Less known facts about armies
- Thread starter Rodrig0
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Just to be sure: Are you refering to armies that contain only one kind of unit? If one unit in the army has no stealth attack the army would lose the ability, thus the case of a mixed army is of little relevance. Homogenous armies however inherit the abilities of its units, thus an army of marines can use amphibian attack.
Kirejara
King
yes, but they inherit only the ablities in "Unit Abilities" (like amphibian or foot unit), but they lose the abilities in "Special Orders" (like airdrop, bombard, enslave and upgrade) and "Worker Actions" (like building a road or a fortress).
Only if the Army itself has marked a ability in "Special Orders", they can execute it.
You can even bombard with an Army of Swordmen if you have enabled that order in the Army (Tested, but the Army uses its Fidged animation instead of the Swordman attack animation ).
I made a Sniper unit, which has stealth attack. (can pick units from a stack).
I put 3 snipers in an army; the army has no stealth attack.
If you have more than one wonder that 'halves upgrade cost' (like one Leo's Workshop and one eh... Michaelangelo's Workshop) then those wonders don't stack.
So you built that second wonder all for nothing.
Oh wait, that wasn't about armies
So you built that second wonder all for nothing.
Oh wait, that wasn't about armies
timerover51
Deity
If you have more than one wonder that 'halves upgrade cost' (like one Leo's Workshop and one eh... Michaelangelo's Workshop) then those wonders don't stack.
So you built that second wonder all for nothing.
Oh wait, that wasn't about armies
No, the Wonders do not stack if they have the same bonus. If you set the Great Lighthouse and Magellan's Voyage both to give your ships a +1, and have both, you will only get the +1. If you have one set for +1 and one set for +2, you will get a +3.
If you set a second Wonder to reduce corruption like the Forbidden Palace, that Wonder cannot be built before you have at least 8 cities, and I am not sure that it really works. It does not double the effect of the Forbidden Palace.
You can have 2 or more Wonders that auto-producen the same unit, such as having Sun-Tzu's Art of War, the Military Academy, and the Pentagon all set to auto-produce Armies.
More precisely it is OCN/2, but no less than 2 in total. The value you mention is true for small maps, but for tiny it is 7, for standard 10, for big it is 14 and for huge 18.
Yes it does. The effect of secondary capitals on Nopt and thus rank corruption is cumulative. The effect on distance corruption replaces each other, depending on which capital is the closest.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=76619
timerover51
Deity
Thanks for the information on the city requirements for the Forbidden Palace. I was not aware of that. That does explain why I do not often get the Forbidden Palace on the huge+ maps that I play on.
I should have figured that another secondary capital should work, as the Secret Police HQ functions as one as well. I will have to keep that in mind. On occasion, I have set J.S Bach's Cathedral as an anti-corruption center. Then I got more creative with city improvement settings, and watched how many cities I have.
timerover51
Deity
Back to the subject of Armies. I have been experimenting a bit with Armies and Leaders in Play the World. They do work somewhat differently from Conquests, but I have not checked the Basic game as yet.
First, Armies in Play the World can finish Wonders, City Improvements, and Units, along with being converted into Wealth. You do have to check the "Finish Improvements" box in the editor however.
With respect to Leaders, if you give another unit the ability to build Armies and "Finish Improvements", and set it to Leader, it can be built by whatever civilization you wish to build it, and as a Leader, it can also finish Wonders, City Improvements, and Units, along with being converted to Wealth. I have been using the Spanish Conquistador for my experimenting, and also using them in combat. They can gain Elite status, starting out as veteran, and also generate additional Leaders. I had an Elite Conquistador, going by MacArthur (I was playing the Americans, and the built Leaders get the Leader names of the Civilization), and after defeating a Celt Spearman, generate a MacArthur Leader. Quite interesting.
With respect to the AI using Armies, the test scenario was quite enlightening. I have four buildings set to allow the building of Armies: The Heroic Epic, Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Military Academy, and the Pentagon. As near as I can tell, all three of my opponents build The Heroic Epic: the Celts, the Japanese, and the Egyptians. The Celts then actually built several Armies, and used them on me, in a couple of cases, using their Army against one of mine. I apologize for not taking screen shots, but I do have the SAV prior to major Army combat if anyone is interested. In one case, the Celts stacked their Army with additional units to hit one of my Armies. Quite an intelligent use for the AI.
First, Armies in Play the World can finish Wonders, City Improvements, and Units, along with being converted into Wealth. You do have to check the "Finish Improvements" box in the editor however.
