How does garrisoning work? I see certain research bubbles that add HP to garrisons, but does this apply only if the AI attacks you instead of besieging your city, and does it only apply to the reserve units? Do you guys keep extra garrisoned units besides the reserve ones?

Your Garrisoned units get extra Life equal to the amount of "City Defense" if the city is attacked.



Placing a city under Siege reduces this each turn and if it reaches zero, will start taking health from the occupants each turn until they die.

Propbuddha wrote:
Your Garrisoned units get extra Life equal to the amount of "City Defense" if the city is attacked.



Placing a city under Siege reduces this each turn and if it reaches zero, will start taking health from the occupants each turn until they die.

So if you take your units out of garrison to attack the besieger, do your units lose that garrison bonus? A lot of times minor factions just sit there and siege your city without ever attacking.

Yes they lose the health bonus.



My understanding is that the AI only attacks when it is confident it can win. Cities with garrisons are much more difficult to attack than the current AI militia-only cities.

I don't know about anyone else, but I have seen some AI cultists defending their city with both garrisoned and non garrisoned units. So the AI sometimes will defend its cities fairly well.

Adventurer_Blitz wrote:
I don't know about anyone else, but I have seen some AI cultists defending their city with both garrisoned and non garrisoned units. So the AI sometimes will defend its cities fairly well.

I've seen healthy-sized AI garrisons too -- but the problem has been that as soon as I invade, they'll throw all nearby forces at my first stack, including nearby garrisons (even if the odds are against them), meaning they fight without the city bonus to life points, and that the previously garrisoned cities are left undefended after just one battle.



It would be understandable AI behaviour if the garrison troops joining the battle could mean a significant boost to their chances of victory, but this hasn't been the case as far as I've seen; without city defense giving them additional life, they are just too weak to make a difference. For now, I think simply restricting garrisons to actual city defense duty would be an improvement.

This thread has some nice ideas about how to improve the siege and city defense mechanic: /#/endless-legend/forum/5-general/thread/1665-city-conquest-defense-and-the-a-i.