ASK The CIV TEAM 8/22/01!

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
My big problem with the 1 army/4 cities rule is, what if you want to defend a city from a rampaging army, but all your armies are out in the field, and all you have left are stacks of single units! The way I see it, an army will be able to overcome each individual defender one at a time because the defenders aren't an army.
Instead I feel that, once you have a great leader or military academy, then units defending cities should act as "de-facto" armies. This means that, if you take the units outside the city, they will revert to individual unit status, but inside the city, any attacker will be facing an army!

The attack ratings of the early units have dropped. If this remains the case for later units then I would say cities will be almost impossible to take without armies and artillery support, and any city garrisoned by one or more defensive armies will be impregnable.

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Lung
Oh, now i get it! Instead of an elite unit becoming a great leader after heroics on the battlefield like a Julius Caesar; he shags another soldier, and....hey, presto! Out pops a great leader!

Erm, wouldnt an elite unit be made up of multiple soldiers, like a hundred or so... And a leader that 'pops' out of that elite unit be made up of a single soldier??

Ive gotta admit, the way you put it was much funnier

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
My big problem with the 1 army/4 cities rule is, what if you want to defend a city from a rampaging army, but all your armies are out in the field, and all you have left are stacks of single units! The way I see it, an army will be able to overcome each individual defender one at a time because the defenders aren't an army.
Instead I feel that, once you have a great leader or military academy, then units defending cities should act as "de-facto" armies. This means that, if you take the units outside the city, they will revert to individual unit status, but inside the city, any attacker will be facing an army!


The_Aussie_Lurker.

This is a good question, especially if you have two or three enemies, and they all come with armies on you, that means that you will bite the dust for sure.

It seems to the unfair that you can have as many units as you want but you can have only so many armies, and if you dont have an army that you are doomed.

I.E. we might have a run who gets to the great leader first, assemble an army, and than go shopping , how can a single unit defeat three stacked ones? (an you can have your single units supporting it, after stack gets weak you just form a new strong one, just take weak units out and put new healthy ones in.

Example: turn 1 you have an army stack in front of enemy city.
you attack, kill the unit and lose some hit points.
Turn two do it again and lose some more.
Two units destroyed, and your army might be quite weak.
turn three - regroup. Take three weak units out, and put three new units in.
Turn four..kill another defensive unit. and so on... the defender has no chance until he can build an army as well. (remember that the defenders unit always dies since it is much weaker than the attacker and it cannot respawn to become elite and than a great leader to support a deensive army) Even better if you have two great leaders early on, and the defender has none....


That would mean that if you cannot make an army there is no reason for the enemy not to defeat you. and if you cannot control the production of great leaders, than it is just pure luck if you are going to survive or not!!!

Either that or armies are just good defensivly???

OK, I hope it is not so bad, buit I would like to hear how do armies actually work!

[star mouse]

Originally posted by Harlan
One question I have concerns Leaders. Can they live forever - could I have Hannibal still leading troops 2000 years later? If so, very strange.

I would think of the Great Leader as some kind of Lord from a prominent family in my Empire. Individual Lords die, but the family lives on. It's how I view my "leadership" in CIV, as a representative of a great and powerful family.

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by MarkG
yeah, now you'll just have to deal with endless units

I trust you *did* get the nature of my complaint? See Master of Orion 1, in which groups of units played a major role -even without 'stack benefits'.

[Tiberius]

Wow, guys, you asked so many questions that I got a headache! Poor Dan

Of course, I have my own questions, too
- Can we bribe a leader? If yes, then what happens if we already have the max. allowed number of armies?
- if an army is defeated and killed, the leader dissapears, too? Also, can we assasinate only the leader of an army (with a spy or something) ?
- can we edit the max allowed number of units/army and the max. nr of armies/civ in the rules.txt?
- I know this was asked before, but I'm very interested in this question: are the non-general great leaders (great scientist/traders/etc) in or not?

Thanks in advance for any answer, Dan (does a smiley help to get an answer? anyway, it doesn't hurt, so ...)
I Firaxis and Civ3

[The Mad Viking]

Elite units >< Civ Specific units; no link between Golden Age & Leaders.

The leader CAN appear, according to Firaxis, when an elite unit wins in battle. If its like normal to veteran, you will have to either be lucky, or have the elite unit fight close to its death in hitpoints to get a leader.

I think you guys are a going a little overboard on the value of armies.

Stacks in forts and cities defend similarly to armies already in Civ 2. You don't need to worry too much, except that you will more likely lose a unit and a pop point. An army of 3 vet riflemen attacking fortified vet riflemen behind city walls is likely as not going to be completely destroyed w/o destroying a unit. Ouch! The odds of each hit point battle still hugely favour the defender.
Armies just let you gang up on a single unit, rather than letting the defender move their best and freshest unit to the "front" as each individual unit attacks.

