Armies

Armies are an essential gameplay mechanic in Age of Civilizations 2 and its predecessor. Armies are numbers that will appear on each province, representing how many armies there areies are numbers that will appear on each province, representing how many armies there are. Armies can be recruited for five times the amount of army units being recruited, unless the player has built an armory in the province, which halved the cost and will appear next turn and cost Movement Points. Armies can also be conscripted, which doubles the cost but makes them immediately available for action, or disbanded, which both cost movement points. Armies cost [insert number] gold per turn. When the player is at war with another civilization, a battle interface will be displayed when armies meet in the same province. Each province has a defense bonus, and the army with the better odds will win and the opposing army will be destroyed, unless circumstances destroy both armies.

Military upkeep, or the price per turn to maintain your armies, can be lowered in a few ways. One of them, the easiest of them all, is to disband any unnecessary armies. Another idea is to group small groups of soldiers together in one province rather than multiple provinces, to lower the burden on an unnecessarily large number of provinces (suggested is the capitol or border). The third one is to make sure provinces holding soldiers are well developed, which lowers costs. Try to build supply camps and fortresses in provinces with a permanent soldier presence; they lower costs dramatically, no joke. And finally, try not to move soldiers around too much. With each turn in a province, defense points increase (a red shield on the corner of a province tab). Defense points will peak at 50 points (at 50 turns). Defense points increase defensive power (which lowers casualties if the province gets attacked) and maintenance costs. Then you can use technology points to lower soldier upkeep.

You can see how many possible soldiers you can get in the recruitable population map mode. You can recruit somewhere between 1/10th and 1/5th of your population. The population decreases when you hire soldiers, and vice versa when you disband them. A preferable number of soldiers is 10 for every 100 people. Once you can afford major military recruitment, try to ramp up all bordering soldiers to $10,000 each (not too hard, plus it guarantees no small nation is going to get through). If you have allies, you could even put soldiers on the alliance border to defend you and your allies.

Strategies and Tips

* Two armies with about the same number of troops will likely cause a defender victory.
* AI players tend to split their armies until there are a few hundred troops, and sometimes under 100 troops, to conquer territory. The best way to counter this is to get armies with a few thousand troops (2000–10,000, depending on the amount of enemy forces) and steamroll them.
* Before hitting "next turn," make sure to check your armies to see if they are all making the correct movement.
* Place armies at the border to defend better against attacks.
* Before declaring war, mount troops on your enemy's and their allies' borders for a quick offensive.
* There are 2 buttons to move armies: 'Move to' and 'Move'. Use 'Move to' to automatically find a route to the target province (note that the route might not be desirable for use).
* When defending provinces that don't have castles or fortresses, it is recommended to hold out on whatever border you're defending until you have the aforementioned buildings set up. This can ensure that, with troops, you can stay protected.
* Disband armies you don't need to lower army costs.
* Provinces with armies in them will have greater stability without assimilation.
* If you want to make the enemy nation suffer after a non-annexation war, you could plunder all of their provinces to scraps, resulting in a very dead population and a horribly broke economy. Stabilization would also go down. If you want to take it to another level, you could destroy any province's buildings (press more on an occupied province and press the X that is located next to the building). You guarantee that the nation will be broke and won't be that big of a threat for a long while.
* When battling an enemy too big or a war you don't want to fight, as long as they aren't in your direct borders, you can sign peace with them immediately. This doesn't work sometimes, so you could pay 1 gold to your neighbors to attack with you. They will agree no matter what (glitch feature).
* The Capitol Army is what you must always be ready for. You must expect a minimum of 2–3 groups of border soldiers to be at the capitol (or coming from the capitol).
* Use conscripts as a last resort. They are expensive.
* If you are in another nation's province, if they are at war, and the province your soldiers are in gets occupied by enemy forces, you will immediately be at war.
* War weariness must always be considered. You may like going on a world conquest for 100+ years, but your citizens will lose favor with the war, be lower in happiness, lose stability, and civil wars and rebellions will happen. Try to keep war weariness below 60%.
* Employing soldiers lowers unemployment.
* You have to get 100% stability to be able to hire the maximum number of soldiers possible for a province.
* In case you lose a war, you can go into the peace negotiations tab and tap on enemy-claimed territories until they are yours or neutral.
* If you want to make the game 10 times harder, you can change the difficulty to legendary, and something that many people don't know is that you can completely remove military upkeep from the game, so you can build infinite armies with enough money, population, and preparations! The game gets more realistic this way, as now puppets can actually help by building a huge army while you are focusing on the economy, and this also makes you strategically think and be much more diplomatic, as now you need to run away from any unnecessary war, as it could eat away your huge army with a small nation, and then you can get a coalition against you and immediately die.