A Very good Unit--trebuchet

[flaglkk]

In Warlord, at the early stage (even after the emergence of macemen), trebuchet is a very good unit to conquer cities because of it's 100% city attack ability and it's relatively low cost. I often produce as many trebuchet as I can and just produce some defensive units to conquer cities.

There are many merits:
1) it bombards city defence quickly
2) it kills all units with attack below 8 easily. I often kill macemen with no difficulties after City Raider promotion II (best at III)
3) it has a chance to withdraw even failure. So the withdrawn Siege can be reused for next attack.
4) it causes colleteral damage. So, I often sacrifice a few at the beginning and kill the rest of the defending units with no difficulties.
5) it is not costy. Normally, it takes only 1 - 2 turns to be produced from my capital and some production cities.

With this super weapon, I destroyed most of the civs near me in a short period of time. But of course, a strong defensive troop is necessary to protect them, as they are easily killed on the way to the cities.

Hope this sharing gives you another tactics for city conquest

 

[cabert]

you obviously mean trebuchets

 

[flaglkk]

Thanks very much. I mean trebuchets. I am at the office, so I cannot init the game and check the name

 

[FuRRie]

So, you told something everybody allrdy knows, thats nice

 

[voek]

Actually I think they are less incredible as they may seem. They will be at least facing longbows and are useless in the field (less then cats in field). At this moment you already have (build) macemen. City raider macemen (upgraded from swordsmen f.e.) are just as good or even better. More importantly you still need those city raider macemen for the later CR riflemen/grenadiers (assuming you aren't done by then). Of course trebuchets can still be upgraded to canons, but it comes in rather late.

I use them since they are great in getting down the city/cultural defences, but I don't rely fully on trebs. I would also advice still building the cheap cats. I always use 1 or 2 first for suicide, so defences are weakened. Then attack with CR trebs (getting them promoted) and maces.

 

[cabert]

catapults are cheaper, and better for stack breaking, you still need those!
+ trebuchets don't defend the city, you need garrison.

Other than that, trebuchets are killers (with CR 3, longbows don't hold ground against them)

 

[slowcar]

trebs are way better to attack cities then macemen. if the first lose, the later win, macemen don't pull off this trick.
of course you still need maces, but as you need trebs to bomb down the defense you can as well attack with them. and they are cheap....

in fact trebs made warlords more easy as the KI is not able to use them properly.

 

[bitplayer]

I wouldnt be surprised to see an s paintied on them in the future. Super unit.

Not as super as the axmen imo. But still pretty freaken overpowering when hitting in coordination.

 

[UncleJJ]

Trebuchets are probably better than Macemen in the middle ages particularly when they get CR3. But if the game carries on into the Renaissance and you get Grenadiers then upgrading some Macemen with CR3 is a very good thing. Therefore my strategy in the middle ages is to use a mixture of Trebuchets and Macemen with CR promotions. The Trebs are used to soften up the defending stack (after defence is reduced to zero) with collateral damage as well as often killing the top defender (or retreating after severely weakening it). After a couple of Treb attacks I use the best Macemen to finish off the weakened defenders. That way I get the benefit of Trebs and build up my Macemen for later on.

My main attacking stack in the late Middle Ages could have 5 types of troops.

a) Catapults and Trebs used to reduce defence (4 needed for 1 turn to 0%)
b) Trebs with CR promotions to lead the assault
c) Macemen with CR promotions to finish off defenders
d) Stack Defenders and healers (Pikemen, Macemen, Elephants etc.)
e) City defenders to garrison the captured cities.

 

[angeleyes]

As promotion i always use city-attack, few times i tried barrage but couldn't see any extra collateral damage Is there anybody who uses barrage with success???

 

[cabert]

As promotion i always use city-attack, few times i tried barrage but couldn't see any extra collateral damage Is there anybody who uses barrage with success???

barrage is useful when you're colateral damagers don't stand a chance of winning.

If you have 10 trebuchets facing 5 longbows, and even the CR3 only has a 20% odd of winning against the top defender, it's "better" (more on this further) to promote a brand new treb to barrage I and II and suicide making a lot of colateral damage.
This way, you have less units to suicide. It could even be better to send a barrage II catapult (cheaper, and same result!).
That's short term efficiency.
If you don't use barrage promotions, you're going to lost some more noob units (so, you'll need to build more!) to soften up the same stack.

I still favor CR, because :
- you do colateral damages too, though not as much
- you get a higher chance to wound the top defender
- if you retreat you gain xps towards a better unit, with better survival rates, whereas a retreating barrager will only be a better suicider next time

 

[UncleJJ]

As promotion i always use city-attack, few times i tried barrage but couldn't see any extra collateral damage Is there anybody who uses barrage with success???

