[Diety] How to Effectively Spear Rush?

[Novntis]

To appropriately scope the discussion, I'm playing on the most recent official release (6-19-2020) with no additional mods/submods. I usually play standard speed, standard size, no tech trading, no ruins. I usually play on Continents/Pangaea/Communitu_79.

I've tried this a few times now with the civs with unique spears (persia / greece) and warmongers with early bonuses that impact spears (i.e. sweden / assyria / zulu), and I'm not sure I fully grasp how this is supposed to work or how it can work to your benefit at higher difficulties. My experience has been that spear rushing is extremely risky, especially on Diety, as if you fail to take a city or make gains, you're stuck with costly units that are quickly stomped by swords and take a fair amount of science before being upgradeable again. My questions for you veteran diety players are thus as follows:

1) When do you decide to spear rush? As the monument and shrine are essential, you typically have ~20 turns to decide what you build next and a few more turns before choosing policies. What do you need to see to make a spear rush your short-term goal? My assumptions are this realistically requires authority to work well and thus you must have barbs, city states to tribute/attack, and nearby enemies with easily traversed terrain.

2) How many units do you need to make this work? By what time do you need to have all the units produced by? Unless playing greece / persia, which have more efficient units, I seem to have problems with producing enough units to take expansions before cities get walls. Do you beeline Bronze Working or do you build the cheaper warriors first and delay Bronze Working before making warriors obsolete?

3) Can/should Statue of Zeus make its way into a spear rush, or is it a build order distraction? The barracks and boost is nice but is it worth that many hammers when you quickly run out of time for the rush? My typically build order is monument > shrine > warrior > warrior (buy worker around this time with saved gold) > spear > as much of a spear as possible before Zeus > more spears until max supply or slightly past max supply. This has an implied tech order of beeline bronze working > pottery > beeline iron working.

4) What promotion trees are important? My instinct is that Drill I > Drill II > City Assualt (50% on this version vs the ~30% in the Beta) is the most effective way to go if you actually want to damage a city with your melee units, but I've seen a lot of arguments for the Shock line on the grounds that enemy units (for exp, science, culture) should be the priority, not the cities. I played a game recently with persia's immortals and just spammed them with shock promotions which definitely helped kill units early on and was sufficient to take an expand, but couldn't continue the push once I got to an unwalled tradition capital. I suspect I was being greedy eying the capital, and it was certainly hopeless once they put a wall in, but I guess I wasn't really sure if I should try it or not.

5) Do you attempt to do anything else while spear rushing? Do you build settlers? Do you build buildings? How much do you neglect everything but war? I assume left side authority first is mandatory to ensure at least one early settler and a fallback in the event the rush doesn't go well.

6) What do you realistically hope to achieve by spear rushing? Taking an expansion? Taking a city state? Defensively farming units? I think the "on kill" yields in this mod make it a bit difficult for me to see the bigger picture when it comes to the benefits of killing units without taking any cities. When do you peace out to work on your neglected infrastructure?

 

[chicorbeef]

Last civ I have tried this with was Sweden, on the June patch. Deity, Continents, Standard settings. I play without events/tech trading and recently without ruins too.

It's not always possible to spear rush (sometimes the terrain or your neighbors just won't allow it), but it is a viable strategy. You should know that I'm kind of a noob at Deity and I have lots of failed spear rushes too.

1) I usually go Monument-->Shrine, then build Warriors as I prepare for Bronze Working to be researched. Being able to upgrade about 2-3 Warriors as soon as you hit Bronze Working is a powerful kick-off to this strategy, and I use them to tribute/hunt barbs first. I ignore the Worker until later, that's probably the key difference. God of All Creation is a really good pantheon for this strategy that supports your Capital, so you don't necessarily need a worker asap.

2) As many units as your Supply Cap offers usually, so that's about 6-7.

3) I get Statue of Zeus if I have decent production and/or I have mercantile city-states nearby to heavy tribute. You probably want to aim for Statue of Zeus before Turn 50 at the latest, otherwise you might be better off ignoring it.

4) I go Drill and City Assault too, the +25% boost per promotion I feel is just too impactful to let go of. The flanking bonuses are kind of small at this point. My basic rule of thumb when warmongering is usually Shock on mounted units and Drill on melee units. With the old version of City Assault with the 50% boosts Drill was a must-have for me.

