[GS] Courser and Cuirassiers

[Lord Lakely]

This is why they need to slow the tech and civics advancement down.

Part of the problem, but not the entire solution. Production costs also need to be lowered in general, otherwise you won't be able to get out units before they become obselete. (OT, but settling in the endgame is a pain because you will get approx 0 districts up in cities settled after the Industrial era due to scaling production costs)

 

[kaspergm]

I have studied this for a long time. I think there were several key design ideas that all got mixed together.
One was that each unit line would have special attributes and uses- heavy cav hits harder, ranged pays for safety with reduced melee str, etc.
The next was that unit strength should rise by 10 points per era.
The third was that unit gaps will force players to vary their army.
The fourth is that cost is determined by what row of the tech tree units unlock in.
You can only sustainably have 3 of these 4 at once though. The first two are really good rules; the third is fine. Adding the cost rule just wrecks the entire game balance.
Ex:
1) heavy Chariots cost the same as spearmen, have 28 str, and 2 or 3 move. Spears can hit them for +7. (this is IMO the original & balanced design of how heavycav-anticav was supposed to work)
2) Horsemen are cheaper than swords even though they are faster and also have 36str.

I'll distill to this: they've clearly tweaked a ton of stuff from the original design to handle unit gaps making half the units useless. But the entire point of unit gaps was to tell players "suck it up" and deal with armies where half the units had the upper hand every era.

Sorry for jumping a bit back in the text here, but I think the overall unit design of Civ6 is indeed worth discussing. I'm myself strongly against the idea of big unit gaps, although I acknowledge it's a feature that has also some possibilities. It certainly puts you on your toes because it puts a big emphasis on tech advancement, but I also see it easily exploitable. Reach Musketmen before your neighbor, and you can squash his Swordsmen and Crosbowmen with little to worry about. If he happens to have no horses for Knights, he's basically a sitting target. With smaller unit gaps, this is not so much the case. In a unit system like Civ5, you could pretty easily defend against units one upgrade level ahead: Swordsmen could outlast Longswordsmen on defense if not seriously outnumbered, Longswordsmen could outlast Musketmen, Musketmen could hold their ground against GW Infantry, etc. So it's more difficult to overrun your opponent, but it's also more forgiving wrt. keeping up with technology. I prefer smaller gaps, but I guess from a design point of view you can say both approaches are valid.

Then there's the question about different unit types: How many do we need, and what roles do they serve? Obviously the big joker here is Heavy vs. Light Cavalry, which is the biggest new element in Civ6. Personally I'm not much of a fan of this separation, I don't see any clear role for either. Sure, one has extra movement, the other a bit more combat strength for its era, but when they come in alternating eras, it does feel like a pseudo-distinction: In terms of actual power (in a vacuum), we have Chariot (heavy) < Horseman (light) < Knight (heavy) < Cavalry (light) < Tank (heavy) ~ Helicopter (light), so it's only once we reach the modern/atomic era with Tanks vs. Helicopters (one era later) that we actually see some sort of decision in trading speed for power with going one way or the other. A much more meaningful introduction than the Light Cavalry would imo. have been introducing a Ranged Cavalry line (starting with the Chariot and upgrading towards the Helicopter Gunship), which would have higher movement but lower combat strength and only range 1 compared to the conventional ranged units of range 2 (and no such nonsense as the Machine Gun losing range). There's also the whole discussion of Melee units having a bonus towards Anti-Cav, which just seems unnecessary and undermines the usefulness of the Anti-Cav (a better solution would be to give ranged units an overall lower CS but a bonus against Anti-Cav; albeit this would probably make an alternative non-iron Melee upgrade for the Warrior necessary).

Finally, there's the whole question of strategic resources. Thankfully, they finally seem to fix this with GS, after taking a step in the wrong direction with vanilla Civ6 compared to Civ5. I'm hoping that with GS, strategic resources will actually constitute a limiting factor to how many military units you can support in a small empire.

 

[Sostratus]

I'm hoping that with GS, strategic resources will actually constitute a limiting factor to how many military units you can support in a small empire.

If the system actually limits resource units in a meaningful way, I fear the dirty laundry of the current system will come to light.
Right now, because the resource system is a binary "can build/cannot build" there is no extra cost or benefit assigned to units just because they have or don't use resources.
The combat stats and production and maintenance costs were developed independently of each other and resources, as far as we can tell.

