What is the preferred unit to attack longbowmen and crossbowmen? Yeah, obviously tanks would get the job done, but I mean in the same technological era. I just fought a war where I tried knights, war elephants, macemen and even another crossbowman and they bounced off doing little damage. I succeeded on strength of numbers, but I suffered grave losses. Is there an effective unit to use in this situation?

+archery promotion units ?

and well ... knights should rip them off

Catapults. The only way to go!

Catapults. The only way to go!


Arrrr ! When the catapults fail, there is only one solution !


...


more catapults !

Arrrr ! When the catapults fail, there is only one solution !


...


more catapults !

Exactly! Nothing can stand against the power of the catapults!

I usually have a city breaker unit [cover + cityraider x3 best atack unit possible] but i find that the ritual sacrifice of some catapults is un avoidable [buy them first strikes or extra collateral damage]

I usually have a city breaker unit [cover + cityraider x3 best atack unit possible] but i find that the ritual sacrifice of some catapults is un avoidable [buy them first strikes or extra collateral damage]


I think the sacrifice of catapults worth it as your attackers will not die and keep their exp, which is probably the most important thing for warfare. You will have very soon a +4str unit (with +melee/gunpowder/horses), a +3 city raider, a +2 medic ... etc, which will help you greatly for the following campaigns.

When wanting to crush cities defense, a winning team is to have :

- many catapults (3+) to shoot walls quickly, then to do collateral damage and then crush with the appropriate unit (see below)
- 1 hand to hand expert (bonus against htoh troops maximized)
- 1 bowmen expert (bonus against bow + city attack bonuses)
- many high value units, usually elephants if you can afford, or any kind of the highest melee vaue unit you have

This way, once you crushed walls and did real collateral damage, you choose the more appropriate unit to strike first. Anti bowman first ingeneral, after that you usually have a lancer/pikeman, so you use H-to-H specialist and after send all the elephants to crush down the city.

When i am playing conquest, i use a stack of lets say 5 to 8 units that will take all cities, supported by 1 archer and 1 lancer with medics ("doc") that will accompany and protect the cities meanwhile defending units you made come to protect it.

You do not need to build more offensive units, except cats. The first stack of offensive units will earn so much experience taking the cities after cats that overspecialized they can crush any defense that was catapulted.

When wanting to crush cities defense, a winning team is to have :

- many catapults (3+) to shoot walls quickly, then to do collateral damage and then crush with the appropriate unit (see below)
- 1 hand to hand expert (bonus against htoh troops maximized)
- 1 bowmen expert (bonus against bow + city attack bonuses)
- many high value units, usually elephants if you can afford, or any kind of the highest melee vaue unit you have

This way, once you crushed walls and did real collateral damage, you choose the more appropriate unit to strike first. Anti bowman first ingeneral, after that you usually have a lancer/pikeman, so you use H-to-H specialist and after send all the elephants to crush down the city.

When i am playing conquest, i use a stack of lets say 5 to 8 units that will take all cities, supported by 1 archer and 1 lancer with medics ("doc") that will accompany and protect the cities meanwhile defending units you made come to protect it.

You do not need to build more offensive units, except cats. The first stack of offensive units will earn so much experience taking the cities after cats that overspecialized they can crush any defense that was catapulted.

It works mostly against the AI, but human players will also put different kind of defenders, and the strongest defender AGAINST your attacker is always selected.

When you click on another unit. you will see a different defender if there is a better one against your unit. I usually throw first a couple of cats, then some newbie high value unit to remove the defenders which were not hurt enough. Then you know what happens when the defenders have only 1/2 of their strength XD ...

It works mostly against the AI, but human players will also put different kind of defenders, and the strongest defender AGAINST your attacker is always selected.
For sure it's valuable against ai. And the fact that that the more appropriate defending unit is chosen is why i use a hth specialist to crush the lancer before attacking with elephants ;)
You can also choose to have an unique attacking force (ie : only elephant), the danger is that you attack pack is very weak if the ai decides to attack it. For instance a lancer attacking your pack would be dangerous even with its low attack value (and ouch the pikeman).
That's the reason why i find it appropriate to have hyper specialized units in your attack stack, not only for attacks, but also to pevent yourself from counter-attacks.

