What's your favourite resource

[rah]

Me neither. I learn something new every time.

[Blake]

Hummm. I don't think that's right.

What is true is that Chariots will only spend half the time costing supply - since they move twice as quickly. So they do cost only half supply, in practise.

Anyway, regarding the counter to the Chariot - the spear. Somehow when I use chariots the enemy ends up having some trouble hooking their copper up, something to do with the chariot ganking the worker and cutting roads and pointing and laughing then charging off into the sunset only to return a few turns later.

I'm a Sentry whore. I whack a barb (if cha, killing 2 barb warriors should do the trick, at least on monarch, no rax needed) and get Sentry. Sentry is awesome, you pick up so much more information.

So yeah anyway, get a fast chariot, go disconnect their metal or roads. Come back with his buddies, kill.

It's harassment rather than choking. Pretty effective.

[foudres]

chariots are better than horse archer i have to admit that... And because you'll always research the required tech you have not wasted anything.

But i think that copper still has the upper hand as beeing a better ressource overall.

And for the one that said that knights just require guild, in fact the also require iron (and of course horses).

[absimiliard]

Half maintenance! Geeze.

Are we sure about that?


Back onto the chariot vs axe debate though. For city taking I prefer chariots. For me it's the cheap, not the speed though.

I find 2 units per defending archer pretty typically covers my attack. Two axes will do an archer. Two chariots will do an archer. So for the earliest rush I prefer the chariots since they're cheaper and I can get my handful faster, that they get to the enemy faster is just a plus. Add in that some of the chariots will survive the initial "weakening" attack by withdrawing and it's all gravy.

Once we're past the rush-phase and the enemy can build spears my opinion will change quickly. But for an initial "fastest route to a kill" rush, I'll take roads, and AH for $100 Alex.

-abs

[couerdelion]

OK the half-maintenance thing is complete tosh so we can forget that little red herring.

I did carry out a little investigation on the cost effectiveness of chariots vs axemen. It’s a relatively simple scenario involving no combat promotions.

City is a typical capital with 40% culture defense and defended by 12 fortified archers.

1) Test 1 – How many chariots do I need to capture the city in one round of attacks?

I actually need 35!!!! Quite surprised how high the figure was there but some of those chariots didn’t even scratch a defender. With a 4% kill chance on an uninjured archer, there was never a great chance of getting an outright kill and most injuries left the defending archer with 70-85% strength.

Of course, the city would have fallen with fewer because of surviving chariots being used in a second round of attacks. So this test does not say that the required ratio is nearly 3 – 1.

2) Test 2 – See if you can capture similar city with same hammer value in axemen.

Conveniently, the 35 chariots cost the same as 25 axemen so all that needs to be tried here is to place those 25 axemen outside the city and see if they can get in.

Result. The axemen capture the city with 2 spare units. With an 18% first attack probability I will be getting probably 2 automatic kills on the first wave of attacks and archers are generally injured enough to make the second round a mere formality 90%+

Does this prove anything?

Well only my gut feeling that the “city raider� value of chariots and axemen are about the same. I think a much larger sample would be needed to prove that one was cheaper than the other.

Of course it’s also not black and white and there are other factors that favour one or other side of this discussion. But for me evidence supports the more solid axe-pack

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Blake
Hummm. I don't think that's right.

What is true is that Chariots will only spend half the time costing supply - since they move twice as quickly. So they do cost only half supply, in practise.

Blake wins the cookie

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by couerdelion
OK the half-maintenance thing is complete tosh so we can forget that little red herring.

Is not

[Brutus66]

Thread-jackers!

[binTravkin]

courdelion, what Blake was saying is that while attacking with chariots, you'd face much smaller enemy stacks and mostly not the ones requiring resources (as you simply pillage the needed improvements off).

Just for the record, you need 20hammers to produce an archer, let's say the city producing them runs at 10 hammers - 1 from cap, 1 from forest and 8 from two hill plain mines.
Let's assume the city has two workers chopping, which raises the hammer output to 20/turn (or chop each 2 turns).

Now, I as enemy am 12 tiles far from that city, when you spot me coming and start pumping archers one per turn.

If I will be using chariots, they will show up after 6 turns roaming and in 2 turns they will have destroyed your improvements and routed/captured your workers, which will leave you with 7 or 8 archers built.
Add a prebuilt road to that and you've only managed to build 5-6 archers before my attack.

Furthermore, when fighting vs chariots, the chances to bring in reinforcements shrink badly, as tearing roads apart quickly is not a problem.
You can say that axes would be good at stopping reinforcements by occupying choke points, but they would need to get there, which aint gonna be soon enough.

It is also almost impossible to do hit-and-run warfare (want a few more workers - just pass the borders and look for them, if none are there to capture, you can always pillage some to slow your enemy's development) and combat recon with anything that moves less than 2 tiles per turn - if there's a road nearby, you simply get caught.


That being said, I think chariots are too weak to exploit all the goodness of mobility, but they're cheap and early enough to stall your opponents development by capturing/routing workers and destroying improvements, while you work your way to say IW and build that road to get the real attack force in fast.

