Spartan Academy: General Discussions

[Solomwi]

There may not be any effect. It just seems logical that a Pacifist nation would be quicker to find military action abhorrent. As I said, I've yet to use it, so I'm simply guessing and asking.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by DeepO
I love amphibious cavs, which seem to come relatively easily with an AGR leader. Without AGR, it's much harder though, and I'll generally go over land with all non-marine units.

Do Cavalry get the free Combat I Promotion from the Aggressive trait? I thought they were mounted units, not gunpowder...

[Dominae]

Cavalry, Marines...those are pretty late-game units. Turning to the early-game:

In my opinion, Chariots and Horse Archers dominate early-game warfare. Especially Horse Archers because of their bonus versus Catapults.

Two moves means Chariots and Horse Archers can conduct Galley-type surprise attacks anywhere on land. In Civ3, if you wanted to put some Horsemen behind enemy lines to pillage and harass, they were essentially suicide missions. In Civ4, Horse Archers are arguably the best defenders of the Ancient era; only one unit, Spearmen, stops them, and that unit (conveniently or not, depending on your point of view) is not a fast mover. What this means is that the presence of Horse Archers on the battlefield is a major headache for the defender.

If get to play as Mali, no resource would make me happier than Horses. We would then be virtually immune to any sort of Ancient and Classical offensive, and could reasonably conduct our own if we so desired.

That said, if we do have Copper our number one priority should be putting Spearmen in all our key defensive locations. Time and time again in MP I have discovered that the lone Spearmen averts disaster like the Archer can only hope to.

Engineering is a very powerful tech in multiplayer that gets overlooked a lot in SP. +1 Road movement adds a huge amount of flexibility to defense (and sometimes offense). Pikemen fufills the same role as the Spearmen only better.

I hope we never build a Swordsman, they're very narrow usage units whose unique power can be duplicated just fine by a Catapult.

[Theseus]

Holy... that was fast, at 17 replies in a couple of hours!

[Solomwi]

Way to jinx it, T.

Has 'Poly gotten excrutiatingly slow for anybody else, or is it just something strange happening on my end?

[Krill]

I think it is your end. Poly is fine for me.

[Solomwi]

Strange. On one refresh just now, I got a database unavailable for maintenance message.

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Theseus
Holy... that was fast, at 17 replies in a couple of hours!

I thought that was slow for GS standars

[Krill]

That is slow, I must admit...

I stil doubt we'll beat the 1000 posts generated by a single turn...

[Arrian]

Dom,

I'd love to have horses too. Chariots are great early-game units to protect yourself from barbs and anybody who is thinking of getting frisky with an early rush.

Spearmen are pretty cheap, though. And they do really bad things to HA's.

...

Pacifism: I use it often. I don't know if it has any undocumented effects like extra WW. I've fought wars with Pacifism, and it didn't feel any worse than WW under, say, Free Religion.

-Arrian

[Theseus]

SkirmiRush.

Discuss.

[Hot Mustard]

I'd rather skirmintimidate.

[Metaliturtle]

I've been playing around with skirmisher rushes a lot lately, and it is very effective with raging barbs as the barbs seem to like giving the exp to the skirmishers. I had them rotating from strongpoints on the last game I played, got 6 total, 5 w/ 2-3 promotions was able to rush Catherine early on and thrash her city.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Theseus
SkirmiRush.

I rarely use Scouts myself, but I'm glad we're going to in this game because it will allow us to make a more informed decisions regaring a possible rush or choke. So for now I would say: let's let our Scouts do some work before deciding on how to use our Skirmishers.

The main thing about SkirmiRushes is to be realistic about what they can actually accomplish: they are always a major pita to the target, but without follow-through (Axemen, Horse Archers) are rarely sufficient to take out another human player/team entirely.

If we do decide to rush, it will be after a thorough analysis of what we expect to accomplish versus the diplomatic ramifications (I'm sure we justify the rush economically - Skirmishers are not very expensive). For the record, I think that keeping our nearest neighbor off metals and horses is a sufficient accomplishment to justify how much they will hate us for it, but if we can only deny one or the other it's probably not worth it.

All that said, I would love to implement/witness a SkirmiRush in a demogame - should be very exciting.

[Dominae]

By the way, in my (limited) MP experience I learned that the best use for a Skirmisher is as an immovable pillar: put a couple on a tile and dare the enemy to try and dislodge them.

They're very slow in transition (especially in enemy territory where the defender gets to use Roads) and not superb on offense, so it's essential for Skirmishers to have "tempo" advantage, i.e., to get there first. With sufficient warning, a defender can weather a Skirmisher rush with a comparable number of Archers/Warriors (sad but true).