bring back military leaders

Firaxis has really fleshed out the Great Leader concept in Civ4, but I'm confused as to why they chucked the military great leader (henceforth Great General). I like that the military great leader could be spawned from an elite unit. Since there are no elite units in Civ4, any military unit with some number of promotions (2 or 3 sound good) that wins a battle could spawn a Great General. I realize that's inconsistent with the Great People points system, which bothers me a bit, but I haven't come up with anything better.

The 4 abilities of a Great General would be:

* Accelerating the discovery of a military technology.
* Settling in a city: gives all military units built in that city an extra promotion.
* Help trigger a Golden Age
* Build a Military Academy. The Military Academy allows a city to use its production to add XP to a unit stationed in that city.

Not a bad idea; but, perhaps the designers wanted to de-emphasize military strategy, putting obstacles in front of the "pure aggressor" civilization.

My idea for spawning Great Generals, which keeps fairly consistent with the city specialization of CivIV, is to give all units a "home city" tag and keep track of how much experience units with that home city gain. Once you reach the threshold, you'd get the General. I like the idea of the Military Academy, but the promotion bonus is either redundant with the MA or easily exploitable, depending on how it's implemented. Perhaps the General's other power will be the creation of a few "super units" with all promotions?

I'm reluctant to bring back home cities. I had an idea on the way home that is sort of like you suggest. Each unit has a number of XP associated with it already, right? Then just say that when any unit gets (for example) 20 XP, it spawns a Great General. Then the bar is raised so that the next Great General comes when any unit hits 40 XP, 60 XP, etc. just like with cities and their Great People points.

I don't understand what you mean about that Military Academy being exploitable. Remember that promotions don't come at fixed intervals. The first might come at 5 XP, then at 10 XP, 20 XP, 40 XP, etc. So if you tried to build up a super powerful unit with 10 promotions, you would be sacrificing a whole city's production for potentially the whole game. The Military Academy would be much more useful for pushing units to 2 or 3 promotions. The balance could be tweaked by adjusting the promotion levels and the hammers to XP conversion rate.

I think a Great Leader giving any units all promotions would be too powerful. I think an alternative mechanism whereby a Great Leader directly gives some number of promotions to some number of units would be complex and unwieldy.

I like this idea a lot. Really, I can't see why they took out the great leader they already had to add a bunch of non-combat people. Not that I dislike what they put in- I think it's a neat idea- but military leaders have been as important as all the other kinds of great people throughout history. For that matter, a fair number of the civilization leaders are military generals.

The hardest part would be figuring out how to spawn them. I'd suggest having a civilization-wide XP pool, so whenever any unit wins a battle you get closer to a great general. It would have to decay over time; that way you'd only get one with a serious war, and not by having one battle every 4 turns for a thousand years. Obviously the threshold would go up each time you get a general.

Another possible ability of the Great General could be to give adjacent units "temporary" promotions, which could give the GG some interesting strategic uses (as well as becoming target for assassination). The type of promotion given to the units should ideally be one that the unit that spawned the Great General already had -- or perhaps preset. The "reach" of the GG's influence could perhaps even be tied to techs discovered (increased by e.g. Radio).

Khaim said:

The hardest part would be figuring out how to spawn them. I'd suggest having a civilization-wide XP pool, so whenever any unit wins a battle you get closer to a great general. It would have to decay over time; that way you'd only get one with a serious war, and not by having one battle every 4 turns for a thousand years. Obviously the threshold would go up each time you get a general.

Click to expand...

That's why I suggested it be tied to a unit because it would be more like the way other Great People are spawned, except instead of the city accumulating points, it's the unit. The threshholds get bumped the same way as with cities.

Holistic said:

Another possible ability of the Great General could be to give adjacent units "temporary" promotions, which could give the GG some interesting strategic uses (as well as becoming target for assassination).

Click to expand...

That's an interesting idea sort of like the "command center" unit I've read about in other games. I formulated this suggestion the way I did above in order to make Great Generals' abilities more like other Great People.

I was also giving some more thought to the inconsistency between the creation of Great Generals and the other Great People. Instead of making other Great People more like Great Generals, why not make a couple of the other Great People more like Great Generals. Instead of a city spawning a Great Engineer, maybe instead Great Engineers are spawned by Workers that accumulate XP, just like with military units above. Workers could also have promotions just like military units, like Road Builder or Miner. Similarly, Great Prophets could get spawned by Missionary units. Currently, Missionaries are single-use, but if they were reusable and could accumulate XP, they could spawn Great Prophets as well. I can't think of a large number of promotions for Missionaries, though; they'd all be variations on "convert people faster." Great Merchants, Great Scientists, and Great Artists I'd leave alone. I think having two types of Great Leader spawning is superior to one type with one exception.

