Originally posted by Anndra
Hey boys, but this thread wasn't about Combat Groups?
Ooops, I suppose so. I blame Shyrramar
I'm all in favor of battle groups, anything to simplify moving many units would be welcome. Of course, just reducing the obscene number of units running around during the late game would also help streamline things.
The one thing to beware of is confusing novice players: people won't intuitively understand the difference between a battle group and an Army. For that reason, I'd rather see them be the same thing. It would work something like this:
(1) Armies are available right from the beginning of the game. They would cost nothing to build: all units would have the load command available at all times and could use it to found new armies as well as join existing ones or board ships. Probably the name of the command should change whenever no ship or existing army was present to indicate that it would found a new army. The point is, at the beginning of the game, armies are simply a device to help manage your units: basically, the battle groups that jonathan_95060 suggests. I'd let ships join themselves into Navies, as well.
(2) There is no limit on the number of armies/navies that can be built. Again, they're not something special, at first, just a means to simplify movement, so no need to limit the number of them.
(3) Armies, at first, confer no combat or movement bonuses. However, I would implement the retreat idea that we were discussing above, and, because an army is a stack of units all obeying the same command, after one unit retreated, the next in the stack would attack. This would be somewhat of a change from current armies, in which the first unit to attack
always retreats when its down to 1HP and lets the next unit move in to attack. That would occur sometimes, but other times, the first unit would get destroyed, and then the second unit would attack. This removal of the advantages of armies (at first) would be necessary since they're now free and easy to build, and would serve to make them essentially an implementation of the proposed battle groups.
(4) I
would still have a limit on the number of units in armies, probably 3 at first. I know this deviates from jonathan_95060's concept of the battle group, but I don't think it would be too terribly big a problem. For one thing, the ancient age seldom has huge numbers of units in it the way later ages do. Secondly, even if you did want to have a stack of 12 swordsmen, 4 swordsman-armies (with 3 units each) would still be easier to manage than 12 individual swordsmen, even if it wasn't as easy as a single army with 12 units in it. Since armies no longer confer an advantage at first, the initial unit limit could potentially be higher than 3, but some sort of limit is necessary because of the way armies would improve later on...
(5) Although armies would
start out conferring no advantages other than making unit management easier, as the game progressed, this would change. Various techs, Wonders/Small Wonders, and great leaders could confer advantages to armies, as well as increasing the limit on the number of units in them. For example, some early tech, like Warrior Code (or a new tech inserted later in the ancient era) could confer the advantage that units in an army were more likely to retreat when attacking (making armies a little more like Civ 3 armies because fewer of the units in them get destroyed). If a great leader appeared, you could assign him (or her?) to lead one of your armies, and that army would then get combat bonuses like in C3C. The Military Tradition tech could increase the number of units by 1, while the Military Academy could allow you to build (for a certain number of shields) "General" (or "Admiral") units that could lead an army and confer the same benefit as a great leader (basically, you'd be building modified great leaders that could only lead armies/navies, not help rush things). Pentagon could also increase the number of units, or give some other advantage. These are all just random ideas.. the point is, the value of armies (and the number of units that could join one) would increase throughout the game, so that, by the industrial/modern ages, they're much more similar to Civ 3 armies. Actually, if you had lots of armies, most of them should probably not be much better than at the beginning of the game (more units doens't really make them any better as long as they're not sharing HP, so that would be fine). Only a few of your armies (roughly the same number as there are total in Civ 3) would have the better advantages conferred by great leadership.
Like I said near the beginning of the thread: when I first heard Civ 3 would feature Armies, I was assuming (and hoping) that they would simply be a means to organize units so you didn't have to click to move or attack with each individual unit. But then, after playing Civ 3, I've come to like the way that Armies turned out to be, even though it wasn't what I was hoping for. My suggestion here would be to combine the two, rather than introduce battle groups as a separate concept. For the most part, they'd be simply organizational improvements (like the proposed battle groups) but the appearance of great leaders or the building of certain wonders would allow them to actually give some advantage.
I think I must steel myself and become the stubborn thick-head I am!
Yeah, it must be that! 
