Musketeer Rush

A while back a few people were discussing the strat of rushing to Musketeers with Napoleon by ignoring the Alphabet line of techs and going straight to Gunpowder. The aim was to get Musketeers and overwhelm the AI before they could respond with anything more than Longbowmen.

I tried this out but ended up no better than if I had gone the conventional route. The game tells me that the shorter route to Gunpowder is by Writing to Theology to Education, which overlaps a lot with the Alphabet route. I tried clicking the other route (Metal Casting to Guilds) and indeed it seemed more techs to research and a lot more turns.

The game was an Emperor standard continents with 8 players at Epic speed. My only deviation was researching both Pottery and Animal Husbandry (needed cottages and some health bonus for my flood plain cities), Mathematics (to open up Currency and Construction so that I could trade for them from the AI) and IW (had no copper). I am not sure if these are really deviations anyway (eg. can one research Education w/o Maths?).

I could trade for or extort the religious techs up to Monotheism. I found that I had to trade to keep my economy alive. I traded away even Education and Gunpowder (the latter only to my friends) so that I don't get left behind in tech. Anyhow, the fact that I can trade them goes to show how well the AI is keeping up at my tech route, despite their numerous deviations.

In the end, I got several Musketeers out to demolish some longbows. Several turns later, though, I started seeing enemy musketmen. So much for early Musketeers. I am still doing well with them, but it seems the success of the game thus far is much more the result of my extensive warring with pre-cats swords and axes. The familiar techs I researched and the results indicate how similar this approach is, in effect, to my usual emphasis on getting Alphabet, Currency, CoL and Civil Service first.

So, having failed in my objective, I need the proponents of the Musketeer rush strat to share their experience so that I can see where I've gone wrong. How do you do a proper, deadly Musketeer rush to catch an enemy still languishing in the Dark Ages?

I just tried this and had the same result. It seems like rushing for gunpowder left my economy so weak that it would have been faster to just research in a more balanced fashion. Maybe an early war would help matters? I tried to be peaceful so I could research faster, but maybe grabbing some AI cities early on would help get to gunpowder faster.

I'd be curious to see a report of a successful implementation of this strategy myself.
Granted, I've only tried it a few times but with the exact same results: either my economy was in such bad shape I couldn't expand anymore, or they soon became obsolete again.

I'm inclined to believe the Musketeer's truly a pointless UU from what I've experienced thusfar.

imho napoleon is designed for v.early aggression instead of teching up the ladder. his starting techs provide pottery first after min-bronze. that way you can cottage up to support your troops. aggression is obvious. and then industrious means you spend less turns on stonehenge and the oracle (maybe pyramids if you have stone). if i was going to wait at all with napoleon it would be for maces after a cs sling, but imo i'd rather go rex with napoleon i think he's fairly well suited to it despite not having financial or organized.

Thoughts/suggestions.

1) Slingshots might help here.

2) Trading away your techs that you expressly say are what you want to give your advantage in the game you want to play = Bad Idea.

3) Even if you see Musketmen among the defenders... who cares? Muskets are only 9 Str vs 8 Str of a Maceman. What's the advantage? Gunpowder is a different type of unit. If you see Muskets, give your guys the Gunpowder bonus. Regardless, what I don't hear you saying is that the AI (a) gave their units the Gunpowder bonus and (b) had enough experience to do it in the first place.

Wodan

Well, I used middle line research to Nationalism/Muskets/cats combo.
I did playd Peter.

I got COl from Oracle, Civil service from GP, Philosofy and 2/3 of Education from GS.
I did trade for some other tech, but my own research was something like that:

farming-mysticism-meditation-priesthood writing (col from oracle)-Bronse-Alphavit-
(Civil service +1040 from GP rest natural research), Philosofy (GS)-Paper-
Education -(gs help)-Liberalism (Nationalism)-Gunpowder.

I did not have even metallocasting, as I did not want to trade Civil service/Philosofy.
I think I start thatde then after I got Nationalism, but I clearly remember crushing 2 civ with Drafted Muskets/cats combor why still moving my units 2 stept on roads.

Gunpoweder-Military tradition.

That is standart no gold no gems no silver start. If you have 1-2 of this you can do civil service slingshot.

I have a new idea for this: research masonry, and chop like mad to get the pyramids (shouldn't be too hard with napoleon or louis' industrial trait). That'll give you a great engineer to rush machinery, AND allow you to switch to police state when the time comes to build musketeers. I haven't tried this yet, but I will as soon as I have the chance.