With respect to Leaders, if you give another unit the ability to build Armies and "Finish Improvements", and set it to Leader, it can be built by whatever civilization you wish to build it, and as a Leader, it can also finish Wonders, City Improvements, and Units, along with being converted to Wealth. I have been using the Spanish Conquistador for my experimenting, and also using them in combat. They can gain Elite status, starting out as veteran, and also generate additional Leaders. I had an Elite Conquistador, going by MacArthur (I was playing the Americans, and the built Leaders get the Leader names of the Civilization), and after defeating a Celt Spearman, generate a MacArthur Leader. Quite interesting.
With respect to the AI using Armies, the test scenario was quite enlightening. I have four buildings set to allow the building of Armies: The Heroic Epic, Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Military Academy, and the Pentagon. As near as I can tell, all three of my opponents build The Heroic Epic: the Celts, the Japanese, and the Egyptians. The Celts then actually built several Armies, and used them on me, in a couple of cases, using their Army against one of mine. I apologize for not taking screen shots, but I do have the SAV prior to major Army combat if anyone is interested. In one case, the Celts stacked their Army with additional units to hit one of my Armies. Quite an intelligent use for the AI.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
The Editor will let you do almost anything you feel like doing, regardless: you could make GLs/Armies cost only 10s or less, and spew them out like Workers if you wanted to.
So while the above is all very interesting for modding purposes, it doesn't really address the point of the original post, as I understood it: the less-known properties of Armies in the unmodded base-game(s).
As I understand it, based on what I've seen happen in-game, and read about on CFC, this result is not unusual. The Vanilla/PtW AI 'knows' that it can use [M]GLs and the MilAcad to generate Armies -- and having built and loaded them, it will then send them out to fight, often specifically to attack the other players' Armies.
However, what the Vanilla/PtW AI isn't so good at, is picking which units to load into its Armies. Since Vanilla/PtW Armies are limited to the speed of the slowest unit, the human player will tend to load an Army with similar/identical units, certainly all with the same MP (e.g. all M=1 attackers OR M=1 defenders OR M=2 or 3 mounted-units) in order to magnify those units' primary utility(s), and avoid slowing down a 'Fast-Army'. Conversely, the Vanilla/PtW AI will throw 2-3 fairly random units into its Armies, possibly resulting in a usable 'all-round' Army (because low-D attackers could now be boosted by a high-D defender), but one whose combined stats often did not make it very useful for any particular purpose, except by accident (and whose fast-units would usually lose their speed/retreat advantage).
Although I've not (yet) seen this happen in-game myself, I've read one or two reports on here of Conquests players discovering single-unit AI-Armies doing guard-duty in crappy (often captured) fringe towns. So the Conquests-AI apparently does still build Armies, but it doesn't send them out into the field to fight anymore: this is presumably something to do with one or more of the buffs that Conquests-Armies received (compared to Vanilla/PtW-Armies):
- +1MP-bonus
(compared to the fastest unit in the Army) - A(/D)-value bonus based on Army-units' total A(/D)-values, divided by 6 (without MilAcad) or 4 (with MilAcad)
- Blitz-ability
- 0 MP used for pillaging
So on the rare occasion where the Conquests-AI gets an MGL, keeps it long enough to reach a town (that is not building a rushable improvement) and builds an Army, it will put a single unit in it, but no more after that. And then that Army will never be used, because it will usually be no more powerful than an 'ordinary' single-unit of a similar type -- but to the AI, any 1-unit Army (cost = 400s + unit-cost!) looks a lot more valuable than the standard single-unit, so it's (much) less likely to risk that Army in combat
Back on the subject of modding -- if removing the Army's +1MP bonus is possible in the Editor, I wonder if doing so might be enough to get the Conquests-AI to use Armies again... Has anyone ever tried it?
(OTOH, with the buffs that Conquests-Armies have, at my current playing level -- Emp and struggling -- I'm kind of glad that the AI can't use them...
)
Kirejara
King
The reason for the one-unit-armies that are sometimes observed is that the KI unable to understand the additional movement point of armies.
And if they put a Horseman or Knight into it, the army has got 3 movement points and there is no unit available to match that. If they put in a slower unit (Swordman, Mace or whatever) they do not run into the trouble of filling their army.
And it seems that they will not use partly filled armies for offensive, but simply wait for faster units became available (bad if the one unit allready have 3 movement points ).
But in defence of the KI I have observed that with Millitary Tradition they will complete a Knight/Horseman Army with Cavalry.
In a modded game the workaround could be to create "real" one-unit-armies with additional hitpoints. In my last game the KI even filled these with Cavalry after they had build the Pentagon (since these Armies are autoproduced by the Mercenary Guild every 20 turns following Currency, the Pentagon required now 5 Armies and Nationalism ).
And no, the additional movement point for Armies seems to be hardcoded.
