Armies
Armies represent your faction's mobilised military force. Each army is built from a defined troop composition, consumes resources and equipment to function, and has an organisation level that reflects how ready it is to fight.
An empire can field a number of armies equal to 3, plus 1 for every 2 settlements it controls.
Composition
An army is made up of units drawn from several troop categories:
- Infantry
- Heavy Infantry
- Marksmen (ranged)
- Cavalry
- Heavy Cavalry
- Siege Engines
- Engineers
(Garrison troops are a separate category used to defend settlements only, and cannot be recruited into a field army. See Troop Types for the full roster of unit types, their stats, and equipment usage.)
Each faction also has a preferred troop type and a target percentage it wants that type to make up of the army's total troops. Keeping your composition close to this target grants an Army Composition Bonus (ACB) of up to +20% to Melee Value (MV), Ranged Value (RV), and Armour Value (AV) — representing the army fighting in the faction's trained style. The bonus does not apply to Shock Value (SV) or Resolve (RSV); these are treated as intrinsic to the troop type rather than something improved by formation discipline.
The closer your composition sits to the faction's target percentage, the higher the bonus, peaking exactly at the target. Move too far away in either direction and the bonus tapers off to nothing (an ACB of 1.0). For example, a faction favouring Infantry at a 70% target gains a bonus across roughly the 56–84% range, with the maximum +20% sitting at 70% itself. Armies belonging to neutral (non-faction) forces always have an ACB of 1.0.
Each faction has a set of default composition templates, offering different mixes of these unit types to choose from when raising or reinforcing an army. A composition heavy on cavalry behaves very differently in the field to one built around siege engines and heavy infantry, so the choice shapes what the army is actually good at.
Movement
An army's movement speed is set by its slowest troop type — mixing fast cavalry with slow siege engines means the whole army moves at siege-engine pace. Terrain, Province Development Level, rivers, and sea travel all affect how costly each step is.
See Movement for the full breakdown of movement point costs, terrain values, and how armies embark and disembark for sea travel.
Organisation
Organisation reflects how prepared an army is to fight. It ranges from 0 (routed) to 100 (fully prepared), stored internally as a decimal but always shown to the player as a whole number.
Different activities cap how high organisation can climb, and how quickly it regains:
| Activity | Maximum Organisation | Regain Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Resting | 100 | +4 per cycle (+2 additional with 100+ Engineers and the Fortified Camp trait) |
| Moving | 80 | +1 per cycle |
| Executing a project | 20 | +1 per cycle (some projects, such as Garrison, set their own higher cap) |
| In combat | varies by round | none regained while fighting |
If organisation reaches 0, the army routs: it loses a significant portion of its equipment and is forced to retreat to an adjacent hex, unable to fight again until it recovers. See Combat System for how organisation drains during a battle.
Combat Readiness
Combat Readiness (CR) is how effective an army actually performs in combat, and is calculated from two values:
Combat Readiness = Organisation × Equipment Level
Where Equipment Level is the army's current support equipment stock as a percentage of its maximum capacity. A worn-down, poorly supplied army fights far below its paper strength even with full organisation.
The minimum Combat Readiness any army can fall to is 10% — even a routed, exhausted force still has small clusters of troops who fight back when attacked. Garrisons defending a settlement always fight at maximum Combat Readiness.
Army Experience
How experienced an army is has a significant impact on its combat performance. Each troop type has a training value reflecting how much training it takes to reach full experience — Basic Infantry needs less than Cavalry, for instance. An army's experience percentage is its accumulated experience points divided by the combined training value of everything in it, which means recruiting fresh troops into a veteran army dilutes its experience, since the points stay the same while the total training requirement grows.
