Tholish said:
The equivalent of spearmen and warriors in the industrial and even modern age do exist. The native americans fought muskets, rifles and cavalry, with warriors and archers. The Zulu fought the rifles, cavalry, and infantry of the British or Boer or whoever with spears.
What is a police force armed with just billy clubs, like the bobbys of london, but a warrior being used for MP effect. What about ceremonial units like the pikemen of the vatican or the chariots of ancient rome? During vietnam, the vietcong often used very primitive weapons against the US, such as bungi sticks. Guerillas in latin america often use machetes as weapons. Private sailing ships (basically caravels) still exist, and are sometimes used as transports (dunkirk). And of course, there is the molotov cocktail and tank trap combination that often allowed partisans to fight german tanks with almost nothing. Recently the Northern Alliance used cavalry in Afghanistan.
Thank you - I was itching to say that, and you came up with some brilliant examples.
The fact is that a spearman CAN defeat a tank, by using uncharacteristic weapons and tactics. His spear might be his only assigned weapon, but if he sees a jerry can of petrol he's gonna use it to blow things up...
That said, I don't think the original suggestion is so bad - you would be paying for their upgrades, but you'd be doing it over a period rather than in one lump sum. And it would reduce the use of the "build 50 horsemen before discovering Cavalry" exploit, in cases where the horsemen were built far in advance (I tend to start building my will-be cavalry from very near the beginning of the game, and never bother with chivalry). But in the cases where people build them the turn before discovering the new tech, it would indeed be much more imbalanced - even if you pay five times the support cost, you would still save a fortune.
What I think is really wrong with the current system is that you end up producing units for gold instead of shields. Take the horsemen to cavalry example again. You build your horseman for 30 shields, don't pay any gold for upkeep if you keep below your support limit, then pay 60 gold, I think, to upgrade it. I would much rather pay 60 gold that an extra 40-odd shields... If you've got Leonardo's Workshop, it goes down to 30 gold each... It would seem appropriate to me if the cost was in shields, or a combination of shields and gold, than in gold alone.
But of course, this doesn't fit in so well due with the current system as shields cannot be stored into a central fund. Hell, that's exactly what money is for! I can see arguments for allowing central pots of resources (useful for wonders), but those same arguments are probably equally good reasons against using them...
But yes, I can see why they needed to make the cost greater than it was in Vanilla / PTW...
