Ancient Blitzkrieg – Cyrus’ Immortal Rush Guide

Any update since BtS 3.17 came out?

The sharp increase in barbarian spears is a severe nerf to any Animal Husbandry based rush strategy (Persians, Egyptians, Mongol) I'd say.

(Yes, I know you're suggesting to turn barbs off entirely, but I would like to know if you believe your strategy remains viable without resorting to that, somewhat drastic, step)
 
Ive never seen more than 3 barbarian spearmen in a game. Even if you got alot more though, the cities you found should have at least an archer or something. Thats what I would do at least, even a warrior can hold of a spearman once the cultural defense rating goes up some.
 
This is not an optimal win-on-deity guide. I would recommend trying both leaders out.

Persia are meant to be 1 of the strongest empires in the game, for sure. depending on playstyle you can select both leaders.

just like friends told, if you want to take advantage of early immortal rush and then keep peace in mid-game, then darius seems better.
if you want to war more frequently also in mid game, then cyrus is much stronger, no doubt. for late game wars, both leaders you can select.
so both seem playable.
this was a comparison for levels>=emperor

for low levels, always and always select cyrus, for that there is no need for an extra monetary trait (financial, philosophical, organized etc.) in lower levels.

if you love civilization and if you love challenges, always select Cyrus.

Yes Darius is very powerful but with CE only! on the other hand, cyrus is flexible. he can adopt SE as well, in fact IMO, SE is even better for him.

unlike wejer, i would recommend building cottages rather less with Cyrus. because vassalage or bureacracy suits Cyrus more than free speech. but still some towns near riverside may help in high levels. in low levels you really don't need.

else than a few cottage cities, try to have mostly high pop cities (30-32) for GP farming and some extra high production cities with 19-22 pop.
as cyrus is charismatic, he will easily have many level 7 units early, and i believe quality is even more important than quantity as long as your units can heal fast.
 
Combat I -> Medic I+II+III -> Morale -> Leadership -> Combat II+III+IV -> Commando -> Combat V+VI
What's up with this?
 
Could we not rename this the Rammsess/Hatty Charriot rush as well. Would many things change?

Sarge:gp:

Well, i thought noone was playing civ4 any more. glad to read new posts. My reply:

No. The term "ancient blitzkrieg" here means absolute victory before BC. War chariot has some disadvantages. The comparison can be handled very much in detail but shortly

* egyptian chariot doesn't receive defensive bonuses. So you would have to train a few defenders to put in stack with the chariot. even if you do so, then you wouldn't be able to move by two. this slow motion totally ruins all strategy. with fast and good defending immortals, you can kill roughly 3 civilizations before BC (marathon game speed) that would enable you to REX pretty good enough

* only advantage of war chariot is that its advantage of 5attack instead of 4. so this means it will have the attack advantage against not only the archers but also the spearmen.

so these two details mean that the egypt. chariot gets absolute later as it is also strong versus spears but although it will go for a longer time period, it will never ever shine as much as an immortal stack.


just train 10 immortals. kill the 1st civ. if you loose 3 immortals, train 3/5 more. if you always attack by 10/12 immortals (and nothing else!) you will easily be able to kill anybody until swords and spears really start to widespread a lot. If you apply the strategy well, you will be guaranteed to kill a few neighbours.

By the way, according to game conditions Darius can also be a good guy. I was undersestimating him in means of warring but after a space race victory on emperor level i understood that Darius is very powerful for refreshing economy after long wars.

Yes he will never have high level units but he seems to have a good economic advantage instead. in high difficulties, this is also important. i killed 3 neighbours before BC with him and vassalized the last chinese guy on my continent in mid-age. My space race victory came very easily afterwards.

I 'm a SE dominant and warmonger player but Darius also suits my strategy. But let me emphasize that if I will play on a difficulty level of monarch or easier, i would always prefer CYRUS.
 
