Holy army strategy

[DrPepper836]

Here is a strategy that I've found works very well, and have used it to win some games myself. It pretty much requires a spiritual/adaptive civ though, or it won't be anywhere near as effective. If you are adaptive, then switch to spiritual when you get the option.

First, get a city going with priest specialists as soon as you can. When you get some, start building the AoL right away in your best hammer city.

Second, start cranking out some 20+ priest units in the AoL city.

Third, found a religion. I prefer the order for various reasons, some being that the priests being able to use bless to give theme an extra strength point and spreading the religion and getting free crusaders to help act as garrison units to keep your army at a higher size.

Fourth, use your next priest to build the great shrine of your religion. Not really necessary, but it helps gold and stuff. You give up some XP for the priest units, but they get to be pretty high anyway.

Fith, keep upgrading the AoL.

I normally go Combat I - V, then Drill I, then start going on the convert units path, then finishing up the drill line for my priests. They get insanely strong. I had about 6 of them last game that were Combat V, Convert III, and Drill III.

 

[slowcar]

divine units are inferior to melee units because they can not learn some important promotions like city raider 2+3, shock2, cover2.
having some elite warriors upgraded to axemen/champions goes a long way and while some divine units (paladins/eidolons) are strong on the battlefield (mainly because their counter-promotion is rather rare and has only rank1) they can not attack cities as well as melee units.

 

[cabbagemeister]

The ability to crack cities depends on the priest units you're upgrading from. If your Pals/Eids used to be Priests of Leaves, they have a nice Empowered tiger summons to weaken the top defender with. If they used to be Ritualists, they can cast Ring of Fire and smash the weakened defenders.

For Spiritual Civs especially, it's very easy to use DrPepper's strategy to amass a large force of Mobility, Combat V priests whose magical abilities make them more than a match for all but the most elite champions.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

divine units are inferior to melee units because they can not learn some important promotions like city raider 2+3, shock2, cover2.
having some elite warriors upgraded to axemen/champions goes a long way and while some divine units (paladins/eidolons) are strong on the battlefield (mainly because their counter-promotion is rather rare and has only rank1) they can not attack cities as well as melee units.

I recently started using a variant of this with the Kurio and one thing that you're forgetting is that divine units with potency gain experience for "free".

With what you're describing, unless you're in a huge map, you'll probably end up with a couple elite warriors that are good for promoting.

In the early phase, if adaptive, at turn 95 you can switch to spiritual and you should have your religion established already so you crank out a bunch of disciples and let them sit. By the time you're ready to attack, those potent disciples will have more exp than your warriors, and you'll have all of those disciples to play with/upgrade to priests etc.

If adaptive, you an also switch to arcane after that and do the same with adepts giving you a fleet of potent adepts and priests. You really don't even need melee units at that point, anything you fight should be like 0.2 or 0.4 strength after spells.

 

[heisenberg]

=P to add to DrPepper's point for Order, don't forget about social order!
If you're going for an altar victory you'd definitely want to run theology once you get it, and social order simply "solves" your happiness problem for you to run as many priests in your GP cities as you can manage food-wise.

 

[cabbagemeister]

In the early phase, if adaptive, at turn 95 you can switch to spiritual and you should have your religion established already so you crank out a bunch of disciples and let them sit. By the time you're ready to attack, those potent disciples will have more exp than your warriors, and you'll have all of those disciples to play with/upgrade to priests etc.

Unfortunately I don't believe disciples gain XP for free, even with the Potency promotion. I think you have to have a Channeling promotion to get free XP. This is why the Altar is so powerful, because it's the best way to get a lot of 10-15xp priests out.

 

[DrPepper836]

Well, that is technically true, yes. However, a confessor with 4 strength, +1 holy from innate ability, and an extra +1 holy from bless, coupled with +60% from combat promotions is nothing to sneeze at. Especially when you have 15 of them. That's a total of 9.6 strength each, and some of that would get multiplied further because it's holy damage against certain enemies. By the time that that kind of strength is obsolete, you can help it along with paladins, religious heroes, and priors. Also, since the confessor has spirit guide, they give all of that exp to another unit when they die.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Disciples do have the <bFreeXP>1 tag despite lacking channeling promotions. This means they don't normally gain free xp, but they do if they have the Potency promotion or if they are trained by Govannon.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

Unfortunately I don't believe disciples gain XP for free, even with the Potency promotion. I think you have to have a Channeling promotion to get free XP. This is why the Altar is so powerful, because it's the best way to get a lot of 10-15xp priests out.