Maybe an alternate thing that a Great General could do is upgrade all of your units to the next tech level. So dropping a Great General in a city would make all your Horsemen Knights (in Civ3 terms). It could apply to all of your units, or maybe just all of the units of a particular type.

I don't like the idea of a great general that could improve army. I just want it to be able to put in names of leaders of armies.

apatheist said:

I was also giving some more thought to the inconsistency between the creation of Great Generals and the other Great People. Instead of making other Great People more like Great Generals, why not make a couple of the other Great People more like Great Generals. Instead of a city spawning a Great Engineer, maybe instead Great Engineers are spawned by Workers that accumulate XP, just like with military units above. Workers could also have promotions just like military units, like Road Builder or Miner. Similarly, Great Prophets could get spawned by Missionary units. Currently, Missionaries are single-use, but if they were reusable and could accumulate XP, they could spawn Great Prophets as well. I can't think of a large number of promotions for Missionaries, though; they'd all be variations on "convert people faster." Great Merchants, Great Scientists, and Great Artists I'd leave alone. I think having two types of Great Leader spawning is superior to one type with one exception.

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If these promotions turn out to be as fun as I'm expecting they will be, this would be a great idea.

I thought it was strange that the original great person was a military leader and then it got dropped for CIV4 ...I think the suggestions in this thread are all excellent, and I hope Firaxis will consider adding it in an expansion. It seems like it would require too many code changes to be added in a mod.

How about keeping tract of all the damage your military units inflict. When you have inflicted enough land damage you get a Great General in your capital city. When your naval units have inflicted enough damage you get a Great Admiral.

Great Admiral hasten speed of building a Dry Dock
Great General Builds a Military Academy as a National Wonder

Great General or Admiral adds +1 to strength of each unit it is stacked with.

Holistic said:

Another possible ability of the Great General could be to give adjacent units "temporary" promotions, which could give the GG some interesting strategic uses (as well as becoming target for assassination). The type of promotion given to the units should ideally be one that the unit that spawned the Great General already had -- or perhaps preset. The "reach" of the GG's influence could perhaps even be tied to techs discovered (increased by e.g. Radio).

Click to expand...

I saw that idea a while ago and I likes it.
It could be permanent for only a few units and then consumed, I still don't know why they are eaten!
Or temporary for many.
I am not sure about the name.
Does Joan of Arc count as a leader like this?

A generating ideas is to make it so that every time a unit is built the hammer cost or strength is added to the chance of making one.
That way many small or few large are equal.

Most excellent suggestions!

CVDon said:

How about keeping tract of all the damage your military units inflict. When you have inflicted enough land damage you get a Great General in your capital city. When your naval units have inflicted enough damage you get a Great Admiral.

Great Admiral hasten speed of building a Dry Dock
Great General Builds a Military Academy as a National Wonder

Great General or Admiral adds +1 to strength of each unit it is stacked with.

Click to expand...

The idea is good, but what the leader would do is too minor to be usefull, particularly if it is just for one city, as you seem to be saying for the Great Admiral. As for the Great General, it might work as an alternate way to build the Military Acadamy, although I would think that most of the time you would be able to build it the normal way before you would use a Great General, so you might want something like where he gives a cirtain amount of experiance for a cirtain city for x number of turns when born.

I don't mean the general is part of the city, that is just where the general appears. Great Persons always appear in a city, then you move them where you want them.

Using the Great General/Admiral to build would be an option, as with any Great Person, or you could use the General/Admiral as a combat unit to boost the strength or movement or other ability of combat units the General/Admiral is stacked with.

You could also specialize your Generals by picking one when created:
Good Defender +10% when attacked
Good Attacker +10% when attacking
Good City Defender +25% when defending a city
Good City Attacker +25% when attacking a city
Hard Marcher +50% movement
Guerilla Leader +25% attack/defend in forest/jungle

something like that

hi, i just found your thread.
I am currently in the process of modding in a great general. At the moment i have just modded in the unit and given it the ability to "join" a city. I am planning to also give the city an xp bonus for all units created but cant figure out the xml on that.

The other things he can do is contribute to a golden age and hopefully create a military academy, like the scientist does. I plan to make the building allow the city to build military units faster (maybe 25%).

I did hope to try and make him spawn like 2 high xp units but cant code that in xml so thats a no go

Anyway any suggestions would be helpful. some of the stuff you are talkign about here is quite advanced in terms on programming i think so i will just stick to the simple xml stuff i think.

also check this thread if you can help me....
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=139650

thanks

oh i forgot to add that GP points for him will generated by maybe the national epic and some other buildings. I will also make his base points lower as there wont be many buildings generating points for him. I have tried modding in a General/soldier specialist but i cant seem to get it to work.

I knew there had to be a thread on this somewhere....

Sovarn, thanks for working on this. I'll keep an eye out for when you put out the first test mod.