protective/charismatic: archer rush

People always try axe or chariot rushes but there is always the risk of not having metals or horses. Why not archer rush? No resources are required, so you can start the rush earlier and they come cheap. Load them up with drill promotions and they work just as well as axemen considering that you have more of them--with about 2.5:1 or 3:1 numbers, I have taken capitals of creative leaders with 3 defenders easily, along with cities on hills.

Protective leaders plus a barracks makes for drill 2 archers right off the bat and allow for early drill 4. Charismatic leaders can also quickly get drill 4 archers due to the lower experience required. In a pure strength contest (combat promotions), defending archers are hard to beat, but with a significant amount of first strikes you are guaranteed to do some damage and whittle down the defenders. This is why archers are almost as good as axemen, because axemen don't get first strikes.

It's amazing how much time is saved not looking for horses/copper and not worrying about roads and connecting resources. Just get some production going in your capital, build a barracks and make archers to rush your neighbor; it works. I completely destroyed a creative neighbor on (Warlords) Monarch this way when I was fenced in as the Persians with no horses or metal and I had a force of drill 3 and drill 4 archers by the time I was done. That was after researching the techs to look for metals and horses; think about if I had just gone straight for archers. It's a guaranteed strategy as long as you aren't up against protective leaders yourself.

Maybe mix protective with aggressive for the free combat1? or do archers not get that?

TheDS said:

Maybe mix protective with aggressive for the free combat1? or do archers not get that?

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Archers dont get the aggressive traits free Combat I. It's for Melee and gunpowder units only, IICR.

Play whoever has these two traits, of China. Grab MC early and head for Machinery before any enemies have longbows and start kickin their butts. Chokonus with DI-IV kicksass...

Diamondeye said:

Play whoever has these two traits, of China. Grab MC early and head for Machinery before any enemies have longbows and start kickin their butts. Chokonus with DI-IV kicksass...

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Or the best of all: a Churchill archer rush. Protective and charismatic gives you drill 4 archers in no time, which you store away for upgrading to redcoats. Aelf tried to get drill 4 crossbows for this purpose but an early archer rush will net you more drill 4 troops.

Aggressive has half-priced barracks, so you tokugawa can start immediately with cover.

vicawoo said:

Aggressive has half-priced barracks, so you tokugawa can start immediately with cover.

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Cover only adds strength, though, and I don't think that is the point because axemen or chariots have far more strength. I think the advantage of archer rushing is the ability to accumulate huge amounts of first strikes with drill promotions, which gives you the chance to damage or defeat opponents without having to have a decisive strength advantage. I don't know how the math works out and I haven't done tests, but I found that drill 3/4 archers were an extremely effective rushing force even compared to the amount of axes that the same hammers could have produced. Being able to produce them earlier and without resources along with the synergies for protective/charismatic leaders is only icing on the cake that makes the rush all the more appealing.

gallego said:

Or the best of all: a Churchill archer rush. Protective and charismatic gives you drill 4 archers in no time, which you store away for upgrading to redcoats. Aelf tried to get drill 4 crossbows for this purpose but an early archer rush will net you more drill 4 troops.

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Drill 4 Archers still have only strength 3. Compare that to a CG II archer on a hill and the defender will have 3 (+45% +50% +50% +25%) = 3 x 2.7 = 8.1

Sure, you have a few free swings at your opponent, but they're all strength 3 vs. strength 8.1 and that's not even counting culture.

Even if you compare your Drill IV archer against a standard Acher with no promotions at all in a city with no hill, no culture and no walls or castle, you're still looking at strength 3 vs. strength 4.5. 3 free swings and 3 free chances at a swing aren't going to do you much good there.

Archers attacking city = dead archers.

IMHO skirmisher rush is the only legitimate archer rush. I don't care how many drill promotions you add to your regular archers 33% increase in base strength will beat it. Still you'd better pick your target. I won't do it on any protective leaders. And besides people playing Mansa are generally busy going for the builder path or early religion, not many people will start his game researching hunting and archery.

popejubal said:

Drill 4 Archers still have only strength 3. Compare that to a CG II archer on a hill and the defender will have 3 (+45% +50% +50% +25%) = 3 x 2.7 = 8.1

Sure, you have a few free swings at your opponent, but they're all strength 3 vs. strength 8.1 and that's not even counting culture.

Even if you compare your Drill IV archer against a standard Acher with no promotions at all in a city with no hill, no culture and no walls or castle, you're still looking at strength 3 vs. strength 4.5. 3 free swings and 3 free chances at a swing aren't going to do you much good there.

