great defense in the square they've just moved into when the counterattack comes. Often, they'll get lucky and take 0-2 hits, and can be used multiple times this way before they have to head back for repairs.

Armies help a militaristic civ make up for having no oil, in other words.

Armies are _very_ useful on defense. A normal unit trying to overcome an army has to overcome as many as 20 hit points before it loses 2-5. And if it loses, one of the army units has a chance of gaining a hit point. When fortified, a full army heals up to four hit points per turn.

Leaders are best used to hurry wonders. That's why you use only one to get an army. That starts a chain reaction, first to Heroic Epic to get more leaders, then Military Tradition to get the academy, and all the armies you want, then the Pentagon to increase army size. Stockpile the rest of the leaders.

The attack rate you lose in combining units into an army is worth it, IMO. Armies should be thought of as slow-moving juggernauts. Your three bowmen might take out three defenders per turn; on the other hand, you might lose three bowmen and take ten turns to replace them. With an army, the enemy WILL LOSE one defender per turn, and you will take no losses.

I do wish they'd allow upgrades of units in armies. I know you can trounce your 3-unit army around for a while, then build the Pentagon, and add one more unit to it. I'm guessing that if you could somehow get one unit to die without losing the whole army, you could then replace that unit with a better one. Also, armies should be able to pillage. It's not unbalancing if they can. (Has anyone tried selecting one of the units within the army and seeing if it can pillage?)

To answer tsnelson: you still have to pay upkeep on the units in an army, plus the army unit itself. That is, an army with three units in it counts as four units total. This usually isn't a problem for me. With militaristic civs, I tend to use "war governments", and am always under the limit of units I can have for free anyway. With non-military civs, I go democratic, and by then my cities are producing so much commerce that the army upkeep is negligible.

Garth Vader: being able to move units in and out of armies indefinitely could be unbalancing, actually. It amounts to an army that can fully heal every turn. If you could move units in and out of armies, I would advocate such an action using up the army's movement points for the rest of the turn. (It's a reorg.)

[Garth Vader]

If you could move units in and out of armies, I would advocate such an action using up the army's movement points for the rest of the turn. (It's a reorg.)

Good solution!

[jack_frost]

heh, what a simple, elegant solution...

But then wouldn't we all be complaining that they were powerful once you had the 'build armies' minor wonder?

[Venger]

Armies suck

Armies, yes, suck. They lose offensive attacks, they cannot be upgraded, are not transportable by galleys (4 unit armies). The advantages they have, though, is the gradually save production costs for replacement units.

This is not enough to balance them though. Armies should receive +1 attack point for every unit over 1 in the army, hence a 4 unit army should have +3 on attack or defense.

They also should be loadable and unloadable. An army is just an aggregation of units, these units can be broken into their constituent parts in real life, same goes here.

And allowing loading/unloading would allow them on a god damn boat...

Venger

[Admiral PJ]

Maybe its best to keep your second army unloaded for a while then, till you can get some decent units for it, the first being used to enable the Heroic epic function.
Do the army units gain promotions, going up to veteran etc?
It should be possible for an army to make another leader maybe, with enough success, this seems logical.
Armies like Wellingtons had lots of generals and created many heroes that could be seen as leaders in the way civ3 uses them.

Can armies be used for ships? that would be very useful.

I think armies are balanced enough like they are, though i've only had one battle with them - we should try reducing their cost though ; to 250 perhaps.

Admiral Peter
Civ3 is a brilliant game :>

[Green Giant]

I find armies useless because they always die on the first attack. Every experience I have had with them whether I attacked or an opponent attacked me with an army they have died instantly. I never use them any more.

[gamma]

Green Giant: Umm, did you try putting units INTO the army first? An army by itself is like a money clip; it's only worth what you put into it.