Army mysteriously vanished

**Amaris** · 06-07-2008, 07:38

Hi,

In my current game as SPQR Epirus conquered the whole balkan peninsula, and after I took Segesta from the Eleutheroi Epirus went to war with me.
I had two almost full stack armies in the Segesta region and one of them was attacked and outnumbered by an epirote full stack army. I saved before the battle and in the end won a heroic victory (my first famous battle in the current game). After saving the game again this army was attacked by another epirote acie and I decided to retreat now. Doing this I could hear my general scream and my legion vanished!
Well....I would have reloaded then, but my other legion in the segesta region was also attacked now and it was quite a violent battle which was hard to win. I didn't want to fight it again, so I didn't reload and abandoned the legion which had won before such a glorious victory. Afterwards I could read that it's general had fallen in battle.

What happened ?
I thought I had retreated !

Why was my army automatically destroyed ???
If the epirotes pursuited my legion and attacked it again, why wasn't I given the chance to fight manually ?

Greetings,
Amaris

**Nobo** · 06-07-2008, 08:54

if your general had that little "fight or die" symbol by his image, then the entire army will be destroyed if you loose. And the computer sees a retreat as a loss, i think

**Amaris** · 06-07-2008, 09:47

Originally Posted by Nobo

if your general had that little "fight or die" symbol by his image, then the entire army will be destroyed if you loose. And the computer sees a retreat as a loss, i think

No, that can't be it. If an army has this symbol, it means that no further retreat is possible - the army must win or die. In this case the retreat-symbol is inactive. But in my case it was possible to fall back.

**Cambyses** · 06-07-2008, 12:59

Are you sure you didnt accidently click on auto-resolve?

Otherwise this is a very weird situation

**Maion Maroneios** · 06-07-2008, 13:05

I this is something like a bug. I've had it once or two with a standard army (non FM lead) but there are more threads like this from others, IIRC.

**Amaris** · 06-07-2008, 16:56

Originally Posted by Cambyses

Are you sure you didnt accidently click on auto-resolve?

Well, when I read your answer I almost would have wrote "No, I'm not sure - this could be simply it.", but on second thought....I should have seen the table with the battle statistics, telling me "Clear defeat" or such thing and my losses. But there weren't one, that I know for sure. I only could hear my general scream.
Therefore I don't think that I accidently auto-resolved the battle.

**glouch** · 06-07-2008, 17:27

i think in your case, what happened was although there was an option to retreat, and the general did indeed have enough movement points, your army didn't have anywhere to go except a very small patch of green (showing how far the army can go), hence they were annihilated.

this has happened to me numerous times, and i've actually managed to do it to the AI also.

i think it might have something to do with tiles. my theory is that if the green movement zone is so small that it only occupies only one tile, and that one tile leads to nowhere (for example, your army is located in small peninsula with the enemy army blocking the way out and there are no friendly ships to escape to), what happens is that the gets annihilated anyway.

that's just my theory though.

**Irishmafia2020** · 06-08-2008, 00:37

To back up Glouch's statement, there is indeed a well known bug in which if a character(usually a diplomat/spy etc) is surrounded and cannot move, then if you move a unit into their location, then they will die. This is also true of armies or units, although usually this would not occur, as the position must be occupied by battle. If this happens, you hear a scream, and the character disappears. I occasionally use this "cheat" to assassinate annoying enemy characters (I roleplay a sweep of the countryside or something). Glouch must be correct in ascertaining that the game believed this scenario to have occurred for your army when you retreated. Unfortunately, the entire army is destroyed in this event... Basically this is a bug that you can use to your advantage, but this time it hurt you!

**mcantu** · 06-08-2008, 01:12

This just happened to me in a Lusitanian campaign. I was seiging a city and retreated when a stack of reinforcements showed up (i was not surrounded though). My entire stack disappeared and i got a message that my FM's had been killed...

**Amaris** · 06-08-2008, 07:43

Okay, thanks for the explanation. I'll watch out that this never happens again. It can screw up a strategy quite a bit if a whole full stack army simply ceases to exist.

**artaxerxes** · 06-08-2008, 11:59

I tried landing an army in Arabia, hoping to take out Saba before they started expanding (was earlier days). An eleutheroi attacked me, and since I wanted to save my troops for Saba, I retreated. Next turn they were all gone, with heroic death message for the FM... and there was plenty of room to go, but think they may have lacked movement points

**Lusitani** · 06-08-2008, 16:12

I had the same problem happening to me a few times also, they just dissapeared when oredered to withdraw.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=103828

**artaxerxes** · 06-09-2008, 21:16

It has happened thrice to me (so my plan of kicking out Saba when they're young seems to be somewhat a failure

) - all 3 times because 1) they were in a foreign province (eleutheroi all 3 times if that matters) and 2) they withdrew when out of movement points. That IS the reason for my problems - no problem with having nowhere to withdraw to, this is bloody arabia

Btw. Mine armies DIDN'T have 'must fight or be destroyed' signs, as far as I remember. But they died nonetheless... the reason must be something... like... well?... quicksand!!!