Irony of aggressive civs?

cymru_man said:

How can you say Quecha is underpowered? Have you SEEN what people do with that unit?

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I mowed them down with my roman praets (despite some resistance), it was on settler level though

cymru_man said:

How can you say Quecha is underpowered? Have you SEEN what people do with that unit?

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No, but I'd love to hear what can be done with them

The AI is pathetic at fighting Quechuas. It will make archer upon archer and send them at your Quechua that's standing on a forested hill next to their capital. It doesn't even know that a warrior would do a better job than an archer. You can easily take out 1 or 2 civs with Quechuas alone.

haha nice lol dumb ai

cymru_man said:

How can you say Quecha is underpowered? Have you SEEN what people do with that unit?

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On a small map, the AI is doomed if I am Huayna Capac.

Certain units are better in SP then MP and vice verse. Here are some examples:

Quecha: in MP human players know better and wont build archers. But is great against the AI

Musketeer: Really a better MP unit. Any 2-move units with no clear counter in MP is valuable

Keshik is a fairly undesirable UU in any case, esp. with HBR more expensive. Human opponents will still build Spears to kill them, and chop there wood before the show anyways. Bonus versus catapults...so what.

if you're unhappy with the UU's, just mod them to your liking. i know, some will frown on this idea, but a balanced modification, i.e. modifying all units is fair. i.e. the samurai, now have 2 movements but a bit more expensive (nostalgic about civ3 i guess). phalanx should get a bonus against melee, and the praetorians should be even more expensive. the immortals were not cavalrymen in real life, so they are back to melee, but keeping their 2 movements, they are essentially fast swordsmen. keshiks... well soooooo underpowered, considering the fact that spears and pike can effectively counter them. higher strength + an extra first shot will do the trick. and those much hated Jags, well i leave that to y our imagination.

I think it's partly been made this way to prevent anything becoming overly powerful. Imagine how overpowered one of the stronger UU's would be, if they had the free combat promotion. Cossacks redcoats and pretorians are all hard enough to deal with as they are.... it'd be absolutely chaos if one of the agressive civ's had a UU such as these.

It's been designed so agressive civ's can be dangerous throughout history, whilst other civs like rome and england have a military "golden age," but are average the rest of the time.

Personally I think it makes agressive civ's more fun to play. You can start wars whenever you want, where as with other civ's, I always find myself waiting and planning for my UU war.

Personally I quite like some of the agressive civs UU's. I'm a huge fan of the quechua. I only ever play on marathon, and they've very useful on slower game speeds. It might be different since they changed chopping, but against the AI, if you were commited to a quechua chop, you were almost guaranteed to take out at least one civ before the AI has axemen.

Along with what Zombie said, I would propose that people stop thinking of aggressive as a free combat 1 promotion, and start thinking of it as boosting your unit's strength.

An axemen has a strength of 5. An aggressive civ's Axemen is 5.5. It's Macemen are 8.8. You can throw in the fact that combat 1 gives you promotion to cover, and shock, but for me, just thinking of their effective strength is convincing enough of aggressive's utility.

An aggresive civ will win those tough city battles where the odds are hovering around 50% much more often than a non-aggressive conquerer. With fewer losses it will need to build fewer units to accomplish the same end, and as a result will have more shields to devote to city improvements. It's really a builder's trait you see.

Mahatmajon said:

Um. Archer and longbowman can get city defense promotions. They are good as defensive units in your cities. Having cities on hills for added defense makes these units even better city defenders.

Phalanx can't get city defender. Therefore it is an offensive unit. Having +25% hill defense on an offensive unit is "one of the stupedest unit abilities in the game IMO".

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Since when are spearmen offensive units?

I barely build spearmen. Maybe one or two for my axe/sword stack and whatnot.

The only time I build spearmen is when I attach copper when I have a warrior partially built. Then I don't have a choice.

I think it's kind of ironic (and sucky) that the aggressive civs have such mediocre UUs: phalanx, keshik, quechua, jaguar, musketeer, samurai.

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I dont agree with you, phalanx and jaguar are the only units of this list that I see as kind of unsefull, but others...

