promotion advice and strategy

[Dis]

I feel like I'm not using my promotions effectively. And I don't seem to have access to some of these promotions some of you guys are talking about in other threads. I know some have some requirements and not all units can get them. I wish there was a spreadsheet or something that explained all of this (hint: post a link if you know of one ).

What are the best promotions? What gives the most bang for the buck. Are increasing strength promotions really worth it?

[gdgrimm]

About the only obvious answers to promotions questions are.....

Units that you never intend on leaving the city, i.e. they exist solely to defend the city, get the City Garrison Promotions.

Units that you're expressly going to use solely to take other cities, they get the City Attack promotions.

After that, it all depends.

"Defense" units designed for counter attack, I usually promote to maximize their counter effectiveness (i.e. Spears get Combat I, II, Formation; Axemen get Combat I, Shock).

Cats designed to bring down defenses, get the barrage promotions. Early 'recon' units often get Woodsman promotions if the terrain has a lot of jungle or forest.

I could go on and on, but I won't.

Perhaps ask some specific question or provide a specific situation?

[Sabre2th]

Re: promotion advice and strategy

Originally posted by Dis
I feel like I'm not using my promotions effectively. And I don't seem to have access to some of these promotions some of you guys are talking about in other threads. I know some have some requirements and not all units can get them. I wish there was a spreadsheet or something that explained all of this (hint: post a link if you know of one ).

What are the best promotions? What gives the most bang for the buck. Are increasing strength promotions really worth it?

Generally, what gdgrimm said is sound advice. I will add one thing, though:

If you are the type that generally doesn't get involved in wars, you may be more likely to hold on units through the ages. If that's true, you'll be upgrading most of them and you may want to stick to just combat/medic promotions for your regular field units and avoid class specific promotions until gunpowder units start appearing (city raider/defender promotions are still a good idea). Again, that only really applies if you can avoid big, difficult wars.

As far as a chart of promotions go, I have a poster of them that came with the game

[MasterDave]

I think I prefer city attack promotions more than barrage for artillery units. However, I do tend to upgrade up both paths, with the barrage artillery serving in the field to wear down stacks outside of cities, and the city raider artillery just hitting cities. Trebuchets always get city raider in my Civ's.

I have experimented with Drill promotions and flanking promotions, and generally have decided to stick with garrison for defenders, the combat promotions, and the specialty promotions such as cover, shock, pinch, etc.

It is occasionally fun to make a commando unit or two, but these are most useful for fast pillaging, and not much else. Blitz is also a fun one for gunships (four attacks per turn if they don't get hurt). I like giving tanks barrage first in general.

[Dis]

any advice on naval ships. I find when I go battleship to battleship I often lose. I can't understand why the AI battleships are so much stronger than my battleships. It's annoying when it always takes 2 battleships to take out one. I got for the one that increases strength 10%, but that still doesn't work.

I also see AI's stack their naval units alot. Especially when using them in conjunction with transports. I've been giving the promotion that causes collateral damage. I still lose my battleship, but I do a lot of damage to the stack, and can clean it up with other ships.

[Dis]

I mainly ask because I played my first game as the persians. Never messed around with immortals that much (I usually use axeman for early conquest).

they weren't strong enough to take out archers by themselves. So I gave them the increased chance of retreat promotion (they already have an increased chance to start iirc). This seemed to work well. My losses weren't too bad when taking cities. I just had to take a 2 to 1 ratio to take a city.

The thing about immortals (and chariots which I also built for the first time yesterday), they get promotions like flanking, and the one that increases visibility, and increased movement. How do you guys rate thouse? I was unsure whether to increase movement. Increase visibility didn't seem that great for my purposes.

Lately I've been giving my tanks the collateral damage promo. As there are always multiple units in a city, and a tank isn't strong enough to win battles on it's own. But this is because I'm lazy and don't use arty. They are just slow, and slow up my conquest. I usually play germany, so my tanks go blitzing fast through enemy territory.

And finally, what is medic III promotion? That might be in warlords only, as it was discussed in a warlords thread. I guess I could just check my manual. And I didn't realize the promotions were on the poster. I'll have to check that out as well. It's been so long since I looked at those things.

[Dis]

Originally posted by MasterDave
I think I prefer city attack promotions more than barrage for artillery units. However, I do tend to upgrade up both paths, with the barrage artillery serving in the field to wear down stacks outside of cities, and the city raider artillery just hitting cities. Trebuchets always get city raider in my Civ's.

I have experimented with Drill promotions and flanking promotions, and generally have decided to stick with garrison for defenders, the combat promotions, and the specialty promotions such as cover, shock, pinch, etc.

It is occasionally fun to make a commando unit or two, but these are most useful for fast pillaging, and not much else. Blitz is also a fun one for gunships (four attacks per turn if they don't get hurt). I like giving tanks barrage first in general.

Commando!! No wonder I have never heard of these promotions you guys are always talking about. It's a combat IV prereq!!!

