Chinas Starting Techs

You meant to compare rifles and rifles, not rifles and infantry right???

To draft Comabt II rifles for And and Hannibal you need to be getting 8 XP per city which means a barracks + Theocracy + 2 GGs (or WP, or Pentagon, etc..) Still you need an 8 XP city to draft a combat II gunpowder (or combat I/Pinch).

Any protective leader with a barracks and Theocracy gets a three promoted unit right off the bat upon the draft, and from any city with a barracks and the state religion.

 

Another problem I have with Protective isn't the archer units but the promotions they get. CG is great for the computer but I would prefer Gurrial1 for defence as I rarely defend in my cites, but often will outside the territory on hills. As well Drill 1 sucks. plain and simple. Drill 3 + 4 however are good so that's a bit of a mixed bag but still. Drafted Rifles do get 2 free promotions but I wonder in practice how useful they actually are. I think I would trade both for just Combat1.

 

I'd add the caveat "and possibly fishing". If you have a water start, you can build a workboat first, especially if you have a forested hill or anything else that provides 2 or 3 production. It's an opening some players (far better than me, I might add), swear by.

Of course, there is no guarantee you get a coastal start. Unless you regenerate the map once or twice.

UU is definitely in top half, especially if you make an effort to beeline Machinery (after Writing, probably). It receives extra first strikes on top of the ones you get with Drill, has all the advantages of starting with Combat I (like unlocking Medic, Shock, and Cover), and the collateral damage means you can use them right after the catapults hit to continue the assault. On lower levels, you can usually use the Oracle to pop Metal Casting and get them even quicker.

I want to know how you survive without archery units--no longbows or crossbows?

I think Mao has the better of the two trait combos. If I'm playing for culture, I like Philosophical leaders like Pericles. As a matter of fact, I'd say Pericles beats out any other leader going for a culture victory.

How so? You can start with Mining -> Bronze Working, and either produce a worker if you have food resources or a workboat if you have a high production tile (if you like that approach). By the time either is finished, you will have Mining and can go on to BW.

 

No. My point is that a leader whose traits let you develop a big tech advantage -Hannibal, for example- will in effect give you better units than an aggressive or protective leader by that point in the game. (The early game is a different matter.) Getting cannons and rifles before the opponent does will have a bigger impact than Drill 1 and CG 1 vs the same unit.

That doesn't mean that there is no advantage from having extra promotions. But it doesn't come close to making up the disparity between protective and the top tier traits.

 

You are forgetting about border pops for new cities. You have pigs with no other food source. You tech AH, Mining, BW. You need Myst for border pops and you need the wheel to connect a military resource. If your capital happened to have an agr. source you still need to tech mining and bw and are not guaranteed to have metal. So you end up teching AH anyways.

Having both AGR and FISH as starting techs severely slows down your opening because it requires 5 key techs to be researched (AH, Min, BW, Myst, Wheel) instead of 4. Of course, this is dependent on your leaders traits too. Willem is Creative so no issues and SB has a resourceless UU so you don't have to have AH (with Agr tiles) or the Wheel.

So Ironically, that leaves America as the only civilization potentially screwed with what I consider a poor combo. Like the Greek early game can blow hard with Alexander but playing with Pericles is rather painless.

Techs themselves aren't necessarily good or bad until you pair them up with traits.

 

Your capital's borders automatically pop due to the Palace. I know it's an obvious point, but it's one worth making.

I've rarely gotten Mysticism for border popping alone--rushing to Writing and then whipping libraries does fine for me, or an AI spreads a religion to me. If I'm a Cha leader, I'll pick it up for the boosted Monuments, but that's about it.

 

It depends on what is available. America sucks with a livestock-only start and lots of forest hills. Inland Japan is arguably even worse though.

Sometimes you can skimp on mysticism if nearby resources are favorable. BW potentially too, especially if your hills aren't heavily forested and you wind up finding horse.

I could do w/o the fishing though. Fishing is pretty good for cheesing early religions with mysticism (a feat only izzy can do w/o unrestricted leaders), but that's about it...otherwise I'd prefer most other techs excepting possibly hunting.

 

Perhaps it would be easier to list the UU's that are *potentially* more useless. So im not saying these are completely worse than the cho-ku-nu, but that these are the only that could reasonbly be considered worse.

-the 2 modern UU's
-the 2 boats
-the babalonian archer.
-dog and jaguar warrior
-the elephant
I dont think im missing anything.

Think about the cho-ku-nu a minute. It costs more than cats and does less collateral damage. And can't take city raider. Or bombard. Compare it side-by-side to the hwacha if you want a laugh.

Ok, i'll admit it. Every once in a while, if i'm invading an aggressive civ, and i dont have knights or muskets, i'll build 1 or 2 crossbows to protect my stack. And the plain old archer is sometimes necessary if you have no recources at all. But longbows? All they are good for is sitting in cities, which is a bad way to defend, unless whoever is attacking you somehow forgot to bring siege. I honestly cant remember the last time I've built one..