In one of my games, i played monarch difficulty, and marathon speed, standard lakes map. I played as Inca. There were six AI. First three of them, i conquered only using Quechuas, and it didnt even take long time. During these wars, i lost three Quechuas!!! think about it, three!! then I reseached some tech and fixed my economy (at this point it really started to hurt) I had 8 cities at 1500 BC. then i went for oher civs with axemen and swordsmen. It didnt take long, and at 50 AD I had conquered all the world (expect one city that i gave to Elizabeth) then I started to milk, and built all wonders, and captured all holy cities(expect barbarian destroyed Jewish holy city), and founded others.

Keshiks may not be best units for taking over cities, but i cant imagine better units for pillaging. They ignore terrain movement costs and so they can move as fast at enemys land as in your own lands.

Musketeers arent so bad, because they can move 2 squares per turn, they are really usefull if you dont have horses or iron, and cant built knights or other powerfull unis.

And as you admitted Samurais arent so bad. tokugawa is propably the best leader for warmongering. He has good UU, agressive trait, and organized trait, so you can fight long wars without destroying your economy.

What units are good UU if these arent? I would like to know...

ok, first off i should say i play on normal speed. so therefore quechas have a very short timespan for me. plus i'm not *just* evaluating the unit based on vs. the ai, but also on their potential for vs human opponents. no human opponent is going to build archers if they see an aggressive incan on the horizon. not only that, but who doesn't rush to get axes out right away for both offense and defense?

keshiks for pillaging? yes, sure, but first of all you don't want to pillage too much a land you're planning on taking, second of all no human player is going to avoid building spears vs an aggressive mongolian and will have them sitting on their copper mines, and finally you have to research archery and hbriding which stunt your tech growth since they don't lead to anything.

musketeers have two movement pts which is good--better for defense imo--however they don't really get offensive promotions which makes them debatable for offensive combat. and they only have no counter if you're clearly ahead in the tech race, which doesn't always happen.

and in terms of balance, true if aggressive civs had a strong ai too that might be too much. kinda like how the cultural civs don't start with mysticism and the financial don't really start off with what's required for pottery, etc.

it just seems ironic to me that the aggressive civs have defensive and/or lame units (i'll exempt japan from this since i changed my mind about samurai...i guess next game when i want to be more aggressive i'll use tokugawa...i just can't bring myself to play catherine since i always avoid the civs that are clearly op).

It is amazing to see how many people don't understand that phalanx is just an AXEMAN in attack against AI's archers, but with a terrific ability against mounted units. The opponent can simply forget all kinds of Chariots/Immortals/Keshiks/War Elephants/Knights - it's pure suicide. While with another civ you have to include some useless units in your stacks to make the defence against mounted units, with Phalanx you do also the attacking.

I would very much like to see what would all these players do if suddenly the AI sent into their territory small groups like antimelee horse archer/phalanx or War Elephant/phalanx just for pillaging (btw, it would be interesting to learn if someone has tried this in MP). The fact that AI plays badly doesn't make a unit bad - especially when it has BOTH extra unit strength AND an extra terrain strength.

From all the aggressive UU, only the Jaguar is (IMO) almost useless.

Phalanx is an amazing stack defender especially if you stage on hills. The AI likes to counterattack with mounted units and Phalanxes beat everything until cavalry. That's a very long lifetime for a UU. With 5 str they can also take on archers early on to finish a city if your axemen and swords suffered bad dice rolls.

I still hold that the jaguar is crap since it's only good in the rare games where you don't have copper or iron.

No terrain movement penalty, that's all that needs to be said about the Keshik. You'll never find a better raider.

Lord Chambers said:

An aggressive civ's Axemen is 5.5. Its horse archers are 6.6.

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An aggressive civ's horse archers' strength is 6. Only melee and gunpowder units get the bonus.

However, like i said, the +10% strength is only a small part of the bonus given by aggressive. Getting all further promotions faster is at least as big of a boost.

futurehermit said:

ok, first off i should say i play on normal speed. so therefore quechas have a very short timespan for me. plus i'm not *just* evaluating the unit based on vs. the ai, but also on their potential for vs human opponents. no human opponent is going to build archers if they see an aggressive incan on the horizon. not only that, but who doesn't rush to get axes out right away for both offense and defense?

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Even on normal speed a small stack of Quechuas will allow you to take out a close civ before tech advances too far. You can usually take out 1 and if you get lucky with a close neighbor you can bottle up a second one. More below.

keshiks for pillaging? yes, sure, but first of all you don't want to pillage too much a land you're planning on taking, second of all no human player is going to avoid building spears vs an aggressive mongolian and will have them sitting on their copper mines, and finally you have to research archery and hbriding which stunt your tech growth since they don't lead to anything.