A typical ai city is defended by archer x3 + lancer x1
Once cats did their first work, elephant directly is often shot by lancer. A hth unit is really valuable in the stack (or pillage specialized hth unit, like axeman) as to reduce losses.

But the main point was : cats, cats, again cats and some more cats. They do 80% of the job (the harder part).

For sure it's valuable against ai. And the fact that that the more appropriate defending unit is chosen is why i use a hth specialist to crush the lancer before attacking with elephants ;)
You can also choose to have an unique attacking force (ie : only elephant), the danger is that you attack pack is very weak if the ai decides to attack it. For instance a lancer attacking your pack would be dangerous even with its low attack value (and ouch the pikeman).
That's the reason why i find it appropriate to have hyper specialized units in your attack stack, not only for attacks, but also to pevent yourself from counter-attacks.

A typical ai city is defended by archer x3 + lancer x1
Once cats did their first work, elephant directly is often shot by lancer. A hth unit is really valuable in the stack (or pillage specialized hth unit, like axeman) as to reduce losses.

But the main point was : cats, cats, again cats and some more cats. They do 80% of the job (the harder part).

They should add a ranking of number of cats produced, along with the wealthiest civ, the most cultural ... etc XD

Knights demolish archers, especially if they had some levels when you upgraded them to knights. Also seems like the time period from knight to cavalry is short usually, so you boost the unit even further. Yeah but cats/artilery are nice (till MAs)

I typically ensure I have at 2:1 numerical superiority with combined arms (mixes of units), then I bombard the city down to zero, select all remaining units and stack attack, much faster than select each unit individually and works pretty well, since it usually net me the new city and some golds.

Mutax2003

Knights demolish archers, especially if they had some levels when you upgraded them to knights. Also seems like the time period from knight to cavalry is short usually, so you boost the unit even further. Yeah but cats/artilery are nice (till MAs)

Knights demolish archers? Tell that to the slain units lying on my battlefields. I think I lost five or six before I even killed one defender. I guess I'll have to start building catapults, which I've never used before.

Knights demolish archers? Tell that to the slain units lying on my battlefields. I think I lost five or six before I even killed one defender. I guess I'll have to start building catapults, which I've never used before.

Aye, there's your problem right there. Cities now get a massive defensive bonus from culture, and smashing through that is hard work. I rarely ever used siege weapons in Civ3, something I am sorely regretting considering how often I am using them now! First you use catapults with accuracy promotions to bombard the city and take down that defense bonus, then you use more catapults with collateral damage promotions to suicide themselves into the city and hurt their defenders which -severely- hurts their odds of winning a fight, even longbowmen. Then you use more catapults as paperweights, it doesn't matter, just more catapults! Then you rush to Steel to upgrade them into cannons ;)

You hardly used siege weapons ins Civ3? :eek: The Civ4 version is a weak shadow of their overpowered glory!

I typically go to a city with 4-6 catapults and at least as many attackers, usually a combo of knights and macemen. Bombard the city defenses with the cats (two or three of which have accuracy). That will take one or two turns with the bombarding, then I attack with the cats with collateral damage to reduce the strength of the defenders. Follow immediately with the attackers and the city is yours with the loss of a 3-4 cats and usually no other units. Once I have my core of attackers (enough to take two or three cities in one turn, I build nothing but cats and defenders.

You hardly used siege weapons ins Civ3? :eek: The Civ4 version is a weak shadow of their overpowered glory!

Sirrah, there is a reason your post count is over twenty thousand and mine is but three.

In general I don't sacrifice catapults, only use them for bombardment of defence because if your camapaign is far away or overseas, it's faster to get knights to replace a few that get lost per city than catapults to front.

Otherwise, my recipe is multipronged attack. Each prong should have 3 catapults, cowered by 1-2 good defenders (axemen, archers, pikemen or medieval versions of them) and 5-15 horsearchers (or knights or cavalary), swordsmen (or macemen or grenadiers, etc...) with some defenders (pike, axe, archers, defenders with medic promotion are good).