As an marathon player on Emperor/Immortal in BTS I can say that this rush does not work very good. Well, it does a very short while, but usually the time you attack with mass immortals the 3rd city/capitol on Immortal difficulty the AI already has a spearmen there :(. Immortals are great vs barbs/scouting and mainly I attack the moment I research/trade for currency/code of laws/feudalism, and use Immortals which gained at least 10 exp from barbs as medics supplementing my catapults/swordsman (75% city raider) army which is also supplemented by 2 spearmen and 2 axemen with both with 10% strenght promotion and +25% melee units / +25% archery units. That army can raid cities without looses, so thats why I usually delay the attack to build a stable econymy so I can raid 15+ cities in one war and it still doesn't harm my economy much.
 
As an marathon player on Emperor/Immortal in BTS I can say that this rush does not work very good. Well, it does a very short while, but usually the time you attack with mass immortals the 3rd city/capitol on Immortal difficulty the AI already has a spearmen there :(. Immortals are great vs barbs/scouting and mainly I attack the moment I research/trade for currency/code of laws/feudalism, and use Immortals which gained at least 10 exp from barbs as medics supplementing my catapults/swordsman (75% city raider) army which is also supplemented by 2 spearmen and 2 axemen with both with 10% strenght promotion and +25% melee units / +25% archery units. That army can raid cities without looses, so thats why I usually delay the attack to build a stable econymy so I can raid 15+ cities in one war and it still doesn't harm my economy much.

well i don't remember each detail about the starting post of the thread, if you mean it by "this rush". of course each strategy has dependencies, resource location and map type. but if you have a good horse location not very far to the capital, you can be able to rush a few neighbours with 2 or 3 cities at most. to make the first rush in about 2500BC helps much.
immortals are strongest until 1000BC generally in emperor level. And rightfully deciding who to attack first is also important.
in one of my games, i killed 2 civs and nearly killed the 3rd with only immortals.
that 3rd continued to liv with a far away last one city.

i also killed anotehr (4th civ) with half immortals and half swords.
 
As an marathon player on Emperor/Immortal in BTS I can say that this rush does not work very good.

Marathon Emperor/Immortal is the perfect setting for the Persian Immortal rush. The AI will start with a worker so you can build warriors, steal workers, and get them back quickly. By the time you have AH and Wheel, you can have 4-6 stolen workers hooking horses and then chopping forests. Meanwhile, your neighbors are spending precious resources building replacement workers instead of settlers, and what's more, you have your neighbors' territory completely scouted and know where the copper is. And then on Marathon, units are relatively cheaper than on other speeds, and they move relatively faster on Marathon as well.
 
Hello. I am a long-time reader of articles and forums here, but have only been driven to actually register and join-in by a third consecutive failure to execute a successful Immortal Rush - I wonder if anyone can tell me what I'm doing wrong?

I play BTS on Prince and usually win. I tend to favour financial civs, small to medium watery maps and cultural victories with a bit of conquest thrown in. In recent games I've enjoyed easily trampling my neighbours to bits with Praetorian and Quechua rushes, and having read this (very detailed and thoughtful) article was enthused by the concept of the Immortal rush.

Trouble is, my three attempts have ended so badly I now can't really believe that Immortals can do what they're supposed to be capable of. In each game (on Prince), I've researched animal husbandry, the wheel then bronze working. I've built worker, warrior, worker, settler or some variation. Once I declared war early and stole a worker with my warrior, other times I've tried for a more surprising attack. In each game I've built my second city right next to some horses, connected it asap, built barracks and started to churn out the Immortals. As soon as I've got three or four I've taken them into enemy territory, only to find the targets not soft enough and the pointy spears of the Imz not sharp enough.

Even if the enemy capital only had a single archer in it, they have always managed to get a second one in there by the time I attack. When the city is on a hill an attacking Immortal is lucky to do 0.5 damage, if it isn't on a hill it might do 1. This still means that you would need at least 3 Immortals per Archer and usually more. If I wait until I have 8 or so Immortals, I find that there are either three Archers waiting for me, or worse Spears.