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I think you're missing a major option for warfare. It is definitely not necessary to always take the other guy's land. You can get a long way by simply crippling a nearby opponent, allowing you to get ahead on tech and to grab more open land. Bottle up the enemy, destroy the economy, and make money pillaging.

Declare war, post sentry units (axes) around the major cities and pillage every improvement. You don't have to pillage the actual mine if you can break up the trade route by pillaging roads. Even if they keep the ability to produce Spears in 1 city for a while, you have Axemen outside waiting to ambush any they try to send.

What if they have a big pile of spears already waiting? Do Keshik/Axe stacks. Keshiks use their 2 moves to move/pillage then the Axes move into the same square. It pillages as quickly as straight Keshiks. It's just slower for pure movement (so plan your pillage route accordingly).

Bottling up is also the same technique to use for Quechuas in MP. Declare war. Pillage any improvements and park next to the city in defensive terrain. Without resources, you can't build anything but warriors that have a chance at pushing the Quechuas back and even then, with all of them having Combat I and a good defensive position it's darn hard. Build axemen later and take them out when it is convenient.

futurehermit said:

I think it's kind of ironic (and sucky) that the aggressive civs have such mediocre UUs: phalanx, keshik, quechua, jaguar, musketeer, samurai.

Kinda hard to be **aggressive** with these units!!! Musketeer, jaguar, and phalanx are defensive units, the keshik requires you to research two deadend techs (hbriding, archery), quechua has such a short period of use and is of questionable usefulness, which leaves only the samurai. The samurai is debatable, but I have found that they lack the punch you would like to face longbowmen at that point in the game.

I dunno, does anyone else have any thoughts on this? I started out really wanting to go with an aggressive civ, but because of the UUs, I've started playing with other civs and finding much more success.

edit: I wonder if this is consequently why conquest seems so much harder than the other victory conditions? Imo the 4 best conquest civs on paper would be: napoleon, genghis, huayna, montezuma. This is because of synergy of traits and UUs "in theory". But since their respective UUs actually suck conquest is made more difficult since you can't leverage your UUs. What do you think?

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I'm presently playing a game on Noble difficulty as Genghis Kahn, and it has been phenomenally easy. I killed Monty right of the bat with warriors, then I made some Keshiks and destroyed Gandhi (I didn't take his towns, he was too far away and his towns were too sucky, I just used him for promotions and ended his civilization quick). I moved on to Elizabeth to expand, got rid of Isabella because she was nearby and usually bugs me (though she survived out on island somewhere, but has so far remained way at the bottom, and is now about a thousand points below me). Then Mansa Musa and Frederick got above me in score. Since Mansa Musa had a lot of wonders I wanted, I used the last of my keshiks to take some towns, then upgraded them to knights. He's almost dead, and I'll take Frederick after that, then kill either Hatshepsut or Qin She Huang, and so on.

Early on, things were looking kind of bleak. My economy very nearly came to a halt. After a few hundred years, I was back up to 70% research, which presently leaves me with nearly 400 research produced per turn at 1650 AD. Frederick is kicking my butt with technology, but I will soon fix that... I'm at the top for population, score, production, territory, soldiers, food, and 2nd in GNP (Frederick is at the top, but his power on the graph is a notch below me, and I've got about 1000 gold to spend on upgrades, and seriously higher production and better military civics). When I get environmentalism, I still have most my forests, so my end-game looks good.

I think this has actually been easier than my games at settler difficulty because I don't have to spend so much time upgrading pathetic cities. I can just blitzkrieg through territories, get wonders without working on them, and produce huge stockpiles of gold sacked from all the victims. I have made only 2 workers, I have captured 9. From them, I have always had a surplus of labor, to the extent that I can piddle my time away placing roads in every square of my expansive territory. The one thing I lack is diplomatic relations, but because of the strength of my military and economic power of my nation, I don't need it. The only people who have technologies to trade to me are people who I wouldn't want to exchange technologies to. I am so powerful that while Frederick hates me enough not to talk to me, he won't go to war with me. As long as I maintain my military, this game is mine. I can pick and choose the time and place I want to go to war, and I can win. The Keshiks gave me the headstart that I needed to be where I am now.