The 'Macemen Moment'

[Kaosium]

I need some help with a dilemma that I've not yet found a solution to. I'm playing Civ 4 Gold as the Celts (Spi/Chr) on the Emperor level and I'm running into a common occurrence that is ruining my latest games. Everything is going fine until all of a sudden someone shows up (it's been the French three games in a row now) with a dozen macemen and I'm nowhere near Feudalism, let alone Civil Service. I'm generally just done with Construction and halfway to Monarchy or somesuch.

I can 't think of any defense using Axemen/Chariots/Spearmen and Gallic Warriors against macemen. Even my War Elephants are rendered mostly useless, as if their stack has macemen, it generally follows that pikemen are amongst it. Yeah, in the open field a two-star shock WE has parity with a generic pikemen, but you lose a lot of WEs that way. If my WEs are being chewed up by Pikes there's not much left to put much of a dent in those menacing Maces.

So far my strategy as a Celt is to start Poly and build a Settler from the get-go. Then I build a warrior in both cities while researching Archery and send them out to get experience from animals/barbs so they'll be one or two star Cover specialists for the inevitable barbarian wars. I build two archers in each city and send them out hunting to get experience too, ensuring they'll all be back by 2200 BC. After Archery I research AH or Ag and after that the wheel. Then I start mining and BW, and after that pottery. Next is writing and meditation. If I have marble available I'll go for Masonry after the Wheel and try to build the Temple of Artemis and the Parthenon.

As I'm playing aggressive AI, after the barbarian wars start to run down circa 1000 BC I usually get a declaration. I fight it with whatever is available and so far have had no problems with that part, even the one where I had to fight axemen with archers. That can be done, with a few three-star shock archers and some fodder to soften them up.

My problem is, the wars never seem to stop. While that is great from the standpoint of getting experience, it puts a cramp into my building of libraries. I can usually get one or two up, but as I'll only have three or four cities I'm just not generating enough research and get behind. As long as I can get to Construction first after the basics, I have no problem---until those bloody macemen show up, then I'm doomed.

On Monarch, once I had my catapult force up and running the game was basically over. Oh, they'd get macemen first, but not so far ahead of me and I'd either be close enough or able to fight them off with Longbowmen until I could convert my Gallic Warriors to Macemen too. I'm still having no problem conquering/razing their cities with catapults--until those damn macemen show up. I can attack his cities all I want, but he can take all my core cities with blinding speed with those macemen and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.

I'm sure some of you have mastered Emperor, what do you do about this problem, or how do you avoid ever being confronted with it?

(please don't say 'play someone besides the Celts,' I wanna be able to do this with Brennus. I know intimately how much easier the game is as financial especially)

[Torkkeli]

Catapults!

[Nugog]

[#07]

Yeah have a heap of catapults on hand for the inevitable stack.

It's a big jump between monarch and emporer, you seem to have a set plan that you won't budge from. It's probaly best to look at your surroundings and base your tech order on that. I usually head straight to bronze working and then try and found my second city where the copper is, but sometimes there is no copper so you need to adapt.

[Metaliturtle]

Beeline for BW, at all times you should have at least 1/5 of your cities building military units/barracks (more in most cases) also ignore archery unless you have horses but no copper.

A mess o' catapults should help with their SOD's.

[wodan11]

My thoughts are that the place to examine is not in what units to build or when. Rather, early tech path, and early builds are the more likely culprit.

For example, say you always do nothing but build settlers and warriors until you have 12 cities. I've never tried that myself, but I daresay this would result in a pretty stagnant research capability. This will inevitably result in the kind of scenario you describe.

While that's probably not the exact cause, there are plenty of other possibilities which could be the case. Can you describe what you usually do when you play? The first 150 turns or so.

[Theben]

I made the switch to Emperor recently, and haven't had any real problem fighting off my enemies. But I do start to fall behind in tech and can't seem to catch up once the fall begins... usually starts around gunpowder.

[Ming]

If you have Ele's... make sure you build a stable. Then give them combat one and shock. If you hit their stack with even just a few cats, the Ele's will clear out those macemen, even with a few pikes in the stack.

If ever in doubt, build more cats.

[joncnunn]

The main counter to Maces is Crossbows! Build lots of them if your anticipating a war against enemy Maces.
I also note your playing the Celts, and both their leaders are protective so you should be building some Crossbows in any case.

[Theben]

?? Neither Celt leader is protective.

[#07]

@Theben

I have the same problem sometimes re falling back around gunpowder. I find I can avoid that by early conquests and acquring lots of land, capturing a shrine is a big bonus.

[Arrian]

Catapults!

That was my first thought as well. Obviously lots of shock promos on your melee units and WE's and garrison archers for cheap defense. Seems to me you need numbers & the splash damage from cats in order to cancel out the AI's tech edge.

It sounds like a depressing situation. Which is why I don't play Emperor.

-Arrian

[Theben]

@Theben

I have the same problem sometimes re falling back around gunpowder. I find I can avoid that by early conquests and acquring lots of land, capturing a shrine is a big bonus.

Money has been an issue, as well as landmasses that aren't as nice as they used to be. I find that I have a lot more trouble expanding my nation size past 6-7 cities even with currency and CoL... if I want a good science rate.

[Kaosium]

Thanks guys, I think cats are the answer. I'd thought of that, but dismissed it when it occurred to me when the AI would try sending a cat or two against me it just irritated me, it didn't solve anything--just delayed the inevitable. However, as I think on it, a cat or two might be useless, but a half-dozen of them followed up by a finishing force to waste his decimated troops would be a different thing entirely.

Incidentally, I don't do the same thing every game as one suggested, I just laid out a general plan to give people a sense of how I start the game. What the map gives me modifies my basic plan, I'm not stupid.

I also should ponder if I really want to play Emperor, just like with Civ 3 I decided against Deity after a while as I didn't like what you had to do to win and how it made certain parts of the game I find very enjoyable (i.e building wonders) virtually impossible. I ended up happily playing Emperor for virtually all my Civ 3 games as outside the Oracle you could generally build most any wonder you wanted, and you didn't have to smash up every neighbor early to survive.

[wodan11]

Incidentally, I don't do the same thing every game as one suggested, I just laid out a general plan to give people a sense of how I start the game. What the map gives me modifies my basic plan, I'm not stupid.

I didn't mean to imply you were stupid, sorry if it sounded that way. I used a pretty blatant example to illustrate the point. What you're doing might not be so obvious but might have just as big an effect.

When you say you fall behind in tech, that means you are being hampered by unit maintenance, city maintenance, not getting enough sources of research, or not trading as well as the AIs. So, to really help you, we would have to look at why that's happening.

It's all well and good to simply build a ton of cats. IMO that's not really answering your question and is not really helping you fix the problem. If your problem is really something such as unit maintenance or lack of infrastructure, then what you're doing is treating the symptom not the disease, and the cats are likely to even make the disease slightly worse (because you'll be adding more maint costs and have less hammers to make courthouses etc).

/sarcasm on

How to Win CIV
Step 1) Build Cats
Step 2) Profit!

/sarcasm off. While there's some truth/benefit to the Cat strategy, there's a lot more to CIV than that.