The new Stacks of Doom

[nzk13]

Why would u ever do quick combat & mini popups at the same time? how do you know about battle results then with HUNDREDS of units?

[Emptiness]

When the dust clears, the units that are still around survived and the units that are gone died. Why would you waste valuable time watching the attack animations for 200 units fighting sequentially, in just one turn of combat? Or, to be more exact, why would you not turn on quick combat after the first time you had to sit through that?

[GlobularFoody]

Originally Posted by Emptiness

When the dust clears, the units that are still around survived and the units that are gone died. Why would you waste valuable time watching the attack animations for 200 units fighting sequentially, in just one turn of combat? Or, to be more exact, why would you not turn on quick combat after the first time you had to sit through that?

Exactly. I was locked down for about 10 minutes in one game of regular Civ and it was sheer torture. It was a late era game and the AI had a gazillion units attacking one of my heavily fortified cities and it just went on forever. I learned my lesson well from that!

[a_civilian]

You can actually turn on quick combat in the middle of a battle. Just click the button near the top right corner (left of the civilopedia button) which opens the main menu and you can go to the options and enable quick combat as usual. The change will take effect immediately after the current combat.

[Kranden]

I don't know AI can be nasty on diety but also kinda stupid. One game with 12 civs huge map playing as the Grigori I found myself facing massive stacks of pyre zombies barely beating them off and finally forcing him to become my vassal, about 30 turns later I'm facing off against 70 ogres and 30 mages from the clan. I lose my northern gold farm which had 4 dye on 2 rivers with a gold mine right away to the clan. and Have to continually use haste and assassins to pick off his casters while falling back to a choke fortified with citadels. Barely holding the line I have maybe 10 dragon slayer and 6 assassins and a few casters left after his massive siege. I quickly spam draft building up an army as fast as possible to counter while I still can. I go on a rampage capturing city after city without even enough men to protect my captured cities. At this point ive captured about 15 of his 30 cities and before I can enslave him the Ljosfar declare war on me ><. Then he pops his world spell and doesn't even attack with the treants pretty much destroying his econ wtf? Then I sue for peace with the orcs and bribe him to war with the Illians. And go own the stupid elves.

So it can be good and bad at times.

[Buckwild]

Originally Posted by Kranden

I don't know AI can be nasty on diety but also kinda stupid. One game with 12 civs huge map playing as the Grigori I found myself facing massive stacks of pyre zombies barely beating them off and finally forcing him to become my vassal, about 30 turns later I'm facing off against 70 ogres and 30 mages from the clan. I lose my northern gold farm which had 4 dye on 2 rivers with a gold mine right away to the clan. and Have to continually use haste and assassins to pick off his casters while falling back to a choke fortified with citadels. Barely holding the line I have maybe 10 dragon slayer and 6 assassins and a few casters left after his massive siege. I quickly spam draft building up an army as fast as possible to counter while I still can. I go on a rampage capturing city after city without even enough men to protect my captured cities. At this point ive captured about 15 of his 30 cities and before I can enslave him the Ljosfar declare war on me ><. Then he pops his world spell and doesn't even attack with the treants pretty much destroying his econ wtf? Then I sue for peace with the orcs and bribe him to war with the Illians. And go own the stupid elves.

So it can be good and bad at times.

Off topic, but related to your post:
How do you make someone your vassal? Do you need to research something for it to be an option?

[mcwill123]

I'm pretty sure that Feudalism enables vassal states.

[SurahAhriman]

Originally Posted by mcwill123

I'm pretty sure that Feudalism enables vassal states.

You would be correct.

[Kranden]

Oh my god, just yesterday playing on diety with aggressive AI, Calabim had no less than 500 units. The game was lagging so hard at one point that ending a turn was a 10 min load time and eventually the game became unplayable.

[Selrahc]

Originally Posted by GlobularFoody

Exactly. I was locked down for about 10 minutes in one game of regular Civ and it was sheer torture. It was a late era game and the AI had a gazillion units attacking one of my heavily fortified cities and it just went on forever. I learned my lesson well from that!

Indeed. I learned my lesson from a 50 minute computer lockdown following my assault on late game Clan of Embers. It was pretty epic, but never again.

I'd been planning a strategic decapatation of their capital from the sea and sitting within walking distance were thousands of troops. Let me just say... Water Elementals as Keelyn were insane. Gibbon, 2 heroic archmages from lucky lair results, 2 regular archmages and 4 liches had been rolling over empires with ease and I was getting ready to finish up. They rolled into the Clan of Embers city and saw the defenders. I nexus gated in champions and arquebuses and a few buff adepts and mages, then spent the treasury on mercenaries but all told it was only about 50 troops.

The archmages had summoned up their maximum worth of puppets and elementals. Tower of elements was up, meaning that over each heroic archmage would summon 2 puppets, who would summon 4 elementals, which would split into 8, which turned into 16, lasting two turns probably around 40 strong elementals to start, turning into 160. 8 water nodes and empower 5 meant that each one was a force to be reckoned with. And they would clearly be doing the heavy lifting.

Facing off against them were over 400 ogres alone, as well as countless rangers, chariots, catapults shaman and axemen. Massively hurt by maelstrom of course.