There are five experience levels:
| Level | Experience | Combat Efficiency |
|---|---|---|
| Recruit | Below 20% | −20% |
| Trained | 20–39% | No effect |
| Experienced | 40–49% | +10% |
| Veteran | 50–89% | +25% |
| Elite | 90%+ | +35% |
Gaining experience:
- Issuing the Exercise project trains an army automatically, but caps out at 45% experience (Experienced level) — reaching that ceiling stops the training project on its own.
- Combat itself also grants experience: an army gains 0.4% per cycle spent fighting.
- Losses work against you here too — if an army loses 10% of its troops in a battle, it also loses 10% of its accumulated experience points.
- For an army to gain experience from combat, it must either win, or lose without taking any casualties at all.
- Garrisons defending a settlement are always treated as Trained, regardless of actual experience earned.
Note: this system tracks how battle-ready an army currently is, and is separate from Military Tradition's Battle Honours progression, which permanently customises individual troop types over the lifetime of the empire. The two happen to share some level names (Veteran, Elite), but measure different things — don't confuse a Veteran army with a Veteran-tier troop slot.
Grain Supply
An army's Combat Readiness is further modified by how well-fed it is. Armies draw grain to feed their troops, and a shortfall reduces effectiveness on top of the organisation/equipment calculation above:
| Grain Supply | Status | Combat Readiness Modifier |
|---|---|---|
| 100%+ | Abundant | ×1.00 (no effect) |
| 75–99% | Normal | ×1.00 (no effect) |
| 50–74% | Shortage | ×0.95 |
| 25–49% | Severe shortage | ×0.90 |
| 0–24% | Famine | ×0.80 |
This means an army that outruns its supply lines doesn't just risk starvation — it becomes measurably less effective the moment battle starts, on top of whatever its organisation and equipment level already cost it.
Army Strategy
Before entering combat, an army adopts a strategy — a tactical posture that modifies its combat stats for that battle. Some strategies favour raw physical power, others favour holding the line or breaking enemy morale, and most carry their own requirements before they can be selected (troop composition, experience level, or specific technologies).
Every newly raised army defaults to Rush Enemy, while city garrisons always fight under the automatic Garrison strategy. Beyond that, the right choice depends on your army's composition and what you're facing — a cavalry-heavy force charging into a defensive Phalanx is a very different fight to the same charge against a Skirmish line.
See Combat Strategies for the full list of strategies, their requirements, and exactly how each one modifies your stats.
Equipment Stock
Armies continuously consume support equipment whenever they move, train, or work on a project, regardless of whether the empire is at war or at peace. Equipment is replenished monthly from the empire's shared reserve. See Global Equipment Stock for how this reserve works and how it's shared between multiple armies when supply runs short.
Disbanding an Army
Standing down an army isn't simply deleting it — a disbanded army's people and equipment go somewhere, and how much of each depends on where and how the disbanding happens.
How to disband: set an army's wanted troop numbers to 0 for every troop type. There's no separate "disband" button — reducing every wanted troop count to zero is itself the disband order, and the army stands down once its actual troops fall to match.
Population: 35% of a disbanded army's troops return as citizens to the settlement it disbands in. This figure is deliberately below the 0.5-citizen recruitment cost covered on Population Growth — if disbanding returned population at a higher rate than recruiting consumed it, raising and disbanding armies repeatedly would manufacture population from nothing.
Equipment: returned to the Global Equipment Stock in full — 100% — including Support Equipment, Armour, Melee Weapons, and Ranged Weapons, provided the army disbands at peace. An army disbanded while actively engaged in combat instead returns only 25% of its equipment — the chaos of standing down mid-fight costs far more than an orderly stand-down does. The population return figure (35%) stays the same either way; only equipment recovery is affected by combat status.
Manpower is not touched by disbanding at all. A stood-down soldier becomes a citizen directly, the same way any other population growth works — it doesn't pass back through the manpower resource in the Global Equipment Stock first. These are two entirely separate paths: recruiting draws citizens into manpower, and disbanding returns troops directly to the citizen population, without ever touching the manpower figure in between.
