Pikeman upgrade to Lancers?

S

Sharku

Chieftain
Joined
May 21, 2012
Messages
83
Pikeman upgrade to Lancers, are they serious? Someone please tell me this is a bug.
This a complete kick in the balls for my entire infantry line to turn into a garbage unit
no one uses.
 
Pikemen & Lancers have much in common. They both are used to kill cavalry. Pikemen might be better at general fighting at their era as they are hugely buffed but lancers can act as scouts & pillagers. It makes perfect sense IMO as Pik'emen -> Rifles was dumb from gameplay perspective.
 
You don't go from infantry to cavalry its just stupid. Lancers are just garbage anyway.
Its a huge kick in the balls to both Germany and the Celts. Theres no excuse for them
to be changing the upgrade path like this.
 
What was after pikeman? I agree in game terms I hardly ever had a great use for calvary except for pillaging and scouting by the time frame and after in game, but in all fareness the long pike went to being a mounted unit with long pikes (lancer). They are anti mounted unit which the new line follows, anti tank thereafter.
 
I literally retired when I saw this. I had at least 6 veteran line infantry that are now pretty much useless and
I'll have to replace from scratch. There was a reason no one used lancers and now
whole civs will be stuck with them because of this stupid upgrade path.
 
So you retired as soon as you saw it? You didn't think "Hey, maybe I should try these guys out, since the whole game has been rebalanced maybe they're useful now"? You just assumed that they are as useless as they were before all the major changes and then decided to come straight to the forums to bellyache about it? Is that the basic gist of what I just read? Please feel free to correct me if I've gotten any of this wrong.
 
Yes I did it just plain pissed me off because its so moronic. Why would I bother with lancers at all?
Sorry cavalry is better, for that matter so are muskets. Weak mounted units aren't exactly useful
as a battle line.
 
Tactically they should slow your enemies mounted troops, as the 1upt is kind off disorienting that feature though. I had the same dislike in Civ 4 when mounted changed to helicopters, just had no use for them since they were easily taking out. I assume lancers require horses which if true makes it even more useless as those horses are needed elsewhere. But again its all about balance.
 
Its all about balance all right. I just had 90% of my army
suddenly have no future. Ugh......
 
That's what happened to me in Civ 4 lol. I've actually never had that much of a bulk of of anti calvalry in my army, but I suppose that is dependent on how much iron we get lucky/access too. I feel your pain on it though. I haven't gotten the expansion yet to see if I like it or not.
 
Pikeman upgrading to Lancers makes more sense than pikeman upgrading to rifleman. Also lancers were buffed to not be as terrible as they were pre-expansion.
 
This does seem a bit pants to me - especially if you're playing a game at a higher difficulty level.

There are plenty of games I've been in where I've had no iron, and had to build up an army of pikemen and bowmen to hold off the AI swordsmen. This adhoc army always proved somewhat fragile but workable when defending. If I could hold out till rennaissance and bulb rifling, I'd upgrade and make the fragile army more robust. I haven't got the game yet, as I'm in Europe, but this swap to lancers seems like a serious shot to the foot. Screwed for iron, fine, you're pretty much screwed for long term army build.

I can understand the "historical" logic of it - but there's plenty of stuff in game that doesn't follow exact historical patterns. Maybe when I play, and see the new balancing, I'll find it's possible to fight with lancers. Alternatively, the diplomacy system might now work and I might be able to trade for iron.......which would be a whole different game. I'll wait and see.

What I liked about vanilla though was that in one era you might be screwed for a particular resource militarily, but if you survived that era you'd be able to make up for it in the next era.
 
I remember in Civ 3 you needed saltpeter to get muskets, you were severely screwed during the gunpowder age if you do not have access to it till you could get riflemen. It severely sucks when you require a material for a war and have no access to it, but it does add a value to the game as you retool to get the needed tech advance. I've always thought they should have a simple unit in each age that doesn't need a required material even though it might suck overall but you can still make a push to survive, sort of like the fanatics in Civ 2. I wouldn't know how to balance that feature but perhaps after a certain tech the unit would no longer require that resource?
 
What they should do is have variable upgrade paths so we can choose what we want.
 
Greasy Dave said:
I haven't got the game yet, as I'm in Europe, but this swap to lancers seems like a serious shot to the foot. Screwed for iron, fine, you're pretty much screwed for long term army build.
Click to expand...

If this was vanilla, you'd be right, but since it isn't, you're dead wrong. Both lancers and pikemen have been buffed, lancers still don't seem like the best unit in the game or anything but they are stronger now. People who haven't even played the XPack or tried the units now that they've been changed are doing an awful lot of complaining about stuff that they don't actually know anything about in this thread.
 
People who haven't even played the XPack or tried the units now that they've been changed are doing an awful lot of complaining about stuff that they don't actually know anything about in this thread.
Click to expand...

Sorry no. Lancers have a strength of 25 a musketman is about the same as that.
For that matter I could just use all those horses to just make cavalry. Or wait and
build rifleman. The only reason they did this is to make people use units that were
never used before. The problem is they weren't used for a reason.
 
Well, to be fair:

Lancers now have the same combat strength as the old riflemen (25) and don't have the ridiculous +100% defensive penalty anymore (it's completely gone).

Sure, they still have the -33% against cities but you should use a few siege units anyway. In the open, lancers are great against units and can defend themselves now. If you tech fast enough, there is definately a window of opportunity to use them effectively because riflemen need quite a few more techs (not only one like in vanilla civ 5).

The strongest unit they have to fight are the musketmen which are slightly weaker (24) and can only move two hexes.
 
Dude seriously your complaints seem completely ignorant. A musketman has 24 strength, lancer has 25 AND faster movement. A lancer is overall as good or better than a musketman, the only downside is the requirement of a horse resource. And no, you CAN'T just use the horses to build cavalry, because cavalry are later in the tech tree than lancers are. So are riflemen. Your alternative appears to be having no new units in the renaissance era at all. There is a very good reason they made these changes to the units and the changes work, perhaps you should actually try them before having a knee jerk reaction and spouting nonsense.
 
I'm pretty sure he ment knights. I apologize for using the term calvary myself, but I tend to when I refer to mounted units for short hand.
 
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