Best second Promotion for chariots?

[shulec]

I am sure Diety is a different matter entirely. This is at Monarch.

Anyway I took the advice offered and promoted the chariots for strength, attacked the metal city first with about twenty chariots, and they just had the one source of metal so I got lucky there.

I won the war but had economy problems and lagged in tech because I was whipping chariots I guess.

Attacking your first city on Monarch with 20 chariots sounds like the reason your economy crashed. This could be justified if the AI is choking you settling with a hilled city... otherwise, this is a poor use of resources. Try to strike to the heart of the the AI empire, the capitol. First, get intel to know how many troops are in the first city:

1. Use open borders
2. Promote a 5/2 XP chariot with Flanking I and Visibility. (Barracks and two XP from killing barbs.
3. Guess that his capitol is nearly empty once you see a settler leaving the capitol

If you are going to declare with 20 chariots, attack 2 or 3 cities simultaneously. Early in the game, the AI won't usually garrison more than 2 or 3 units.
Take a cease fire, which stops the war with 0 turns of peace. Heal, and declare war again right away.
You should be able to mow down one AI and have experienced troops ready to harrass or even take out a second AI.
Consider attacking with 6-9 chariots to take 1-2 cities. This will be several turns earlier than with 20. Take a cease fire and wait for the next 6-9 chariots to show up and finish the AI off.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

On slow speeds medieval can be great. There are usually a few AIs that you can deny either horse or iron. Denying either prevents AI knights (nothing realistically can flank your stacks) and denying iron makes it so that knights can trivially kill + do flanking damage to their siege at favorable hammer ratios.

The main problem is trebs vs castles takes so long. Against peaceful-style AIs that don't make many castles or delay you can still swing this on normal speeds sometimes and get some really cost-effective wars, but usually not. On epic or especially marathon the medieval window is open a very long time and you have time to bombard/heal units/etc.

I've seen deity players win domination on normal speed with medieval units, so I wouldn't conclude that knights are awful, but it's pretty situational.

Chariots are pretty junky against spears, you really want to lock down metal with them ASAP, or stick a city giving them access to it on turn of DoW so they can't muster reinforcements. Civ IV AI doesn't counter-attack much so they'll just sit there in cities with tons of units often, that can be a pain.