Imbalanced I say!

Is this terribly imballanced or am I doing something wrong. I was palying as the Mongol's Kublai Khan, and tried to take Rome, with 4 archers in it. I attacked with 4 chariots and 2 keshiks and lost by quite a bit. All of my units were buffed with strenght and/or withdrawl and only one of their archers was buffed (with city deffence), and yet I lost 2 chariots, 1 keshik, and the rest of my units were left with almost no health. What the hell? That doesn't seem right at all...

And also, why did each of my units attack a different archer so that none of them died? This is dumb...

archers defending a city are tough to take down. Don't forget the bonus they get from defending a city, and their first strike. Did the archers have any promotions?

Losing the four chariots isn't too surprising, but I would have thought your keshiks couldv'e have done something. But the fact is you didn't have much of a numbers advantage.

You could maybe have taken the archers out with, say, eight Keshiks. Chariots can't do much of anything against fortified archers, they'd be better used pillaging. If Rome was built on a hill, you need to count on losing even more units before taking it out.

Withdrawal isn't a great promotion. Strength is good for a large portion of your army. But what would have really helped are swordsmen and axemen with city raider and cover promotions. I would even think those would be necessary to combat fortified archers in cities before you have catapults.

This result is in no way astonishing. The archers get quite a bonus for defending a city. Then there may be the city defense by itself, which would add to this. And finally, the city may have been placed on a hill.

To have only 2 units surplus, but no support from artillery always is a bad idea if you are going to attack a city.

Finally, it is quite logical that the system always tries to put the best defender to the frontline. Therefore it is hard to try to perform a battle of attrition, measured by the numbers you present to us.

Well there is city defence bonus which can only be brought down by siege weapon, ships or planes bombardment
BTW there is also an odd estimation which tells you your chance of winning as well

If you don't attack at once, and lose units to archers, they can gain experience, and promote themselves, becoming even more defensive. You need to bring along strong units like axemen (with +25% vs. archers), melee, and keshiks.

Argoth said:

Is this terribly imballanced or am I doing something wrong. I was palying as the Mongol's Kublai Khan, and tried to take Rome, with 4 archers in it. I attacked with 4 chariots and 2 keshiks and lost by quite a bit. All of my units were buffed with strenght and/or withdrawl and only one of their archers was buffed (with city deffence), and yet I lost 2 chariots, 1 keshik, and the rest of my units were left with almost no health. What the hell? That doesn't seem right at all...

And also, why did each of my units attack a different archer so that none of them died? This is dumb...

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Archers get +50% City defense by default. Add another 25% for the fortification bonus plus I'm guessing 40% cultural defense from Rome, maybe even 60%. That means a total defense strength from each Archer of 6.3 to 6.9. Plus 1 had a defense strength of 6.9 to 7.5, depending on the cultural defense of Rome at the time. So it's not really that surprising you didn't do very well with the number of units you had. The Archers had your Chariots out-gunned and were pretty much an equal match for your Keshiks, even a little bit stronger. It's not a good idea to go after a capital city without bombard units, the cultural defense is going to be too strong unless you have overwhelming numbers.

PS: Oh yeah, I forgot their First Strike. I guess you're lucky you didn't lose all your Chariots.

Also whenever you attack a stack of units the computer automatically chooses the stongest one to defend, so bringing an overwhelming force and destroying them is much better than trying to chip away.

Argoth said:

why did each of my units attack a different archer so that none of them died?

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They didn't attack a different archer so much as a different archer defended against you. Whenever you attack a tile then that tile picks its unit with the best odds of defeating the attacker. When you would take one archers health to 1.8 or whatever in an attack then there was still 3 there with 3.0 health that were better defenders now. So, naturally, they had their best guys defend.

If you ever find a barb city with archers/axemen and walk an army of axemen and swordsmen up to the city, select between the two. You will notice when you select your swordsmen, the axemen will be the defender as they get +X vs melee units so are best suited to fight them off. If you select the axemen of yours, then the archers in the city will show up as the defenders as they are best suited to fight off the your axemen.

As far as the rest, everyone seems to have it covered pretty good. Archers have the inborn ability of city defense and 1 free first strike w/o any upgrades. This makes them natural born city defenders. If you plan to take on archers, city raider and anti-archer is your best bet. Chariots arent that great city attackers, think of them more as strong scouts. Your best city attackers this early on is axemen and swordsmen with city raider/anti-archer promotions.

As was mentioned already this was a rather unsurprising outcome. Hope this helps.

I find it hard to believe that I even could have ammased a large enough army. It was roughly 200BC, I was researching Iron working, and had 4 cities, one of which I had just took from the Romans, and I had trouble producing even that, much less 8 Keshiks. I didn't have any source of copper or iron so axemen/swordsmen were out of the question. I couldn't produce units faster, and I feel that if I waited any longer, Rome would have had something even worse. And to make it even more challenging, my science was set at 60% and still dropping.

I wish there were replays so I could get a better idea of how to actually get enough units quick enough to take a city.

Argoth said:

I find it hard to believe that I even could have ammased a large enough army. It was roughly 200BC, I was researching Iron working, and had 4 cities, one of which I had just took from the Romans, and I had trouble producing even that, much less 8 Keshiks. I didn't have any source of copper or iron so axemen/swordsmen were out of the question. I couldn't produce units faster, and I feel that if I waited any longer, Rome would have had something even worse. And to make it even more challenging, my science was set at 60% and still dropping.

I wish there were replays so I could get a better idea of how to actually get enough units quick enough to take a city.

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If you didn't think you could muster a large enough force, you should never have tried to take on his capital like that. It's going to have the strongest cultural defence of any of his cities, and you have to account for that in your numbers. Either that or have Catapults along to reduce the cultural defense. The very least you should have done was waited until you could upgrade those Chariots into Keshiks as well. You were being too impatient, the time wasn't right to take him out. You have to plan your attacks well in this game, and make sure you have the right amount of force to get the job done.

Yes a better choice might have been to cripple him, take 1 or 2 cities, make sure you pillage his iron/copper/cottages, and then declare peace. Until you have cats it'll be very hard to take the capitol.

Wodan

Argoth,
Don't worry. I made the same mistake in one of my first games. You'll learn quickly from this mistake (as I did) and with experience, you will see that the combat system is not really imbalanced (though opinions may differ for some). Anyway, just keep in mind it'll be hard to take well-defended cities until you get catapults. Once the cats are out to play, you'll find cities falling much more quickly and easily.
If you're figting an early aggressive war without catapults, you need to target the weakest cities. While the capital may be the juiciest target, it's almost always the hardest to take and if you cripple your enemy sufficiently so by pillaging, stealing workers or capturing/razing poorly defended cities, you'll take his capital later anyway.

I guess that makes sense. Thanks!