Chariot Archers - Poor man's catapult (CCMAT game)

[Fizpez2]

I've been playing King (moving up today I think) and ever since I played a game with Egypt I've really been loving chariot archers for an early game rolling thunder approach.

Assuming there is at least a little open ground within 2 hexes of your target city it is so easy to push a unit in, attack and retreat. No damage taken most of the time means that you pretty much roll to your next target right away. Picking up barrage (1-3) and the city attack bonus means easy clears of defending melee units (which properly enuff tend to stick to hills/forrests).

I was still able to inflict damage up to city strength = 33. Sure catapults do much better but they are so slow to reach the next target. The five moves per turn for egypt means I could run in up to 7 chariots to the same square for the attack.

On the down side if there are lots of hill they are horrible - and even a wounded warrior will kill them in one round if it gets in to melee range so plan accordingly.

I found that skipping horse riding for the time being I could get to writing and calandar much faster for GL and happiness bump while still rushing to secure my continent.

I'll let you know how it goes next level up.

 

[Gus_Smedstad]

Funny, I was just messing with the War Chariot and I thought it was completely useless at Emperor. You're talking about moving after attacking, which requires that the unit have Blitz. That's a very late promotion for the War Chariot, which gets at most 3 XP per attack. And 7 chariots? I don't think I've ever built that many military units in the early game, typically 3-5 (depending on type) is enough to take cities, and by the time you're fielding that many chariots, they're fielding spearmen which are largely immune to chariot archers / war chariots.

 

[Niniux]

He is playing with a balance mod that rebalanced a number of things about the game. Look up CCMAT in the Creation and Customization forum and look in the Modpack subforum.

 

[Gus_Smedstad]

Oh, OK. Chariots being able to move after firing is added by one of the sub-mods of that pack. That's a change that makes sense, after I finished my Egypt game I thought the main problem with the War Chariot was that it had to stop after firing, which meant it tended to die unless the target was weak and in the open, or unless you brought melee blockers along - in which case the War Chariot had few advantages over regular archers, and the drawback of not working well against spearmen.

 

[Gwyddelig]

This strategy however works very well in the vanilla game with Keshiks. to be honest, they almost felt overpowered to me.