Archers attacking city = dead archers.

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Defending archers that early in the game don't have CG2, and the whole point of the rush is that you catch enemy cities when they have low culture, no walls, and 2-3 archers tops. Easy to beat with 7-8 of your own, and if you think about how quickly you could amass 8 archers if you really tried, it's pretty quick. You will lose lots of archers each attack but the drill makes sure that you take some damage off, and eventually you break through. Each city you take can start producing archers itself without needing to be hooked up as well, so your force replenishes itself quickly. I've wiped out opponents three times on monarch like this, so I'm not posting a theoretical "what if" strategy, I'm just saying it has worked more than a few times without even really aiming for it, including for creative capitals and cities on hills.

protective archer rushes work, but they're a last minute resort in case you dont have horses or metals. It actually has about the same loss ratio as axemen. The one time i did it, i didnt lose very many of my archers. of course the AI was very close to me so my archers didnt have to travel far and i finished the ai off with swords from the iron i captured from him.

gallego, i would mix up your stack of attacking archers. get some with drill and some with cover. throw the ones with cover at the defending units first to weaken them while having your drill mop them up. I may be mistaken, but wouldnt combat II+cover+drillI have a better chance of damaging a defending archer with a high strength than a DrillVI archer?

MrFelony said:

protective archer rushes work, but they're a last minute resort in case you dont have horses or metals. It actually has about the same loss ratio as axemen. The one time i did it, i didnt lose very many of my archers. of course the AI was very close to me so my archers didnt have to travel far and i finished the ai off with swords from the iron i captured from him.

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But what if you don't wait to find out if you don't have horses or metals? What if you go for archers right away? And while it loses the same as axemen, it nets you drill 3 or drill 4 troops to upgrade later. Combat promotions are easy to get from your later wars with conventional attack troops.

gallego, i would mix up your stack of attacking archers. get some with drill and some with cover. throw the ones with cover at the defending units first to weaken them while having your drill mop them up. I may be mistaken, but wouldnt combat II+cover+drillI have a better chance of damaging a defending archer with a high strength than a DrillVI archer?

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You are probably right. I didn't really do the math on it, but I judged drill promotions to be more valuable as they have synergy with the archers and are harder to come by with later units. Cover won't really help in most situations if you want to keep your veteran archers for later use.

gallego said:

Defending archers that early in the game don't have CG2, and the whole point of the rush is that you catch enemy cities when they have low culture, no walls, and 2-3 archers tops. Easy to beat with 7-8 of your own, and if you think about how quickly you could amass 8 archers if you really tried, it's pretty quick. You will lose lots of archers each attack but the drill makes sure that you take some damage off, and eventually you break through. Each city you take can start producing archers itself without needing to be hooked up as well, so your force replenishes itself quickly. I've wiped out opponents three times on monarch like this, so I'm not posting a theoretical "what if" strategy, I'm just saying it has worked more than a few times without even really aiming for it, including for creative capitals and cities on hills.

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You are certainly correct in saying that you could take an opposing city that has no walls, low (or no) culture as long as the city is not on a hill and the AI is asleep at the wheel and you don't plan on taking any more cities after that with the archers you produced up to that point.

That doesn't sound a lot like a "rush" to me. A rush is something where you rush a bunch of units and then use those units all in one short campaign to do something impressive. If you have to wait for your newly conquored cities to end the revolt and then start producing their own archers as well to continue the attack, then you're not in a very good position.

8 Archers cost 200 hammers and Drill IV comes at 10 XP (8 charismatic). I'm going to assume that you don't have Theocracy, Vassalism, West Point or the Pentagon yet since you're talking Archers here, so I really wonder where you're getting 8 Archers that have 8-10 XP each that you can afford to throw away taking a lightly defended AI city with enormous losses. The last time I counted, you get 3 XP from a Barracks and maybe another couple of XP from a Totem Pole. Where is the rest of the XP for your slavering horde of Drill IV Archers coming from? They're certainly not coming from promoted units that you got while taking AI cities. I'll go through the numbers in the attack that would be most beneficial to you.

Your attacking Archer: Strength 3 with 3 first strikes guaranteed and 50% chance each for 3 additional first strikes.
The defending Archer: Strength 3 with no promotions +50% for being in a city = Strength 4.5

Check out http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/combat_explained.php for an explanation of how combat works.