Disciples do have the <bFreeXP>1 tag despite lacking channeling promotions. This means they don't normally gain free xp, but they do if they have the Potency promotion or if they are trained by Govannon.

Yea, I used it this last game. After switching to spiritual, had each city make 3-4 disciples and let them sit until I was ready to upgrade. They had something like 20-odd experience each by then.

 

[slowcar]

cover2+cityraider2+3 are worth a lot more then the higher base strength of the divine units.

 

[heisenberg]

Yea, its hard to overlook the raw strength of city raider III.
The spiritual line really shines well on the field, but when it comes to cracking hard fortified targets by mid-game its sometimes best to level up some melee units to do it.
For example, even your blessed paladins would have some trouble trying to dislodge cheap garrisoned iron longbowmen with city garrison promos, even with combat V and CR I.
A few CR III, Cover II, Combat V iron champions would do the job nicely too, and they would still benefit from the blessed spell, and we're not even talking about mythril phalanxes.

Overall speaking, the strategy of churning out mass experienced disciple units with the AoL is a pretty defensive strategy, and after all if you're going for AoL victory, you shouldn't really need to go on really big offensives. But its still good, like any other strategy, to diversify your units a bit, to go down both divine/metal lines for some defensive/utility/offensive units.

Paladins and High priests aren't the best at cracking city defenses, but after you take out the hardest few targets, using them to mop up the weak ones with the command promo certainly has its merits.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

Yea, its hard to overlook the raw strength of city raider III.
The spiritual line really shines well on the field, but when it comes to cracking hard fortified targets by mid-game its sometimes best to level up some melee units to do it.
For example, even your blessed paladins would have some trouble trying to dislodge cheap garrisoned iron longbowmen with city garrison promos, even with combat V and CR I.
A few CR III, Cover II, Combat V iron champions would do the job nicely too, and they would still benefit from the blessed spell, and we're not even talking about mythril phalanxes.

I think the main point though, is that you're not destroying those cities with brute force. Depending on which priests you have, you wouldn't be attacking a full strength garrisoned iron longbowman, you'd be attacking a 0.9 or 1.2 strength longbowman after all the damage spells.

 

[slowcar]

you'd be attacking a 0.9 or 1.2 strength longbowman after all the damage spells.

care to tell me which priest would do that? even the few that have direct damage spells (RoF, tsunami) have a built-in damage cap that leaves defenders strong enough. oh, wait, RoF and altar do not go very well together. and tsunami and land wars don't, either.

throwing massed numbers of weak creatures (like 20 combat5 tigers) at fortified longbowmen behind city walls means nothing but free xp for the defender. they kill them with their first strikes alone quite often.

mounted units are nearly the same with the exception that they can learn cover2 and can get insanely high withdrawal-rates while being immune to first strikes. you need a very large stack though which is a big hit on income and science.

maybe this is all different on lower difficulty, but on the other hand you can do whatever you want if there is no challenge.

 

[fuzzy_bunnies]

care to tell me which priest would do that? even the few that have direct damage spells (RoF, tsunami) have a built-in damage cap that leaves defenders strong enough. oh, wait, RoF and altar do not go very well together. and tsunami and land wars don't, either.

throwing massed numbers of weak creatures (like 20 combat5 tigers) at fortified longbowmen behind city walls means nothing but free xp for the defender. they kill them with their first strikes alone quite often.

mounted units are nearly the same with the exception that they can learn cover2 and can get insanely high withdrawal-rates while being immune to first strikes. you need a very large stack though which is a big hit on income and science.

maybe this is all different on lower difficulty, but on the other hand you can do whatever you want if there is no challenge.

Yea, I withdraw my point. I tried using some priests this way in my latest game.. didn't fare too well. Even after a barrage of catapults. Granted, my mounted didn't do much better either. Back to fireballs!