And if they put a Horseman or Knight into it, the army has got 3 movement points and there is no unit available to match that. If they put in a slower unit (Swordman, Mace or whatever) they do not run into the trouble of filling their army.
And it seems that they will not use partly filled armies for offensive, but simply wait for faster units became available (bad if the one unit allready have 3 movement points
). But in defence of the KI I have observed that with Millitary Tradition they will complete a Knight/Horseman Army with Cavalry.
In a modded game the workaround could be to create "real" one-unit-armies with additional hitpoints. In my last game the KI even filled these with Cavalry after they had build the Pentagon (since these Armies are autoproduced by the Mercenary Guild every 20 turns following Currency, the Pentagon required now 5 Armies and Nationalism
).And no, the additional movement point for Armies seems to be hardcoded.
In fact, the Vanilla/PtW AI is quite good at it. I have "often" seen Armies filled with identical units and used quite well in PtW. (Ok, "often" is an exaggeration... Only on Deity you see AI Armies once in a while. My theory is, that this is because of two factors: a) only on Deity the AI has enough units and therefore "combat opportunities" to have a good chance of actually generating an MGL and b) in my experience the AI prefers rushing a wonder over creating an Army, so most often in the rare cases that the AI actually gets a leader, it ends up as a wonder. But on Deity the AI is quick to build wonders by hand, so the probability that a leader gets generated while at the same time there is currently no wonder to rush, is much higher than on the lower difficulty levels...)
For example, in one of my first Deity games, GOTM 71, I vividly remember seeing Ottoman Armies filled with 3 Sipahis...
I was quite glad at that time that they were fighting the Arabs and not me...I think the conclusion is right, but the premise from which you deduce it, is wrong...
Most probably the reason for why the Conquests AI is unable to handle Armies is that Firaxis did not fiddle with Army-building and -usage instructions. E.g. from PtW to C3C they changed the properties of Armies (+1 movement etc.), but "forgot" to also adjust the algorithm that selects which units to put into an Army... And consequently the poor C3C AI has a hard time finding "2-movement swordsmen" or "4-movement Cavalry"... Resulting in exactly the symptoms that you describe.Edit: crosspost with Kirejara
So by adding cavalry to an army of swordsmen the army gets 4 movement points? As i recall it this army wil still only have 2 movement points. It is the slowest unit within an army that counts.
pretty sure that's the case, or else I would've put some more defenders in my armies
Kirejara
King
I can confirm that, an army has allways the speed +1 of its slowest member.
I often sacrifice a movement point by adding a Mounted Camel Guard (4/6/2) to a Cavalry Army.
walletta
King
Off topic but I recently had two Mayan javelin thrower armies and as I play with enemy automation switched off, I got the impression from the screen alerts that, when they were under attack in AI's turn, they were producing slaves like machine gun fire. LOL
Perhaps it works like the mechanism for unit promotion: "Two consecutive wins in the same turn are a guaranteed promotion".
So perhaps in this case, two consecutive wins in the same turn are a guaranteed slave...
But what I find even more strange: why is the AI attacking your Army? Did you use it to protect a city?
So perhaps in this case, two consecutive wins in the same turn are a guaranteed slave...
But what I find even more strange: why is the AI attacking your Army? Did you use it to protect a city?
walletta
King
Perhaps it works like the mechanism for unit promotion: "Two consecutive wins in the same turn are a guaranteed promotion".
So perhaps in this case, two consecutive wins in the same turn are a guaranteed slave...
But what I find even more strange: why is the AI attacking your Army? Did you use it to protect a city?
I was using them (not 'it'
) to defend and later to attack and in both cases the AI flung horsemen at them which were unseated in droves and put to work in the slave gangs.
Kirejara
King
Something interesting for modded games.
If an Army can be upgraded to a later type of Army this can only be done at the Military Academy.
Unlike normal units they do not lost any movement points through the Upgrade.
You can fight, run into the city with Military Academy, upgrade, add a new unit (assuming the new army type is larger ) and going back into battle in a single turn.
If an Army can be upgraded to a later type of Army this can only be done at the Military Academy.
Unlike normal units they do not lost any movement points through the Upgrade.
You can fight, run into the city with Military Academy, upgrade, add a new unit (assuming the new army type is larger
) and going back into battle in a single turn.
Kirejara
King
I had a bad surprise yesterday.
It is known, that an army composed of Marines or Berserks can perform an amphibian attack.
But a mixed Army composed of Marines and Berserks is no longer amphibian.
It is known, that an army composed of Marines or Berserks can perform an amphibian attack.
But a mixed Army composed of Marines and Berserks is no longer amphibian.
