Super Stacks

[Sarisin]

I was just thinking about how much I missed the super stacks of attackers (say that 3 times!) in FFH2. You would often see the barbs especially pile up the units and come after you. However, until my current game enemy stacks of more than 5 were a major event in my games (my stacks were bigger)

I'm trying to play (CTDs constantly, but fixes too!) a game on a huge fantasy realm map with 18 civs.

Charadon is at peace with the barbs and has the highest score - but not enough to have the barbs say he is too refined and cultured. Anyway, 3 other civs decide to declare war on him so I think this would be a good time to dogpile. Bad decision.

I have a decent, veteran army (Raiders/Adaptive) from killing lots of barbs and I quickly take two Doviello cities. I see the Doviello army approaching. Now, it's hard to tell what is in that army by just those 7 white dots. Here's what it included:

Axemen (50) - this is not a typo!
Hunters (30)
Other Axemen not included above (7)
Horsemen (13)
Adepts (3)
Beastmen (20)
Thanes of Kilmorph (4)
Rangers (7)

134 units!!!

Needless to say, Charadon took the two cities back as my guys beat a hasty retreat leaving the cities undefended. Mercifully, he accepted peace and didn't wipe me out.

Here's the thing:

Maybe I don't understand how maintenance works in the game. Charadon had here an army of 134 units. He had 33 (!) cities, each with at least 3 defenders. He had other small armies fighting the other civs. So, he must have had at least 300 units!

Still, he is showing 0 Gold, BUT 29 per turn!!!

I have 5 cities (now, after losing 2) and maybe 30-40 units and I'm fighting to stay above the red numbers at 50% Research.

Back to the stacks...

Later in the same game, here comes the Illians declaring war on me on a different border. Their stack had nearly 100 units!

What the *&$#@! is going on with FFH2??!!

Actually, these are the games I love to play. Thanks for giving us warmongers a real treat Kael and Co.!

 

[OzzyKP]

What difficulty is that?

 

[MiKa523]

High difficulty reduces military maintenance for the AI afaik.
Also the 0 Gold he is showing is just the amount he is willing to trade, not the amount he really has.

 

[Fafnir13]

I remember reading an article once where the vanilla creator/person involved with creation commented on this. According to their logic, the AI is not smart enough to do things that players do like leave city's relatively undefended. This would leave the human player with a great advantage as they could field more units out in the open being useful and conquesty. Hence, the AI is given a lot of free units to compensate. I think certain difficulty levels compensate a tad much....
Eh, at least I enjoy getting to kill good numbers of troops. Still, those massive numbers are just insane. Should the AI ever get tweaked to the point where it can more effectively use all the options available to it I think that the ridiculous freebies it get ought to be turned down.

Although, to be honest, I have not seen truly massive stacks in quite some time. Perhaps I simply haven't let peace times permeate my worlds long enough for such stacks to build up. I tend to play monarch, so that might also have an effect...

 

[[NWO]_Valis]

I had such stacks also. That is why I asked in the mod-mod forum if there would be a posibility to max out the number of units that can stack on one title. Like you could get only 3 melle units, 3 archers, 3 mounted, 2 disciples and 2 arcane + heroes. To bad no one was able to implement it :/

 

[Gelvan]

what is the fun in watching half an hour while two armies of 150 units are fighting for one tile?
I think I'll stick to Warlords/Noble difficulty. Higher difficultys seem to be boring...

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

just turn on quick combat and the fights are gonna be kinda instant. still, 150 of them would take quite a long time indeed. but at least you don't have to see the same animation over and over again.

 

[spriditis]

I had such stacks also. That is why I asked in the mod-mod forum if there would be a posibility to max out the number of units that can stack on one title. Like you could get only 3 melle units, 3 archers, 3 mounted, 2 disciples and 2 arcane + heroes. To bad no one was able to implement it :/

The Total Realism mod had a negative modifier for super stacks. The more units you had, the more severe the modifier. I'm not sure what kind of changes that would require but it's a possibility. (This kind of change is probably more useful for multiplayer rather than single player. The AI needs all the help it can get.)

 

[Sarisin]

What difficulty is that?

Yeah, that's another thing...it was only MONARCH!

I don't think anyone would call it one of the higher levels of difficulty.

To be fair, I have played many, many games of FFH2 since its inception and never seen anything like this. I've seen some big stacks (I think mostly barbs) that used to truncate there were so many units in the stack. Now, they are politely using parentheses for us.

I always use Quick Combat, but, as I said, I just retreated and left them have the cities. I am certain with that army Charadon could have easily put me out of the game, but when I offer peace he accepted.

I was actually able to survive the Illian stack as my guys were fortified on a forested hill with some strong units and I had a Grigori Medic with Crown of Brilliance (still don't know how he got that as I did not have Empyrean anywhere) that weakened them. They made a couple of stupid kamikaze-style attacks but didn't kill anything. All he had was Hunters, Horsemen and Warriors fortunately.

 

[Humakty]

I have no problem on monarch difficulty, maybe you concentrate too much on building an elite force, but ignoring the fact that you do NEED a huge army, whatever the final objective you do pursue.

It also seemed to me that the latest versions of the mod have a more competitive IA, and that it has become hard to survive playing a small civ (less than ten to fifteen cities on a large map).

