i love this promotion, but i hate how disappears with the arrival of gunpowder. how does this make sense? did guns stop people from raiding cities? i don't get it. it's really silly that we have to build a bunch of city raiding macemen and upgrade them later to gunpowder units. either way, it's pretty annoying because you have to babysit these city raiding gunpowder units because you can't build them anymore and it drives me crazy whenever i lose them in battle.

please make city raider promotion last all throughout the game...

I think tanks can get them as well as cannons. But I agree that it is dumb that between musket men and all the way until tanks there are no raiders. By the time of musket men, most borders are fixed and expansion flows through the barrel of the gun.

It is available to tanks and artillery.

1. They wanted to make gunpowder units like infantry better defensive units than offensive units, to encourage more varied forces.(planes, artillery, tanks)
2. This makes sense historically.

i think the best change would be to just make so city raider promotions are removed when the Infantry are upgraded, and possibly regain the exp to use for appropriate promotions.

i think the best change would be to just make so city raider promotions are removed when the Infantry are upgraded, and possibly regain the exp to use for appropriate promotions.

that would be lovely! great idea! :goodjob:

bhruic are you around?

Remove the city raider promotions when Infantry are upgraded? Why would you want to do that? Then whats the point of saving CR III macemen to upgrade into Infantry?

sorry, yea tanks and artillery still have CR but i was talking about gunpowder infantry.

CR is one reason why i keep old units around. sometimes, i keep some warriors around from the when the game started and use great generals on them to get a modern city raiding unit out of a warrior.

I think its because gunpowder units have built in city attack by the fact they ignore any walls. The city raider ability is showing seige equipment the units bring with them and this is not something that happened so much in later days. Instead they would use cannons and air power when available.

You even get a little seige tower animation dont you when they attack, im sure of it.

I think Dominico's got it right.

Well YMMV, but I have modded in city raider for gunpowder units. It turns out to be nice if you have no oil nowhere near you...and it means you don't have to worry about saving all your ancient melee units with CR.

I also allow mounted to get cover, because I hate the dominance of stupid longbows, especially on hills, and having cavalry who can quickly take out archery units makes sense (after playing total war).

I think Its supposed to at least mildy reflect actual warfare in history. Artillery was the primary offensive equipment following the invention of gunpowder followed by mass infantry charges. And considering the lack of city combat in the WWI era it makes sense that in a stand off only artillery provides the necessary attack power.

It makes for a really strange progression in the game though. I get gunpowder, and instead of equipping my military with the best new weapons, I try to build as many macemen as possible before rifeling makes them obsolete??? With a barracks + vallesage and throcracy, my macemen start with CR2. A couple of battles and they have CR3. Once I get a sizeable force of CR3 macemen, I am ready to research rifeling so that I can upgrade them.

Not only is this a backwards game mechanic, it is also broken. The AI does not take advantage of the CR upgrade track, so it just gives the human player a 75% attack bonus in the mid game that they AI does not have. On higher difficulties, this is what often gives the human player the edge to take on the stacked odds that the AI has.

It makes for a really strange progression in the game though. I get gunpowder, and instead of equipping my military with the best new weapons, I try to build as many macemen as possible before rifeling makes them obsolete???

i put off rifling to stockpile macemen quite often. i've lost track of how many games i was never able to build riflemen, since i learned assembly line before i ever bothered with rifling :lol:. so when i learn rifling, i have to build infantry, riflemen are never an option.

once i decided to see just how far i could go. i had no war worries, everybody loved me, so i goofed off. turns out you can get really far into the tech tree in BtS without bothering with rifling ...

http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p285/kmadcandy/FutureNoRifles.jpg

What's all this "Rifling obsoletes Macemen" talk? I get Rifling and continue to build CRIII Macemen (who get upgraded to Riflemen) all the time.

Bh

because you can't build grenadiers. units go obsolete when you can build all units they can upgrade to. you apparently delay military science instead! but i want blitz *giggle*.

Oh, guess that makes sense. I never bother with Grenadiers. Riflemen have a higher str, and if you are CRIII, that's enough to win most attacks anyway. Besides, the +25% vs mounted is really nice to take on all of the Cavalry attackers I face.

Bh

The city raider promotions are very powerful....too powerful to be standard in the modern ages for all units.

You get them in the earlier eras because you have less things to give xp to new units. Using civics, buildings, wonders and generals, it's possible to produce units with a lot of promotions in the later ages. When you're pumping out new units with 10xp from 5 cities every turn, having them all city raider 3 would be very overpowered.

Units also go obsolete if you can build units that you can upgrade all the units they can upgrade to

So if you Never research Military Science, then as soon as you get Infantry it is just like you can build Grenadiers, because Infantry are one of the things Grenadiers can upgrade to.

so SAM infantry obsolete Riflemen and Grenadiers because you can upgrade Infantry to SAMs (and so SAMs also obsolete Maces+Pikes)

Never understood city raider for tanks since street combat was hell on them.

Tanks in street to street fighting are priceless.

Yes a tank on its own would lose but to me they represent part of the army.

Imagine city raider tanks as the Elephants of germany and the Shermans with flamethrower upgrades. They stand back and pound resiliant defenders buildings to rubble, or flame them out.

City raider can be seen as upgrades to your tanks weapons or specialisation of tanks to heavy front armour and bigger explosive shells.

maybe it's so that you need a StratRes to make attacking units

EDIT: imagine if defensive troops got CR - Sitting bull would be marching around with CR3 longbows in 500AD. it would screw the whole game up.