But only ranged and Anticav never need resources. Anticav are awful, so if this system does squeeze players then what i think we will see is:
-Always build as many mounted as possible
-Otherwise build ranged units
Ranged units shred any anticav the opponent was stupid enough to build and mounted units can just gallop around them. You're better off spending strategics on your own mounted to counter their than put it into weaker and slower melee, which again, are vulnerable to ranged.

Sorry for jumping a bit back in the text here, but I think the overall unit design of Civ6 is indeed worth discussing. I'm myself strongly against the idea of big unit gaps, although I acknowledge it's a feature that has also some possibilities. It certainly puts you on your toes because it puts a big emphasis on tech advancement, but I also see it easily exploitable.

I also favor less unit gaps, although I'm amenable to a one era gap here and there just for historical reasons, gameplay, etc. Sometimes you gotta take a little vinegar out of those heavy cav.

The worst problem with all unit lines having these gaps is that the units that do exist were balanced as if every line has a representative in every era; upgrades are continuous. But with so few units in the game, the system on the field is discrete with gives rise to other behavior. The example I always mention is that spears, while they actually beat H Chariots, also have tofight in classical; where they lose to horsemen and swords. Because of that, there's no reason to build spears in the half era where they only counter one unit. This means there's no anticav running around to upgrade into pikes, removing the "counter" to knights (let's pretend pikes counter knights for a moment.) So the starting conditions of which units come when massively impact the first few eras of the game. It is an issue.

There's also the whole discussion of Melee units having a bonus towards Anti-Cav,

This exists for one reason and one reason only:
In civ5 G&K, when they switched from 10hp to 100hp units, they also re-balanced unit strengths across the board. Part of this was that swordsmen now had 14 strength and pikemen had 16. Swords required iron, which wasn't guaranteed and was also on the bottom of the tech tree; pikes came on a tech in the "science" path of the tree, which everyone rushed. So pikes came out when swords did, required no resources, and beat them in combat. This led to all the non-legion sword UUs in the game being useless, which evidently rustled some jimmies at FXS. They may have gone a little over the top when designing 6 with that in mind

Resource units need to justify themselves, especially when there are two infantry lines in the game. But conversely, resource-less units need to be a viable option or the game becomes wheel-of-strategic-fortune.

 

[Jkchart]

With the change of knights requiring horses, there is an interesting choice in medieval:
build 44str/5move courser for 200 that upgrades to 62 str cav
build 48str/4move knight for 180 that upgrades to 64 str cuir
I bet you can guess which will be more popular.
This is not a very good change, IMO. Knights were differentiated by the iron usage. Now the premier units until the modern era are strictly horses and niter.
This also has huge implications for the classical battlefield. Horsemen were only kept down by a lack of upgrade; now that they get one, people will quickly realize two things:
1) Horses are easier to get than iron and horsemen are cheaper than swords (80? v 90) and horses are faster than swords
2) Horses have the same strength as swords (36) and both beat spears 1 on 1 (+1 and +21)

So horses, which were sleeping giants, can wake up and pivot their momentum into coursers to continue the reign of terror. The Black Army needs to be nerfed in strength because 50 strength for any medieval unit is just straight bonkers. Only losing by 1 to pikes and costing almost the same? Yeah, get out of here- +6 str is like a 25%ish boost, plus they can levy units for maximum cheese. Let's also not forget that Poland has the winged Hussar heavy cav that is essentially a renaissance unit even though it comes at mercenaries- now they get an upgrade too.

But, we also see that the unit gaps theory comes to a head in the cuirasser. Cuirs are actually weaker than i thought they would be, only 64 str. But they 'have to be' because the anticav unit available to handle them is only 55str pike and shot; so they can still "beat" cuirs by 1 point.

There's also the huge issue that with the stockpiles limitation being pretty small unless you invest in encampments (and you have to have resources to begin with) that the fabled "peaceful builder" civ will discover they cannot rely on xbows and pikes very well. Xbows might do okay holding off coursers but they cannot handle knights- which are cheaper and require the same horses as coursers. Pikes don't counter knights in practice because they are so expensive.

Ending note:

I would be very very happy if they changed scythia's ability to instead be +1/+2 horses from horse resources than the double units they get now. It's more sane and better represents, I think, the intention of the civ. In the same way I would be happy if Venetian Arsenal just halved the resource cost of ships.

Your analysis is spot on methinks.

I would like to point out that this is not taking into account which unit is attacking or defending, and what terrain this combat would take place on, fortification bonuses, forts, etc. But there are definitely some balance issues if you look at unit pairings in isolation, and it definitely shows why some counters don't work. It's very frustrating when, for example, unless you can find a perfect defensive position, a knight can head on attack your pikemen and not suffer very much damage.