Army size and placement?

[bdchambers79]

First off, I love the 1UPT, as I actually have to think about my unit placement now
(In fact, between 1UPT and hexes, I feel like I'm playing a table top war game).

Anyway, there are two parts to this question.

1) How large an army do you need?
In IV, I always had at least one unit per city, preferably more, not to mention my attacking hordes. Depending on the current era, I would often have stacks of 12+ units marauding the countryside, assaulting the enemy. Obviously, this doesn't work.
So far, I'm finding that many cities are fine without any units defending them, as long as I have a good road system and a mobile army that can respond quickly to threats. A few good units centrally located are able to adequately protect several nearby cities.

Not to mention, attacking takes fewer units now. I'm finding that 4-6 units (2-3 each of melee and ranged) works well for an attack group, as its hard to coordinate the movement when you have more. However, having a second wave is useful for backup.

But, once you have your army...
2) Where do you put them?
In previous games, I would go on an expansion binge, annex a bunch of cities, then turtle up and wait through a few cycles of building more troops before I launched another assault.
Now, I can't just station all my troops in my cities as I turtle up, because of the 1UPT... so, I have to keep them in the country. How do you decide a good location to station them in?

Anyone else have thoughts about adequate army size and positioning?

 

[Wulf38]

With a tech lead, you can conquer the whole world with like 5 units. I won a domination using 3 riflemen (later upgraded to infantry), one artillery, and a great general; Artillery is god against less advanced units like musketmen. I assume you need more when at tech parity, I'll have to find out once I play at a difficulty level where the AI can keep up in tech.

The new combat system makes it possible to station units on your borders with potential enemies rather than turtling in your cities. Abuse defensive terrain and zone of control. Look at this screenshot of my current game showing my border region with Askia. In order to get into my territory, he would either have to attack my units on defensive terrain, or move onto the flatlands next to them where I can attack with a bonus.

 

[WuphonsReach]

I've been thinking about this and here's how I approach things in a Large/Marathon map.

For the most part, your army's formation is going to be 2 tiles deep with your highest HP, best defense, melee range units as the front line, with ranged behind that and high mobility units behind that or interspersed with the ranged.

Great Generals give out a 25% boost to any unit within 2 tiles. Things like medics give out a boost to the surrounding tiles (radius of 1). Note that GGs are non-combat units and should always sit on a tile with a very strong defensive unit (usually a melee that doubles as a healer and stays away from combat, or a ranged unit works well too).

Here we are sitting due east of the city marked by the pale blue flower. Our melee (M) units take all the tiles directly next to the city, ready to strike once the defenses are down. Ranged (R) units sit at the edges of the formation, backed up by high-mobility (H) units like horses/calvary. The siege engines (SE) are always screened by melee/ranged, but are within striking distance. The great general (GG) sits in the middle of the lines in a place to offer bonuses to the majority of the units. Whether you stack the GG with a melee or ranged will depend on what assets you have fielded.

Slightly different line-up.

Of course, none of this takes into account terrain features which can block ranged/siege from seeing the city. But in general, your siege engines should never sit next to the city.

Melee includes both pikes and swords in my book. usually a mix of both if they are about the same strength. But if one is 2x more powerful then the other, then I'm more likely to fill my front line with the stronger units.

When attacking a city, the medic promotion is very useful to have interspersed in your lines. Otherwise you'll take a fairly nasty pounding as you roll up on a city.