5) I will build a couple of Settlers, because you'll need a few of your own expansions if you want to survive, I focus on infrastructure in my secondary cities but not so much my Capital, at least not until I have a strong army. I go left side Authority as well.

6) It's to take a quick expand or two. I don't go for City-States this early, I prefer to just tribute them. Sometimes you can go for a Capital but if that's too greedy you don't have to. Killing units is part of war, though I usually make it a goal to take a city or two, it does good damage to the AI to soften them up to conquer fully later. I peace out when I feel like the war is getting too risky and I'm about to lose units, remember you can always peace out for 10 turns, heal/regroup, then attack again. Getting the first strike is powerful.

 

[stii]

I think the real issue is what are you gaining doing this? A few patches ago I found it pretty easy to do a archer rush but I also found it didn't really gain me much. You get a capital you can't build a courthouse in for ages and you spend a huge amount on units. I think the only time this super early rush makes sense is if you are on an island with one other player and conflict is inevitable. Otherwise just building more cities yourself is more effective

 

[LifeOfBrian]

Novntis, unless I'm playing with a unique spearman (Greece, Persia, Celts...), I avoid spearmen rushing because the risk of failing is too big. But with those civs, I rush Statue of Zeus and then start churning out my UUs. While waiting to get 3 or 4 of them, I use them to gain experience by fighting barbarians. Once I have 3-4, I send them to war (usually soon enough they get city assault), aided by my medic pathfinder for faster healing, while continuing to produce more of them. I don't build any settlers etc. until I've conquered my first city and/or reached one or two units above my unit cap.

 

[Milae]

There are many things you can do with early Unique units/spears which don't involve taking other cities.

- They have a high combat strength so that helps you get tributes if you move them near city-states.
- Assuming you are playing Authority killing barbs will get you a lot of culture.
- Usually instead of taking someone else's capital early on my preferred strategy is to weaken my neighbour significantly so they I can easily take them out either with catapults or trebuchets later on. Conquering in Medieval is generally much better for you because you will get higher yields from Imperium policy, you should have the tech to build Courthouses so you won't have as much unhappiness, and you can get yourself a Vassal which is also useful.
As mentioned previously best way to use them early is with a few of them and a medic. Make sure you keep them all alive and get experience on them while killing opponent units and taking their workers etc. Most unique units will have promotions which stay with them for the rest of the game so even though swordsmen have higher combat strength, keeping unique spearmen alive will give you great infantry for the whole game when you upgrade them especially from Tercios onwards where all infantry becomes the same.

One thing to bear in mind is that if you have a good army early you won't really need to rush out settlers as you can prevent other Civs from settling near you using your army. In some games I have just built units until I got to my force limit before building settlers. Also Terra Cotta Army is an amazing Wonder for Authority games so I would prioritise getting that over conquering cities/expanding early.

 

[Novntis]

Thanks everyone for the comments. I've played a few more authority games this weekend and I think I'm getting the hang of early aggression. My big take away is terrain/mobility is probably 75+% of the deciding factor in whether a spear rush can take a city in my hands. It's not super hard to kite units away from the enemy cities if the terrain allows and usually if you've built at least 4-6 spears you can pretty much swarm any non-defensibly positioned expansion without walls once the units are out of the way. On the other hand if there is 1-2 tiles of city adjacent lake/coast or just rough terrain everywhere it becomes pretty hard to make gains and you give the AI more time to send units at you.

As an example, I was able to conquer all of a neighboring Siam (4 cities) in one game as Iroquis with just 6 Spears and an archer due to the crazy forest mobility. They didn't even have time to get walls up. Sadly I had to abandon the game due to a bug with the UB forest yields disappearing after reloading a save. Here, I beelined Bronze Working for Zeus which combined with a few Drill/City Assualt spears made for potent city breakers. The only problem with this game was that I didn't found a religion after someone stole my Renewal pantheon. However, with Terracotta and spammable Swords online I was in a great position to quickly crush the next nearby civ.

I also started a Rome game that seems promising in which I started fairly close to a very sad desert Brazil on flat terrain. After getting pottery I beelined Zeus, secured it, and at 4 Drill spears I was able to grab an expand and start harassing the capitol. I then got UB and Legions online with Terracotta, and finished off the capitol. Early on the flatter terrain definitely helped and probably made the difference. Unfortunately now I have a pretty big mountain range to navigate to get to the next civs, but I don't think its hopeless as my Production is #1 thanks to UA +10%, Copper Monopoly +10%, Earth Mother +1p, and finished Authority. It also turns out legions are great at making really fast roads through unsettled mountainous terrain, so I can maintain maneuverability. If I were any other civ, I feel like I'd probably completely stall out on conquest at this point. I also founded a religion with Hero Worship and Orders and I'll try to grab Zealotry ASAP.

