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...or 'why the Jag rush is so much better than the plain warrior rush'.
The structure of your basic war: First, build a large enough fighting force. Second, fight, whilst building more units to replace casualties (if you don't need to do this, then you're probably waiting too long before launching the initial attack). Keep fighting until you take all objectives, or until you don't have a sufficient number of troops to maintain the offensive.
That's the way I play it anyway. So the amount of time you can sustain a war depends primarily on the balance
between the rate at which you suffer casualties, versus the rate at which you replenish them - or more precisely, the rate at which the replacements arrive at the front line.
So the advantages of the Jaguar warrior over the normal warrior:
1) Retreat ability. If you play around with a combat calculator which includes retreat chances, you notice that you need slightly more Jaguar warriors to take kill a given target on average (you lose out on some wins when your Jag retreats), but you take notably fewer casualties. So to swarm a town early in the game may need 7 (or 8) Jags rather than 6 warriors to give you the same chance of taking the town, but at the end, you'll only have 1 dead rather than 2 (on average). So you need fewer replacements.
2) Golden age. Once you start the fighting, you trigger your golden age, which allows you to get a production boost (and a gold boost, but that is not relevant). The Aztec golden age is purely a production boost for churning out Jag warriors more quickly (and you should plan for that - mine unshielded grassland rather than bonus grassland - mining bonus grassland is a waste right now because you don't get any extra benefit from the golden age). Most of your cities will be small, and with not many tiles improved. The golden age will reduce the Jag production time in a 2 shield city from 5 turns to 3 (and from 4 to 2, 3 to 2 in higher production cities). You can produce 50-100% more Jag warriors while the golden age lasts.
3) Fast movement. Since you tend to start off capturing towns close to you, and then move on to further away ones, this makes a difference - you need to overtake the front line as it moves away from you. The result here is that given equal production rates of Jag or normal warriors, the Jags get to the front line at a higher rate than the normal warriors (or, more pertinently, Jag warriors getting to the front in numbers advance the front line more rapidly than normal warriors can).
4) Scouting. As per the 'Triple threat' thread (see the 'must read' library), Jags act more or less as scouts, so you can find out where your victims live earlier, and get your army heading in the right direction earlier. So you can catch them with fewer defensive units.
5) More abstract: playing the Aztecs, and knowing you have to make the most of the window of opportunity you have, you tend to focus more on building Jags than you would with warriors, so you have a sufficiently large force to start a war earlier in the game than you would with normal warriors. At least for some people...
6) Leaders. If you are dedicated to churning out Jag warriors and using them, you probably have even odds (or better) of getting a great leader from your early warmongering, which is probably best spent on the Pyramids (finishing off your fighting with a sudden spurt of rapid city growth can set you up very nicely indeed).
My experience has been that normal warrior rushes tend to peter out quickly. You just can't keep a large enough force in the field to take more than one or two towns before you are forced on the defensive due to lack of healthy troops. The Jags on the other hand tend to increase in numbers as the war goes on, at least during the golden age phase, and it is not too hard to maintain their numbers for a protracted war even outside the golden age (unless you are fighting the Greeks or the Zulus of course, and you ought to stay well away from them unless there is no-one else to kill).
The structure of your basic war: First, build a large enough fighting force. Second, fight, whilst building more units to replace casualties (if you don't need to do this, then you're probably waiting too long before launching the initial attack). Keep fighting until you take all objectives, or until you don't have a sufficient number of troops to maintain the offensive.
That's the way I play it anyway. So the amount of time you can sustain a war depends primarily on the balance
between the rate at which you suffer casualties, versus the rate at which you replenish them - or more precisely, the rate at which the replacements arrive at the front line.
So the advantages of the Jaguar warrior over the normal warrior:
1) Retreat ability. If you play around with a combat calculator which includes retreat chances, you notice that you need slightly more Jaguar warriors to take kill a given target on average (you lose out on some wins when your Jag retreats), but you take notably fewer casualties. So to swarm a town early in the game may need 7 (or 8) Jags rather than 6 warriors to give you the same chance of taking the town, but at the end, you'll only have 1 dead rather than 2 (on average). So you need fewer replacements.
2) Golden age. Once you start the fighting, you trigger your golden age, which allows you to get a production boost (and a gold boost, but that is not relevant). The Aztec golden age is purely a production boost for churning out Jag warriors more quickly (and you should plan for that - mine unshielded grassland rather than bonus grassland - mining bonus grassland is a waste right now because you don't get any extra benefit from the golden age). Most of your cities will be small, and with not many tiles improved. The golden age will reduce the Jag production time in a 2 shield city from 5 turns to 3 (and from 4 to 2, 3 to 2 in higher production cities). You can produce 50-100% more Jag warriors while the golden age lasts.
3) Fast movement. Since you tend to start off capturing towns close to you, and then move on to further away ones, this makes a difference - you need to overtake the front line as it moves away from you. The result here is that given equal production rates of Jag or normal warriors, the Jags get to the front line at a higher rate than the normal warriors (or, more pertinently, Jag warriors getting to the front in numbers advance the front line more rapidly than normal warriors can).
4) Scouting. As per the 'Triple threat' thread (see the 'must read' library), Jags act more or less as scouts, so you can find out where your victims live earlier, and get your army heading in the right direction earlier. So you can catch them with fewer defensive units.
5) More abstract: playing the Aztecs, and knowing you have to make the most of the window of opportunity you have, you tend to focus more on building Jags than you would with warriors, so you have a sufficiently large force to start a war earlier in the game than you would with normal warriors. At least for some people...
6) Leaders. If you are dedicated to churning out Jag warriors and using them, you probably have even odds (or better) of getting a great leader from your early warmongering, which is probably best spent on the Pyramids (finishing off your fighting with a sudden spurt of rapid city growth can set you up very nicely indeed).
My experience has been that normal warrior rushes tend to peter out quickly. You just can't keep a large enough force in the field to take more than one or two towns before you are forced on the defensive due to lack of healthy troops. The Jags on the other hand tend to increase in numbers as the war goes on, at least during the golden age phase, and it is not too hard to maintain their numbers for a protracted war even outside the golden age (unless you are fighting the Greeks or the Zulus of course, and you ought to stay well away from them unless there is no-one else to kill).
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