Beelining guilds?

[futurehermit]

That means you need some defensive troops to hold the cities, if you keep your them (i.e. domination rather than conquest victory) and to hold the tile your knights / cavalry heal on. Otherwise counterattacks can be expensive and damaged troops can soon be overwhelmed.

My damaged knights heal up in conquered cities while waiting for longbows to get there to defend.

My damaged cavalry heal up in conquered cities while waiting for muskets to get there to defend. I love French because their muskets can keep up with your cav, which is GREAT!!! Napoleon imo is the ideal domination leader. Great traits, great starting techs, great uu, and great ub (uu and ub are GREAT for domination if used properly imo).

If you attack FAST, FAST, FAST you will not have to fear a counter attack in your cities. By the time the AI gets their offensive stack together, they are pushing daisies (less than 10 turns)

 

[Roxlimn]

I sometimes beeline Guilds, but I'm only a Noble player.

I mainly do this for Spain for the Conquistadors. You CAN go crazy with those units and not every War Elephants will stop you if you bring along a couple of Formation Conquistadors. Tremble before the might of Spain!

I'll also do for the extra health if there's a major benefit to be had from it, and with Spain's Expansive, it actually argues against acquiring Guilds for the health benefit alone.

Playing Napoleon actually gives you more incentive for getting Guilds to grow your cities as you can benefit from the extra health to complement your extra happiness. Then go for the Gunpowder. If you attack with Charismatic promoted Knights, it'll incite a response from the comp to generate pikemen - just the kind of defender you want for when you're attacking with Musketeers!

Personally, I find that the greatest advantage to building Knights early with Guilds is so I have more of them to promote instantly to Cavalry as soon as I get the chance.

As an aside, do people like deploying Blitz Cavalry as well, or are there better things you can do with 4 promotions?

 

[Arnesson]

Warlords - Noble - Ice Age - Normal. I have tried this twice now, once as Lizzie and another as Mao. In both instances, I didn't get the GE I was promised and I was too late with my Knights to have the desired impact. I won both games with Space victories, but they were hollow ones as they were not the Conquest or Domination results I was striving for. Perhaps it is just the map I selected, so I'll try Panagea and see if that makes a difference.

 

[obsolete]

I love French because their muskets can keep up with your cav, which is GREAT!!

Hmm, you mean there actually CAN be a use for muskets after all?

Oh wait a minute, it's a UU unit, so not really a true musket.

<wink>

 

[futurehermit]

Yeah, exactly I'm not a huge fan of muskets at all, but musketeers are a respectable UU

 

[Tzu Iop]

Great Merchant:

Currency
Banking
Economics
Corporation
Metal Casting
Code of Laws
Mining
Constitution
Wheel
Pottery
Sailing
Paper
Railroad
Industrialism
Monarchy
Civil Service
Guilds
Fascism
Mass Media
Agriculture
Writing
Mathematics
Printing Press
Flight
Machinery
[...]

Looking at the tech preferences list of the Great Merchants, show me that the options for the great merchants are pretty good for beelining guilds. You get very good Techs by three GMs respectively four if you take paper into account, which is in my opinion is an excellent tech to trade with.
And the position of guilds isn't that bad, since Chemistry is only tree additional techs away. So you get Engineering and begin to build trebs and maceman (you will also get early maceman that way), while waiting for Chemistry and upgrading your maceman to CR2-Grenadiers, who are devastating in combination with trebs. So it maybe can launch a sequence of two or three wars which can get you a huge amount of land.

PS.: Please, excuse my maybe somewhat strange english, because I am not a native speaker.

 

[futurehermit]

I thought I had the guilds beeline figured out and then ran into a problem...paper! So that means another great person is needed.

My thoughts on the beeline:

-Use a philosophical leader

-Chop GW to get GE

-Then tech normally to alpha, etc. You want to get to CoL by the time your GE comes in. If you want to risk it you can run a scientist toward the end of your GE to try and speed it up a bit, but you risk getting an improbable scientist or something.

-Once your GE comes in, caste system and run as many scientists as possible then as many merchants as possible.

-Tech to machinery then CS. Lightbulb machinery and paper. Trade CS for feudalism. Lightbulb guilds.

