What's your favourite resource

[absimiliard]

Hallelujah brother Blake.

That is exactly why I like chariots for the early rush. Give me horses nearby my capitol and a nearby victi . . . . err .. . . neighbor and my game's plotted out just beautifully.

Sometimes I can even get back onto a slingshot after a chariot attack its so fast.

-abs

[couerdelion]

Guys,

I understand what you are saying about disruption. You spoil the AI's improvements - netting a small profit - and leave it will little to defend itself from a large stack. You can usually do this with chariots because they normally move faster than foot soldiers.

But all this messing about pillaging also takes time and quite frankly, I do not want to be wasting time roaming around the capital and nearby cities because I want to capture the cities themselves. And Axemen are better at doing that.

Sure it's possible to do plenty of damage with chariots. I actually enjoy doing it myself but more because it is not as simple as it is with axes.

There is also the one big advantage of Axemen and that is that they also come with the whip technology. What's more you can double whip them so the axemen force can be put together very quickly.

Finally, the copper-based attack has no weaknesses and does not need immediate access to copper. The chariot based attack needs horses early. It's all well and good to say that you will just go in and destroy any mine but what are you going to do if there is a spearman already there and maybe there is also more than one mine to deal with.

[Blake]

A chariot rush is opportunistic. You have cows or pigs, probably start with hunting or ag. You research AH, horses pop up in a very handy spot. The chariot rush is on!

Pillaging doesn't take time - it's just a way to kill some time while the chariot stack is completed.

Also lots of civs have ag/wheel or hunting/wheel while only one has mining/wheel. In a cruel joke that one is Mansa Musa with his awesome Skirmisher meaning he barely needs copper.
The point of having the wheel is it means the resource can be hooked up quicker and workers are more productive - guaranteed, at least assuming you are researching AH knowing you have pig/cow/sheep. BW has no such guarantee other than whip/chop and I'd honestly rather pasture up something than chop...

So AH->Horses makes me very happy when I see it.

[absimiliard]

Despite my "hallelujah" for Blake I don't entirely agree with him on everything. I won't pillage during a chariot rush. The most pillaging I'll consider is ripping up a road to say mined copper or pastured horses, purely to disconnect a military resource.

Otherwise I'm focused on taking the enemy cities. If I'm rushing with chariots I'm typically not into settling my own early cities, instead I'm planning on taking them from my neighbor/victim.

I agree with Blake that it's totally oportunistic though. But that's what we're talking about here, what resource do you want the most. I want horses, for an early chariot rush.

Will I get BW, sure, I want to pop-rush my chariot rush to speed it up. The bane of the chariot-rush is time, time for the enemy to get above 40% culture defence in his/her capitol. And if I don't have horses and do have copper nearby, sure, I'll go for an axe rush. Gotta go for war eventually unless you're on an island.

But for brutally fast rushing . . .. . for me it's horses and the wheel. Chariots are just incredibly fast to pump out, and so cheap they're totally expendable. For anything other than an early rush, give me metal of some sort.

But if you're asking what resource I want to see right out of the gate. I want horses, and I want them in my capitol's fat-cross. Give me that and I won't even build a second city typically, instead I'll TAKE it. And then since it's such a fast rush, I'll get on with my life like the rush never happened, almost like the Civ-Gods gifted me with a free capitol for nothing. I just can't rush that fast with copper, but I can with horses.

That's why I like them so much.

{edit}I think maybe we're forgetting what we're discussing here. What resource do you like best, not do you have an all-encompassing plan for your game. For me almost all my games are random choices in game-setup, so I don't have "plans" per se. I look at my randomly chosen leader and the randomly generated terrain I get and make a plan from that. So sure, if I have copper I go axe-rush, if I have horses it's charioteering time! If I have neither I grump and grouse because I hate iron-based ancient warfare. But it's all about exploiting what you're given. The question here is "What do you want to see most?" For me I prefer to see horses early for my rush, and I feel that so strongly that they're my favorite resource to have, pretty much period.{/edit}

-abs