Move catapult stack to city, start bombarding. As you take defences down, start moving catapult stack towards next city, attack with 2 movement units, take city. While units are healing in newly conquered city, catapults are already reducing defences of the next one.

omg, i cant believe u dont use cats.... they r the single most important unit in your offense. the only way u could win w/out any type of bombarment of the defense bonus is if u r somehow way ahead of your enemies and have tanks while they have longbowmen or sumthin

In all the Civilization games my strategy has always been to build only offensive units with high mobility, like mounted units and tanks. The theory being that you can defend yourself by attacking attackers before they get to you, and the quicker you get to the enemy city, the less time they have to bomb you or attack you with artillery, etc. I really don't like using a stack of slow moving infantry. This has always worked in the past games, but it's different here because of the fact that certain units are very susceptible to others, so knights against pikemen doesn't work like it used to. I have to learn a new way to make war, and it's hard to adjust.

Problem is, you still gotta slow your mounted units down to the siege weapons speed. Unless you made infantry units like Axeman / Archers to escort them. I usually let the horsemen get in front. Pillage those improvements near cities I plan to raze / cannot capture then return to the Siege weapons stack when they are in position to bombard.

Best move you can do with mounted units are probably pillaging and intercept stragglers (small stacks that snuck up behind your borders), otherwise they're pretty horrible against most units when trying to take the city.

Cavalry is a little better, but I still like Grenadiers for all rounders. The real damage dealers during gunpowder era for me is the cannon. Everything else is just to protect the siege units.

Here's my strategy. Build all catapults/macemen at first when building up for the war. Macemen are actually better attackers than knights IMO because of city raider promotions. Make sure you have a lot of cats - as many as you'll need for the entire war. Then you attack with all your macemen and catapults. Then switch all your military production cities to build knights. Why? Because the knights can get to the war front and join the battle much sooner than another maceman could.

But yeah you pretty much have to bombard every city down to at most 20% defense bonus. A city with 80% and a longbow in it is going to be nearly impossible to take. The thing is the more units you lose when attacking a city the more promotions the AI gets on its defenders. Soon that longbowman has city garrison 3 and combat 1 and then even a city raider 3 maceman with 0% defense bonus is likely to lose.

Also watch for cities on hills. They will be quite a bit harder to capture and you may want to sacrifice a catapult or two for collateral damage.

the only way u could win w/out any type of bombarment of the defense bonus is if u r somehow way ahead of your enemies and have tanks while they have longbowmen or sumthin

Last night I was forced into an early war with Tokugawa, didn't have time to build siege weapons. Focused all my strenght on Tokyo, it was heavily guarded + 60% defense bonus, but other cities were too far away. There was spearmen, catapult, 2 axemen, 2 longbowman and 6 archers inside. I attacked with 8 horse archers (strength-medic-25% vs melee) and 1 axemen (2x strength-3x city raider). Swept the city in 2 turns, loosing 4 horse archers in the process. 3 of those were lost in 1st turn, last one in 2nd turn. I checked the battle odds before each attack, most were not in my favor, not by much, yet I won. Only the Axemen had odds in his favor, not by much too, but he lost only 0,5 strength in both turns, slaughtering 1 longbowman and 1 archer. Sometimes siege weapons are not needed. Oh, this was on Monarch difficulty ;)

Last night I was forced into an early war with Tokugawa, didn't have time to build siege weapons. Focused all my strenght on Tokyo, it was heavily guarded + 60% defense bonus, but other cities were too far away. There was spearmen, catapult, 2 axemen, 2 longbowman and 6 archers inside. I attacked with 8 horse archers (strength-medic-25% vs melee) and 1 axemen (2x strength-3x city raider). Swept the city in 2 turns, loosing 4 horse archers in the process. 3 of those were lost in 1st turn, last one in 2nd turn. I checked the battle odds before each attack, most were not in my favor, not by much, yet I won. Only the Axemen had odds in his favor, not by much too, but he lost only 0,5 strength in both turns, slaughtering 1 longbowman and 1 archer. Sometimes siege weapons are not needed. Oh, this was on Monarch difficulty ;)

That sounds like pure luck to me. A horse archer against a longbow in a 60% defense bonus city? I'll assume he was fortified in there. That would give the longbow an effective strength of like 12.6. Against a 6.6 strength horse archer? You should have lost all 8 of them trying to take that city. I'm having a hard time even believing this scenario.

