Leaders useless?

[Rydbeck]

I cannot understand people saying leaders are so effective, good etc. Sure, they are great to rush wonders, thats really great.

But building armys? So far Iam dissapointed how they perform on the battlefield.
The use of 3 or 4 units stacked together in one makes you loose the flexibility. For example, say you are attacked by 4 single tanks and you have 4 tanks yourself. With an army you can get 1 maybe 2 of the enemy tanks, but with 4 single tanks you can destroy all 4 enemy tanks.
They also take a hell of a time to heal completely even if you have barracks.

I think there is a real waste using 3 or 4 units to build a army, just making it slow and unflexible.

What do you think about the army? Some suggestions?

 

[David In Asia]

i can't comment on armies, as i never even had one, but i do think that even without the army capability, a leader can be worth it's weight in gold. hole them up in city, wait for that advance which gives you the wonder you want, and bam!! instant wonder. great stuff.

 

[No.Dice]

I never consider building an army until i've used a leader on my FP, or the sistine chapel. If i could load/unload units, and upgrade the units in the army, that may make them marginally useful. The recently added blitz ability of the earlier mobile units earns them some respect, but not enough to warrant throwing away 3 units.

The heroic epic doesn't increase your chances of spawning a leader enough to insure one shortly after its constructed, so i don't understand the army first mindset a lot of players have. I find myself building it for the culture if i'm far between useful wonders.

I find the wonder-rush choices of some players a bit surprising as well. Sun Tzu's over the FP or Sistine Chapel? Are barracks really that hard to come by, and that expensive to rush?

 

[alpha wolf 64]

I like armies after I get to at least chivalry. A 3-knight army is hard to beat if you have more units with it. i use the army to beat the strongest defender then finish off the remainder of the defenders with my indivdual units. plus if the AI counterattacks, the army will be the first line of defense.

 

[Woody]

The use of 3 or 4 units stacked together in one makes you loose the flexibility. For example, say you are attacked by 4 single tanks and you have 4 tanks yourself. With an army you can get 1 maybe 2 of the enemy tanks, but with 4 single tanks you can destroy all 4 enemy tanks.

Do not ever use armies for picking off units, armies are to crack the first defender in the enemies large cities. I use my first leader to make an army about 95% of the time, I make sure it wins its first battle then you can build the heroic epic and later the military academy. After my first leader I use leaders to rush wonders and never get another army until the mil academy and then I build them myself. Once you get your first few armies built you can build the pentagon then your really have a powerfull tool at your disposale. I love using 4 unit armies of modern armor, they take out that elite mech inf fortified in the size 30 city on a hill across the river 90% of the time.

 

[No.Dice]

Probably a silly question , but how do these situations differ from throwing 3-4 seperate units at a defender? The blitz ability the mobile units recieve? If you recieved an unlucky roll, isn't there a possibility of losing the entire army, instead of losing just a single unit if you chose to attack seperatly? Or does the game treat it like a new battle once one unit in the army is defeated?

I'm not going to pretend i know exactly how the combat results are determined, its very possible i skewered the definition.

I just can't imagine how an army would be more beneficial than sistines or an early FP. Or most of the wonders for that matter.

 

[Zouave]

Not having important MILITARY leaders is another major fault with the game.

Yes, armies are not worth making. What we need is a great combat leader, such as Alexander, Hannibal, etc, who can do such as supply a combat bonus to all units in a stack.

Better yet, the game could use STACK combat, instead of individual unit battles.

 

[alpha wolf 64]

no dice, the way the army works is that the first unit attacks until it has 1 hp left, then the next one attacks, and so on. You can lose any units in the army until every unit in that army is done to 1 hp. I use the same strategy as Woody. By using that first leader to get an army, you can then can an army victory which allows you to build the heroes epic which increases your odds of another leader. its kinda of a gamble but the AI always seems to be picking wars with me so i get tons of elite battles later on, so I usually have a leader to rush build the important wonders. Sometimes not tho, but thats ok, there's no single wonder that can completely turn a game.

 

[alpha wolf 64]

btw, i totally agree that stacked combat would have been a superior form of simple combat. Or failing that, give a 25-50% attack bonus if a unit attacks from a tile that contains a great leader, which I would think is fairly easy to implement.

