Assyria: worthwhile or complete trash?

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vivalamexico

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So, I have not played with Assyria much, and am contemplating giving them a more serious try. I have found people here who like them, and others who categorize them as a crap civ.
What do you think?
If anyone has experience w/ Assyria I would appreciate any tips (beyond something obvious like use siege towers)

EDIT: For Immortal/Deity
 
The Siege Tower is the quilivent of a Battering Ram. it's VERY powerful unit.

The Assyrians also can get arandom free tech when conquering more advanced civs (including city statses!).

So they are a very offensive oriented civ.. which is troublesome because warmongering is very frowned upon nowadays in the game by other civs making ti difficult to play the diplomacy game right.
 
i have never played assyria but in my games, the AI assyria tends to dominate the game early on with its GPT. In fact on my immortal playthrough, attila, who had the most soldiers in the ancient era, declared war on assyria, only to get its butt knocked back into central asia.

Since then its army never went to no.1 again for some reason.
 
In MP, it's great. You can use your early stength to intimidate your neighbouring player opponents as well as CS'. In SP, it's best to leave out UU and do warmongering later in game or if you're doing pangaea, you could start your warmongering spree straight away. There's a guide to Assyria somewhere in tips and strategies that recommends beelining military techs and ignoring the rest, as well as not bothering to build wonders.
 
I've never been successful with Assyria on Immortal - the siege tower is very powerful, but without catapults I struggle to take cities quickly enough. The UA is a bit like espionage - you're getting the free techs too infrequently for it to help you catch up in the early game, since by the time you get one, other civs will have researched another couple of their own. I've heard that some people play Assyria just for late-game city grabs, so that you can Oxford a key tech later in the game, and this may be more successful than trying to emulate the Huns.

This way you may also get an advantage from the Royal Library - as it is, the need to follow the Drama & Poetry path and build a Writer's Guild sits poorly with early warmongering, and the experience bonus isn't worth the delay to an early warmongering strategy.

The Siege Tower is the quilivent of a Battering Ram. it's VERY powerful unit.
Click to expand...

But comes at the cost of the catapult, which the battering ram doesn't (although losing spearmen is inconvenient, it's not a particular problem when taking cities).
 
Who uses catapults anyway? Siege towers are AWESOME as they give all adjacent units city bombard bonuses. You bring two into a city with a few cb's and it's going down. get them cover 2 and they're unstoppable. then later, when they're cannons, you can use them more effectively. I usually dont use cannons to siege a city, but with cover 2, it can be done. Problem is with bnw war mongering diplo hits when you war early are off the charts, so they're no longer a top civ, in my opinion. royal libraries aren't that good. treasures of ninevah is awesome though as you just stay on teh bottom of the tech tree, and you get al the techs on top from the poor sots that you conquer.
 
northernscribe said:
Who uses catapults anyway?
Click to expand...

Generally no one because no one warmongers that early. But as a civ that is warmongering early you'd want to.

Siege towers are AWESOME as they give all adjacent units city bombard bonuses. [/QUOTE]

Really? The Civilopedia describes them as giving city attack bonuses, suggesting it's a melee-only effect. I also didn't realise they keep the promotion on upgrade.

Problem is with bnw war mongering diplo hits when you war early are off the charts, so they're no longer a top civ, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

I tried warmongering early to test the BNW diplo hits, and you can get away with one or two early (EXTREME or MAJOR) city captures - plus, at this point you won't be known to the whole world so won't get the penalty if you take out your closest rival before meeting the rest of the competition.

As with any early warmongering, the lack of trading partners is the big constraint in the early game.
 
I have found that Assyria's UA works well when you don't try to wipe your neighbors out, but instead harvest their outlying cities like fruit. They are usually poorly defended and low population if you get to them fast enough. It doesn't matter how big the city you take is, if the civ has a tech that you don't, you will get it. Just raze their small cities and wait for them to plant a new one. Doing this only intermittently helps keep the warmongering hate down too.
 
