The future of swordsmen

anandus said:

I'm afraid the sword-zerg will be back again in BNW.
(Nb. I mostly play multiplayer.)

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You still need enough iron(4+). And this time CBs are available to partially counter them.

Matthew. said:

Thanks for the clarification. So it went from 214 to 192 standard map/speed? 22 beakers doesn't seem like a whole lot, but I suppose every bit helps.

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In G&K, Iron Working is 195 , other Classic II techs are 175 , so there will be a 20 decrease.

On a sidenote, the 20 beaker extra cost for IW was probably not taken out of the blue, as it is, the cumulative Beaker cost of researching Horseback Riding and Iron Working is exactly the same, namely 285 . Compared to the cumulative cost of teching to Composite Bows - 320 - it shows that the frequency with which a unit is used is not only a question of the tech cost to get to it, but also a question about how useful the unit is, and how essential the other benefits obtained along the tech path is. These things don't seem to have changed a lot in BnW.

But certainly, the gamble of getting or not getting Iron hasn't helped the Swordsman, so in that regard this is a definite step in the right direction - and the 20 beaker discount isn't going to hurt it either.

As far as I remember my civ IV experience, it really was kinda crippling to have no metal. AI had those Sword/Axe/some cats/few spears stacks which were a pain to counter without axes of your own. Horse archers could have some success against that, but spears made them die too often, and swords were no easy prey too. Archers were just crap, you could only have some success with Mali's UU. That said, I'd still say that reimplementing early units to require Tin or Iron would be a good idea. Archers would be still resourceless, and they are boss in V, and warriors are viable for longer, and you can still have horses. After all, there's no reason you shouldn't be screwed without any metal, it's just the extent of that screwedness that should be balanced.

I'm happy that iron will be revealed at BW. I think this is enough to bring the balance back (I think making IW cheaper might be actually going too far - look how many techs it takes to reach Civil Service and calculate their cumulative cost, people tend to heavily underestimate how much quicker you can get to IW than CS). The only real problem I had with iron in G&K was that researching the tech was essentially useless if you didn't happen to get iron. Now that the gamble is out of the equation, things should work fine. BW is useful in its own right, and if you do not get iron, you know right away and don't have to progress further.

As for this making sense conceptually - I think it sort of does. I imagine Iron Working to refer to the ability to extract iron from ore. Metallic iron is rare in nature, and by the time bronze was used, people DID make iron weapons. The problem was that metallic iron was rarely available.

Granted, for gameplay reasons Civ can't really be "realistic" in its depiction of bronze and iron. Iron was not actually superior to bronze prior to advancements that led to steel. Iron was simply much cheaper than bronze (once iron ore was a viable resource), due to exhausted deposits of tin. If anything, iron - due to being much more common - should not be a Strategic Resource, and tin should be. Getting from BW to IW would get the benefit of actually NOT requiring a strategic resource anymore.

But, as I said, that doesn't really work well from the gameplay perspective. It's not like Civilization is a terribly logical game, especially Civ 5 (just look at the prerequisites of some techs).

Interesting little historical info there oddtail

So I'm kind of wondering if this hurts the spear in any way, but I don't think so. They'll likely be built less, but that's not so much because they will be less useful but because the swordsman is now more viable again. I am happy to see this change.

Probably not a big deal, but I guess the reduced beaker cost for IW means that Steel also comes 20 beakers sooner (unless they increased the cost by 20).

kaspergm said:

In G&K, Iron Working is 195 , other Classic II techs are 175 , so there will be a 20 decrease.

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Ya that is why I mentioned standard map. I think it has a 10% increase on beakers across the board. The numbers I pulled were straight from the game.

Hm well now I'm going to ignore iron working even more than I had previously... I basically just got it for the added production from iron tiles, much like how I usually get animal husbandry for horse production and not necessarily for military units. Very interesting. Should help greatly with building early game wonders.

oddtail said:

As for this making sense conceptually - I think it sort of does. I imagine Iron Working to refer to the ability to extract iron from ore. Metallic iron is rare in nature, and by the time bronze was used, people DID make iron weapons. The problem was that metallic iron was rarely available.
.

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Quite true. The earliest iron artifacts are actually on parity with bronze on the timeline, but they were nickel-iron alloys from meteorites, not earthly ores.

One can only imagine the level of superstition attributed to weapons forged from sky-metal that could hold an edge better than bronze.

Eagle Pursuit said:

Quite true. The earliest iron artifacts are actually on parity with bronze on the timeline, but they were nickel-iron alloys from meteorites, not earthly ores.

One can only imagine the level of superstition attributed to weapons forged from sky-metal that could hold an edge better than bronze.

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They probably didn't know it fell from the sky, though. I imagine that the meteorites could have fallen thousands of years before the moment when they exploited it.