The attrition tactics with flanking promoted Immortals described in this article haven't worked out. I've only managed to get a few to Flanking 2 before my initial attack, and even these have tended to die rather than retreat. Defending archers have been swiftly promoted until they have City Garrison 3 or Hills 2 and are practically immune to Combat 1 Immortals. Even though my capital swiftly starts producing cheap Immortals at a rate of 2 every 3 turns, my enemy manages to make new Archers almost as fast, even if I occupy all his hammer bearing tiles... Soon I'm faced with a city bristling with seven or eight elite Archers and go elsewhere looking for softer targets, only to find loads of Spears.

In short, two Immortals don't seem to be able to take a city with one Archer in it, and you're unlikely to ever get better odds than that, so the whole tactic is a big dead-end, even on Prince.

I guess I'm missing something - but what??
 
You never need more than 2 immortals per archer... Unless they are protective and on a hill i guess.. You need to have a big enough army to kill the enemy when you start the war, just wait a few more turns. The ai won't build up troops while not in war, but decleare on it and it will start to spam troops. What speed are you playing on? Rushes become a lot easier on the slower speeds. On quick speed rushes are almost impossible while on marathon it is very hard to fail. With immortals rushing on normal shouldn't be too hard, but if you spend too much time on useless stuff it can still go bad.
 
Yes Darius is very powerful but with CE only!

When warmongering ORG is the most important trait, not Financial. Early warmongering consist of working farms, mines, whipping, and chopping more immortals. You won't be working cottages from most cities for a very long time (the fewer the better).

The majority of research will be coming from scientists (multiple cities), an academy, and deficit research fueled from conquered cities and by selling techs. ORG will help nicely with civic fees but just as importantly (if not more) drastically reduces the time needed to get CHs up - say 8-12 turns per city as a whole. When you have 15-20 cities from 500 - 1 AD that is huge.

ORG is superior earlier while FIN starts to shine the longer the game goes on - in a 20 city empire at 1AD with 120 population with 53gpt in civic maintenance while running Theocracy, slavery, and representation would translate to about 60 gpt in maintenance saved which would equal around 25% of your total research. Financial would need to work around 37-40% of all their tiles as cottages and be producing approximately 2C per tile. They very well could :) .

Of course you still need to factor in the gold saved from earlier CHs and the Forbidden palace - not to mention if an empire had that many cottages they would be a poor war machine in the first place and wouldn't have nearly as much land at the same date, nor would they be able to acquire new land as fast either =D.

As an marathon player on Emperor/Immortal in BTS I can say that this rush does not work very good. Well, it does a very short while, but usually the time you attack with mass immortals the 3rd city/capitol on Immortal difficulty the AI already has a spearmen there

That's why you go to war with all your close neighbors and pillage every metal/horse in sight and leave 3-4 civilizations with nothing more than Archers - works great on Immortal too! This means getting 1 - 2 Immortals and war/pillage and repeat until 3-4 civilization around you have no metal/horse. An archer in a city will not come out to attack you w/out around 5 archers, which means you are free to pillage everyone remotely close and non stop war.
 
Resurrecting this thread, I just got back into Civ IV and decided to give this strategy a try. Thanks a lot, Wejer, for writing such a detailed guide.

I started a marathon Monarch level game with two other civs. Managed to steal a worker from each, the first time I've done that. I noticed that after each theft, the AI switched to using pairs of workers and archers, so I guess it is not very feasible to steal more than one worker from each civ any more.

The tech and build order suggestions were very clear:) I ended up having to chop my Settler in order to grab the only horse resource from my nearest neighbour. That meant it wasn't a very good city, but the stolen workers had pre-made a road to the site, so my capital could immediately start producing Immortals.