I never had a unit get that many promotions. Which make me think I'm playing the game wrong. I'm very wreckless with my units. I still have some old civ2 and civ3 habits I cannot break. I just throw them against cities regardless of the odds. I need to better protect my good units. But then if you protect them, they won't ever attack anything, and won't get any more experience.

Or maybe I'm just not doing enough warfare. I don't think I ever got over 4 promotions the entire time I've been playing this game.

I'm looking through the manual right now. I do use cover (+25% against archers), I've had some limited success with this, but I still prefer city attack.

And what about Drills? (extra first strike). I've been giving these to archers stationed outside of cities. I'm not sure how good these are. My archers in cities get the city garrison promotion.

And I do use shock to try to take out the barbarian super axeman and swordsmen who seem to always take out my axeman sitting on a hill.

[Jaybe]

Dis,
With your battleship vs. battleship, I would definitely try to soften it up with airpower (or expendable naval units) first. Otherwise, it's going to be a close fight. Despite promotions, a little bad (or good) luck can throw expectations out the window.

I will give tanks 1 or 2 city raider promos, the rest combat; except for about a quarter of my tanks which get barrage, for special assignments.

If you aren't going to use artillery support, then at least use bombers! Otherwise you are asking for heavy losses, which speeds war weariness. Do you really enjoy using police state government?

Drill promos have been much maligned. Improved in Warlords with collateral damage protection (starting with Drill II).

Medic III is Warlords specific. Extra healing (15% instead of 10%), including adjacent tiles.

[trev]

In particular for aggressive civs which get combat 1 automatically I will usually give swordsman cover in preference to city attack, especially early in the game when archers are often the sole defenders as you gain 25% in attack in preference to 20% and also gives you a benefit in the small chance of a counterattack by archery units. After a successful attack then I begin city attack 1,2,3 etc for the swordsmen

[Snotty]

in my attacking stack I like to have at least one mounted unit with withdraw 1 and +1 visibility range, you get a lot more notice whats coming and can sometimes see up to 3 tiles away

[couerdelion]

My take on the Drill promotion is that it works well if your unit already has a strong combat ratio. If you’ve ever looked at Bureaucracy you’ll notice an interesting effect it has on the commerce in your capital. The 50% bonus is applied first before the science/gold split and the result then gets the gold/science multipliers. So the 50% bonus from Bureau is multiplicative not additive.

It’s the same with Drill. Take, for instance an Archer in a city on a hill who’ll probably be expecting Axes or Swords as a threat. With perhaps 20% culture, the fortified archer will have +145% defensive bonus so will fight at a combat strength of 7.35. A Raider Axeman will fight at 6 so there is already a bonus.

We might equate the Drill I promotion to some percentage of the “total” combat strength (as opposed to base). Let’s say the first strike benefit is worth 10% so the first strike chance would be 5% (I think). So now our Archer is fighting with equivalent strength of 7.72. The second and third drill promotion are then worth 10% each while the fourth is 20%.

We can then compare this with Garrison promos (which are only added to the Base combat strength) to get

Drill I (0.37) vs Garrison I (0.60)
Drill II (0.74) vs Garrison II (0.75)
Drill III (0.74) vs Garrison III (0.90)
Drill IV (1.47)

I’ll probably run a few tests to try to get some sort of value for the first strike benefit because these figures would seem to indicate that the drill promotion can rarely beat the Garrison for a defender. However it is a more flexible bonus than purely defensive ones. Of course, it’s absolutely no use against Horse Archers (except Drill IV).

In general promote to favour specialisation of troops with a few special units (medics, scouts, pillagers) who will follow a different promotion path.

p.s. Commando is very difficult to reach because it’s difficult to get that much experience before you lose it again at the next upgrade.

[rah]

I rarely use defensive promotions for garrisons. I don't want them attacking my cities, because if they are, they've probably already devestated centuries of land improvements. Seige weapons damaging stacks are devestating to city defenses.

So, except for newly aquired cities I don't let them attack my cities. I go out and get them first. I want my seige engines doing the colateral damage.

I concentrate on offensive promotions because I expect all units to be able to attack when necessary. Defense is for those that aren't as capable field generals. And if you mix up those offensive promotions they will serve you well when your much smaller but more numerous SODs are counterattacked in the field.

The last (jammed with troops) city I blitzed with Cossacks I moved a single Cossack onto every square in an enemies big cross and just sat there for 2 turns. The defending city's seige units were neutralized as the ai wasted them unsuccessfully on solo units. Every turn i switched out a fresh cossack for every injured one, and after a few turns I started moving solo seige units up. by the time they got next to the city, every offensive unit in the city had been burned up in futile attacks. And since the city was surrounded, no reinforcements could get in. The city fell quite easy with just a couple of units loss. It almost felt like CIV II

Defending the same way can also be beneficial. but for that I suggest pairs or trips to take advantage of the rock/paper/scissors nature of CIV IV. The AI is talanted when attacking a large SOD, but is feeble attacking 4-6 smaller stacks. Sure they'll elliminate one of them, but after you clean up, most of their discressionary forces are eliminated and moving against their cities is then safer.