In all the Civilization games my strategy has always been to build only offensive units with high mobility, like mounted units and tanks. The theory being that you can defend yourself by attacking attackers before they get to you, and the quicker you get to the enemy city, the less time they have to bomb you or attack you with artillery, etc. I really don't like using a stack of slow moving infantry. This has always worked in the past games, but it's different here because of the fact that certain units are very susceptible to others, so knights against pikemen doesn't work like it used to. I have to learn a new way to make war, and it's hard to adjust.

I played civ3 like this quite a lot. I was mostly a monarch player though (low enough that I could play fairly quickly and not lose :D ). I'd send Knights, Cavs, Tanks depending on the age out in front with workers and defensive units and settlers coming behind. I was never a huge artillery player since it would slow my offensive down so much and I counted on being ahead in tech. I'm sure the more experienced better players will say I should've moved up to harder levels, but I still felt it to be challenging for the amount of energy I wanted to put into it. That strategy just isn't a strategy anymore, at least until tanks come around and even then it's not really valid. No more 3 movement units and the cultural borders are a much bigger problem for that strategy now. Combined arms stacks are the only way to defeat opposing cities now. First, even at noble the AI can stay with you tech wise in the beginning. That means it'll be a long time before you have a significant strength advantage and even then city defenses will massively protect a weaker unit. Cats are the only way to bring down cities defense until frigates and bombers. Since you need to bring them, then there is no significant speed advantage to having horses instead of melee/archer etc.. units since you won't be able to attack a city until it's defenses are down. I find I almost don't build more then a couple cavalry units anymore. They're still very useful for pillaging, to have a few at home for offensive defense against counterattacks, or to pick off units near your stack so that you can still retreat back to the stack. Also, since they are often the highest strength unit of the age they are valuable, but there is no way you can get away with just masses of cavalry against cities anymore.

Last night I was forced into an early war with Tokugawa, didn't have time to build siege weapons. Focused all my strenght on Tokyo, it was heavily guarded + 60% defense bonus, but other cities were too far away. There was spearmen, catapult, 2 axemen, 2 longbowman and 6 archers inside. I attacked with 8 horse archers (strength-medic-25% vs melee) and 1 axemen (2x strength-3x city raider). Swept the city in 2 turns, loosing 4 horse archers in the process. 3 of those were lost in 1st turn, last one in 2nd turn. I checked the battle odds before each attack, most were not in my favor, not by much, yet I won. Only the Axemen had odds in his favor, not by much too, but he lost only 0,5 strength in both turns, slaughtering 1 longbowman and 1 archer. Sometimes siege weapons are not needed. Oh, this was on Monarch difficulty ;)

All these calculations include the promotions you said the units had and the 60% city defense, as well as the inherit abilities of each unit. The order of the battles is based on how the AI would choose what to defend with next (to the best of my ability).You would start this out with 6.6 horse vs 11.1 longbow for your best odds (no promotions for the long bow, city not on a hill). If you lost 3 horses the first turn, then we'll assume you lost one to a longbow, then the 2nd horse won (highly unlikely at those odds). Then repeat for the second longbow. Then you would face a 10.4 spearman to a 6.6 horse. Assume that you lose the third here and win with the second horse again. You still have 2 horses and one axeman (this is if you moved to within one square of the city the turn before and no units attacked you including the catapult? or did any damage). You now have two horses and an axeman left. If you win the next two battles with 8.6 horses against 8 strength axes. Then your remaining axe defeats the catapult at 7.5 to 8 underdog. On the next turn you have 5 horses and one axe that have to be damaged in the very least, since they've all won underdog battles last turn and now you have to beat 6 archers that equal a 6.3 against you. You also said you lost a horse on the second turn, so unless there was a battle of mutual destruction (never seen that happen, you not have enough units left to defeat 6 archers, and there is no way any of the units would've been in good enough shape to do so. As far as I know, there is no difficulty level that would allow this to happen and taking all the numbers out of the equation in terms of strength, just saying you lost 3 units on the first turn, means at best you only killed 6 of 12 defending units. Then if you lost one more on the second turn you could only defeat defeat 5 of the remaining 6 archers.

You would start this out with 6.6 horse vs 11.1 longbow for your best odds (no promotions for the long bow, city not on a hill).