I'm still in two minds about the tech trading though. On the one hand, like Wodan says, the whole point is to get a monopoly on certain techs. On the other hand, if you're only researching the techs that lead to gunpowder, you really hurt your economy (pretty soon you're cities have literally nothing to build except units- you can't even build research!). I think it might be worthwhile to trade for writing and alphabet, since those speed up your research, and you can probably get them with metal casting (which is no where near gunpowder), and then stop trading.

You can get Machinery from GM if you want to go this way.

Just a pointer for the experimenter out there:
Nationalism and drafting units is a compliment to having early musketmen. However, you will be far from Nationalism if you persue gunpowder via machinery.

I think a better route is Civil Service to Education. This will give you techs to better sustian your game, and let you pop nationalism (or gunpowder) with liberalism.

I've done the musketeer thing a few times, and I think it's a mistake to focus solely on musketeers. Musketeers just provide a little more oomph.

The way I do it now is:

1. warrior rush or axemen rush an early civ to make use of the aggressive trait
2. start down the path to theology, this lets you get stronehenge and the pyramids with the industrius trait
3. hopefully get christianity and the commerce bonuses that go with it.
4. get gunpowder, and use the tradability of paper and theology to get things like code of laws and preferably philosophy
5. build up a musketeer force to act as a pillaging force, since they can beat any medieval unit in the open field with vassalage and theocracy upgrades. this is the 'rush'. Not a city taking rush, but a pillaging rush. Use the musketeers speed to whip around strongpoints and hopefully take down small cities.
6. Immedietly after gunpowder focus on liberalism to slingshot to grenadiers and use these to take down cities. I guess you could go straight to chemistry from gunpowder though... but meh. Liberalism is needed for other things like free market.

You can't get liberalism first if you go down the traditional metal-working, guilds path and going to musketeers gives you a nice fast repsonse unit which works well in the open harrasing improvements and taking small undefended cities.

So I prefer to think of it as a grenadier rush. Grenadiers can beat medieval defences, whilst musketeers are great pillagers.

Let me clarify with a few points I neglected to mention. Someone said that your economy would be suffering if you don't research the traditional economic techs. I agree. The reason why I survived was because of cottaging wherever I could (mainly the many flood plains) and of fervently spreading Buddhism after I put a shrine in Delhi and built a few monasteries. That made the difference - I had no precious metals/gems (in fact, not a single happiness resource) to begin with and only got gold after capturing Delhi with my axe-sword warbands. Pity I was compelled to be Hindu like the rest of my continent. But the Hindu holy city will be mine eventually anyway. And no, I still couldn't get Christianity for all the bee-lining to Theology because my economy was not strong enough to research quickly.

My trading away techs like Education was due to the long-term need to improve my economy and keep up in the tech race. And I reasoned that since the AI can research Education anwyay, they will get it in a matter of several turns. I believe Cyrus and Hathesput will try for Liberalism. That's why I said given the fact that I can trade Education to them means my rush isn't exactly working out very well anyway. They're not far behind me.

I still find Musketeers useful, though. It's unlikely anyone will get Grenadiers soon and by then I will almost be the undisputed superpower of my continent. These guys reinforce the front lines very quickly, fresh from the ovens of my core cities, making my invading armies unbeatable due to concentration of force and mobility. Very Napoleonic, actually. And, like Wodan said, I can easily beat enemy muskets with Pinch, which they can't get immediately because they are not aggressive. No sign of knights as the AIs race for Liberalism. My game is far from a failure (although not going for Currency and CoL turned out to be very dangerous) but my Musketeer rush is.

From reading the various inputs here, I've reasoned that the best way to do this rush is to do a CS/CoL slingshot since you can get to Gunpowder via CS, Paper and Education. And you can at least build courthouses to support your growing empire. No point playing an agressive civ if you don't exploit your trait from early on, IMO. Aggressive axemen are the scariest stuff in the cIV world, coming so early.

Thanks for all your replies. Any more thoughts?

Mutineer, how did you get Oracle w/o chopping for it?

Try, you allwasy will get Oracle with out chopping. Idea is not to research Masonry or build anything extencive, just build oracle when research writing.
It will take about same amount of time.

I useally play on Emperor.

Yeah I think aggressive axemen are very scary.

Musketeers are just knights who actually don't come too late.

Another strat to consider is tech trading towards military tradition whilst you are building musketeers. Cavalry and musketeers are an awesome combo.

Joh said:

Another strat to consider is tech trading towards military tradition whilst you are building musketeers. Cavalry and musketeers are an awesome combo.

