Unit

Units are groups of citizens that fulfill a specific job and move together across the map. They represent a player's mobile workforce and their means of projecting power outside of cities and camps. Units are constructed in cities or camps using either recruits or wood.

Recruit-based units (legions, skirmishers, archers, etc) exist independently from the troops who compose them, and will automatically reform in their home city and maintain their experience even when all of their members are killed.

The game knows Combat Units, Naval Units and Civilian Units.

Unit Production & Selection

 * Units can be produced in cities by selecting the specific unit to create in that city.
 * The home city of a unit can be changed provided certain conditions are met. To change a unit's home city, the new city must be the same native faction and have any necessary buildings to support the unit. A unit will draw replacements from the recruit pool of its home city.
 * Units can be retrained as another unit type supported by the city keeping their XP and officers (requires retraining faction skill accessible via the skill tree).
 * Double-clicking portraits inside cities/camps selects all units of that type in the building and double-clicking ungrouped units on the map selects all visible units of that type.
 * In case of need and as long as certain requirements are met, the game also allows to recruit mercenaries.

Unit Morale
Morale determines how long a unit will fight before they drop their weapons and rout. Units with no morale cannot be ordered into combat. Unit morale is influenced by many factors, including:


 * Running out of food
 * Killing a member of an enemy unit, or having a member of their unit killed
 * Being flanked in combat
 * Insufficient pay because their faction's expenses exceed their income
 * Stances, generals and officers
 * Hostility between the unit's native and controlling factions

A unit's morale will recover automatically if they are moved into a city or camp, or when the cause of the morale loss is fixed.

Combat
See the appropriate pages for Land Combat and Naval Combat.

Capture
Capture routed enemy units as slaves which can be used in resource buildings in place of workers to produce food, wood or gold. Once the target unit is captured, the unit will continue to capture other nearby surrendered units.

Execution
Slaves, hostages and surrendered units can be killed ("executed") rather than captured. Executing units will significantly increase hostility between factions.

Forced March
Forced march allows units to travel quickly through safe territory. This ability can be unlocked by researching the forced march skill.

Scavenging
If your units are cut off from food, you can resupply directly from a food producing resource building such as a farm by holding down the right-mouse button and picking Scavenge from the context wheel. Scavenging food will damage the resource building in proportion to how much food is taken. If the building becomes too damaged it will no longer be able to support the scavengers.

Land Naval Interactions

 * Land units can attack beached ships
 * Ships and ranged land units can attack each other

Liberation
Raiders (aka Rebels) may liberate enemy slaves from resource buildings and turn them into basic combat units that will fight alongside them. While not powerful themselves, they can quickly turn a small raiding party into a major threat if you're not careful. This is historically inspired by Rome's many slave revolts.

Razing
Units can loot and burn ("raze") a foreign city to significantly reduce city stats for a lengthy period. While razing, the population will be continuously reduced and the city level will drop until it reaches the lowest level. As the city loses building slots all building upgrades will finally be destroyed.

Disbandment
Combat units may be dispanded either to save gold or to add recruits to another city. When disbanding a non-mercenary unit into a city of the unit's native faction, the unit's troops are added to the city's available recruits. However, if you disband a brigade anywhere other than one of its native cities, the unit's men will be lost rather than added to a city's recruits.

Unit stats
Units have multiple stats that determine how they fight and how much effect it has.

Description

 * Faction Groups: for which faction group the unit is available
 * Recruitment
 * Size: how large the unit is
 * Recruits Per Unit: how many recruits the unit needs
 * Days To Recruit: how long it takes to recruit this unit
 * Gold Cost: how much it costs to maintain per week
 * Close Combat
 * Melee Damage: how much damage the unit inflicts to enemies in melee combat
 * Charge
 * Charge Strength: how much of an effect the unit can generate by charging
 * Charge Blocking: how good the unit is to withstand charges
 * Ranged Combat
 * Missile Damage: how much damage the unit inflicts to enimies in ranged combat.
 * Missile Range: how far the unit can reach in ranged combat
 * Missile Resistance
 * Defense: how good the unit's defenses are in melee combat
 * Speed:
 * Walk: how quickly the unit can move on the map
 * Run: how quickly the unit can move if force march is active
 * View
 * View Distance: how far ahead the unit can spot enemies
 * Visibility Distance
 * Food Capacity per Unit

Note: missile damage is given on a brigade-wide basis, not on a per-unit basis. If a brigade consists of 40 units, then 2000 group missile damage can be inferred to be 50 missile damage per-unit.

Combat Units' Stats Comparison
Hint: The special Raider brigade types aren't actually used in the current version of the game. In Patch 3.2 "Rebellion", Longbow switched rebellion/raider things so that the brigades are spawned from a rebelling city and will actually just use the brigade types of the faction owning the city, rather than dedicated Raider brigade types.