A comprehensive UU guide (the updated thread)

Anyway, thanks for your patience and support, guys. I will try to add the entry on Quechuas tonight.
 
aelf said:
I doubt it works this way. I don't think March stacks with effects of Medic. Can anyone confirm it?
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March stacks with medic, as long as the marching unit finishes his turn in the same tile as the medic. That's why it's very easy to conquer non stop coastal tiles with navy seals and a medic transport :)
 
cabert said:
March stacks with medic, as long as the marching unit finishes his turn in the same tile as the medic. That's why it's very easy to conquer non stop coastal tiles with navy seals and a medic transport :)
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That's great news :goodjob:
 
Adding to the existing problems I have accessing this forum, my internet blew completely for some time last night, probably because of the rather bad weather. Also, I'm a little too tired these few days to type something that requires so much thought and analysis (heck, the EMC updates are easier to type). I'll get round to doing the entry soon. Just not now, I guess :blush:
 
I'm playing my first game as Persia. Your analysis of the Immortal is right on. They are a very powerful early unit. Fortunately, I had horses in my second city (popped AH from a hut almost immediately), built a stack and took out my close neighbor and founder of hindu, Huayna. Captured his worker building a copper mine before he got it done. Faced zero spears and killed many an archer. Huayna defeated before 1 AD.

What's doubly nice is the immortals that had little combat experience and 0-1 promotions served as excellent fogbusters. I was able to run up 8-10 immortals from 3 to 10 xp just wiping out barbs. As they reached 10 xp, I'd send them to the front and replace them with 3 xp immortals. The 2 movement points helped get them to the front quickly and a guilds beeline found me with my UB (the apothecary is nice) and upgrading immortals to knights for a nice power boost.

So there you have it. Testimony from a satisfied customer. Keep the thread rolling.
 
Elandal said:
Counters work best when defending, as the defending unit is chosen against the attacking unit (best defender against the specific attacker is the one to fight), which deters the opponent from using eg. mounted units while you have formation pike in the stack, and melee units when you have shock crossbow in the stack. Which of course brings us back to cats which do collateral damage..

(for the record: I find it sad that the only way to deal with any stack is to suicide collateral damage on it. No tactics, no strategies, just massed cats used expendably)
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I agree. I guess this is more appropriate for Civ5, but I liked games like Pax Imperium and Rome: Total War, where building and stuff was clearly turn-based, but battles were fought more like a real-time situation. Made the games a bit longer, but it was worth it. A Civ5 that had that feature, at least as an option, would be friggin' orgasmic. :lol:

In the meantime, perhaps a mod could be made to change the way combat is handled, to more closely simulate a general fact of warfare: No matter how well-defended an emplacement is, the attacker has the advantage of initiative. The attacker determines where and against which units they will attack. In Civ, the opposite is true - by making combat "attacker vs. strongest defender" the programmers have given the initiative to the defender. The defenders would probably have to be improved in terms of power to keep the game fairly balanced, or a stronger defense bonus of some sort put in. But if combat was done by "attacker vs. weakest defender", it would shift the initiative back to the attacker and obviate the need for suicide cats. What attacker would throw his knights against pikemen, when they could and should circle around to hit the archers while his infantry engage the pikers instead? Did the Russians throw their conscript units against the Germans? Of course not, they kicked the Italians and Romanians in the nuts :cringe: and put their weaker attacking units against the weakest defenders of the Eastern Front. It seems to me this kind of change in the game mechanics would both encourage combined arms on both offense and defense, as well as better simulate actual combat tactics within the strategic game. And get rid of the need for a bunch of suicide cats. :p

I apologize for the threadjacking, btw. I'll try and come up with some help on the UU guide in penance....:spank:

EDIT: Regarding the Cossack - I almost always promote them at least Flanking I, II if I can get it. A stack of Cossacks with flanking II is a stack-buster. You may not get collateral damage with them, but with the extra withdrawal, they've got a very good chance of surviving even against rifles (their weakness, as Mr. Civtastic pointed out) in any given battle, and will do damage to those rifles to let your grenadiers finish them off easily. A small stack of Cossacks with a fast medic unit is almost as good as a 2-movement siege stack, and you have less chance of having them suicide than with siege units because of the flanking promos. Bottom line: A stack of flanking-heavy cossacks with a fast medic = mobile siege.
 