The goal is to have knights ca. 200-300AD (I've had cavalry ca. 600AD so to be worthwhile, you would want knights a few centuries earlier).

If anyone can pull this off, please let me know. I am moving on to some other things after struggling to make this work, but would be interested to see if someone can pull it off.

 

[DrewBledsoe]

I thought I had the guilds beeline figured out and then ran into a problem...paper! So that means another great person is needed.

My thoughts on the beeline:

-Use a philosophical leader

-Chop GW to get GE

-Then tech normally to alpha, etc. You want to get to CoL by the time your GE comes in. If you want to risk it you can run a scientist toward the end of your GE to try and speed it up a bit, but you risk getting an improbable scientist or something.

-Once your GE comes in, caste system and run as many scientists as possible then as many merchants as possible.

-Tech to machinery then CS. Lightbulb machinery and paper. Trade CS for feudalism. Lightbulb guilds.

The goal is to have knights ca. 200-300AD (I've had cavalry ca. 600AD so to be worthwhile, you would want knights a few centuries earlier).

If anyone can pull this off, please let me know. I am moving on to some other things after struggling to make this work, but would be interested to see if someone can pull it off.

The only think will the above , is you mentioned trading CS for Feudalism. But according to your timescale, that would need generally 2 or 3 ais (to allow for willingness to trade) to have researched Feud around 50-100Ad. Isn't that a little too early / unlikely in most games, even at emperor?

 

[futurehermit]

In my monarch test game I was getting the feudalism trade ca. 200AD. I think that should be the target for setting off your guilds lightbulb. Then mass whip and upgrade (a couple chariots) empire-wide a large army asap. Hopefully you would have at least 15-20 units by 300AD or very slightly after to start your war followed by another 15-20 asap.

I agree the timing of it is tricky. I think if you didn't have to worry about cs/paper the lightbulbing path would be a LOT smoother!!! I just think it's strange that I've got cav ca. 600AD yet I struggle to get knights by 500AD!!!

 

[kniteowl]

The Guilds Beeline looks tricky.

I might as well use my GMs for Gold bombs and just upgrade all my chariots and Horse Archers to Knights.

I'd probably make a beeline to CS and build an academy in my Capital for increased research output and tech Guilds normally.

I'd also most lilely be teching at a deficit using the excess gold from the GM.

 

[futurehermit]

Well, keep in mind CS and paper are on the liberalism path anyways. So, it's just a matter of getting Machinery (with a GE) and trading for feudalism and generating a GM.

It's not THAT hard tbh. It's just the timing that I think is tricky. If you're only getting knights on the table 600-700AD then you are better off going for cav imo. If you can get them 200-400AD I think you can do a lot of damage in a short time.

 

[uberfish]

There's a lot to be gained by thinking of mounted units as part of a combined arms force rather than, say, going 100&#37; knights

 

[futurehermit]

Yes, I'm not opposed to that. But I have had the odd game where I managed to get knights before the AI had pikes and 100&#37; knights did a pile of damage in a short period of time. I don't know think it would be possible on emperor+ but on monarch- I think it is possible. Mounted units are of course great though and I agree that having them in your stack is a great idea. It's just that when you have 100% mounted units, your mobility is greatly enhanced, so whenever you have the opportunity to use it to your advantage, I think you should.

 

[frob2900]

Mounted units are of course great though and I agree that having them in your stack is a great idea. It's just that when you have 100% mounted units, your mobility is greatly enhanced, so whenever you have the opportunity to use it to your advantage, I think you should.

Which is why Cavalry is (was ) broken. Knights, however, aren't fully as overpowered as Cavalry and in the medieval age trebs are so good you're better of fighting movement 1 wars. Just my opinion, though

 

[futurehermit]

Yes, I agree that's what makes cav broken. I really think people don't fully appreciate the power of knights though (which is why I started this thread!). If you use a mix of flanking I/II and combat I/II knights you can do a LOT of damage to an enemy empire that doesn't have pikes yet.

I got the idea for this thread from a game I played using Cathy where I was on a mid-sized island with only GW. I expanded to around 10 cities til the land ran out, then I got guilds before he got pikes. I took out his entire empire in a short period of time with two stacks of around 15 knights using a mix of flanking and combat. It worked great.