Warlord Game Strategy Discussion

[Boracks]

Actually that's pretty amazing when you think about it.

Actually, that's where Civ is amazing. A strat depends on the options you use, the setup you get, and the style you play. There is no one strat that's better than others, any strat that wins was good for that game, and may not work in another game.

Trust me, I've learned that one, especially the not working part...

[Norselord]

We're actually not making any judgement on which is better in this thread.

OK, now I'm confused.

How's the flaming supposed to get started?

[Ming]

It usually doesn't start in these forums. We disagree a lot.. but it's only when somebody starts with the personal insults that the flames begin

[Brael]

One more thought I had on this for a key wonder. The GW is obvious, but a side effect of this strategy would be that it racks up a ton of WW for the civs you're farming while bringing you virtually none. I know AI's have less of a WW penalty but it still adds up. The +100% WW wonder (Statue of Zeus I think? I've never used it before) would make a good addition to things. With the unhappy it would help slow the civs growth and cause them to become fairly harmless given time which again means safer leveling for your units.

[Ming]

If I get a chance to build Zeus, I will just so I don't have deal with fighting with it. The fact the AI's face WW is a bonus in my book

If not, I like to find the city it's in so I can either take it or raze it quickly

[Brael]

One of the last things under discussion was promos. Definitely flanking tactics etc are good ideas. They actually lose effectiveness the higher your win chance, but since the Warlord units are so critical and you want to preserve them alive, flanking and tactics are good no matter how little it helps.

Sort of old post to reply to but I disagree about withdrawl being worth more with lower win percentages. That's only true for a conventional military strategy where you're looking at conserving hammers used when having to send units on high risk missions. With a GG strategy things flip around and you're looking at conserving your units, so rather than view promotions as what conserves the most hammers, you should instead view it as what generates the most exp for the unit. Ultimately we both still value withdrawl but for different reasons I think.

Consider, if you have a 20% win chance on a knight it will on average survive .2 fights, meaning you can expect it to be worth .2 of an enemy unit and consequently, generate an average 1.25 (1/(1-.2)) exp over it's lifespan.

Adding flanking 1/2 will add a 30% withdrawl giving it a 50% chance to live. Lets call that being worth .5 of an enemy unit making it generate an average 2 exp over it's lifespan.

A high success unit though such as a 99% win unit is going to be worth .99 enemies and generate 100 exp over it's lifespan.

Adding tactics to that win rate increases the success chance to 99.3% allowing the unit to generate an average ~143 exp over it's lifespan. As you can see, a 30% win chance on a low success unit only increases the units average exp by .75 before it dies, but adding it to a high success unit increases it by about 43 exp.

Taking that to an extreme with and without guerilla 3+tactics using lets say 99.9% odds, the unit would generate an average 1000 exp with no withdrawl ability but an average 5000 exp with guerilla 3+tactics.

And an AU course would probably be cool, never participated in one of those before (atleast when they were current). Do they still get used?

[wodan11]

I agree with you, Brael.

All I meant by the comment was that withdrawal provides more benefit to a unit with a lower chance to win. Not that it's not worthwhile to a unit with a high chance to win. Two totally different things.

A unit with a 60% chance to win and 25% retreat has a 10% chance to utilize withdrawal. A unit with a 96% chance to win and the same 25% retreat has a 1% chance to utilize withdrawal. Compare the 10 to the 1. That's all I meant.

Clearly, when considering a unit in which much more resources (in terms of player effort and available XP to farm) have been invested, anything that preserves it from dying is a good idea, even if it only happens once in every thousand battles. I mean, if a green unit I just built dies at 60% odds, I'm not going to be very surprised. But if a Warlord I've brought up from a baby and now at 300XP dies at 99.9% odds, I'm going to be like, "awww, man!"

[rah]

One more thought I had on this for a key wonder. The GW is obvious, but a side effect of this strategy would be that it racks up a ton of WW for the civs you're farming while bringing you virtually none. I know AI's have less of a WW penalty but it still adds up. The +100% WW wonder (Statue of Zeus I think? I've never used it before) would make a good addition to things. With the unhappy it would help slow the civs growth and cause them to become fairly harmless given time which again means safer leveling for your units.

The only question is, when an AI has the Statue it sometimes influences my decisions concerning that CIV, so I wonder, does it do the same for the AI. If it acts as a deterrent to the AI in the decision logic and keeps them from declaring on me, then it kind of defeats what we're trying to accomplish here.

And does anyone really know how much WW actually affect the AI? I would assume they get a real break here.

[wodan11]

Depends on skill level. AI ww handicap (% of full value):
Settler 100%
Chieftain 90%
Warlord 80%
Noble 80%
Prince 80%
Monarch 75%
Emperor 70%
Immortal 60%
Deity 50%

[wodan11]

I doubt Zeus is programmed into AI behavior but that's because I have a low opinion of the AI. I'm positive this would be in the python so there's no easy way to answer the question.

Of course, some mods have gone to efforts to improve this, so it depends on what you're playing.

[rah]

Good to know. So sucking them in and killing their SOD on your own turf is better than I thought.

[wodan11]

Yeah, and killing literally hundreds and hundreds of units, and not agreeing to peace all game, would build up to a significant hurt to the AI, esp. with Zeus.

[rah]

But again, once I've delivered the "world of hurt", I think their ability to provide me with more experience points is diminished so it's time to move on to the next one. But I guess if you're going for another type of win (besides domination) keeping all you neighbors around in a "world of Hurt" is the thing to do. I like the sword a tad too much I mean come on, I spend the whole game creating a stack of UBERMEN and you want me to use then only on defense. I don't think I can restrain myself to that.

[wodan11]

Yeah. In fact, I've found that the Ubermen as you put it can often even ignore city defenses. Quite often multiple warlord commando units can just swoop in and kill the city, and even move into it (so that they aren't sitting outside for a possible counterattack while they're hurt) all in a single turn. Pretty exhilarating actually.

Anyway exactly this point is how we got at this whole discussion. Some people whoshallremainunnamed seemed to contend that it is "impossible" to successfully invade a massively defended continent without massive numbers of invading units.

Even leaving aside more "normal" invasions using bombers to soften up and establish a bridgehead and other strats, a simple matter of a couple transports of ubermen will do the trick just as nicely.

[rah]

Better protect those transports

Thank god this is a three day weekend for me so I can give this another go. I'm going to use a completely different promotion path. A whole new breed of UBERMEN.