Of course, you'll need several stacks of twenty units to counter ennemy invasions on all your territory, much more if you're on the offensive.(pangaea maps require awesome stacks of thirty + veterans)

 

[Soam]

I've only seen stacks like that on the highest difficulty at like turn 50. I find immortal ok to play on but the armies the next one up are too insane.

 

[Vorpal+5]

I play on Immortal level too and I often see rather big stacks (in the 100 units or so). Problem is that the AI can get stuck by an entangle and won't move any unit of the stack, even the ones who resisted. I call that a bug!

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

I play on Immortal level too and I often see rather big stacks (in the 100 units or so). Problem is that the AI can get stuck by an entangle and won't move any unit of the stack, even the ones who resisted. I call that a bug!

Hrmm I dunno, it might not necessarily be a bug. Its probably better that the stack doesn't move than risk letting a player split up a stack with a spell. IE if the archmages resist but the rest of the units don't.

 

[[NWO]_Valis]

Calling it a bug is to strong for the reasons fuzzy_bunnies mentioned but it is definitely an AI weakness. You can slow down huge amounts of units with Loki and spiting the stack in two would solve the advancement.

 

[Fafnir13]

The funny thing is that the game tries to hit you with the same trouble. Often, when moving a stack of units, any unit running out of move will cause the game to automatically select the next unit/group. Unlike the AI, we're able to go back, deselect the 0 move unit, and continue on. Of course, there are all sorts of variables to consider when leaving units behind. It would probably be quite an effort to get the AI to make intelligent decisions.

 

[Gelvan]

well, maybe I'm strange , but I really like the idea of Civ4 to have some really good veteran units (around 10) that battle each other together with some super heroes. To let the AI build 100 units is not my definition of strategy nor fun. Every hero must die in face of such a stack and if that's the way it is meant to be played, I really don't see any reason in building a hero, if I could build 50 axeman in the same time.
Nevertheless I ask you: how do you support such armies? I mean, do you have the research slider at 0% all the time? only producing units? Building not one farm other than on resources, else only cottages?

Recently I found a strategy article about early games, and the answers there have been: "build 2-3 units between each building" - well that helped. It decreased my research rate, but at least I don't have the feeling that I could be wiped out, if the AI would attack. I played with Clan of Ember and thanks to cottage spamming, my research wasn't that bad. But hey, that's FAR away from 100 unit stacks, or even several ! 20 unit stacks. I have 10 cities on a tiny world map and I can set the slider to 60% on Noble difficulty.

So are the higher difficulty levels nothing else than build army wars? what is the reason in researching better units, building beastmasters, develop mages?

I think I stay at Noble. It is fair and it is fun. But if you like it that way, do it, no problem, go for Immortal Warhammer 40000 games. I just don't understand it, really.

 

[Marchwik]

I played in Immortal level it is only one defend for big stacks attacking U.Have it doubles stack to defend and counterattack - AI is stupid,that's all

 

[[NWO]_Valis]

But we were at noble, 'those old days' Now we are after that phase and we want something more challenging.

Do not get us wrong, it is not we who have the ~100 unit stacks. We cant afford it as on higher levels you get additional inflation and such. We only fight them

I usually try to fight fire with fire and spam warriors. With bronze and upgrading every 3rd on of them I can keep up with a AI power machine....till the AI starts spaming Assassins as a counter. They kill my warriors and if I try to fight back then next turn the assassins kill my weakened veteran units. The AI is not as dumb as we give it the credit

 

[Sarisin]

I wish I had taken a screen shot of those Doviello or Illian stacks.

Not to worry, though, as here is a screen shot of a 'small' stack of about 90 Infernal units from the same game, about 150 turns later.

That's three separate civs on MONARCH difficulty. One might conclude that the AI has been fiddled with.

Maybe you can see, as some mentioned, a number of the units have been entangled (although I didn't do it).

BTW, my two Beastmasters with Blitz were able to destroy this stack, but I see another one including 4 Beasts of Agares is heading my way.

I might not be winning this game, but it is the most fun I have had in some time!

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

I wish I had taken a screen shot of those Doviello or Illian stacks.

Not to worry, though, as here is a screen shot of a 'small' stack of about 90 Infernal units from the same game, about 150 turns later.

That's three separate civs on MONARCH difficulty. One might conclude that the AI has been fiddled with.

Maybe you can see, as some mentioned, a number of the units have been entangled (although I didn't do it).

BTW, my two Beastmasters with Blitz were able to destroy this stack, but I see another one including 4 Beasts of Agares is heading my way.

I might not be winning this game, but it is the most fun I have had in some time!

Yea, they're not impossible to destroy... In my current game we ended up on one relatively narrow but long continent. My cities to the west just happened to have forest and hills around them so enemy units always ended up stopping before they could attack my cities. I was playing Elohim with Empyrean and had the 3 defenders in the city blind the stack before they could attack. A couple turns later I got my experienced units back from my eastern front and slowly whittled the enemy stack down. Mmm lots of tasty experience A couple catapults, fireballs and a stolen dwarf druid softened up the 50ish units there quite quickly.

That's what I love about this mod, I keep finding new strategies and tactics. Before I pretty much never used blind/entangle since it could be resisted and just focused on damage magic, but now I'm lovin' it.