Rating the Unique Units by Ision

Obviously Immortals and Gallic Swordmen are the very best of, but Cossacks are very underestimated. Particularly I consider a blitz Cavalry pretty much hardcore because they are facing nothing but Musketmen and in the worst case scenario a few Riflemen. Besides, they trigger Golden Age in a good timing if you are going commies (I know most of players don't like it, but sometimes it's necessary) or even if you are already in Republic because you probably are not making 4-turns research and GA can make it happen.

The only bad thing about Cossack is to research a non-prerequisite tech (Military Tradition) which can delay in about 5~7 turns some tree advance, giving back the turns russians get going to industrial age with free tech bonus.

If you already got the GA due some Wonder and are not exactly needed about attack units perhaps you can wait till infantry, making Cossacks obsolete even without being discovered. But that is a unique case.

Tier 2 leadership definetely.

Everkane said:

Obviously Immortals and Gallic Swordmen are the very best of,

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I think that the Iroquois Mounted Warrior is much better than the Gallic Swordsman. The stats are quite similar (3/1/2 instead of 3/2/2, but the extra defense is normally not needed, if you play the unit well), but it has two advantages:

• it's much cheaper (30 shields instead of 40 for the Gallic Swordsman), so you can build more of them in the same time.
• Mounted Warriors have a very good upgrade path to Knights and Cavalry. So the same units will prove useful even in later ages, when the opponents have better defenders. (This is important especially at higher difficulty levels, where the AI researches so fast, that attack-3 units soon become obsolete!) The Gallic Swordsman, however, is basically a "dead-end unit". Upgrading to Medieval Inf doesn't really make sense, as you lose the extra movement, making the unit even weaker (no more retreat chance). So when your opponents start having pikemen or muskets, you just upgrade your Mounted Warriors to Knights or Cavalry, and the fun goes on... If you have an army of Gallics, you can only disband them and build Knights/Cavalry from scratch, delaying your military campaign quite a lot.

Maybe because I never beat Deity on any reasonable setting, only demi-god in the easier Conquests and Emperor on the slightly harder Vanilla, but I found that getting knights was a major slowdown to my chance of winning. After my earliest ancient era neighbor conquest I always moved quickly up the chemistry tree and would sell that tech, and hopefully the one before it (can't remember what it was), and the one after ASAP and that's when I'd get 4/turn for the rest of the it-still-matters part of the game. The leading one to four AI would be paying me between 120 to almost 500 GPT each, and the others just enough to keep them bankrupt as well.

It's funny how the game is fundamentally mercantilist.

However if I went for knights, I was almost always assured to lose that key opportunity. Perhaps I wasn't aggressive enough and would have been able to conquer enough that I'd be in even better shape, especially with Mounted Warriors? I don't know.

Lanzelot said:

I think that the Iroquois Mounted Warrior is much better than the Gallic Swordsman. The stats are quite similar (3/1/2 instead of 3/2/2, but the extra defense is normally not needed, if you play the unit well), but it has two advantages:

• it's much cheaper (30 shields instead of 40 for the Gallic Swordsman), so you can build more of them in the same time.
• Mounted Warriors have a very good upgrade path to Knights and Cavalry. So the same units will prove useful even in later ages, when the opponents have better defenders. (This is important especially at higher difficulty levels, where the AI researches so fast, that attack-3 units soon become obsolete!) The Gallic Swordsman, however, is basically a "dead-end unit". Upgrading to Medieval Inf doesn't really make sense, as you lose the extra movement, making the unit even weaker (no more retreat chance). So when your opponents start having pikemen or muskets, you just upgrade your Mounted Warriors to Knights or Cavalry, and the fun goes on... If you have an army of Gallics, you can only disband them and build Knights/Cavalry from scratch, delaying your military campaign quite a lot.

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What you say about 30 and 40 shields may be true and I'm inclined to agree because most of the time I even prefer horsemen than swordmen.

But looking at the big picture if you are talking about a 3.2.2 making in 3 UU factories this 10 shields will not be an issue and the 2 points in defense helps A LOT (warriors and even bloody spearmen doesn't attack you if you have an unit with 2 points in defense, but they destroy you if you have a unit with only one). Besides, making Gallic + horsemen sounds better than making Mounted + swordmen and maybe you will have to do this.

Besides, upgrading units are not really a big deal since knights don't even belong to a pre-requisite tech and so doesn't cavalries, but if you are thinking about getting military tradition then Mounted has some advantage.

You can put Gallic, Mounted and Immortals in the very best of Tier 1, fair enough.