Syndrome Zed said:
I agree. I guess this is more appropriate for Civ5, but I liked games like Pax Imperium and Rome: Total War, where building and stuff was clearly turn-based, but battles were fought more like a real-time situation. Made the games a bit longer, but it was worth it. A Civ5 that had that feature, at least as an option, would be friggin' orgasmic. :lol:

In the meantime, perhaps a mod could be made to change the way combat is handled, to more closely simulate a general fact of warfare: No matter how well-defended an emplacement is, the attacker has the advantage of initiative. The attacker determines where and against which units they will attack. In Civ, the opposite is true - by making combat "attacker vs. strongest defender" the programmers have given the initiative to the defender. The defenders would probably have to be improved in terms of power to keep the game fairly balanced, or a stronger defense bonus of some sort put in. But if combat was done by "attacker vs. weakest defender", it would shift the initiative back to the attacker and obviate the need for suicide cats. What attacker would throw his knights against pikemen, when they could and should circle around to hit the archers while his infantry engage the pikers instead? Did the Russians throw their conscript units against the Germans? Of course not, they kicked the Italians and Romanians in the nuts :cringe: and put their weaker attacking units against the weakest defenders of the Eastern Front. It seems to me this kind of change in the game mechanics would both encourage combined arms on both offense and defense, as well as better simulate actual combat tactics within the strategic game. And get rid of the need for a bunch of suicide cats. :p

I apologize for the threadjacking, btw. I'll try and come up with some help on the UU guide in penance....:spank:
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Those are some good ideas. Based on what you've posted, here are some things I thought of:

The ability to build a fort in addition to regular improvements on tiles for added defense.

Archers get to attack (with collateral damage) any and all enemy units entering a tile adjacent to a fortified archer (longbowmen maybe 2 tiles?). The key here is if you have several fortified archers on a tile, they will all deal some damage. Those that the survive the aeriel assault can then attack and pick the defender.

Other city defenses like crennaltions and ramparts.

Great generals have the ability to provide tactics (era dependant) to a stack of units. In this instance, I see the GG moving along with a stack and not attached as a 'warlord'. He can be captured.

Perhaps a new thread should be started.
 
johnny_rico said:
The ability to build a fort in addition to regular improvements on tiles for added defense.
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That might work, if a change such as the "weakest defender" is done. Otherwise it would be too strong probably.

johnny_rico said:
Archers get to attack (with collateral damage) any and all enemy units entering a tile adjacent to a fortified archer (longbowmen maybe 2 tiles?). The key here is if you have several fortified archers on a tile, they will all deal some damage. Those that the survive the aeriel assault can then attack and pick the defender.
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I think you're forgetting how big a tile is. You can fit a city with 2-3 million people in a tile.

Besides, if we do something like that, then pretty much any unit starting with Cavalry and Muskets should have the same ability. You name it: tanks, muskets, cannons, destroyers... they all have the "range" to shoot a lot further than a longbow.

Wodan
 
Well, I decided to take one step at a time. Added another paragraph to the Redcoat entry about Drill Redcoats.

Below are ideas on the Quechua that have been given, for my easier reference:

Phrederick said:
On Quechas: They're awesome scouts and anti-barb units because archers don't faze them. Worker stealing is much easier with them as well. The danger with rushing with them is that because you need to build so many so early, you'll face high unit costs and cripple your economy. Additionally, because it's so early, if you keep any cities you'll often have huge maintenance costs. I think that they get better on higher difficulties and on agressive ai, because enemies tend to settle faster and closer to you (anyone else notice that on agressive, enemies will build their second city often right up against your capital?).
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Polycrates said:
The Quechua is a fantastic unit for opportunistic early city raiding, and while it is additionally useful for fighting off barbs and pillaging, relegating them to this role really denies them most of their effectiveness. Used right, they have a surprisingly long shelf life too. On the other hand, you need to base your entire opening gambit on them at the expense of everything else.
Their advantages are: they are cheap as chips - 15 hammers each is less than half an axeman - so you can churn them out at an absurd pace, and you never really need to care about them dying en masse.
Nonetheless, they come surprisingly close to axemen in terms of city-raiding potential, particularly since they come that much earlier.
They are available right from the start, and don't require any additional expenditure on any special tech or resources.
Even though Huayna is no longer aggressive in Warlords, they still come with Combat I, which is important.
They are melee so they can get cover and city raider promotions.
They look immensely cool.

Others may disagree, but I have found the most success (mostly on monarch) with Quechuas by starting worker-barracks-(probably)second worker-quechuas until infinity, while researching mining-bronze working-the wheel. Two workers and a barracks are VERY expensive at this time (especially with warlords), so why make them?

