A World Without Horses

[MidnightRambler]

im my game as the Maya i found myself on a sweet map but without any horses. To make matters worse, none of my neighbors had horses either. i almost always have a few good wars using knights and cavalry, and im not sure on a strategy to use without this resource.
has anybody ever been in a similar situation or have any advice?

 

[SesnOfWthr]

Yeah, I have some advice: Build whatever bombardment weapons you can. Lots of em. Or, if you have the tech lead, you could just build a bunch of MI, etc. Once you get to the infantry era, you'll need a bunch of arty whether you have horses or not.

You know, it always seems to go that way. Whenever I get a real nice starting location, I never seem to have iron or horses anywhere close.
BTW, Welcome to CFC.

 

[Dell19]

A tactic I've seen from mp games is to use settlers to create useless cities just for the extra movement points especially if you are razing cities which helps since roads can make up for losing those 2 movement points that Knights have. And like SesnOfWthr said use siege weapons to support your attacks since they will be able to keep up with your units.

 

[BassDude726]

You could use workers to build roads to wherever you plan to invade next, but that requires a lot of advance planning

 

[warpstorm]

You are the Mayas. Crank your UUs and enslave the world.

 

[MidnightRambler]

Sadly, my Javelin throwers were rendered useless by those swordsmen

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Just wondering does the whole MAP lack horses or just what you and all your neighbors know of the map. ( I assume the former)

In any case, I'd say warmonger with swordsmen until you reach the middle ages..then you'll probably need more art. support for taking out pikemen (Chivalry would still be worth getting if you can get the Knights Templar First.)

 

[Dell19]

Crusaders might actually be useful for once if your other troops also have one movement point. In my latest game without horses I've just used early stacks of swordsmen to go around wiping out the enemy although it helps that I only had to fight one veteran spearmen with all the rest being regulars... (On Monarch btw)

 

[MidnightRambler]

thx for the replies, i took SesnOfWthr's advice and cranked out almost as many artillery as i had swordsmen/ med. infantry. Since the artillery could keep up with the infantry, i had no problem taking cities.

The only downside to this strat is that it takes twice as long to mobilize, and artillery was always at risk to be captured.