Horses vs Swords

[Thalassicus]

In GEM do you build more:

• Horses: chariots, horsemen, knights
• Swords: swordsmen, longswordsmen
• Equal horses and swords.
• Neither horses nor swords.

(on average for leaders with no horse/sword unique units)

 

[KmDubya]

In the early game I will build horsemen before swords, possibly including chariot archers if the terrain is flatter. In the early game I value the mobility, threats may come from any direction and I do not have any strategic depth of cities of road network yet. These horsemen will then get upgraded into knights. Past knights I don't care that much about horse units.

Once my empire starts to grow I will build up a core iron army for the future. I try to build swordsmen and then upgrade into longswords and gunpowder.

Once I get to cannons my armies job is to protect the cannons as they do the killing, artillery just makes this better. At this point the defensive nature of foot soldiers is better than the mobility of horse units.

I just like the grinding style of ranged bombardment, in Starcraft I loved Terran siege tanks

 

[Thalassicus]

These are a very surprising and helpful results. I didn't expect it was this lopsided!

I'll experiment with things to make horses more appealing.

 

[mitsho]

One role for which I would build horses is exploration at a time when scouts are too weak and are coming back to home to be upgraded to sentinels who lose the movement bonus, correct? They are however too expensive for that most of the time, not?

I agree that the reason why Iron is more important is that Swords can stand between the catapults and the city whereas horsemen would rather retreat back. I would not change that since then we are back to the horsemen rush of early civ 5. I'd rather emphasize the mobility aspect, allowing you to deploy them where they are needed now (= less units required).

I'd also bet that if you'd include unique units, the horse would be up again since there are some awesome UU's there.

 

[Bernd-das-Brot]

What I build depends mostly on the terrain between me and the potentiel main enemy, but with at least some open space I prefer horses for their mobility even if they would be a bit weaker than swords.

 

[Thalassicus]

I'd rather emphasize the mobility aspect, allowing you to deploy them where they are needed now (= less units required).

How do you suggest we do this? We could give hoses earlier access to terrain movement promotions...

 

[mitsho]

If I knew that, I would've written it down

We also need to be wary not to make them too strong and let them get quickly way behind the enemy line... Ideally, they would be able to quickly go around the enemy's land (and there's enough place for that in the ancient and classical eras) to attack at the ideal spot while swordsmen would need to chose straighter ways. Also a good tactic to use them (or one horse) is to go in and pillage that iron/horse/luxury ressource.

Allowing quicker access to terrain promotion (are desert and ice separate from rough terrain?) seems like one way. I'd also like a ignore zone-of-control promotion, though that might be too strong?

Another option is to add horse-related events. Making not the unit, but the way to get it (horseback riding tech) cheaper, could be another one, but then you run into the problem of the Chariot as evidenced in the other thread.

 

[Thalassicus]

There are four terrain promotions: snow, desert, hills, and vegetation. This variety exists mostly for barbarians to get homeland bonuses. They currently unlock at tier 4, and mounted units only have the vegetation variety. We could give them access to all terrain promotions at tier 2? Ignoring zone of control would probably require complicated changes to the core AI, so let's avoid that. I agree that making the tech itself more appealing might be another solution.

How about a combination of small changes in many areas, so we don't skew any one part of the game too much:

• Move a few important items to Horse-type technologies.
• Better access to movement promotions.
• Slightly higher strength.
• Slightly better Stable production bonus.

Tier|1|2|3|4
|||| Arctic_Power
|||| Desert_Power
|Shock_1|Shock_2|Shock_3| Hill_Fighter Melee |Drill_1|Drill_2|Drill_3| Woodsman
||Cover_1|Blitz|March
||Ambush_1||
||Siege||

|Shock_1|Shock_2|Shock_3|Charge
Mounted |Drill_1|Drill_2|Drill_3| Woodsman
||Cover_1|Blitz|March

On a side note, I might combine arctic and desert power into an "endurance" promotion which helps both, since snow and desert are obviously never adjacent to one another. It's probably redundant to have separate promotions...

 

[Ahriman]

I'm really surprised at the results here, as I find horsemen very useful. I wonder if some of it comes from the techs; iron working now gives a bunch of stuff including a tile yield boost from mines, while horseback-riding is less of a priority. And some of it is that the chariot has reverted to a not-useful unit again (chariots were very useful when they had move after attack).

 

[Thalassicus]

Chariots have move-after-attack and 30% higher strength than archers in Gem, same as in Vem. Chariots have not changed in comparison to other early units for a year or so.

How can we make the 3 horse techs more important when compared to the 3 iron techs? Pottery gained shrines in G&K, so we could move villages from pottery to animal husbandry. Domesticating farm animals could realistically let people settle into villages. This would make animal husbandry better. What could we move from the bottom 2 rows to Wheel or Horseback Riding?

 

[mystikx21]

Most likely it is the techs in my case. I tend to make haste to iron-working because of all the goodies mixed around the swords.

I find horsemen to be useful to build a few, for upgrading to knights later especially. I tend to build fewer of them than swords for the following reasons.
1) They're not quite as useful for defending (counter-attacking yes, holding ground no)
2) Not anywhere near as useful for sieges, both for defending themselves and for attacking the city. No flanking bonus + no city bonus + city penalty.
3) There's a couple anti-mounted UUs out there that an AI will have plenty of to chew up the horses more, requiring more maneuver management of armies. There is no clear "counter" unit for swords in this way unless playing against Alex.