[couerdelion]

I haven’t really noticed any discernible difference between the size of defending stacks when attacking with chariots versus axemen. The only key difference in the initial strike is that chariots may (depending on terrain) be able to strike immediately at a 0% or 20% culture city while axemen have to move first and attack the next turn.

So the only difference for the city or cities attacked at the start is that any roving archers who can move to a vulnerable city might make it slightly tougher to break.

After that there is healing and moving to the next target which will have started building its defences up.

On the cost side I think chariots probably work out more owing to the level of free units. At this stage in the game we might suppose to have 10 free units and if we assume that 3 of these are workers and 3 are garrison, we leave just 4 units for offence.

With an army of 10 axemen, I would expect to pay 4 gold per turn (2/3 per unit in excess of free units). If we need 15 chariots to do the same job this will cost 8 gold per turn or twice as much.

[Arrian]

[disclaimer: in SP]

Chariots
War Chariots
Immortals !!!

Give me Egypt or Persia with horses nearby and I will do awful, awful things to the AI. Spears? Only if they can get copper/iron hooked up. If they're my chosen target (nearest neighbor), that ain't happening.

Chariots and the chariot UUs are cheap, fast, and have a retreat chance. They rock.

-Arrian

[binTravkin]

I haven’t really noticed any discernible difference between the size of defending stacks when attacking with chariots versus axemen. The only key difference in the initial strike is that chariots may (depending on terrain) be able to strike immediately at a 0% or 20% culture city while axemen have to move first and attack the next turn.

So the only difference for the city or cities attacked at the start is that any roving archers who can move to a vulnerable city might make it slightly tougher to break.

After that there is healing and moving to the next target which will have started building its defences up.

On the cost side I think chariots probably work out more owing to the level of free units. At this stage in the game we might suppose to have 10 free units and if we assume that 3 of these are workers and 3 are garrison, we leave just 4 units for offence.

With an army of 10 axemen, I would expect to pay 4 gold per turn (2/3 per unit in excess of free units). If we need 15 chariots to do the same job this will cost 8 gold per turn or twice as much.

couerdelion, are you reading what Blake, me and some others are saying?
Chariots = economical disruption

No unit is universal, each has its role and used in a different one is much less cost effective.

However, by denying opponent important resources, you can turn out most of the rock-paper-scissors parts, leaving only one for you to combat, and the best units for this clearing job are chariots - they're early, they're cheap, they're fast.

[AshenPlanet]

.

Chariots are awesome, but horse archers aren't bad either.
I'll often start with chariots and research archery + horseriding early while I'm attacking people with my chariots (of course, I don't bother with horse archers if I have war chariots or immortals).
Knights and cavalry are great too.

Bottom line is: 2 move is very much better than 1 move...

.

[Kuciwalker]

With an army of 10 axemen, I would expect to pay 4 gold per turn (2/3 per unit in excess of free units). If we need 15 chariots to do the same job this will cost 8 gold per turn or twice as much.

But chariots cost half maintenance.

[Blake]

The first thing to understand with Chariot attacks is they are a DISPOSABLE attack force.

You commit to annihilating your neighbor and build the minimal force to do that - even if you lose most the force. All you need to do is take the capital and that AI is out of the game.

A chariot attack usually goes something like this:

I get a chariot out ASAP and hopefully pick up sentry and go scout the borders.
I locate the worker building a mine somewhere suspicious.

If it seems appropriate (especially if it's their capital) I just pop in and gank the worker and rip up the mine/road if it's done. Otherwise I might wait until I have 4 chariots.

Once I have 4 chariots I hop in and raze the 2nd city, losing 2 chariots. This typically leaves them without strategics. I might capture the 2nd city instead depending on placement. My target is the capital though and razing works best for that (the AI tries to refound the 2nd city).

I continue to indirect the AI's effort to expand by cutting down it's archers in the open, disconnecting roads in the wilderness and pillaging mines, while building a mega stack of chariots.

The AI has been busily pissing away it's archers trying to reinforce it's expansions or protect it's workers. Then my big stack of 8-10 chariots pops in and ganks the capital.
With the AI's heart torn out it's typically trivial to clean up the remaining cities with some new chariots.

At the end of the war the AI is gone and I'm left with little army - nothing to cost me upkeep, just enough to hunt the barbs and act as garrisons. I have two capitals, maybe an extra captured city or two, the 2-4 cities I founded during the harassment.

The thing is, with the early land grab and the need to focus on economy I don't need to do any more conquest for a long time - I can easily afford to wait until Crossbows, Elephants and such, until I have marketplaces. By then Axemen will be way reduntant.

So to me it doesn't really matter whether I use Chariots or Axemen, either will get the kill done, I find chariots are faster, cleaner and more lossy. Axemen are slower but that also means there's more chance of picking up a wonder, a chariot harrass/attack is so fast and so brutal the AI wont be engaging in any big works, it'll be constantly trying to replace it's losses. I find chariot attacks are always very successful, the control from higher mobility does that, axemen attacks are more iffy. Both have pros and cons and it mostly depends on which resource is most handy. To dismiss the power of either is a mistake.