In contrast, I also started a Greece game in which I was a little boxed in by hilly mountains and got defensively forward settled and couldn't maneuver well (I wonder if this is partly the fault of the Greek's hill bias). My UU was basically a waste as I couldn't move anywhere fast enough to kill barbs, tribute, or attack cities. I think the Hoplites are good, but they're fairly mediocre when its hard to get adjacency bonuses.

I don't think its a surprise that mobility is king, but I definitely needed to be reminded. Also having played with both the +33% vs +50% city assault on the beta, I have to say its a fair bit less exciting, but still strong. The +50% city assault really helped maintain the momentum of my spear rush on my Iroquis game, but my beta Rome game didn't benefit quite as much from the +33%. I think cover probably would have been more helpful long term.

 

[stii]

I've tried this out a bit more and I found tributing CS was the most powerful thing you can do. Build two warriors quickly and upgrade to spears you can hit max tribute then rotate between nearby CS. Having unique spear didn't seem to matter that much, it mostly helped for upgrades later. Mongols was best because double pushed it up to absurd levels. I was getting 100-150 on T40-50 and double that with Mongols.

I did monument pyramids warrior warrior but you certainly don't need to build the wonder. This was on deity so it is possible you might be unable to tribute as early as they need 5 pop for heavy tribute on lower difficulties.

You can certainly use the spears to attack with after tributing but I just used them to clear camps and then to garrison cities for +2 culture. You get a lot of extra culture even if there isn't a culture CS so you get the 5th Authority polices pretty quickly. A bit of gold early then two rounds of tribute from roughly four CS is a lot of free yields for building two warrior early then a few more a bit later.

 

[Powerwise]

1) When do you decide to spear rush?

Medic 2 on my opening scout unit. Grabbing advanced weapons from an ancient ruin helps, too, but you don't allow ruins, and in any case I'd rather have a mobile medic who can stand behind my spears and increase their survivability.

 

[Novntis]

I've tried this out a bit more and I found tributing CS was the most powerful thing you can do.

Absolutely agreed, especially with the recent heavy tribute changes. Makes Aztec, Celts, Zulu, and Iroquois a lot more potent early game (have better mobility to reach camps and city states faster or just lower tributing reqs via UA/UU) and Mongolia has crazy tribute bonuses later in the game. I think as you're building up your forces you need to be hunting barbs/CS in order to be effective with any spear rush given the benefits.

Medic 2 on my opening scout unit. Grabbing advanced weapons from an ancient ruin helps, too, but you don't allow ruins, and in any case I'd rather have a mobile medic who can stand behind my spears and increase their survivability.

I do this regularly now. I have to say this only works well if you're fighting unwalled cities or have upgraded to scout which unfortunately requires sailing/ruin. Else walled enemy cities will be quick to one-shot your pathfinder. This is certainly where assyria's stacking medic 2 comes into play as a more reliable option. If not playing assyria, I've started splitting spears early on 50-50 drill/shock so I can get a few medic II units by the time swords come online that hopefully won't be one-shot.

 

[tothePAIN]

Absolutely agreed, especially with the recent heavy tribute changes. Makes Aztec, Celts, Zulu, and Iroquois a lot more potent early game (have better mobility to reach camps and city states faster or just lower tributing reqs via UA/UU) and Mongolia has crazy tribute bonuses later in the game. I think as you're building up your forces you need to be hunting barbs/CS in order to be effective with any spear rush given the benefits.




I do this regularly now. I have to say this only works well if you're fighting unwalled cities or have upgraded to scout which unfortunately requires sailing/ruin. Else walled enemy cities will be quick to one-shot your pathfinder. This is certainly where assyria's stacking medic 2 comes into play as a more reliable option. If not playing assyria, I've started splitting spears early on 50-50 drill/shock so I can get a few medic II units by the time swords come online that hopefully won't be one-shot.

Tributing is probably best for your own economy in the long run but taking a city from a neighbor can weaken them significantly and make later wars much easier, setting up a neighbor who will be a prime target. One of the things that hadn't been discussed as much.