[C3C] upgrading armies?

[revenantlast]

Hi there,
I was just wondering if anybody knows if its possible to upgrade an army unit?
Essentially i want to have a basic army unit (with transport capacity 1 and no blitz or zone of control) then upgrade it to a bigger army with blitz. Is this possible? would the city need the military academy wonder?

 

[Wolfshade]

Hey, armies cannot be upgraded once you loaded units into them.

As alternative option, you can add wonder which autoproduces, say, "General" unit. "General" can be upgraded to "a basic army" unit with no resources (like if it's an infantry company) required. Further, "a basic army" can be upgraded to "an advanced army" unit with, say, iron+oil (like it's an infantry company equiped with armored cars/personnel carriers/tanks). Such chain can include as many armies types as you want.

Cities/limitations. At least human (AI has some cheats), player won't be able to create more armies than it's allowed by cities number. I didn't try to mod it myself, but in the Worldwide once I struck the limit (by cities number) I couldn't load any units into army unit - so I had to sacrifice my knights armies vs tanks as armies cannot be upgraded.

 

[Kirejara]

Hey, armies cannot be upgraded once you loaded units into them.

This is not correct.

You can not upgrade the units in an army, but you can upgrade an army itself to a later type of army (that has to be added first of course ).

But an army can only upgraded in the city with the Military Academy.

This means that an army upgrade can only be done by a human player as the KI does not know this.

 

[Jorsalfare]

Kirejara is right. Also, if the army you upgrade to has less capacity than the army you upgraded from, the "surplus" units will be expelled (unloaded). Armies can only be upgraded in cities that have the ability to build them AND have a building that allows it's city to produce veteran units (barracks in standard CIV3). These requirements might be the reason why AI apparently are unable to upgrade armies.

Regards Sigurd

 

[Wolfhart]

Kirejara and Jorsalfare are correct, and so is Wolfshade about the number of cities placing a limit on the number of armies.
My contribution is to point out that in order to upgrade an Army unit you must also have a total number of armies that is ONE less than the limit placed by the number of cities.
For example: if it takes 3 cities to support one army and you have 12 cities you can have a total of 4 battle-created armies. But updating one of those armies is only possible if you have a total of no more than 3 armies. It seems the extra slot is needed by the game software during the upgrade!

 

[Civinator]

Well, every post here has some good points, so let´s hope this post has some good points, too.

The first point is to reflect, why many of us want armies in the game.

- It´s an unit that is much stronger than the other units of its era
- the access to this unit is strongly limited
- there is one more interesting option to use a military great leader (MGL)
- it helps the human player much more than an AI player, as the AI is not able to handle that powerful unit well

The last point also is a big point against the use of an army-unit, if you want a more demanding civ-game. That´s why my mod CCM has no armies.

I give you now a glimpse into the next version of CCM2:

In the general settings I set the 'Build-army Unit' to catapult and the cities needed to support an army to one.



The catapult is a normal unit, that cannot been built normally, as it needs a strategic resource (Gamemechanics), that is not available in the game. This unit can been built by autoproduction (as here the resource for the building is needed and not the resource of the unit) and - this is here the more interesting point - by a MGL, even when the civ has no access to that resource. It is not necessairy, that the MGL changes to that "army-unit" in a city that holds a building with the barracks-function, the transformation can be done in every city of a civ.



As you can see, the new "army unit" in CCM2 is still a weak unit (with a slightly higher defense value like a spearman and no additional hitpoints), but it can upgrade to stronger units (that have the king-flag) when the tech for those units is researched. I could have set this unit as an 'Ancient Army' unit by giving it the cummulated hitpoints of two or three units of that era and the defense and attack strength (and may be bombardment, blitz or simply any other flag allowed for C3C units), but this wouldn´t have fitted well to the concept of CCM2.

Of course this 'army'-unit can upgrade to any other unit (per example a 'Medieval Army', an 'Industrial Army' and so on) , when the perequisites for upgrading are reached (tech, resources, money), but for upgrading it needs a city with a 'barracks-building'. The best of this setting in my eyes is, that it is fully compatible with my concept of autoproduction of units. The only difference by having a catapult(-army) produced by a MGL and a catapult(-army) produced by a building is, that the 'army-unit' (here catapult) produced by a MGL doesn´t start in veteran level, while the autoproduced 'army'-unit starts in veteran level, as the building, that autoproduces that 'base-army-unit' has the barracks-flag, to assure that the autoproduced unit is always upgraded. The fact, that this unit only uses one transport slot in a ship (helicopter or plane) in my eyes is no real problem.

 

[revenantlast]

Wow thank guys, this has saved me a lot of testing!
I was planning on giving certain 'cultures' in my mod access to wonders early in the game that auto produce small flavored armies then have them upgrade bigger armies. I was also wondering if adding the king flag would make the later armies only available through upgrading, has anyone tried this?
My mod is over a small time scale, so I think its Ok that the units in the army cant upgrade, but that's defiantly something I might try in my other mod.
As for using the build-army unit as a different unit, does this mean the battle-created/build-army units dont need a leader/army flag? that could create some interesting set ups such as treasure hunting scenarios or creating a hero unit.
thanks again for all the help, it really is appreciated!

 

[Bluemofia]

Wow thank guys, this has saved me a lot of testing!
I was planning on giving certain 'cultures' in my mod access to wonders early in the game that auto produce small flavored armies then have them upgrade bigger armies. I was also wondering if adding the king flag would make the later armies only available through upgrading, has anyone tried this?
My mod is over a small time scale, so I think its Ok that the units in the army cant upgrade, but that's defiantly something I might try in my other mod.
As for using the build-army unit as a different unit, does this mean the battle-created/build-army units dont need a leader/army flag? that could create some interesting set ups such as treasure hunting scenarios or creating a hero unit.
thanks again for all the help, it really is appreciated!

1. Yes, any unit with the "King" flag cannot be built normally. One of the more interesting uses (to me at least) is to use it to build (via city production or auto-production) "Battleship Hull" then upgrade it to full "Battleship" as a limiting factor to encourage diversity of ships. They will also be at the bottom of the stack, so you will need to kill the screening elements first (non-king units) before reaching the King unit with the exception of stealth attack.

2. That is correct, the build-army or the battle-created unit is not limited to requiring leader/army flag. However, the battle-created unit cannot be built normally, as if it was another king unit, so you can't think of it as a rare way to receive common units as reinforcements. In the Kardashev 3 mod (in progress) leaders can build (commission) "Flagship Hulls" which upgrade to "Flagship" king units, and armies (Task Forces) are separate units entirely, only build-able at the Military Academy equivalent.