Civ4 Units Strategy

in the manual, they said that explorers always defend!!! where did you read that they'll never get killed because they'll never defend?
 
in the manual, they said that explorers always defend!!! where did you read that they'll never get killed because they'll never defend?

The implication being that your explorer imparts the benefits of its medic promotion on your stack of units while having a strength score too low to ever be selected as a defender when the stack is attacked. Thus you don't accidentally lose your medic because you gave it to a strong unit that is selected as a defender and killed.
 
Scouts and explorers.
They are bloody usefull in MP. I allways have a bundh of them.
1. When you have an open border with a player you can send them in all their cities. It IS vital to know where the human player stacks his units (a good complement to F9)
2. When attacking the human player often launches a lot of his forces in the front line. With explorers or scouts you can see where are the undefended cities in their territory.
3. Explorer often have very good promotion and very player will want to kick one of them out of a forest hill. Often they don't even pay attation to them while action is going on everywhere else.
4. They give you info on all the wars that are going on between other players. It's vital too. You need to know who is going to take advantage 5-10 turns before it arrives to have time to react (send troups to make a gift, iron/copper/horse donation, stop commerce with strongest civ or even prepare for war).

At the end of the day, these units transform your civilization. It was an isolationist nation, now it's intelligent.
IMO in MP, you need to spend more than 50% of your time with the camera outside your territory.
 
frank_mosta said:
Hear, hear, I love infantry too. One thing there are not good at, though, is assaulting cities. Unless.... you have obtained them from upgrading melee units with City Raider. I've found it harder to take cities than in C3; infantry with city raider promotions make it a lot easier.
Riflemena nd infantry can assault cities if they get the Gunpowder bonus (+25%) and plenty of cannon or artillery support. When fighting against cities which have walls/castles, the benefits of the infantry will be strongly appreciated since you can knock down the cultural defensive bonus with bombardment but you can't destroy city walls. That 50% bonus is the difference which can halt a cavalry assault in its tracks where an infantry assault will carry the walls.

Barracks and one of the +XP civics is vital. Enough siege units with the collateral damage bonus will be able to bring down the average attack strength of defenders, and they are cheap to build compared to the losses in a conventional assault. If every siege units has the Accuracy and Barrage promotion, then the damaged units can take the bombard role on the next city while others take the suicide role. Better to lose 5 or 6 siege units to soften them up because they have only basic XP. Once the defenders are at half strength, your main assault will go in untouched and the XP's build up quickly.

Plus, you'll need those riflemen and infantry units to hold the city after you take it.
 
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