Assyria is definitely not complete trash.
Even if you don't war mongle, the UB allows you to delay Amphitheaters until Opera Houses are right around the corner.

About the only civs that have nothing at all to offer peaceful players are Zulu & Mongols.
 
Inspired by this thread, I decided to roll an Immortal Assyria game - rerolling my first two starts because they were unoccupied islands. The third game took an hour - turned out to be a duel map. I just beelined to siege towers and composite bows, got trade techs to set up caravans to city-states, built Statue of Zeus and Terracotta Army (by that point TA got me +1 siege tower, +1 warrior, +1 composite bow, +1 archer and +1 scout, which I disbanded). Theo hadn't expanded past Constantinople, so I never even got to take advantage of the UA when I took the city...

Okay, any civ is great on a duel map, warmongers most of all, but it was quite fun regardless.
 
Assyria is kind of like Germany to me in that you are guaranteed to have an interesting game. Sure you could play peacefully with them, but you could also play peacefully with Shaka. Assyria is meant to warmonger.

When you get your siege towers you are going to be curious and you are going to try them out on a city. When you see how easy they go down and get a free tech from doing so, you are going to take another city. You won't be able to help yourself, much like getting 10 barbs at the beginning with Germany.

Some civs will hate you and probably have an ongoing war with you until the end of the game, but you have 3 capitals and that to me makes an interesting game.
 
Krajzen said:
Remember about Denmark.

Oh wait, Denmark has also nothing to offer warmongering players :lol:
Click to expand...

The Denmark UA also works on civilian units; so it actually had some use for peaceful players: Faster moving your workers around.

Also, Denmark is the best civ for taking cities one & two tiles away from the coast (It can land and attack the city in the same turn)
 
joncnunn said:
The Denmark UA also works on civilian units; so it actually had some use for peaceful players: Faster moving your workers around.

Also, Denmark is the best civ for taking cities one & two tiles away from the coast (It can land and attack the city in the same turn)
Click to expand...

Denmark is very good for rapid exploration and settlement.

England is another civ that's borderline for non-warmongers - that +2 movement is only useful on certain maps, leaving you with not much but a spy.
 
The Siege tower is an amazing unit that made me go warmonger - and I am the kind of player who wins ~99% of his games via culture or diplomacy.

...so, yeah, Assyria is certainly a worthwhile CIV. I consider them to be Huns 2.0.
 
PhilBowles said:
Denmark is very good for rapid exploration and settlement.

England is another civ that's borderline for non-warmongers - that +2 movement is only useful on certain maps, leaving you with not much but a spy.
Click to expand...

England has a coastal bias so like Denmark you'll find that sometimes you can move units (including civilians) faster via ocean even if the destination is on the same landmass.
Extra Spy translates directly into a (small) boost for Diplomatic victory; one more city state ally via spy and in late game that's one more diplomat for 1 point towards diplomatic victory. (Going cultural, that same extra spy for diplomat also can be used to largely offset ideological penalty.) That reminds me; I haven't played England since Vanilla; and should probably play them again in my next game.
 
Assyria is a good civilization. I was able to get one of my few immortal victories as a science one.
 
One question if you get given a city as part of a peace-negotiation deal will you still get a free technology or do you have to physically conquer the city? I ask that because it seems like most people will weaken an AI by destroying their military & use diplomacy because you don't get the diplomacy penalty.

I do think that Assyria's UA is odd, is there any evidence that they really invaded other civs to take their technology? Their motive to conquer seemed to be from expansionist tyranny that was often provoked by distrusting neighbours that stirred up trouble for the Empire & a desire to exact tribute and wealth out of their subjected peoples.
I think Assyria would be better if they had some Vassal themed UA where they get extra bonuses from puppeted cities and citystates (maybe puppetting Citystates produce half of the benefits of an ally-citystate (i.e. culture/faith/food etc).
Learning a free Ancient to Renaissance era technology should be given as a bonus to any civilization that conquers a foreign city - I.e. there should be more rewards for warmongering in the game, lets see the Romans adopted most of their culture/civilization from the Greek world...
 
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