Knight Templar

[alexman]

Originally posted by Thriller
I don't agree it should be upgradable - too powerful then, same as Ancient Cavalry.

I don't think this a fair comparison. Ancient Cavalry would upgrade to either Knights or Cavalry, both of which are feared as offensive threats of their time. Guerillas don't exactly fall into that category, even with the AU mod boost, because the defenders of the time are so much better.

[Aqualung71]

While I agree with your distinction Alexman, the few Guerillas I built in AU501 turned out to be reasonable offensive units. It doesn't take make of a tech lead for them to be up there as reasonably good attackers - 8 attack vs say 6 defence Riflemen? Not overpoweing, but still useful. And the zero range bombard makes them very handy defenders to have in a stack. Also, they then would upgrade all the way to TOW, which I learned were extremely versatile units in different situations.

Still, I don't think it would be a game altering tweak, so i'm not gonna get too animated about it. From a "tidiness" point of view I always like to see upgrade paths, so maybe it's a good thing.

Would giving Crusaders an upgrade make any difference to the AI in terms of attractiveness of the KT wonder? I presume not.

[alexman]

OK, the following proposal is under consideration:

Yes/No: Crusaders upgrade to Guerilla.

Voting in a week.

[Konquest02]

Would it be possible to make the Crusaders upgrade to Guerillas and making the Wonder expire with Replacable parts? That would take care of the problem of the wonder pumping "60 gold Guerillas".

That way, you could upgrade your crusaders, but you could not build new guerillas using the KT.

Food for though.

[ducki]

I thought KT expired at Steam anyway...

[Konquest02]

Originally posted by ducki
I thought KT expired at Steam anyway...

Ah, forgot to check the manual... My error

Then I think the point of the wonder spitting an almost guerilla is not really valid...

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Konquest02
Then I think the point of the wonder spitting an almost guerilla is not really valid...

Sure it is: unless you lose all your Crusaders, you're going to have a nice Guerilla force waiting for you at Replaceable Parts (with minor refitting costs).

The point of the Statue of Zeus and Knights Templar is that their units go obsolete if you do not build the Wonders fast enough. They should give you a power boost over a very short time period, then become obsolete. Anyway, that's what they were designed to do.


Dominae

[ducki]

They should give you a power boost over a very short time period, then become obsolete. Anyway, that's what they were designed to do.

That almost sounds like an argument against allowing them to upgrade.

I know that when we were discussing SoZ, someone did a cost-benefit analysis comparing the shields invested in the wonder to the average expected output (converting ACs to shields). Would our discussion here benefit from this sort of information, or is the perceived problem/weakness simply that the units go obsolete, weakening the AI that builds it? If so, does that make a case for giving the ACs an upgrade path, in order to remain consistent?

Since the human can use these wonders as generators or portable shields, does their expiration give the human an unfair advantage in knowing when they are "useless" and being able to speed improvements in very corrupt settlements or expend them by fortressizing strategically/tactically effective spots(Hmmm.... Radar Tower + Fortress + Mountain + Infantry + Arty Stack. Muwahahahahahahaha!)

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Random though they may seem.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by ducki
That almost sounds like an argument against allowing them to upgrade.

That's precisely what it is.

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by Dominae


That's precisely what it is.

Yep, got my vote too.....metaphorically speaking, that is

[nbarclay]

AIs tend to get Chivalry early enough and spend long enough in the middle ages that I don't see much risk of the AIs' not getting their shields' worth. Granted, the lack of upgradability undercuts the value of Crusaders a little if they aren't used in a timely manner. But on the other hand, if it weren't for the AU Mod's changes, their attack value would be only one less than the best available all the way to tanks.

My only real objection to making Crusaders upgrade to Guerillas is that I view the change as unnecessary and the AU Mod shouldn't be making unnecessary changes. But if I were on the panel, I'd vote against it on that basis.

[pvzh]

So many "harsh" replies No need, no need... well if nobody really wants the wonder IT IS ABSOLUTLY WRONG and that MUST be fixed/changed. It should not be "the Great Wall (Civ3, PTW)".

What about reducing the cost of wonder to 200 or even 150 or make it SW (crusaders everywhere: Religious Wars )? Getting 7-8 crusaders out of 300 shield wonder it is on the point of getting the same amount of shields back. That was Emperor, continents, celts in monarchy and feudalism, so I was not draging the overall tech progress too fast (I was about at the same reseach speed as 2 leading AI's, and one of them was obliterated by me during the Middle Ages). KT was build with prebuild around Leo. I bought Chivalry after I have researched Invention.

Even Lighthouse on pangea is more benefitial (your trade can not be disrupted by AI's or barbarians until astronomy; you can travel in absolute safty as long as you and your turn in sea: no AI or barbarian ship will attack you).

[nbarclay]

After some more thought, I'm starting to think making the Knights Templar stronger might be more worthwhile after all, but I also thought of a serious problem with lowering the cost as the way to do it.

First, the reason the wonder could probably use some beefing up: timing. If you build four knights, you get most if not all of your units while the AIs are still using pikemen instead of musketmen. If you build the Knights Templar instead (at least without a prebuild), few if any crusaders will appear before the leading AIs start using musketmen. Thus, even though the knights are weaker than crusaders in absolute terms, they are likely to be stronger relative to the opposition they face. Even going after weaker opponents, the knights will have a longer period of relative strength between the time they become available and the time the enemies have musketmen available to even the odds.