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But wouldn't beelinging straight for Military Tradition and forgetting about the Musketeer be just as effective? Granted, both require Gunpowder anyhow but I don't quite see the added value of the musketeers. Either your enemies don't have Rifles or Grenadiers yet; in that case Cavalry can handle things very effectively on their own. When they do have those units in place Musketeers are worthless.
I rather research straight to Chemistry before MT and build grenadiers while waiting for the cavalry, or stack up on Macemen + Catapults while beelining for MT and upgrade those units once I discover Chemistry & Steel. Macemen can acquire a couple of lovely CR promotions in the mean time as well.

Yeah, I made a post about the good combination of Musketeers and Cavalry once. They can move in step and pillage all they want. The cavalry can even attack cities under the protection of Musketeers w/o waiting for slow siege units.

The truth is, cavalry vs pikemen is still not cost effective, esp. pikemen with defensive bonuses. It helps to have a good number of Musketeers already if you're doing the bee-lining to MT.

I find that on Emperor, though, getting MT early is no simple matter as getting Liberalism first to get Nationalism free is not easy and the latter is expensive to research.

But, in any case, I think if you've been turning up the heat since the Ancient/Classical Age, you'll find that your neighbours won't get Chemistry as fast as you can come bearing down on them with a stack of Musketeers for some time already. From my experience, Musketeers are a good addition to my forces and make up half of my invading armies for a while.

aelf said:

The game was an Emperor standard continents with 8 players at Epic speed. My only deviation was researching both Pottery and Animal Husbandry (needed cottages and some health bonus for my flood plain cities), Mathematics (to open up Currency and Construction so that I could trade for them from the AI) and IW (had no copper).

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That's alot of deviation. If you don't have copper, stick with archers for early defense. Trade for hunting, and try your best to trade for archery.

It sounds like you were trying to actually build a civilization, which is where you will really get bogged down. If you let those cities grow in population, civic upkeep will crush you.

Every time a city grows, break out that whip for more settlers, workers, defenders, and barracks.

Whats the point of rushing to a defensive unit that will receive garrison-upgrades instead of cityraiders in order to attack cities? Ok, musketeers ignore the walls (the culturedefensebonus still counts though), but I cant see how they should beat a fortified Langbowman in a city.

Never played the french, but arent musketeers just faster than musketmen?

Re cavalry and musketeers:

Musketeers make a good escort for cavalry. They are cheap, and so can bulk up the force, and move as fast as the cavalry. They also are good for protection against pikemen. They heal much faster too, so are good for taking out weak troops that would go down, but hurt your cavalry in the process. What you can do is build a force of musketeers, go on a pillaging spree, and as soon as you get cavalry bring them in for a knockout punch. You can't go on a pillaging spree with grenadiers which is why I like the musketeer/cavalry combo. Even if you can't take a city with musketeers you can do alot of damage because they're fast and so keep the enemy down so they can't get to riflemen.

You can of course just do the macemen thing but then you may as well be playing japan. The knockout unit for france is still grenadiers/cavalry, the musketeers just provide a dangerous pillaging unit that is a threat to smaller cities. Which is why I said this strategy is about a pillaging rush. The only medieval unit that can touch them are knights, so grab msuketeers o nthe way to cavalry, and isntead of wiating for cavalry or grandiers to attack, charge at their resources and smaller cities with the unique unit.

Re longbows:

Musketeers will beat fortified longbows unless those longbows are in a city on a hill. The key here is promotions. With agressive, barracks, and vassalage and theocracy, you will have level 3 straight away, and only 1 combat away from level 4. A musketeer with combat 1, 2 and cover, will get a +45% bonus against a longbowman, or strength 13 in other words. This is more than twice the longbow's base strength so you can see how the longbow will need to use a hill or some fancy promotions to beat the musketeer. Even if you go all general and take combat 3, you still have a strength of 12.

So, the moral of the story is, give your musketeers combat 1, 2, and then save the third promtion for just before you fight. You might need to promote them to cover, shock or whatever based on what you come across.

pi-r8 said:

I just tried this and had the same result. It seems like rushing for gunpowder left my economy so weak that it would have been faster to just research in a more balanced fashion. Maybe an early war would help matters? I tried to be peaceful so I could research faster, but maybe grabbing some AI cities early on would help get to gunpowder faster.

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This is how the game is set up. Balanced research ALWAYS yeilds better results than one sided research, since side paths often result in better economy, culture, research, whatever, which SUPPORTS your research efforts in your main path.

For example, you could, on turn 1, open the science menu, scroll right, and click on "rocketry", close science menu, and return to game play. This will ALWAYS result in you being the LAST civ to get to rocketry. Why? Because the shortest path is not the fastest path.

There are ways to get Musketeer earlier than the AI, just not by going straight to gunpowder. The side techs will increase economy and research, thereby getting you there faster.