Leaders & armies

[shinoui]

Hi Civfans, I've problems with leaders (how to get them), with stacking the units to form an army and to use the Unit order J : "go to (whole stack)" .
Can somebody give a clue to solve that?
Civ III is definetaly a good stuff.
Shinoui

 

[MadScot]

To get a leader you need a successful attack with an Elite unit; you should get a leader one time in 16, or one time in 12 if you build the Herioc Epic (but you need a victorious army for that, so you need to get your first leader with the 1:16 odds). Which means you have to FIGHT!

You can't get a leader attacking barbarians.
You can't get a leader from an attack by an army.
You can't get a leader from an elite if it has already produced one
(which means you have to remember which elites have already produced leaders; there is no way to tell at the moment. Personally, I keep 'old' elites around just to help get leaders, then as soon as (if!) they do, I upgrade them: elites upgrade to veterans. NB if they later become elites again, you CAN get a leader again. Upgrading effectively wipes the slate clean for that unit)
And you can only have one Great Leader at one time. So use him quickly in most cases...

To form an army you need either a leader or the Military Academy.

With a leader, he should run (not walk!) to the nearest convenient city and then you will get two options at the bottom of the screen. One is 'build army'. Click that and he vanishes and becomes an army.

With the MA, you just build an army like any other unit.

To load units into an army, think of it like a ship. When the unit is in the same tile as the army AND has movement left, you can use the Load command.

Note: You can't Unload from an army; you can't upgrade the units in an army; an army moves at the pace of the slowest unit, so generally keep all the same unit (or at least speed) in an army.

General advice seems to be, use the first GL to build an army, which then tries to get a victory so you can build Herioc Epic and Military Academy ASAP. Build your other armies from scratch and use GLs for rushing wonders (their other role) UNLESS you have a lot of battles coming up and reasonably expect another GL, in which case use the first one for an army or an ordinary city improvement. This advice also applies if there are no good wonders etc in the near future.

If you search for Great Leaders or GLs on the forums you'll find a fair bit of discussion about them. The 1:16 odds can be daunting - I've gone whole games without ever getting one. But I have had 5 (so far) in my current game with only one major war . So they do appear eventually.

Edited for poor spelling!

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

shinoui: Welcome to the Forum! Please have a looka t the FAQ thread (amongst the sticky threads on page one), it contains a lot of information for newbies and a link to sumthinelses thread on leaders.

 

[BCLG100]

yeh i just had about 6 leaders in one turn with the heroic epic which allows bettr odds 1:12 and i was miitristic which meant i had more elites

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

the lcuk factor is extremely high here (see sumthinleses thread)

 

[thomson_2001]

Hey BCLG100 I take it you used up each of the 6 leaders straight away before the next one came along cos Im pretty sure you can only have 1 at a time.

 

[BCLG100]

oh yeah course couldnt think of anythin better to do with them so i built armies also it was in the modern age so i had already built the FP

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

yeah you get to the poiunt where you have all wonders and you can't really do anything wiht the guys... In DS2 we used leaders to rush Temples (!) in conquered cities

 

[Park Ranger]

Leaders building temples! What has the world come to?

In industrial/modern eras I have also had sufficiently large militaries and enough battles that I was getting leaders every few turns! One game I founded a city near coal & iron and used leaders to build: factory, iron works, mass transit, recycling center, and something else I don't remember. In the end it didn't seem worth it I just had a massively corrupt and polluting city when I could've had another 4-5 armies...

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

well we had armies galore, smothered everyone already, so what the hell. After all, we had 1300 Mod Armour and Mech inf....

 

[D9phoenix]

Yeah that was a fun game, brought a whole new meaning to the phrase "world domination"

In the end we had too many armies

 

[shinoui]

Thanks a lot MadScot, I'll try everything you explain, but what about that darn "j" supposedly Goto (whole stack) sometimes working sometimes not. I'm using the 121f patch, the command is described in the Julian Egelstaff file which otherwise looks fine.

Shinoui

 

[BCLG100]

it only works if its the same unit and has the same amount of movement points left

 

[shinoui]

hum weird isn'it? I'll try it

 

[Beard Rinker]

Originally posted by MadScot
To get a leader you need a successful attack with an Elite unit; you should get a leader one time in 16, or one time in 12 if you build the Herioc Epic (but you need a victorious army for that, so you need to get your first leader with the 1:16 odds). Which means you have to FIGHT!

You can't get a leader attacking barbarians.
You can't get a leader from an attack by an army.
You can't get a leader from an elite if it has already produced one

Not so sure about the last few MadScott. I'm quite sure you can get a leader from an attack by an army. I also think an elite unit can produce more than one leader.

You also cannot get a leader if you already have one so use up your leader as quick as possible.

Your odds of getting a leader are also 1:12 if you are playing as a militaristic civ. When playing as a militaristic civ I'm not sure that the Heroic Epic improves your odds. My guess is no, but that's just a guess.

 

[sumthinelse]

Originally posted by Beard Rinker


Not so sure about the last few MadScott. I'm quite sure you can get a leader from an attack by an army. I also think an elite unit can produce more than one leader.

You also cannot get a leader if you already have one so use up your leader as quick as possible.

Your odds of getting a leader are also 1:12 if you are playing as a militaristic civ. When playing as a militaristic civ I'm not sure that the Heroic Epic improves your odds. My guess is no, but that's just a guess.

If you can produce a leader with an army in patch 1.21f it's a bug. Please post a saved game here if you can. An elite unit can produce only one leader unless you upgrade it and it gets promoted to elite again as the new unit type. The correct odds are in

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24371