Cavarly overpowered?

[TheMeInTeam]

Horse archers won't have better odds, but yes obviously you need a lot of cats and a production advantage or at least equality when fighting off phants on the defensive, but it is certainly not impossible...
(oh and do get on msn )

If the AI stack has axes, horse archers may very well turn up better odds vs the elephants (that are damaged) than a sword or spear would have vs the partially damaged axe, especially if they're on a hill or something. An axe might be best here actually, but which unit you use will also depend on stack composition of the AI. If they only have, say, 1-2 elephants but tons of other stuff, HAs are more attractive. If they have a lot of swords but few axes, using axes would be better etc etc.

Of course, you know all this too, so we're just spouting things for the benefit of others I guess. I don't think we'd fight very differently given the same game situation, to be honest.

Also, give me a bit on the MSN thing .

 

[Gumbolt]

Alright, so this week I have now learned that...

Cavalry are overpowered...
Airships are still overpowered...
Every UU is overpowered...
Any modern unit is overpowered
Any horse unit is over powered..
Any elephant is overpowered (yes that includes the ballista)...


The warriors are overpowered... (what`s with the added city defense!)

And..... I guess we wait for Firaxis to do an entire overhaul then....

I must be doing something wrong as i never seem to build lots of any of these.

Has TMIT sponsored this thread or is it me. He nevers stops typing about horses or elephants.

I stand by my CKN's. Proud like a father.

Personally i think any unit in the right place, at the right time, with the right promotion can be over powerful.

 

[StuntedAzrael]

On emperor/immortal level you often cannot afford early/mid war. City maintenance, unit production, unit maintenance, war weariness will crush your economy while other AI's are teching away from you. Early game if I can settle 7-9 cities thats it. Economy will not handle any more on standard map. And you don't have an option for fast war unless you can rush with axe or chariots very early.

In my experience it's best to keep your empire medium and to maintain enough force as police and to keep power graph up. Great scientist farm then is important since careful bulbing of techs will by trading get you tech parity with the other civs. Heroic epic is important since you can commit only one or two cities to unit production.

It is very doable to win the Liberalism race in this scenario which more often than not will get you slight tech advantage against all others. If you can maintain that tech advantage until rifling and military tradition than you're set.

This is some of the advantages of the cavarly rush if executed properly:

- In time frame when cavarly is available I can afford to double or triple my empire fast without tanking my economy (cottages + printing press).

- Cavarly rush is several times faster at taking enemy cities than standard 1-move SoD which means that in the end you'll kill less units. AI's will switch to unit production if they are at war. No siege of spies required to remove cultural bonus.

- Very high survival rate (min. 60%). Maces upgraded to rifles with CRII will have only 30% chance against a fortified longbow with full culture bonuses.

- If enemy has SoD and he starts to move it against me that cavarly flanking ability shines. There are always siege in AI SoD stacks. Less units are required to kill it.

- War weariness is not a big issue since there are fewer losses and the war is much shorter.

In the end speed & survivability gives cavarly it's edge. Speed is not really important on marathon but on normal it's crucial.

 

[Tephros]

Yeah elephants are good. They're made more powerful in the game than history would suggest. They should have some kind of chance to hurt themselves or other friendly units, lol.

As a resource ivory isn't exactly rare, but much harder to find than iron or copper and usually confined to one continent or one part of the world. I'd say the main thing that prevents war elephants from being overpowered is their cost. They're significantly more expensive than other units. When you combine elephants and axes in a stack though, the only counter is more experienced elephants or a lot of cats. Though if there's a lone elephant or group of elephants in the field, all you have to do is sac a cat or two and mop up with spears.

If we count UU, the praetorian is a sort of ancient panacea, therefore easy to use and substantially more powerful than swords at a slightly higher cost.

 

[oyzar]

On emperor/immortal level you often cannot afford early/mid war. City maintenance, unit production, unit maintenance, war weariness will crush your economy while other AI's are teching away from you. Early game if I can settle 7-9 cities thats it. Economy will not handle any more on standard map. And you don't have an option for fast war unless you can rush with axe or chariots very early.

In my experience it's best to keep your empire medium and to maintain enough force as police and to keep power graph up. Great scientist farm then is important since careful bulbing of techs will by trading get you tech parity with the other civs. Heroic epic is important since you can commit only one or two cities to unit production.

It is very doable to win the Liberalism race in this scenario which more often than not will get you slight tech advantage against all others. If you can maintain that tech advantage until rifling and military tradition than you're set.