One worker improves food resources (more people for whippin'), builds mines and chops LOTS of forests. The second ASAP starts building roads towards the nearest neighbour.
The workers are needed to accelerate your Quechua production so that by the end of your quechua rushing period, you've recovered the cost of them and the barracks in pure quechua (via production/population/more whipping/chopping/less settlers). They also accelerate your later quechuas towards your borders by building roads (which also connects your copper quicker too), and overall they ensure that your rush accelerates rather than just petering out.
The barracks lets your quechuas get Cover straight out of the gate. Against fully-fortified archers in flatland cities, this takes their victory odds from 25% to a whopping 62.5%(!). Every quechua you build now from that city more than doubles their chances of winning for any battle against archers. Instead of losing 3 or 4 quechuas per easy city, you might only lose one or even none. That is huge - and every quechua that survives such a battle is then immediately eligible for City Raider I as well to become even more of a beast! It's not uncommon for me to end up with a number of level 4 CombatI/Cover/CRI/CRII quechuas, who are deadlier than any axeman.
The first city attack comes a bit later, but the delay to every subsequent city attack is considerably shorter. Plus, that bit of waiting means that the enemy has probably got more second (or third) cities to pop 2 so you can easily capture (with a worker or two inside and a bit of development) rather than destroying. Means you never need to waste hammers on an early settler too. And you can attack much hardier cities - there's no reason to be afraid of 20% defense or hilltops. A capital on a hill is pretty much the only thing they will seriously struggle with, and you've got the numbers to pillage away a huge amount of development very quickly.
So your quechuas have a MUCH longer lifespan and stay useful much longer too. It's very possible to net five early cities with promoted quechuas alone. And since one of these is overwhelmingly likely to be a copper city, you can easily segue into an axeman rush. Your axeman rush will be immensely more powerful because you've already got a huge number of cheap, promoted, fantastic quechuas to help out and do all the softening and often a lot of the heavy lifting too. I believe that's half the strength of quechuas - to add to an axe rush and make it twice as long and twice as deadly.
And when that's over, you've got masses of good units to fortify and fight barbs etc.
If you've done it right, you've probably completely destroyed or totally emasculated at least two civs by this point and you can sit back and start your builder game in earnest with heaps of good cities and a massive land area to backfill (thanks terraces!) and create a massive, financially overwhelming empire with very little local competition!

Without barracks/workers, you will have a lethal large very early force that might raze a couple of cities but you'll lose so many that they dwindle out along with your economy, which keeps up only a slow quechua production and is otherwise pretty anemic. You will also be almost completely unable to take anything but flatlands/non-capital cities. With the barracks, I've been constantly astonished at how long quechuas' usefulness as (at least auxiliary) city raiders lasts - really for as long as axemen! They're often worth still building once you've got axes too, as cheap but effective softeners and pillagers.

Weaknesses:
Warlords nerfs this strategy fairly significantly, by removing Huayna's cheap barracks and making tree chopping less powerful, but I only discovered the joy of quechua rushing post-Warlords, so I can only imagine the pure ferocity of a vanilla quechua rush.
You obviously need fairly close neighbours for this to work, so their usefulness is considerably reduced on very large/islands maps or quick speed.
They are atrocious against axes, so keep them the hell away from them! This would make them far less effective against a decent human player - though sheer numbers early and a copper-denial-and-pillaging strategy (and shock promotions instead of cover - bless that combat I!) may keep them weak (with no chance of archery as a counter) until your axes can overrun them. Probably better to attack nearby AIs though, if possible.
Spamming warriors in response is probably the best defense, but an opponent is unlikely to have a barracks up, so shock promos may level the field, pillaging will give you the production advantage, and when axes come they'll be ripe for the plucking.
Raging barbs is fairly neutral to this strategy (easy promos and little danger) though you need to be VERY careful with your defences once their barbarian axes start coming out en masse. Terraces help a lot too here!
Same weaknesses as with an axe rush:
Protective civs/Mansa Musa are pretty much off-limits except for pillaging or very weak cities.
Chariots/war chariots/immortals will also stop them pretty well if they're lucky enough to find and connect horses before you overwhelm them. Egypt and Persia may require extra special early attention.
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The Viking berserker has became my favourite UU. I just had a most fun game on emperor/fractal/standard with better AI and Ragnar. Bascially the game was constant war. At one point Mehmet was fighting just about everyone. The only civ that didn't war, Elizabeth, is cut off by Mehmet and had her nice empire on the other side of the world (the end notes showed that she had a city razed by barbs at the start, so that slowed her down too). She had about 3 GA's in a row and her score was climbing exponentially. But I won the liberalism race, got Astronomy, and then Gunpowder, Chemistry. All the time I was still having a standoff with Shaka with pikes holding off his kinghts. So I built a 7 frigates and had 6 CR3 berserker to upgrade to grenadiers. Let me tell you CR3 grenadiers are scary vs rifleman, which is all AI's used for defense. The amphibious assault was unbelievably one-sided, something like 98% win chance against redcoats. In about 10-20 turns I razed 5 coastal cities. The frigates can reduce the defence to 0 in two turns and the grenadiers are healed by the GG. However I think there is a bug since troops heal on moving ships even without march promote. Then the grenadiers became infantries and my navy travelled around the continent, burnning down coastal cities of whoever is in the lead. At the end I built the spaceship since I can't be bothered. In true Viking style I razed 35 cities in total. The motto for Ragnar is if you're coast you're toast.
 
