Darius vs. Cyrus

[jpm]

In any discussion of the strongest leaders in the game, Darius is one of the first names to come up. However, I think that Cyrus, with access to the same top-tier UU and the always useful if unspectacular UB, is too often overlooked. It's easy to drool over Darius's traits and think about the tech advantage you will have. However, Cyrus's traits, while perhaps not individually the most desired, have excellent synergy with each other and the Persian uniques.

The immortal comes very early in the game, when you are still aggressively expanding regardless of your endgame strategy. I think Cyrus is better positioned to take advantage of this fantastic unit than Darius is. Darius has no military boosts whatsoever, he relies on having an economic advantage to have a military advantage.

Cyrus has reduced exp requirements for promotions, and double the rate of great generals, which provide exp boosts. This enables him to get highly promoted immortals(or any unit really) very early in the game. Additionally his traits enable him to get a large population early, with cheap settlers to grab land faster and a higher happy cap early on, +2 including monuments. This enables Cyrus to produce more units by either working more tiles or having more cities/citizens to whip, or extra happiness to counter chain-whipping.

If you pursue an aggressive early strategy I think Cyrus's ability to snowball early competes with Darius's commerce advantage. Darius gets more from each tile worked sooner, both from bonuses and the cheap buildings. Cyrus gets to work more tiles sooner, from settling, higher pop and conquest, can build more units faster, and can promote those units faster. I don't know who's stronger across all circumstances, but I definitely think Cyrus should be considered one of the strongest leaders in the game. On a duel pangaea map with equal starting conditions, played by equally skilled players, I think Cyrus would steamroll Darius, but that's a kinda specific circumstance. Also, Darius's leaderhead just looks weird. What are your thoughts?

 

[fed1943]

It depends on the player'style.
If you are better at war choose Cyrus, if better at economy choose Darius.

 

[oranje willem]

Darius is always good, Cyrus is only good if you have an early successful war. That's why Darius is better imo.

 

[plasmacannon]

Cyrus is more fun in always war games on marathon. Where you build lots of units to harass the AIs.
The higher your promotions, the more likely your units won't get attacked.
Positioned well, you stall their growth, and a FIN leader not building riverside cottages starts looking a whole lot less advantageous of a trait to have.
That's when you not teching as fast as another doesn't matter, because he's teching even less than you are and you can build settlers faster to gain in the number of cities advantage to keep producing units and keep the pressure up on the others.

So, yes, it depends on the game.

 

[VSarius]

Put simply, Darius does more with the conquered land than Cyrus, and you hardly need super-Immortals to take out a civ, maybe two. Organized also helps with recovery from gobbling land, Fin is amazing with a land advantage. You can take on ~10 cities and still recover very fast just by spamming cottages. Darius gobbles land and horsehockeys diamonds. Cyrus, not so much. Imperialistic is really a pretty bad trait if you aren't REXing, which you don't want to do with Persia, because you have Immortals, the extra GGs are quite marginal.