You're either leaving out the +25% fortification bonus or the +25% innate city defense bonus that longbows have. It should be 6.6 vs 12.6 which is nearly impossible odds. It would likely take 4 or 5 horse archers just to take out that one longbowman.

You're either leaving out the +25% fortification bonus or the +25% innate city defense bonus that longbows have. It should be 6.6 vs 12.6 which is nearly impossible odds.

You're right, I forgot to include the up to 25% fortification bonus for any of the defending units. That way the only way these odds are are even this good are if all the units in the city just got there and none of them have received any xp promotions yet. I think we've proven that post was full of crap.

You would start this out with 6.6 horse vs 11.1 longbow for your best odds (no promotions for the long bow, city not on a hill).

This might not be true, I think he probably attacked the city with axe before horses just to get rid of one of the longbow. Assuming the longbow has no city defense promotion, then the axe does have a chance of winning 5 * (1 + 0.75 + 0.2) vs 6 * (1 + 0.6 + 0.25 + 0.25) or a 9.75 vs 12.6 odd. Now this is is actually capable of winning, though much luck is need. If he's lucky continues, the second attack via horses should take the 2nd longbow down at least 1/2 hp. From this point onward, it's all 50/50 fights. Odds in this game are sometimes really screwed, I lost a combat 5 commando infantry to a green infantry yesterday:mad: , it was a 30.0 vs 22.0 odd too.

This might not be true, I think he probably attacked the city with axe before horses just to get rid of one of the longbow. Assuming the longbow has no city defense promotion, then the axe does have a chance of winning 5 * (1 + 0.75 + 0.2) vs 6 * (1 + 0.6 + 0.25 + 0.25) or a 9.75 vs 12.6 odd. Now this is is actually capable of winning, though much luck is need. If he's lucky continues, the second attack via horses should take the 2nd longbow down at least 1/2 hp. From this point onward, it's all 50/50 fights. Odds in this game are sometimes really screwed, I lost a combat 5 commando infantry to a green infantry yesterday:mad: , it was a 30.0 vs 22.0 odd too.

Well he stated his axeman had odds in his favor, which indicates he did not use it to attack first, even though that would have been in his best interest. But your calculations are wrong anyway. City raider promotion actually subtracts from the defense bonus of the defender. So the axeman would actually have 5 * (1+0.2) vs 6 * (1+0.6+0.25+0.25-0.75) = 6 vs 8.1 odds. And that's only if the longbow had been fortified for 5 turns. If the longbow had just gotten there then it would be 6 vs 6.6 odds which is VERY winnable.

But it's also unlikely that neither of the longbows had city garrison promotion, which is something we've been assuming in these posts.

I think we've analyzed this scenario to death now. :p

This might not be true, I think he probably attacked the city with axe before horses just to get rid of one of the longbow. Assuming the longbow has no city defense promotion, then the axe does have a chance of winning 5 * (1 + 0.75 + 0.2) vs 6 * (1 + 0.6 + 0.25 + 0.25) or a 9.75 vs 12.6 odd. Now this is is actually capable of winning, though much luck is need. If he's lucky continues, the second attack via horses should take the 2nd longbow down at least 1/2 hp. From this point onward, it's all 50/50 fights. Odds in this game are sometimes really screwed, I lost a combat 5 commando infantry to a green infantry yesterday:mad: , it was a 30.0 vs 22.0 odd too.

Forgot to add the city raiders consecutively, just gave the 30%. So, say that happens, then he must lose either two horses to the spear or two to the other longbow instead and he kills an archer instead of the cat, because the horse is +50% vs. cat so it wouldn't be picked as a defender. Then it's conceivable that the cat attacks the stack IBT, then if it loses the remaining attackers would have enough guys left to defeat the remaining defenders. However, the odds at this point would have to be incredibly long. No matter how you slice it, this never happened.

@Shillen: I didn't know it subtracts from the city defense bonus. I knew it wasn't a straight add up though, 'cause I've seen lots of times where my city raiders units aren't nearly as high attacking as I thought, but I could also see the defender was lowered, so I knew there was some cancelling going on, but didn't know exactly how it worked.

I don't know if that person was lying or not, but I do know that I seem to lose battles I think I should win a lot more often than I win battles I should lose.