But they're awesome at other things so I always have some. There's also plenty of situational effects, if I have a lot of horses and little iron, very flat terrain, larger/wider empire to defend, multiple fronts, etc.

@Thal, technically chariots have "changed", slightly by being buffed when the other horse units were. They were 5/8 and now 6/9. That hasn't apparently done much to give them greater appeal. More than likely the basis of not noticing a move-after-attack is from not building them very often.

 

[Ahriman]

Chariots have move-after-attack and 30% higher strength than archers in Gem, same as in Vem. Chariots have not changed in comparison to other early units for a year or so.

Huh. I think they didn't in the first versions of GEM, and then I didn't notice when they changed and so continued to not use them. My bad.

With move after attack I found them quite useful.

One possibility would be to set them to upgrade (with promotion swapping) into horsemen.

 

[Thalassicus]

I checked the chariot tooltip and found it does not mention attacks take 1 move, which is probably another source of the confusion. You'd only notice it if you looked carefully at the individual promotions. You are right about the several weeks where nothing had modded effects yet, until we got to the armies section of Gem.

How does this revised plan look:

• Tier 2 movement promotions for horses, up from tier 4.
• Move villages to animal husbandry.
• Move lumbermills to the wheel? This would give us a path choice: horses to improve forests, or iron to improve hills.
• 20% Stable production bonus, up from 10%.
• Increase horse strength and cost
• Move Heroic Epic to horseback riding? I don't know of a strong realworld reason to keep it on Iron Working. Two national wonders on horseback riding would give a stronger incentive for tall empires to get that tech.

I don't see many other things we could realistically move around the technologies. Roads could possibly move, but I like focusing Trade on gold, and Wheel on production. It gives us a clear economic choice. I'd rather move lumbermills.

 

[mystikx21]

Q&A
Was the stable bonus increase only to apply to melee horses? 10% still on ranged, 20% on melee.

Recycling centers were removed along with bomb shelters (I'm fine with that personally, but I don't need aluminum usually. Bomb shelter removal is pretty old, just making sure both are intended and known for any one who wishes to comment)

Minor fixes: Wat Phra Kaew text still follows the old model of 10% gold/culture, should be +5 raw gold/culture for temples and shrines. Parthenon could have a note that it also improves admirals (the promotion says so, but not the wonder).

 

[Zaldron]

In GEM do you build more:

• Horses: chariots, horsemen, knights
• Swords: swordsmen, longswordsmen
• Equal horses and swords.
• Neither horses nor swords.

(on average for leaders with no horse/sword unique units)

In general for me:

Archers > Chariots
Horsemen > Swords
Longswords >>> Knights

The mobility of horses is great for hit-and-run but with knights at speed three, ranged units and cities look at them funny and they die.

 

[Thalassicus]

@mystikx21
The stable's supposed to affect all horse units the same. I intended to remove recycling centers & bomb shelters long ago, but forgot the centers. A percentage bonus for Wat Phra Kaew would be nice if that effect existed, but creating it would require core modding, so I copied the flat bonus effect from Neuschwanstein. Parthenon should improve all military GP. I think of generals and admirals as the same unit... they should have been, really.

@Zaldron
Is the strategic resource the deciding factor for you between archers and chariots, or their place on the tech tree?

 

[mystikx21]

Thal, I was commenting that the text/civilopedia tip still reflects the percentage bonus that was originally intended. Ditto with Parthenon and admirals (just says generals).

Fixed both as:

<Row Tag="TXT_KEY_WONDER_WAT_PHRA_KAEW_HELP">
			<Text>+5 Gold and Culture from every Shrine and Temple.</Text>

<Update>
			<Where Tag="TXT_KEY_WONDER_STATUE_ZEUS_HELP" />
			<Set Text="Increases the power of Great Generals and Admirals. [NEWLINE] Provides a [ICON_TEAM_7] Great General." />
		</Update>

I think of generals/admirals as same also, but in some cases, it helps to make sure everyone else is on the same page and knows what the intent is.

Stable was still at 10% on ranged mounted units (also easy fix).

 

[Lazaroth]

When I still played alot, the only thing I found horse units good at was hit and run on archers/catapults (and equivalent). They were pretty much useless against most other things. Therefore I almost never built them. The exception was when playing as Arabia and their camel archer, which I built 100% of the time.

 

[Thalassicus]

@mystikx21
Civup automatically creates tooltips for buildings directly from the game data, so we don't need handwritten tooltips, except for very complex buildings (like Petra).

 

[Thalassicus]

Revised plan again:

• 20% for Mounted with Stable (was 10%).
• Chariots upgrade to Horsemen (was Knights).
• Chariot equal to Bowmen (was halfway between Archers and Bowmen).
• Horsemen 15% higher than swordsmen (unchanged).
• Knights 15% higher than longswords (was 10%).
• Chop Forest unlocks with Animal Husbandry (was Mining).
• Lumbermills unlock with The Wheel (was Iron Working).
• Villages unlock with Trade (was Pottery)
• Heroic Epic unlocks with Horseback Riding (was Iron Working).