Civilization tier list

[Roxlimn]

Martin Alvito:

I don't think that those units cost 4 each to maintain during Classical/Medieval. If I recall correctly, they cost no more than 2 on average at that point in the game, and I want to say it's more like 1-1.5. It isn't until Industrial and Modern that I start noticing deleted units saving me 4 in maintenance per turn and up. Am I missing something here?

If not, a 25% discount on maintenance yields 0.25 X 10 X 1.5 = 3.75 per turn, which isn't any better than what you've posited for the Iroquois ability at that point. Further, I don't think it's totally unreasonable to suppose that they scale roughly equivalently until Industrial or so, with the balance perhaps breaking mildly in favor of the Germans.

Now, if this is another example here of fail documentation by the devs and the Germans actually pay 25% total unit maintenance cost rather than 75%, that would be something indeed.

My mistake; I botched the math. At 10-12 Swordsmen and 5 or so Workers, the military upkeep should come to about 20-ish so the German UA saves you 5-ish, not 10. It's a little ahead of the Iroquois UA, and it just gets better as unit maintenance scales up.

I don't know that it's fair to say that Iroquois UA scales up any. Conquered territories generally already have road networks, and they also generally don't have the same Forest bias as the Iroquois lands generally do. Savings from the UA would plummet the further out from your start you go. Once you hit Railroad, you get no savings, since you're obliged to build standard railroads anyway.

That's what's classically meant by the shorthand "arrives too late to matter" when describing a late UU. By virtue of arriving on the scene so late, the late UU has to immediately generate a winning position where one would not otherwise exist in order to matter. By contrast, if an early UU helps you, say, capture a single city that you otherwise would not have, the large number of remaining turns in which to earn those benefits can have a very significant effect on your ability to set up a win condition later.

I'm not convinced. It's a sensible general sentiment, but it's not all that reliably applicable. For instance, how many games have you played where Rome doesn't have Iron at all, or doesn't have a target Civ that could be attacked in time once you got a hard-to-reach Iron resource? The earliness of the unit plays against it in that instance because it rides the edge of when you reveal and acquire the required resource.

Let's not forget Greece's ultra-early UUs, either. Being early matters only if it's actually relevant; we can't assume apriori that the opportunity to be relevant will be in favor of the early unit just because it's early. It simply doesn't have to be as powerful relative to the replacement unit. A Panzer is significantly more powerful than a Tank - significant enough, I think to be relevant as a late game UU.

Here I'd argue that in a game with multiple major landmasses you never need to play for a Domination win. On lower difficulties you can ignore the AIs; on higher difficulties you're good once your continent is pacified. That means that you can optimize for very early on and achieve a peaceful win condition fast enough with certainty.

I confess that I've never really had to play hard for a win, playing on what many would say was a criminally easy setting. I can see where the AI would not be good enough to claim the peaceful win cons even when it's overwhelmingly powerful. Is it fair to rate the UU based on the real weak points of the AI? Part of me agrees with you, but part of me says that this is merely incidental. In a MP setting, the relevance of the units would be different (and that should also be taken in account).