 

[No.Dice]

I meant when the next unit attacks is it treated as the same battle or a new one? The combat rounds are rather stringy, when one unit scores a hit, theres usually several more in succession instead of a "trading blows" kind of situation. An unlucky roll could see your entire army destroyed, where as attacking separately would see just one unit destroyed and the whole horrible ordeal is done with.

Blah, can't quite find the right words, and its too late to page back through all of those combat test threads. Maybe i'll be able to better say what i mean in the morning.

 

[damunzy]

Stack combat with no bonuses would be fine by me. I would love to just throw all my units at a city and walk away fro a few minutes, get a drink, come back and see what damamge I caused. I cannot fathom using 200 units in a battle without it. (never had to since I never play bigger than a Standard sized map)

 

[Kilroy]

Originally posted by No.Dice
Probably a silly question , but how do these situations differ from throwing 3-4 seperate units at a defender? The blitz ability the mobile units recieve?

In the case of tanks it's not even that. I never put tanks in armies - what a waste. My pre-industrial armies usually consist of either swordsman or knights, and are completely homogeneous. Once I get nationalism though, I my armies consist almost exclusively of riflemen and their derivatives. EXCELLENT for holding important cities during difficult wars, because it's more difficult for the enemy to break them down. Also good for protecting artillery.

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by No.Dice
I meant when the next unit attacks is it treated as the same battle or a new one? The combat rounds are rather stringy, when one unit scores a hit, theres usually several more in succession instead of a "trading blows" kind of situation.

This is actually not true. A good random generator (i.e. one that closely simulates real random numbers) is a lot more stringy than humans would expect them to be. And since we tend to notice the weird results and forget all the normal between, the result is some kind of "superstition" like you express.

An unlucky roll could see your entire army destroyed, where as attacking separately would see just one unit destroyed and the whole horrible ordeal is done with.

The chance of seing the army destroyed isn't higher than the chance of getting all three individual units destroyed.

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

there`s many a good use for armies, see (amongst amny others) here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13332

 

[Sanaz]

Originally posted by No.Dice
Probably a silly question , but how do these situations differ from throwing 3-4 seperate units at a defender? The blitz ability the mobile units recieve? If you recieved an unlucky roll, isn't there a possibility of losing the entire army, instead of losing just a single unit if you chose to attack seperatly? Or does the game treat it like a new battle once one unit in the army is defeated?

I'm not going to pretend i know exactly how the combat results are determined, its very possible i skewered the definition.

I just can't imagine how an army would be more beneficial than sistines or an early FP. Or most of the wonders for that matter.

It depends a lot on playing style, I'm sure. I've never had it timed where I could rush the FP with my first leader, but that would definitely be the one situation where I would rush instead of build an army. I always try to build an early army and the heroic epic - any improvement for the chance of more GLs is useful. After the first army, all other leaders are used to rush wonders.

Having an army to break down the first defender is important in my strategy - the strongest defender may kill off 2-3 individual attackers, then rest and heal before the next turn. With an army, you can destroy the strongest, and your odds of winning the next 2-3 battles improves greatly. Without an army, your first 2-3 units may just be killed and not wounded. In the later ages, I like to have 4-5 armies of cavalry, tanks, or modern armor (depending on timing of wars). This, along with bombardment from ships or artillery, is usually enough to take over several cities in a turn against a well defended enemy. I very rarely have an army killed in battle, unless it's from a previous era and it's too weak to survive.

 

[alpha wolf 64]

The best part of the army is that all 3 army units attack the same defender. thus if an elite spearman and a regular spearman is defending, its possible that just when you are about to kill the elite, your next attack is instead directed against the regular. thus the elite will survive til next turn and ready to kill more tanks

 

[No.Dice]

I can see the merit in a defensive army for guarding a choke point, and to a lesser extent artillery, the AI is definetly afraid of them.

I also wasn't aware you could spawn leaders from elites in armies.

Another somewhat obscure question , when garrisoned in a recently captured city to deter city flips, are all of the units taken into account? Would fortifying a three unit army in a city be the equivalent of fortifying three units there, more? I'd be surprised if resisting citizens with pitchforks could turn back my entire army, and make it vanish into thin air, but stranger things have happened.

It does very much depend on playing style. If i fight an early war, i'll try to time it to end in the early middle ages, and definetly before musketmen. Now, things rarely go as planned, but its nice to be doubling my opponents production with that early FP, or not investing any money in luxury taxes, to give that edge against the more stubborn defenders. Quantity over quality, the AI seems to think so anyway.