I waited until I had 10 Immortals before declaring war on the nearest neighbour. Now one thing which I wasn't clear on, Wejer suggested Combat 2 and Flanking 2 promotions, but with only a Barracks, I had to send the troops in with only one promotion. Did I miss something there? After taking the enemies capital, and razing one other city, there is now one city left, and I have two combat 1 medic 1, one sentry/flanking 1 and one flanking 2 immortals left.

Obviously I'm going to have to produce another set of fresh troops to conquer the last civ, I'm thinking maybe 18 since he is some way away and will be getting axes/spears hooked up. My question is, do I keep the veterans alive and hold off killing the nearest civ, so they can guide and heal the in-production army, or do I risk losing them and wipe out the first civ right now?

Second question, the capital I kept, but they are very unhappy due to war weariness, fighting their own culture and religion and so on. What's the best way to handle this? If I can't keep this at a productive size, should I be thinking about founding a fourth city, maybe towards the last enemy, in order to produce Immortals more quickly?

Thanks again for the guide, I'm pretty confident I'll get my first ever Monarch win, and then I'll try the strategy again with more civs and a higher level:)

Y.
 
In my experience, I need a couple or 3 axemen or swordsmen to take down a 2nd Civ in a rush like this. You will lose the vast majority of your immortals if they have a spearman and even under best circumstances just using immortals is going to kill a lot of hammers.

As far as dealing with the unhappiness. Whip! The granary if there isn't one.. lighthouse for a good coastal capital, monument, whatever will give a big bang for the buck..
 
Hi,

I got to this post from the War Academy, and I don't even know why it's there anymore, the strategy doesn't seem to work, even in prince.

First, I had to re-roll several times just to get horses close enough for this to be viable. When I finally got them next to a half-decent location for my 2nd city, the only 2 neighbors close enough to be "rushed" were Babylon and Maya, both of them with early UU. I was tired of re-rolling so I tried Babylon anyway. Got their 2nd city easily, but the capital was in a hill, and because of the shape of the terrain I could only attack from across a river or lose 2 turns. So I couldn't take it, starting with 10 immortals. I reloaded, built another 4 units and went for Babylon with 14 immortals, still couldn't take it.

So I re-rolled 3 more games, and I never got the horses in a close spot for my 2nd city, so I gave up.

It looks like the strategy depends on too many conditions:

- Horses in a decent spot for the 2nd city.
- Neighbors without early UU.
- Neighbors without capitals on hills.
- Neighbors without the "creative" trait (for worker stealing)

So, unles you tailor the game so you can decide which enemies you get, it doesn't look like this is doable anymore.
 
It's a strategy that you should have up your sleeves, like many, many others. It still up to you to decide if the gains is worth the risk. A lot of factors can make the odds stacked in your favor.

- Cutting access to potentially defensive strategic resources (copper)
- Protecting your stack
- Choosing the correct promotions
- Not attacking over rivers with a stack... damn, you should have figured that wasting a turn moving your 10-14 units was worth not having them all penalized.
- Target switching with fast moving stack. when you declare, Ai as a tendency to stack defender in a small Stack of death. Use your superior mobility ag for a different city.
- Pick your end goal but don't be to rigid. At some point, not taking the capital and having the opponent plead for peace at a strong cost can be a good move.
 
- Protecting your stack
- Choosing the correct promotions
- Not attacking over rivers with a stack... damn, you should have figured that wasting a turn moving your 10-14 units was worth not having them all penalized.
- Target switching with fast moving stack. when you declare, Ai as a tendency to stack defender in a small Stack of death. Use your superior mobility ag for a different city.
- Pick your end goal but don't be to rigid. At some point, not taking the capital and having the opponent plead for peace at a strong cost can be a good move.