The probability that any combat round will be given to the attacker is simply the attacker's strength divided by the total strength. That is 3/7.5 in this case or 40%. The average of 4.5 first strikes gives an average of
40% * 4.5 = 1.8 combat rounds "won" by your attacking Archer during first-strike-time. The damage that you will do in that time is 20 * (13.5/16.5) = 16 per combat round won, making a total damage of 28.8. (note: that's 16.36, but rounded down).

That's actually not bad damage, all things considered, but keep in mind, we're talking your attacker with 4 promotions (and I'm still not sure where he got his 10 XP) against a defender with 0 promotions, no hill, no river, no cultural bonus and no clue. I've stacked the deck in your favor as much as I possibly can here.

When the opposing Archer gets to fight back, we see a slight change in the fight. You win 40% of the combat rounds and he wins 60% of the combat rounds. You do an average of 16 points of damage per round won to him and he does an average of 24 damage per round lost to you. Taking into account the odds of your winning each combat round, that's an average of 6.4 damage to the defender and 14.4 damage to you per combat round.

Your estimate of 8 highly promoted Archers attacking to 2-3 Archers with no bonuses defending seems about right to me.

...oh, and the defender has Slavery? That means you had better have all 8 Archers in place to attack just 1 round after you declare war because whipped archers come pretty cheap and you're going to be seeing 3-4 Archers instead of that 2-3 after the second turn when the 50% penalty for whipping wears off. And keep in mind that the AI switches to military production pretty heavily when

So, which would I rather have? My choice of Stonehenge or the Oracle plus a Settler OR... one AI city on the edge of the AI empire as long as the city had no culture to start, was not placed on a hill and the defending Archers had no promotions.

With Copper, I could have had about 5 and a half Axemen. I'd rather attack with the 5 and a half Axemen so that I can attack other cities with the survivors in later turns.


If you're going to be putting together stacks of city attackers that don't require resources, either build Warriors with City Raider III (you have the XP to do that with the Archers, so why not do the same with Warriors) and leave the defending to the Archers. CR III Warrior attacks with 2 Strength while the defending Archer will have 2.25 Strength. That's a much better ratio than 3 to 4.5, not even counting the price difference between the Warrior's 15 hammers vs. the Archer's 25 hammers.

popejubal said:

Your attacking Archer: Strength 3 with 3 first strikes guaranteed and 50% chance each for 3 additional first strikes.

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No, that's not right. Take a careful look at CvUnit::setCombatUnit.

First strike chances are converted to first strikes using a uniform distribution (ie, a die roll), not a series of coin flips. So with three first strike chances, 2 first strikes is exactly as likely as 3 first strikes (rather than 3 times as likely, which is what you would get with coin flips).

The AI isn't asleep at the wheel. If you hit the AI capital with 8 archers that early in the game, the city will fall. Say the first five die, but the next three make it through. The AI is down a capital and you are on top with more archers on the way. It's one turn into striking distance after DoW and in my experience they haven't whipped out defenders that quickly. At this point, most of your archers will only have drill 2 if protective or charismatic + barb exp, but winning the capital will boost them up. Again, that early in the game, they don't have that many archers, and their ~2 non-capital cities are not going to have the population to whip out defenders. The drill 3/4 is a bonus to save for later once you finish off the AI, and provides you with a great defense force for the near future (warriors wouldn't really help in that regard). It's the future value of the veteran archers that is the big plus with this.

An extra first strike chance tends to be weaker than a combat promotion, in terms of winning odds. If your attention is to gain drill 4 archers, then go ahead (although crossbows level quickly as well). If you want to take cities, cover is better.

If this is a true rush, you might not have time to build a normal barracks. Speedwise, churchill's archers will not overtake tokugawa's archers with a barracks until level 5.

VoiceOfUnreason said:

First strike chances are converted to first strikes using a uniform distribution (ie, a die roll), not a series of coin flips. So with three first strike chances, 2 first strikes is exactly as likely as 3 first strikes (rather than 3 times as likely, which is what you would get with coin flips).

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How does combat where both parties have first strike chances work? Does each side roll first to determine their number of additional first strikes (which will then at least partially cancel one another), or do the first strike chances cancel before a roll?

tried rushing with churchill mali. That was kinda fun...

I once did a warrior rush way back on prince level. I was on a very cramped 18 civ huge earth map so a very early rush was mandatory. I wouldn't try it on monarch level now tho, the AI starts with archers...

i played as a spanish churchill. cheap citadels were pretty nice. one of the few times i spammed castles lol