What's the worst basic land unit?

[Grey Fox]

Originally posted by King of Rasslin
I think they are very useful because they are so much more powerful than horsemen. It's more important to wipe out other civs before you hit the middle ages.

Horsemen are SO much more powerful then Swordsmen. And why waste time building an army of slowpokes? When you can have an army(meaning lots of, not the army unit) of Horsmen, that are later upgraded to Knights(riders, elephants, samurais), and then to Cavalry (cossaks). I don't attach the Iron even, until I have Chivalry because I want to build the best military police possible. Warriors!

[planetfall]

Tanks are still necessary for those civs you can't reach in time. Before adopting Arrians style, I never used knights or calvary because a couple of them do nothing. A stack of 5-10 is something totally different.

From playing the upgrade path I have found with the horse upgrade path are:
1- sometimes civs to beat up on are too far away and have to combine builder/warlord mode. You need some production and roads for chariots to be most effective.
2- stacks of knights and calvary can buy you a lot of territory
3- AI does not fear chariots so it is easy to sucker it into better deals before you upgrade and your power jumps
4- AI devalues your cash reserves as a military buildup and will sell almost anything


Worst unit is the longbowman. They might be useful if defense were a 2. The one gain over swordsman is lost with 1 loss in defense.

A good use of chariots before you upgrade them are 1) quick filling holes in line blocking settler pairs, and 2) adding ability to push back cloud of fog early.

[Arrian]

Though I stand by my comments about chariots/horsemen, I will retract my comments about the archer.

I said the archer is useless. I was wrong. With a combination of the right civ and some luck, it can be extremely powerful. My most dominant game ever began with an archer strike. Therefore, if I voted now, I would go with the longbowman.

-Arrian

[Theseus]

I don;t mind Longbowmen. The few I have left over are good for mixed-unit Armies and static city defense.

I vote Radar Artillery. What a waste. And they are a PAIN to use, the take so long.

R

[Arrian]

Theseus,

I totally forgot about RA - which of course backs up your choice. But the poll doesn't include bombard units.

-Arrian

[muxec]

Hmm... I think that Chivalry research are needless in early midages and due to it i dont use knights. Chariots always lose becous of low attack/defence. Wariors ...

[Theseus]

Aaaarrgghhh!!

You've got to be kidding!!!

Relative strength at 4att is not to be foregone!! Tonight I played the first game in months when I didn't use the power of Knights, and I sorely missed it.

Harrumph.

[King of Rasslin]

Longbowmen are just fine. Knights require both horses and iron. In fact, if you plan on using catapults/cannons, you are only going to be moving 1 space per turn anyway! I love knights, but only when I upgrade them from horsemen. They require a lot of shields to make. I know that bombardment will have to be strengthened if it will make a difference in multiplayer.

[dunk]

I still won't build chariots. If I start with The Wheel, maybe a few. War Chariots (Egyptian UU), on the other hand, absolutely rock. Cheap horsemen. They're great.

I'm currently playing my first game as Egypt. Yay.

[ShuShu]

I would hate to become...

... a thorn in your side Axelman, as I like your posts. But I just can't help myself...

Just as with the 'Scientific' debate we had on my post, you are not using the correct metric.

It is really not a function of how many shields does it takes to produce a unit, but how many turns ...

a production 7 city takes 2 turns to produce the warrior and three to produce the spearman/archer. In six turns you get 3 warriors or 2 archers/spearmen. This isn't Alpha Centauri after all... Quite often it will be better to build that battleship than the destroyer.

I also believe the reason that your formula breaks down with the futuristic units is that it assumes a linear value increase that does not exist.

Promoting from 1 to 2 is not the same increase as 10 to 11. An equivalent change should be from 10 to 20. Unfortunately, 10 to 20 does not work either as the real metric is shields per victory and the later stage units have a broader range of units to attack. That's why the mathematical formulas get chucked out the window when playtesting comes along...

All that said, it is interesting to note how certain units buck the trend, and I never build musketmen (though I didn't know why until now... )