jihe said:
The Viking berserker has became my favourite UU. I just had a most fun game on emperor/fractal/standard with better AI and Ragnar. Bascially the game was constant war. At one point Mehmet was fighting just about everyone. The only civ that didn't war, Elizabeth, is cut off by Mehmet and had her nice empire on the other side of the world (the end notes showed that she had a city razed by barbs at the start, so that slowed her down too). She had about 3 GA's in a row and her score was climbing exponentially. But I won the liberalism race, got Astronomy, and then Gunpowder, Chemistry. All the time I was still having a standoff with Shaka with pikes holding off his kinghts. So I built a 7 frigates and had 6 CR3 berserker to upgrade to grenadiers. Let me tell you CR3 grenadiers are scary vs rifleman, which is all AI's used for defense. The amphibious assault was unbelievably one-sided, something like 98% win chance against redcoats. In about 10-20 turns I razed 5 coastal cities. The frigates can reduce the defence to 0 in two turns and the grenadiers are healed by the GG. However I think there is a bug since troops heal on moving ships even without march promote. Then the grenadiers became infantries and my navy travelled around the continent, burnning down coastal cities of whoever is in the lead. At the end I built the spaceship since I can't be bothered. In true Viking style I razed 35 cities in total. The motto for Ragnar is if you're coast you're toast.
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We're back to this... a perfect example of my biggest objection to their design. :( You didn't even mention using Berserkers. Pikes and amphibious Grenadiers with frigate support.

Wodan
 
Wodan said:
We're back to this... a perfect example of my biggest objection to their design. :( You didn't even mention using Berserkers. Pikes and amphibious Grenadiers with frigate support.
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But as we've agreed before, it's still to the Berserk's credit.

:newyear:
 
Wodan said:
We're back to this... a perfect example of my biggest objection to their design. :( You didn't even mention using Berserkers. Pikes and amphibious Grenadiers with frigate support.

Wodan
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Berserkers themselves did a lot of basic fighting in their time, it's just that one cannot do without frigates and by that time you need grenadiers.
 
:rolleyes: :shake:
 
Mine is better because I turned off the .sig. More punchy that way. :)
 
Hey aelf, just wanted to get another word in on the Gallic Warrior post-patch because I reckon they're really good now.

Now that they can use either copper or iron, they work kind of like the jaguar in that (if you've connected copper) you can start building them as soon as you've got iron working, without the cost/hassle/time/risk of getting iron as well. Plus they don't have the strength penalty that the jag has either. So if you make iron working a reasonably high priority, you can start bringing these guys along in even very early axemen rushes. This is great because you're getting quite a lot of extra strength at that vital time when city defences haven't significantly built up. So it lets you more easily take normal cities, but more importantly lets you take the sort of cities that would otherwise be near-impregnible pre-catapults (capitals on hills, holy capitals, defensive civs, mansa etc). With charismatic, they get promoted pretty nicely from all this too.

As for guerrilla I, it's okay but unspectacular on its own. Lets you cut down on the defensive troops you drag along on a campaign, I suppose. Where it shines is in the ability to selectively upgrade units to guerrilla II (and sometimes III) as opportunity arises and have awesome psycho skirt-wearing commandoes. G II is great because of the beautiful extra speed. A few G II guys separated from the main stack can, if the terrain is half-decent, race around deep in enemy territory and use the massive hill defense bonus to minimise chances of reprisals. So you can race over to pick off a weakly-protected city, or you can run around pillaging the hell out of everything (particularly their mines), or just generally being a complete nuisance, and safely retreat to a hill as needed. A few gallics on a commando raid can be a real thorn in the enemy's side. Bring along a G II archer/longbow/crossbow or two from a dun for even more fun.
Brennus is the promotion king, so you can later have these guys with a couple of other useful promos (city raider, shock, medic, whatever) and keep them doing useful things behind enemy lines for longer.
G III is more specialised, but the withdrawal chance makes them good softeners, particularly for those extra-stubborn cities on hills. Also good for dislodging any troops they've got protecting hills copper/iron (which is also where the G II speed helps for knocking it out early) or counterattackers on hills.
Again, the majority of your Gallics probably won't take either of these, but they offer a nice tactical choice if you know when to exploit it, and they're good fun to boot. Not bad for a bunch of guys in skirts!
 
Thanks for the above. I will update the entry on Gallic Warrior.

EDIT: Added an extra paragraph to the Gallic Warrior entry. Also added a bit about the role of Numidian Cavalry as pillagers in its entry. Next entry will be on Fast Workers.
 
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