This is some of the advantages of the cavarly rush if executed properly:

- In time frame when cavarly is available I can afford to double or triple my empire fast without tanking my economy (cottages + printing press).

- Cavarly rush is several times faster at taking enemy cities than standard 1-move SoD which means that in the end you'll kill less units. AI's will switch to unit production if they are at war. No siege of spies required to remove cultural bonus.

- Very high survival rate (min. 60%). Maces upgraded to rifles with CRII will have only 30% chance against a fortified longbow with full culture bonuses.

- If enemy has SoD and he starts to move it against me that cavarly flanking ability shines. There are always siege in AI SoD stacks. Less units are required to kill it.

- War weariness is not a big issue since there are fewer losses and the war is much shorter.

In the end speed & survivability gives cavarly it's edge. Speed is not really important on marathon but on normal it's crucial.

Since this is a thread talking about overpoweredness, one word solves all your problems:

PRAETORIANS

 

[Gumbolt]

I think axes counter prets. Its just the Ai isnt very clever to this.

 

[oyzar]

Not really... Praets have positive odds against axes in the open field(and trades one for one with axes in cities through surperior numbers). Obviously this is against the AI only, but that is all the OP cared about anyways...

 

[StuntedAzrael]

Since this is a thread talking about overpoweredness, one word solves all your problems:

PRAETORIANS

Well, true but in my opening post I was refering as most powerful standard unit.

Tbh, praetorians has costed me much frustration in the past. I hate to raze cities. Praetorians would crush my economy so badly that I would be lucky to have positive income at 0%. I avoid playing Romans, feels like cheating somehow.

Romans isolated on the other hand...

 

[oyzar]

I don't feel like i have a problem crashing my economy playing romans(at least on pangea) . http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=300357 (post #35 and #40 on my game) here for example... Really rebounding from overexpansion is a not too hard to learn skill, but with as much plunder money as you get as romans you don't really need it...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Agreed, all you have to do with rome is extort a few techs, such as currency/CoL but even just alphabet, and you have the means to recover the economy. Any kind of gold buffer will allow you to duck strike while doing so. With alpha you can just build your way to the other two, whip courthouses, and possibly FP and you're all set...and with a strong unit you can STILL use to take more cities...!

 

[Iranon]

What exactly sets Cavalry apart from toher Renaissance units? Steel is a realistic Liberalism reward on Immortal, and as such available quite a bit earlier.

Also, the AI needs Cavalry to equalise against cannons (Cuirassiers don't cut it - medieval counter units work just fine against them) by which time you're likely to have Riflemen yourself and can continue to grind them into a thin red paste with awesome collateral damage.

Cavalry, on the other hand, can be held off by Grenadiers and is rendered mostly ineffective by Riflemen.

 

[Tacgnol]

Sure, cavalry can be used to great effect if you have a tech lead, I don't think anyone is going to dispute that, but if there's true tech parity it's not so likely for you to have even the 10-15 turns you need to cav rush before the AI starts drafting/upgrading rifles. AI likes military tradition and they like cuirassiers, but unless they're really warmongers, they will generally put it at a lower priority than rifling, and if that's the case your stack of 10-20 cavalry is not going to beat out their SoD and is certainly not going to take over their cities. Sure, it's a smart move, and it can be extremely effective if you use it right, but in most cases with tech parity it's just not going to happen, you're going to charge in, take the first city you find and run into a wall of rifles. It's a good tactic to use, and a bit overpowered against weaker and less advanced AIs, but so are jumbos, so are infantry, so is flight, it is situational enough, risky enough and hard enough to achieve that it is not really overpowered.

 

[r_rolo1]

The only thing that is really OP in civ IV combat is siege. No way around it ( yeah, yeah, we all heard about flank attacks, but the mounted unit have to don't lose to make it ). A certain investement in siege units ( especially cannons and artillery ( this one can only be flanked by gunships, so that is a really wide window of oportunity ) ) will always beat a equal investement in other units if they can attack first and have enough moppers to clean the mess

P.S I remember a game in warlords when I moped out a AI with grens with cats as best unit ( I reckon, it was gandhi, but even then ): grens can't kill more than a cat per turn

 

[Zeiter]

I think mounted units with flanking should do flanking damage to siege regardless of whether the mounted unit wins against the primary defender. Consider it a sort of counter-collateral damage. After all, siege units do collateral regardless of whether they win against the primary defender or not. So another way to equalize siege would be to require that the siege unit survive in order to deal collateral damage. I don't think people would like this solution, so I propose the counter-solution of flanking damage regardless of win or not. Otherwise, as it is, siege definitely IS overpowered.