It went on forever. I went out to lunch while I let it play out. I got back and it was winding down. The opening battles were massacres of ogres, the closing battles saw evidently heavily injured water elementals being ripped to shreds, with occasional arcane units popping up. I even saw some of the archmages pop up from time to time. I think I'd lost the liches before I came back. I held on by the skin of my teeth. Gibbon, one of the heroic archmages and two of the normal archmages survived as well as around a 5 weak heavily injured water elementals and 2 0.2 strength normal troops.

It was one of my favourite fall from heaven experiences, and seeing the massive cataclysmic drop on the clan power rating was priceless, but it is one I have done my best to avoid since that time.

[JustinianVII]

Currently involved in an epic near-end game battle on Prince where (I think) 61 of my soldiers are defending a city against a combined force of at least 1,200 Ljosalfar, Malakim, and one of the dwarven civs. I'll just say this for now: the 1,200 are not winning. (It might have helped them to attack all at once instead of at intervals, though.)

[Arumath]

I've been playing a long running game on a custom made map and it's gotten very interesting. I only recently updated to the patch so I hadn't seen the new stacks of doom yet. I spent most of the game building my island empire into a masterpiece. I had no specific plan for victory I was just having fun building.

Early on the I made good freinds with the Kurionates whom were soon utterly destroyed by the clan. This irritated me but I just left them be and continued building up relations with the other AIs and raiding their costs with my pirates. Finally one of them comes to me wanting me to go to war with the clan which I do however my land army is quite small so I just raid their coasts and pillage their fishing boats while i build up an invasion force. Meanwhile the barbs have buit Leviathan who begins ravaging my island empire. With my invasion force halfway to the mainland I decide not to recall them and try to take on Leviathan with my small defensive navy and some arcane barges to no avail. So I finally cal lback the navy and destroy him and spend many more turns rebuilding before starting the invasion of the clan territory which has now tripled consuming the Hippur and another clan of embers ai.

I cast my world spel land hit them with everything I have seizing the coastal cities very quickly. I spend a couple turns reorganizing my army for an inland push when out of the fog of war marches a massive stack. My jaw dropped as I start reading numbers like 36 chariots 21 Ogres and so on. Here I am with a small highly trained army hoping to hold his 3 key coastal cities and my reinforcement waves at least a dozen turns away.

Suffice to say I abandoned the coast and pulled my fleet back to wait for reinforcements lamenting the wast of my world spell. The other Ai's suddenly make peace with the clan and the Amurites surrencer to the Ljos.

I came back a second time and burned the lesser ports only holding keeping one. I send out my shadows to see what he's up to and he's forming an even bigger stack!

So I have a new strategy guerilla warfare and scortched earth! I figure as long as I can keep my crack army out of reach of his stacks and keep picking at them I can raze his whole empire, though it drive the AC up and up Even if I did eliminate his stacks they'd just go to Hyborem I think.

At least my empire is safe...

[S.K. Ren]

IN another thread, 'reif s' came up with a rather nifty tweak that limits the number of units on a tile. You might want to give it a try, It completely changes the way the AI deals with war. I would say It's a lot less dangerous but it's more like the AI blockades your borders with a lot of mini stacks preventing any war time raiding. And they keep blockading you till they have a huge force and the swamp your cities preventing your from working them. But this works both ways. You can suffocate a city into submission and kill his economy early. I mean you could do this before but now it's a viable tactic since stacks can only have 4 in them when outside cultural influence.(Note, this is not borders, but influence. If a tile has your Civ's % in it's description, you can have 5 per stack but otherwise it's 4 per stack.

This also changes how you build your stacks. One Archmage will no longer cut it.

[Requia]

Another slight tweak is playing on a pangea map. The AI doesn't seem to understand how to go overseas anymore, or maybe its afraid to do war with the smaller numbers of units, pangea means more war and at least a few dead units.

[Morkonan]

Originally Posted by Requia

Another slight tweak is playing on a pangea map. The AI doesn't seem to understand how to go overseas anymore, or maybe its afraid to do war with the smaller numbers of units, pangea means more war and at least a few dead units.

There are some better AI mods in the Mods section that appear to help with the AI understanding how to use navies. So, apparently, the AI uses them more for colonization and launching attacks with those mods in place.

I agree that, in Vanilla, it's best to play on Pangea or, at least, a large continent map. It keeps things lively. But, I've noticed that even on a "Continents" map, the AI will sometimes go stale on the other continent with little to no actual conflict once that continent is fully settled. So, Pangea wins for "Action" potential.

[Jet]

^ Word. I stopped playing FFH on anything other than Tectonics with the Lakes (30% water) option, which still provides a little bit of seafaring action - about to the same extent as naval stuff is developed in this mod.

My coolest stack combat experience was Amelanchier throwing Tigers at my newly-built Baron. I had to replay a few turns due to crashes. I got 100-200 werewolves, I think, and had to delete many of them just to stay out of strike.

[FrozenShadows]

i was playing a game as flauros of the illians on a continents map (6 total) and sheelba litterally wiped out 4 or 5 civs and claimed half of the planet her army was massive, somewhere around 700-1200 units...and at that point i wish ICBM's were in the game x.x

[tylor]

Gazillion units is actually fun. Gazillion of unit promotions is very fun. But that two things mix horribly. Even sorting out 35 wizards alone was annoying. And if add to that all other unit types each one with own set of promotions, mutated units, captured units, summoned units...

Usually it's either army of clones, or band of heroes. And it's for a reason.