 

Yea, lol. Good luck with that.

@Jamuka

Imo dogs are fine for the reason I listed above.

 

I don't understand the hate on longbows/archers. You're going to leave something behind in the city anyway...and these are frequently your cheapest alternates. With CG II they'll defend effectively against their contemporary units, too...especially longbows. Would you rather have 2-3 maces back in that city? I bet you'd rather attack with those?

 

Well yeah, i agree that dogs are fine. Jags too. I was just trying to list any unit that could even be considered being as bad as the cho-ku-nu.


As for longbows, i rarely find i have a deficite of units to leave back in cities. Defending a recently captured city during war, if i dont just leave it empty, there are usually a few obsolete axemen or injured macemen in my stack that can do the job for a few turns. If it's for the HR bonus, i just use whatever units havent been added to my offensive stack yet, and shuffle them around a lot.
I suppose if i was short on luxuries/warriors and really needed consitant HR, building a few archers wouldnt be such a bad deal if couldnt build chariots. But longbows? Not only do those things obsolete my 25 hammer archers, but they require feudalism, a rediculous out-of-the-way tech! I usually get around to trading for feudalism when i finally need it so i can get guilds - so i can get banking - so i can get economics or replacable parts.

 

I like Cho-ku-nu's - They have a strong window from about 400 BC - 400 AD. I never use LBs. Yea, I'm a firm believer you should never self research Feud. Anyone who does has a strange idea of optimal play.

 

It's a pre-req for guilds though so you do need it eventually. In about half my games I can trade for it w/o worry that the AI I trade with will give the tech I sent to my enemies/people I care about. You're going to get access to them anyway then through trades...why not economize on ?

 

I can always trade for Feudalism so why would I ever research it? Unless I am specifically transitioning to a HE my tech path has more important priorities than a beeline for guilds. If I have many cottages I will prioritize PP/Democracy. Lots of farms and whip/draft I will prioritize Biology/Communism then transition to a FE/HE. Steel is pretty much a given with any economy I use. Either of these let me back fill guilds via trade.

Researching Feudalism yourself loses many trade opportunities.

 

That's my whole point though...you will trade for it.

I don't make longbows much either though...it's been quite some games. The reason isn't that they're bad, or that I don't self research feudalism (though I don't I could still trade for it), but rather that the way the game is rigged right now, medieval warfare is the worst era for offense easily, so the player has an aversion towards actually attacking, and on defense active defense is better (on offense you actually want powerful garrisons so your cities don't get sniped by stray crap AI units).

IMO the wall/castle effects on bombardment is really a bit much...something about walls/castles in general don't sit right with me in civ IV. They're flagrantly obnoxious in AI hands, not too useful to the human player, and the inexplicably obsolete long before they historically should, and not for any good reason I can imagine. But, it does screw medieval war over nicely.

 

Regarding the claim that the Chinese have nothing beyond the starting techs going for them: Qin has several very interesting options:

With a good start/on low-ish levels, he can have his cake and eat it... start Pyramids, do an Oracle/MC slingshot in another city, whip forge in the first city and continue working on the pyramids. Lightbulb Metal Casting with the Engineer. Great economy, and this early CKN can easily recover any concessions made in terms of land expansion.

With a more austere approach, Qin can always give 100%. Failure cash for partially-built wonders and turning wall whip/chop overflow into gold are extremely useful ways to finance one's empire. Note that it's quite possible and occasionally worthwhile to stop a wonder 1 turn from completion and start building it somewhere else. For a pure hammer economy, although not my preferred approach, I can think of no better leader: when building gold/science, any chops that come through are postponed indefinitely without decay.

I consider CKN to be in the top third... not as good as they look on paper, but they are a big edge that allows one to dominate warfare until knights show up in numbers. I'd rather have an early archer-killer, but after those and Praetorians I can't think of anything else I'd rather have.

The UB is a little situational... fits in quite well in a wonder-assisted cultural victory but that's a little narrow. Incas can do this as well (or better with 3 capitals...) and their UB isn't nearly as narrow.

 

They are nice starting techs (though I prefer Wheel + anything). Qin usually takes a pretty good chunk of the early wonders whenever he's in my games since he can go right to Masonry.

 

No one has love for Hunting as a starting tech?

 

As a tech it's good, but I rarely want to build souts straight away, and it does almost nothing for workers

 

From post #17:

The best starting techs are Agriculture and Hunting. This way, for MANY starts, you can research Animal Husbandry at a maximum discount (AH resources are common and horses are great for the early game) and then research Archery immediately after if necessary for barbarian defense. This is why I like starting out as Persia. If you've got a coastal capital, then you can just research fishing before AH and then archery after AH if necessary.

I forgot about scouts, though. They're nice if playing with huts on. And furs and deers can be used with hunting.