 

[DMOC]

I don't find cavalry as powerful as riflemen, to be honest. A weakness from the cavalry rush can be attriuted to some very high defenses from protective AI's as well as hills and cultural defense. I'm not saying the cavalry's useless, as it's very poweful with the correct circumstances.

 

[Tephros]

Agreed, all you have to do with rome is extort a few techs, such as currency/CoL but even just alphabet, and you have the means to recover the economy. Any kind of gold buffer will allow you to duck strike while doing so. With alpha you can just build your way to the other two, whip courthouses, and possibly FP and you're all set...and with a strong unit you can STILL use to take more cities...!

Extort techs... I've never had much success with that. Most civs would rather die than give you a tech for peace. Is there a thread on that somewhere?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What exactly sets Cavalry apart from toher Renaissance units? Steel is a realistic Liberalism reward on Immortal, and as such available quite a bit earlier.

Also, the AI needs Cavalry to equalise against cannons (Cuirassiers don't cut it - medieval counter units work just fine against them) by which time you're likely to have Riflemen yourself and can continue to grind them into a thin red paste with awesome collateral damage.

Cavalry, on the other hand, can be held off by Grenadiers and is rendered mostly ineffective by Riflemen.

I personally feel cuirassers to be more the "special" renaissance unit than cavalry. While the AI won't batter the hell out of you with a ton of these normally, the player can amass respectable amounts and cuirasser/spy their way to a lot of cities quickly.

Of course, this is BTS we're talking about then. Vanilla cavalry were no contest. You had all the power of BTS cavalry at the same tech situation as cuirassers currently are (and if you were russia you had 18 str units at this point).

IMO cannons are somewhat overrated. They certainly do the job well just as any other renaissance troop, but vs well-entrenched muskets or longbows you're bound to lose some, and your stack remains vulnerable to a combination of basic catapult/treb siege and some mounted (even knights will own pikes if the pikes have < 5 str and are taking on combat 2 or better knights...which also happen to beat the cannons!). Of course, cannon are still excellent as they can field CR promotions and take cities well. However, IMO cuirassers shred medieval stacks just as easily and then take the AI cities more rapidly. Maybe it's just preference...I've seen deity players succeed both ways (and the rifle draft method also).

 

[StuntedAzrael]

What exactly sets Cavalry apart from toher Renaissance units? Steel is a realistic Liberalism reward on Immortal, and as such available quite a bit earlier.

Also, the AI needs Cavalry to equalise against cannons (Cuirassiers don't cut it - medieval counter units work just fine against them) by which time you're likely to have Riflemen yourself and can continue to grind them into a thin red paste with awesome collateral damage.

Cavalry, on the other hand, can be held off by Grenadiers and is rendered mostly ineffective by Riflemen.

Cannons are further down the tech tree. Your stack of rifles and cannons are slow. You will win ofc. but more turns have to be involved in the war. More war weariness, much more. AI is building units in the other cities while you're moving and taking down defenses.

I don't find cavalry as powerful as riflemen, to be honest. A weakness from the cavalry rush can be attriuted to some very high defenses from protective AI's as well as hills and cultural defense. I'm not saying the cavalry's useless, as it's very poweful with the correct circumstances.

Correct circumstances is the right word. My style of play is focused on getting the right circumstances and then leveraging my short-lived advantage to full effect. And these circumstances can be achieved in most maps.

In my last game as Willem (Emperor, Epic, Pangaea) I have achieved domination victory in 40 turns after getting rifling. Sure, the game was cakewalk but the speed and domination of cavarly is unparalleled. 3 most advanced AI's were bigger than me, however they went democracy, steel, mil.science, sci. method to no avail.

 

[oyzar]

As i said earlier all military units can be abused on emperor and below, maybe you should move up a level to give the AI more of a fighting chance? If you are winning every game due to using the game mechanics properly it is a good sign you should move up . Of course you are using epic which makes war a hell of a lot easier than normal speed, see if your cavalery rush works as well on normal .

@ Flanking affective siege units even when losing, now that would be insanely overpowered... Flanking is more than good enough as it already is...

 

[StuntedAzrael]

Normal speed makes speed even more crucial therefore rush is even more potent. War takes as much turns as on epic, but research, production and war weariness are faster. Rushing with 2-move units is less effective on marathon since you have time there.

Someone posted a deity game few months ago (Snaaty?) here which ended in carefully done Cavarly rush on normal. War lasted about 10 turns. That game changed my style of play. Obsolete in his WE games also made his first war with cavarly alone I believe.