What civ is the one the gets the most undeserved bad rap?

[Martin Alvito]

America's UA is quite good against the living, and the portion of the community that is single-player only rarely realizes this.

The problem with the Longbowmen is that you need to bring both high-quality damage per shot and additional range to bear to make a unit with a range advantage genuinely useful. When compared to CKN, they end up looking pretty bad.

The problem with the Ottoman UUs is that you have to build them from scratch. If you could upgrade lesser units to those UUs, the Ottomans would be at least decent if not strong.

Bismarck's design ultimately revolves around the UA and Landsknecht. The UA is great in a compressed Ancient-era time-frame game (eg: Duel) and bad otherwise; the Landsknecht is a lousy unit on the offensive.

 

[Veshta]

Defensive game doesn't get any easier than using longbows .. replace with artillery when applicable.
Offensive game doesn't get any easier than using longbows .. replace with artillery when applicable.
England's only "downsides" is the other UU and the UA as C5 heavily favours Pangea or other vast landmass maps .. early contact = early cash = early dominance, something that is not generally possible on watery maps.
AI is pretty useless for naval campaigns/landings to boot so that is an extra negative against sea maps.

Germany are scary as hell. It is fairly easy up to Emperor to get CS from the G.Library .. spam the cheap pikes and go to town. Early barbarian recruitment saves valuable hammers and gives you an army for "free".

Janissary's are gods with guns. Offensive bonus and full heal on destruction of enemy makes them stupidly powerful with a bit of ranged damage to soften up the opposition. Best musket around if you ask me.
Ottoman UA suffers the same problem as the English, water based maps are not really played so it has never had a chance to prove itself. Quite powerful now that the useless barbarian galleys can be upgraded to triremes.

Never played the yanks in earnest, but early scouting is godly so reckon they have an early advantage (on non water maps )

 

[Strategist83]

England's UA is absolutely worthless

A statement like this showcases exactly why England is the answer.

The English UA, contrary to popular belief, is *extremely* powerful. The reason for that is it virtually guarantees England will come out on top in any naval encounters. With their greater mobility, they'll always be the ones to shoot first (*very* important in naval battles where units deal extra damage and the first shot is often a kill) and can outrun the enemy if damaged. Basically, England holds the initiative at sea and so completely dominates. Nobody can best the English at naval warfare.

Now, the reason why people like Mr Tacgnol here don't see this is because he only values the UA based on on it works against the AI. However, that is a completely unfair standard to measure anything by because the AI is so poor - you don't even need extra range to beat an AI navy at sea, it's a given that you'll always win, even with a much smaller navy. That has nothing to say for how powerful the English UA is, however.

 

[Strategist83]

C5 heavily favours Pangea or other vast landmass maps

What?! Utter nonsense if I ever heard any.

C5 favors whatever maptype you've chosen to play on!

 

[headcase]

What?! Utter nonsense if I ever heard any.

C5 favors whatever maptype you've chosen to play on!

I think that was basically saying that Pangaea is the funnest map. To overgeneralize, continents has runaway AI, archipelago has stupid AI.

 

[Polycrates]

I'm going to go with England, which I think is a solid mid-tier civ. A bit rubbish on Pangaea, but then almost every civ has their weak maptype.
Longbows have been covered - they're great
In addition to Strategist's excellent points above, their other great strength is their unrivalled ability to project power. The +2 movement is for both naval units and embarked units, meaning that your troops can fly across the water and always have an escort that can keep up and scout for danger as well. The result is that you aren't limited nearly so much in your settling/conquest to just territory adjacent to you - which for a normal civ falls foul of the logistical challenges of having to semi-permanently divide your military strength between the locations (or constantly invite dangerous backstabs). Water is almost like another road rather than a barrier. So you can cherrypick better locations for your cities, expand all over the globe and still mount a good defense (longbows also excel at this role).

And like the Danes (though perhaps to a lesser extent), you have a far greater ability to mount amphibious assaults rather than just overland slogs. Lightning surprise attacks at the enemy's rear can be very effective, especially if you devote some troops to taking the amphibious promotion. Ships of the Line en masse make quite decent mobile artillery, and longbows and Ships of the Line are both good units for defending vulnerable beachheads. Plus you can reinforce beachheads much more quickly than others can.

They're no Babylon, but they're not nearly as bad as people make them out to be.