I use barrage on catapults and later cannons but never on trebs. Barrage is good when you expect the unit to lose (except for chance of retreat) and want to maximise damage... so use it on sacrifice units that you'll use outside cities. For targets inside cities I don't intentionally sacrifice units anymore although that is what I did before Warlords gave us trebs. Now a couple of trebs with CR promotions will do as much, if not more, collateral damage as an old sacrifice catapult (with barrage) but now they often survive or at least seriously damage the unit they're attacking.

Barrage catapults and cannons are great for beating up the AI's Stack of Doom and that is usually why I keep a couple around my main army.

Edit: Drat Cabert beat me to it

 

[shivute]

Actually I think they are less incredible as they may seem. They will be at least facing longbows and are useless in the field (less then cats in field). At this moment you already have (build) macemen. City raider macemen (upgraded from swordsmen f.e.) are just as good or even better. More importantly you still need those city raider macemen for the later CR riflemen/grenadiers (assuming you aren't done by then). Of course trebuchets can still be upgraded to canons, but it comes in rather late.

I use them since they are great in getting down the city/cultural defences, but I don't rely fully on trebs. I would also advice still building the cheap cats. I always use 1 or 2 first for suicide, so defences are weakened. Then attack with CR trebs (getting them promoted) and maces.

I agree 100%. I still build cats even when I can build trebs. I also prefer to attack cities with macemen - after defences are reduced and after a suicide attack or 2 if needed. This is because I think it is much more useful to get a quantity of macemen up to CR3, ready for promotion to grenadier or riflemen. This is the main reason I don't use many trebs.
Not building up enough melee units to CR3 can weaken your forces quite substantially later on.

 

[drkodos]

Trebuchets are Tres Chic.

I don't use them as much as I should. They seem to come a little bit late, as I usually tech toward the Chemistry and Steel branches and by the time I realize I should be building them, Grenadiers and Cannons are right around the corner.

 

[angeleyes]

few times i tried barrage but couldn't see any extra collateral damage

This was my real question, i haven't researched it very carefully, but i can't see the extra damage: with or without barrage, eg. longbows will go from 6.0/6 > 5.4/6 in health after one attack. Are you sure you did get extra coll. damage ??


EDIT: with a little bit of experimenting (worldbuilder) i came to the conclusion that only with combat chances (almost) 0% > with barrage you get a better result than with city-attack.

 

[MrCynical]

I do find the trebuchet seems overpowered; at least I find warfare much easier after it's invention and prior to it's obsolescence.

The crucial issue is that the trebuchet has been stuck in the category of units which are normally suicide units, but are in practice almost the city attackers of choice in their own right. Under some circumstances, such as against swordsmen, a maceman may be better (though against crossbowmen they are substantially worse), but generally only slightly. Once the city defense is bombarded away a trebuchet, especially with city raider promotions, will usually have a better than even chance of beating the top defender in a city (e.g a promoted longbowmen). Even if it loses, it will do collateral damage, making a stack of trebuchets a far more effective city attacking force than a comparable stack of macemen. They also may well retreat, and their vastly higher survival rate than catapults allows for much higher levels of promotions to be accessed (I've had a number of games with many trebuchets with 4 or 5 promotions). True, these promotions aren't as useful on upgrade as they would be on macemen, but frankly the trebuchet has such a long useful lifespan, and is sufficiently powerful, that I don't mind eventually having to rebuild rather than upgrade troops.

No, the trebuchet isn't much use in open combat, but against cities it is unmatched, and at least against the AI many wars simply consist of a series of heavily defended cities to crack. In my opinion it is an unbalanced unit, or at least one the AI is particularly inept at compensating for. Collateral damage in a direct, rather than suicidal, city attacker seems a bad idea (I have similar views on the Cho-ku-nu).

 

[ekanata]

As promotion i always use city-attack, few times i tried barrage but couldn't see any extra collateral damage Is there anybody who uses barrage with success???

Colateral damage is 'given' to some other unit on the same tile with the unit that actually defending the tile from the attacker. IIRC from vanilla sdk, it's based only on base strength and barage percentage of the attacker (and may be some defender's variable). Thus catapult with higher base strength than trebs will serve more damage, assuming both have equal promotion and no rounding error.

 

[Hey Joni]

A very good unit, you say. I say - very overpowered. However, we do not need another discussion on the topic. There was actually a very long discussion about trebs being overpowered. "Trebuchets way overpowered", if I recall the name correctly. Try searching the forum if you're interested in the arguments.

After numerous pages of discussion we finally got an answer from Firaxis that trebs will be made more expensive in the next patch. Well, it is something but I would suggest a bigger nerf. Anyway, let's see how will it go after the patch.