Guilds beeline for Justinian

[kniteowl]

Got to Guilds by 520AD, Got HBR, Guilds. No AI on my Continent has MC or Feudalism, but I haven't built a Single Knight yet... I also got Aesthetics and Drama (UB) while I Was waiting for my GM, I'd probably Research Guilds faster then waiting for my GM to bulb it lmao, I think it was 16 turns of Tech Guilds and 22 turns to Produce a GM. tHe only reason I could Tech Guilds in 16 turns was because of the Merchants assign in my temporary GP Farm for the GM to bulb Guilds and that +9 Gold allowed me to Tech at 100% with only a -1 deficit.

I decided to stick to my strategy and bulb Guilds with a GM but now when I think about it I should have Tech Guilds normally and used that Gm Civil Service lmao.... ah well.

The biggest Obstacle in the Guilds beeline is Machinery, a GE takes too long to Produce and a GS requires you to delay Fishing/ and tech Maths and Iron-working but if You tech Maths you can't use your GM to bulb Guilds lmao.

 

[darrelljs]

And I had wanted to share this a while back, but I'm not allowed to post RB reports prior to the event closing. Anyway, here's a game with Justinian (albeit only on Monarch) where I think a Guilds beeline worked fairly well. If you've been following Unconqured Sun's Deity game with Justinian you'll see that he has basically lost the use of Cataphracts due to the Guilds line being unlightbulbable, but for Emperor and below I think Justinian's UU can be quite powerful.

Darrell

 

[bovinespy]

And I had wanted to share this a while back, but I'm not allowed to post RB reports prior to the event closing. Anyway, here's a game with Justinian (albeit only on Monarch) where I think a Guilds beeline worked fairly well. If you've been following Unconqured Sun's Deity game with Justinian you'll see that he has basically lost the use of Cataphracts due to the Guilds line being unlightbulbable, but for Emperor and below I think Justinian's UU can be quite powerful.

Darrell

Thanks, Darrell! That was a great read. What struck me most from that thread was for how long those Cataphracts were effective - right up to the end against Musketmen! I'd kind of given up on Justinian after a slew of false starts, but now I'm intrigued again...

 

[Babibo]

I concord here, on the power of cataphracts. I recently made my best score ever on Emperor with him, and these units helped a lot (well, I managed to do a Philosophy lightbulb with the Oracle, which helped too...) I didn't really tried to rush guilds, and when I had it, the other civs had pikes, but that wasn't a problem.
My theory is that medieval wars are often tedious because no unit is stronger than the other ones. Knights get killed by pikes, who get killed by macemen, who get killed by crossbowmen... So you keep mixing up your attack groups, and lose in efficiency on the battlefield.

Here you have a fast unit that can counter even pikes. Give your cataphracts the anti-melee promotion, and all you need to do is piling your cataphracts with some macemen and suicide catapults.