- My stack was never attacked.
- I chose the promotions suggested in the 1st post: half the stack with power, the other half with withdrawal chance.
- Yup, I actually saved before that, confirmed that I would die if attacking through the river and tried again losing those 2 turns to move to a better position. That gave Babylon time to get another bowman, they were enough to destroy my immortals even without the penalty.
- As mentioned in my post, I got their 2nd city quickly, then it was only their capital left. This is a very early rush so I assume unless playing Immortal/Deity the AI won't have more than 2 cities by the time I start.
- So early in the game, the AI doesn't have so much to give me. I don't see how a rush so early in the game can be good if it doesn't eliminate at least one rival.

I changed to Rome in order to try a praetorian rush... it was SO much better. While I admit I was lucky enough to have iron in range of a 2nd city spot in my first attempt, the actual rush was way more effective. I completely destroyed the Khmer and America, and even the leading CIV with an early UU (the Celts) lost its capital to my praetorian army in no time. I'm playing small pangea map in Epic speed, so I might win before the praetorian units become obsolete. The comparison makes the immortal rush even less appealing.
 
The immortal rush definitely still works, even on levels way beyond prince. A quick look in the HoF tables shows that the current #1 game for conquest/standard size/normal speed/immortal difficulty (750BC) was won with nothing but immortals. Obviously that game was played with well chosen settings and opponents, but on prince it should work a lot better. Pacal is really the only AI you shouldn't take on with immortals, unless you can take him out before he reaches BW.

One of your problems might have been that you delayed the attack too long. You should not have 10 immortals when going after the first target. On prince level they will quite long have only one archer/city, maybe 2 in capital. Get the immortals out during this time and you only need a couple of units to take them out. Actually, we're talking prince level here... it's sometimes even possible to take out first target before he reaches archery. One immortal is enough for that. Waiting too long will also allow their cultural defenses to increase and possibly even give them time to build walls.

Stick with combat promotions, flanking is not worth it. And don't attack across rivers.

If he has a ton of bowmen in a hill city, you can choose to either leave him alone and go after another target, or try to lure those bowmen out of the city to take them out in the open field or take the city with fewer defenders. Units can be lured out from cities by giving them single units to attack or with workers that he would attempt to recapture. You can also take a ceasefire and gift him back the city you just captured. This will cause him to send a couple of defenders from capital to defend that city. Next turn you declare again, a single immortal can retake the city you just gifted and you can take out the defenders heading that way in open field, or take the capital if you can reach it.

Praets are definitely stronger than immortals, but slower and comes later. With those settings it shouldn't be a problem to take out the whole map with praets. Doable up to deity difficulty.

But anyway, OP is definitely outdated, some bad advice there. On levels where the AI doesn't start with a worker you should not start by building a warrior for worker stealing. There are no workers to steal. On prince you either build a worker yourself or a few warriors to go for a warrior rush on the first target. Building barracks that early is often not the best idea either either, it delays your attack. Better to have unpromoted immortals vs 1 archer and 20% cultural defenses than promoted immortals vs 3 archers and 40% cultural defenses.
 
One of your problems might have been that you delayed the attack too long. You should not have 10 immortals when going after the first target. On prince level they will quite long have only one archer/city, maybe 2 in capital. Get the immortals out during this time and you only need a couple of units to take them out. Actually, we're talking prince level here... it's sometimes even possible to take out first target before he reaches archery. One immortal is enough for that. Waiting too long will also allow their cultural defenses to increase and possibly even give them time to build walls.

But anyway, OP is definitely outdated, some bad advice there. On levels where the AI doesn't start with a worker you should not start by building a warrior for worker stealing. There are no workers to steal. On prince you either build a worker yourself or a few warriors to go for a warrior rush on the first target. Building barracks that early is often not the best idea either either, it delays your attack. Better to have unpromoted immortals vs 1 archer and 20% cultural defenses than promoted immortals vs 3 archers and 40% cultural defenses.

Now THIS sounds really applicable to my game. I built barracks and many units, and Babylon's culture was high by the time I got there. I might try again later with an earlier rush, and forgetting about the worker steal on Prince/Monarch. Let's see how it goes, thanks for the tips. :goodjob:
 
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