Further, for at least some players (including myself on the relatively rare occasions when I engage in knight-era warfare), the appearance of musketmen tends to be a signal to end the knight-era wars and stop fighting until cavalry are available to tilt the advantage back in favor of the attacker. That tends to make crusaders too late to be available for the main knight-era offensives and too slow compared with cavalry to be worth their nominal value of 70 shields in the cavalry era. The time when Crusaders provide their greatest advantage is a time when human players are less likely to be involved in major offensive operations.

Thus, even though it is not hard to have games where the Knights Templar wonder pays for itself on paper, having it pay for itself in practical terms is a lot harder. (That is especially true for human players since we probably tend to time our wars based on the available technologies a bit more carefully than AIs do.) That makes improving the wonder more worthwhile than I've been thinking.

At first glance, lowering the wonder's cost seems like a good way to make it more cost-effective. But the fact that human players are inclined to switch cities from building something else to building a wonder while AIs don't means that human players get a much bigger advantage at a lower cost. A head start of about 100 shields from work on a colosseum, cathedral, or almost-finished marketplace would require that an AI about double a human player's construction pace to win a race for a 200-shield wonder, where the AI would need only a fifty percent advantage to win a race to a 300-shield wonder. Thus, at 200 shields, human players could get the Knights Templar relatively easy by finding a mid-production city that's almost finished work on something else and switching it, while at 300, getting the Knights Templar without distracting a high-production city from a more important wonder is far more difficult (especially on Emperor and higher). Making it easier for human players to beat AIs to the Knights Templar would not help the AIs, especially with the Knights Templar providing a bigger advantage relative to its cost than it does now.

Having the Knights Templar produce a Crusader every four turns instead of every five would keep the "short-term advantage" character of the wonder but make it more clearly worthwhile. Further, to the extent that AIs remain likely to get the Knights Templar in many if not most games because human players are too busy chasing "more important" wonders to make it a priority, the change would often benefit an AI rather than the human player.

Nathan

[ducki]

The only counter I can offer to that is that the AU Mod's Cavalry are also 5 attack now, same as the ("free") Crusader, so the argument about timing would carry more weight(with me) for stock Cavalry. Yes, they move slower, no, they don't retreat. That doesn't make them useless, in my opinion.

Do the Crusaders get a bonus hitpoint?(EDIT: They don't.) If not, would that be a change that would make them strong enough? What about amphibious attack? Does history support that? It seems to be fairly accepted that amphibious is more useful to the AI than the human.

I still think the KT and Crusaders are fine, especially with Crusaders having the same attack as AU Cavalry most of an Age(branchwise) early, so I merely made these suggestions in a search for a conservative middle ground. 4-turn Crusaders with the same expiration date seems to add more weight to the back end of the "mobile shields" stage of this wonder as an undesirable side effect that would aid the player more than the AI, I think.



Edit: Stats from the Editor, AU 1.03b, just to put some numbers all in one place.
Crusader: 5-3-1, 70 shields, no resource reqs for KT
Cavalry: 5-3-3, 80 shields, Zone of Control, requires Saltpetre and Horses
Knights Templar: Cost - 30(same as SoZ, GLighthouse, GWall, Oracle, HGardens, half as much as Smith's, Bach's, Leo's, Sun's, Sistine), 2 Culture, Lifespan: Chivalry->Steam

[nbarclay]

The "mobile shields" situation could be dealt with by offsetting an increase in the number of crusaders with a reduction in their nominal shield value. Indeed, reducing their nominal value from seventy to fifty shields would actually make them less valuable as mobile shields than they are now. To the best of my knowledge, there would be no adverse impact to such a reduction except in the eyes of players whose main reason for building the wonder is mobile shields. AIs don't seem to disband units for shields; the crusader's cost is irrelevant in building it; and the unit doesn't upgrade so upgrades would not be affected.

I'm not trying to say that crusaders are useless in the age of cavalry, but are eight crusaders as valuable as seven cavalry? Is a crusader plus thirty gold worth as much as a cavalry? If not, crusaders in the cavalry era are generally worth less (and I would say considerably less) than their nominal cost of 70 shields, and that fact needs to be taken into consideration in determining how easy or difficult it is to get your shields' worth out of the Knights Templar.

If a player fights a war when the best other offensive unit he has is knights, the crusader's nominal cost of 70 shields is justified. But once cavalry show up, even with the AU Mod's reduction in cavalry's offensive punch, I think valuing the crusader at even 60 shields would probably be a bit high. How many people would give up cavalry's movement and retreat advantages to build 60-shield crusaders instead of 80-shield cavalry if the units had to compete head to head for a place on players' build queues? At an estimated shield value of 60, it would take five crusaders for a player who builds the Knights Templar to break even on cost, and six for the wonder to provide an advantage. From that perspective, the wonder could rarely be regarded as providing more than a small advantage and would sometimes cost considerably more than its benefits can repay.

Regarding amphibious attack, I know of nothing in history that would provide even a hint of a justification or rationalization for such a capability. It would also be a much more serious departure from stock rules in terms of the feel of the game, especially if a player doesn't read the mod's readme carefully enough and gets a city nailed by a crusader he didn't even know had the ability. And if units engaging in an amphibious assault get a combat bonus as I've heard they do, human players could take advantage of that to make crusaders more powerful than they currently are, especially in the era when caravels are around and frigates and privateers aren't. (The reason an amphibious assault capability is considered beneficial to AIs is not that AIs are particularly competent at it, but rather that the threat places pressure on human players to invest in and tie up defenders for coastal cities.)