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 *snip*
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).
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.
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
If someone at Firaxis
also tried fiddling with the Conquests AI's Army-building instructions, to encourage it to build Armies more like a human would, with matching unit-types (or at least matching M-values), that would then be enough to cock things up, I think -- because having loaded the first unit (of whatever type) into a new Army, the Conquests AI would then be unable to find any 'matching' units to add to the first one: e.g. once an AICIv has loaded a Sword (A.D.M=3.2.1) into an Army, that Army becomes a 3.2.2 Sword-unit -- but since there are no generic M=2 Sword-units buildable, that AICiv will not be able to add to its 1-Sword Army. (I guess if it also had the SoZ, it could perhaps add an ACav instead -- but only 1 of them, because that would take the Army's stats to ~4.2.3. And so on).
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...
)