MONSTER Stacks!

[duke o' york]

And that's just on Chieftain level. For each higher level, the number of missiles per turn increases at an exponential rate m^2, m^4, etc.

But I never bother with stacks. My largest will be a catapult and a legion in the early game as I prefer to take to the higher ground around cities to get the defensive bonuses rather than just pile all my troops up in a fortress. You can cut down the opponent's resources by occupying all the good squares in his territory, which is often as effective as waiting until you have a huge force in one fortress and then breaking out. I appreciate the value of landing parties directly into coastal fortresses but instead I just bombard the coastal cities with my battleships, ironclads or cruisers and then land troops directly into the city. I think that it seems a bit strange that if you attack a ground unit on the coast with marines then even if you win, the marines stay on the boat. I know that this is the same for all other combats, but in this instance you should be able to put your troops onto the land. They have just won a combat there. Any suggestions as to how I can amend the rules.txt file to change this? Just giving marines two moves would make them too powerful so it seems quite tricky to me to get this fairly balanced just because I want to be pedantic.

 

[Mercator]

Just yesterday I had a stack of 40 paratroopers, while doing my very first OCC (in Chieftain). I only managed to land my spaceship (without competition) on AC by 2085, so I decided to continue just for fun, to try and wipe out the omnipotent Greeks (with approx. 75 cities). To prevent a risky sea transport I built a huge invasion force of 40 paratroopers, dropped them all on enemy land, and captured 3 or 4 cities (yes, paratroopers aren´t all that powerfull, but much more handy than I could remember) which I then starved down.<br />I´m actually still playing, although I don´t think I´ll be continuing to the end. Trying to wipe out such a large civ, while only having one city yourself is rather tedious, especially when the only city you have is starving due to massive global warming (which I started intentionally to weaken my opponents).

 

[thealien_83]

Normally I tend to try avoid stacking units in any high numbers due to the given risks of doing so. Especially those units threatened by being wiped out together, ie not in fortresses. Occasionally when I feel in the "defensive" mood I tend to have lots and lots of "border" fortresses with a few defending units and the occasional offensive unit in them, but seldom more than some 5 units taken together. Though when I eventually go Fundamentalist ( yes yes, I do that when I've researched every tech and a good few future techs ) I tend to have huge piles of Fanatics in cities and fortresses.

But more to the point. The largest pile of troops I ever had when playing *seriously* was a row of three fortresses with about 40-50 various units in them each. It was actually somewhat of an unecessary Stalingrad situation, as I'd blitzed in the units there only to find the AI more prepared than I'd thought, and thus managed to get myself cut off when he took back the cities to the army rear. Without really thinking I agreed to a Cease Fire, thus stranding the units there. Lucky me those fortresses were there... <img src="graemlins/punch.gif" border="0" alt="[Punch]" />