The big advantages of armies are
1. Defend like their a stack in a fort. You can then set up in siege and not get hurt in counterattack.
2. Will be more able to take out those fortified unit on mountains, which were previously all but impossible.

I would guess/hope that an army may attack more than once per turn, if it doesn't take too many hit point losses. Otherwise, it could be a disadvantage. For example, a 3 unit stack could make 3 attacks per game turn, (like armor) as long as the units are kicking as and not taking hits. How this will fit with armored armies, I don't know. Maybe several attacks per turn...

Interesting question about losing cities to <4.

I would think that you might not lose your leader(s), so you might be able to keep more armies in the field than cities/4. It would be a b!tch now that units aren't city supported to go back to having distant units disappear the instant a city is lost... I speculate that once you have a leader, it is like a transport.

I don't know how leaderless armies formed by a Military Academy would work- but I can see these armies breaking into simply stacked units if you lose a city below your multiple of 4.

[barefootbadass]

This is just speculation, but I doubt they would add such annoying 'feature' as armies disbanding when you lose a city. Say, if you have 8 cities and two armies, I doubt losing a city would cause one to disband. But you would still have to get up to 12 cities to be able to make a third army. Kind of like a situation where you are losing a war, and your armies have to retreat, it can become easier because you have the same numbers of armies(assuming they aren't destroyed) defending a small territory. The opposite is true for empires expanding, it can be harder to hold vaste territories, ala the Romans.

[Grumbold]

I'd agree, just to keep the customers happy if nothing else.

[Satis5d]

Here's my question.

If you lose a city that produced one of the military units that is now part of an army, does that army lose the strength of that unit?

For example: If you have an army with 3 units. Two from Washington and one from Boston and Boston falls to the Babylonians while the army is in the field, does the unit from Boston in the army get disbanded as it would in CivII or will it live beyond its city?

I think a lot of our questions will be answered when we find out how an army defends itself. If an army's defence values and movement values combine then even a 3/4 army will be extremely tough to take out.

BTW I like the idea of limited (3 or 4 unit) armies. Otherwise the single units become too insignificant.

[KrazyHorse]

Units aren't supported by individual cities any more. This was confirmed by Firaxis a couple weeks ago.

[Fiil]

I'm curious if the only benefit of Great Leaders is the ability to raise more armies.

If so I'm gonna keep any GLs protected in my cities until I have to use them (not enough cities to support more armies). This seems strange

I guess (hope) that they will give the army a bonus of some sort

And

If a GL functions as som sort of transport for the army, I suspect that armies without GLs must have another sort of transport??

[Satis5d]

Doh! Thanks KrazyHorse.

I knew that. Wow, there's so much to keep track of. The game really is going to be quite different this time around.

[RobC]

I think people are making some implicit assumptions about how great leaders and armies work without realizing it (all quotes from AskTheCivTeam, 8/22/01):

http://www.civ3.com/asktheteam_082201.cfm

Assumption #1: A civilization can have many great leaders.

I haven't seen anything official that indicates this. KH's suggestion that the max. number of armies a civ can have is equal to (# cities/4)+(# of great leaders) is plausible, but AFAIK, unconfirmed.

>To build an army, you need either a great leader or the Military Academy (Small Wonder).

This could be interprested to mean that both a great leader and the military academy have the same benefit: either allows you to start building armies, up to a max. of (# cities/4). If this is the case, then you will only ever have (and need) one great leader. This leads us to...

Assumption #2: Great leaders are units, and you load up to 3 or 4 other units onto the GL units themselves.

>To build an army, you need...a great leader...
>Great leaders can appear when an elite unit wins combat...
>Once an army is built, you can load three units onto the army, and those units will pool their hit points during an attack.

Note that this does NOT say that once GLs appear, you can load units directly onto the GL. It says that you need a GL in order to
build an army. To me, that sounds like there is an 'army' unit that acts like a transport so you can load units onto it, and those units get the combat benefits of being in an army. It does not imply to me that the GL is the same as the army unit, and in fact does not imply that the GL is even an actual unit. Maybe it just acts like a technology that allows army units to be built, so you don't have to worry about the GL itself getting killed in combat. Another reason to believe that the GL is not the same as an army unit is that the military academy (small wonder) allows you to have armies without any GLs. Now I suppose it's possible that a GL is just a special army unit that doesn't count towards the (# cities/4) limit, much like a SMAC unit with clean reactor doesn't count towards support costs, but I haven't read anything that indicated this.

Can anyone point to evidence that 1) a civ can have more than one great leader, or 2) a great leader is an actual unit instead of just something your civilization gets that allows it to start building army units without a military academy?

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I cannot find the thread, but Dan said that onec your elite unit is promoted and becomes a great leader, what happens is that the unit is still there, and and extra (unit i guess) is being created, ant that unit is the great leader.

I don't know that anyone said that you can have only one great leader. I guess they would announce either here or in the previews that you can have only one great leader if this was so.