How do you take advantage of horsemen rush?

[UknowsI]

Question: If you are able to kill a neighbour through an early horsemen rush, how do you best take advantage of the situation? Puppeting? Razing? Resettling?

The reason I ask is because I often feel like it's not worth it. Focusing on horsemen early will slow down your science and killing an enemy will only give you an advantage if you are able to efficiently use the land or capture a wonder. However horsemen are often too early to get any wonders, and holding or resettling is also often difficult at this point. I can see how it can be an advantage when you can clear a whole island for yourself, but this is not always the case.

Opinions? What do you do?

 

[Slowpoke]

The main gain of horse rush is you puppet cities and sell off their luxuries. You can easily make a solid thousand every 30 turns through the pillage and sales. Not to mention, on high diffculties, your neighbor is going to delare war on you anyways, so you may as well get the heads up on him. If you think you can pull it off, you use the gold and keep buying horses and try to pull a win, razing everything. Otherwise, you use the gold to buy settlers, maritime city state, etc, and keep your horses for defense until you get longswordsmen.

 

[qyll]

I get horses ASAP and kill my nearest neighbor, puppetting all his cities. I always take Honor and get early military tradition to make some super horsemen for later. I will occasionally raze cities if they're in terrible spots. If I get lucky, I'll nab Stonehenge. After that, I spam trading posts, get some economy techs, then go for chivalry. By now, my cash flow should be a solid 200 gpt in addition to selling open borders and luxuries. I start to pump out settlers and rushbuy coliseums in each one for a net +1 happiness. My science has never been slowed down because I spam trading posts and generate many great generals for golden ages. Once I get rationalism and +1 science per trading post, it's smooth sailing from there.

 

[UknowsI]

Research isn't slowed down too much, but without building horsemen you can usually build a library earlier and pop a great scientist or two for a slingshot of choice.

My problem with puppeting is that it will often give me more neighbours, which is more people to defend against over a bigger front. The economic advantage might very well be worth it, but big fronts can be hard to defend against the deity hordes. I think I'll try to play the same map with and without horsemen rush to compare the results. Horsemen can definitely be very powerful if used correctly, but I'm not so proficient with them yet.

What I base my observation on was mostly TheMeInTeam's Let's Play Japan game (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=394784). The horsemen rush didn't give him any advantage before the moment he conquered the enemy capital, but by that time he had sacrificed a lot of production. He was already behind in tech, and his teching was quite slow for an emperor game. For him it was worth it because he cleared his island and set up for a ICS which gave him a great boost, but it hurt his early game a lot which might not have been worth it if he had multiple neighbours.

 

[wurstburst]

I get horses early and go right for the kill. Puppet the closest neighbor (leaving him 1 city if possible, so he can settle some more puppets for me). I try to play with only 2 of my own cities. I don't buy social policies until Rationalism and then Order. After that, I dabble here and there (can usually buy SP throughout with only 2 settled cities).

Usually you can balance the unhappiness with the new cities luxuries. Go for construction when that becomes an issue.

Horses for early offense. Horses for early defense. Horses for doing your laundry. Heck, you can even eat the horses if they die.

 

[jaycuhbbb]

Hmm, I've been trying Deity and horseman don't seem to be as effective there. It may be a fluke, but both times computers were nearly to longswordsman by the time I would be in a position to rush. It is still doable of course with archers but it's hard to advance and not substain heavy losses against deity mass production. It feels like unless your neighbor is super close, it's difficult to advance on the AI before artillery. What does everyone else think?

 

[UknowsI]

My strategy is usually do defend in friendly lands with combined arms and then counter attack afterwards. I am not sure how well it would work on quicker speed though (I usually play epic speed). You don't really need artillery to break them. A strong unit composition such as longswordmen and catapults is viable, although it relies on favourable terrain. With artillery the terrain is of course not so important any more because of your range.

Most people seems to consider horsemen more powerful than other unit compositions, that's why I would like to learn how to use them effectively.

 

[Soronery]

Hmm, I've been trying Deity and horseman don't seem to be as effective there. It may be a fluke, but both times computers were nearly to longswordsman by the time I would be in a position to rush. It is still doable of course with archers but it's hard to advance and not substain heavy losses against deity mass production. It feels like unless your neighbor is super close, it's difficult to advance on the AI before artillery. What does everyone else think?

scout->worker(early farms are big)->Settle 3 cities. (maybe even 4)
Beeline into horsemen. No mining. No pottery. Just horsemen.
Have them all build horsemen.->attack when you have 3 (or 4). Japan can go with 2. They rest might need 3-4.

 

[Blitz47]

I have only won deity with horseman. However, I have only played 1 huge map game on settler difficulty and 1 large map game on settler difficulty because my computer is below the minimum spec, hence problems galore whenever I go beyond small size map.

Now, I "cheated" on deity by picking Greece. You really need at least 2-3 horseman, if not more when facing deity AI. When I only have 1 companion cavalry, I did not attack AI, instead, I was busy clearing barbarian camps to earn $$$ while waiting for my other CC to build or accumulate enough $$$ from barbarian camps to buy another CC.

You tag team the same AI unit, first horseman damages a unit, another horseman park next to it and get flanking bonus and kill off that AI unit. Retreat and heal if necessary. If you have 4 horseman, pair them up in 2's. Since only your first horseman is hurt badly, have the 1st horseman rest up and heal while the other horseman can continue on. Of course some other players just use instant heal, which is fine. This is why you want honor tree double XP to get all those promotions easier. In my 1 deity game, I simply chose the healing promotion, parking a CC with heal promotion and you get +2 HP per turn rather than 1, speeding up my recovery.

I pick honor tree when I play deity, warfare is everything. I have not tried deity with the new patch so I don't know how much has changed. Given how the new AI puppets really well, I will probably puppet the new cities. I have not played much game of map size greater than small due to machine limitation so....your mileage may vary.

 

[jaycuhbbb]

Yeah, puppets seem a bit TOO good! Previously they would build useless crap and that was the only reason to annex them. Now, they build everything a human would and focus on gold. Where was this dev when the rest of the team was making the AI?

 

[biohazard72]

scout->worker(early farms are big)->Settle 3 cities. (maybe even 4)
Beeline into horsemen. No mining. No pottery. Just horsemen.
Have them all build horsemen.->attack when you have 3 (or 4). Japan can go with 2. They rest might need 3-4.

Perfect. That's almost exactly what I do (except I'll settle an extra city and grab mining if I have a mining resource). I do build more than 4 horsemen (I shoot for 6-7) in order to keep the war train going in case I have some unforseen casualties, but I usually begin the war at the exact same point (3-4 horsemen).

Puppets seem to be the way to go, because they're a good economic boost without adding to SP cost, but it might be worth it to raze/resettle size 1 cities if you're not worried about the SP cost.

 

[Snapp]

My strategy is usually do defend in friendly lands with combined arms and then counter attack afterwards. I am not sure how well it would work on quicker speed though (I usually play epic speed). You don't really need artillery to break them. A strong unit composition such as longswordmen and catapults is viable, although it relies on favourable terrain. With artillery the terrain is of course not so important any more because of your range.

Most people seems to consider horsemen more powerful than other unit compositions, that's why I would like to learn how to use them effectively.

The reason why horsemen are more effective against the AI than those units is with the increased movement you can typically pick your battles better and go without losing any units at all.

You also get to the next cities faster due to the increased movement, making your whole conquest happen more quickly.

Horsemen are also the most powerful ancient era unit strength wise, when on the attack.

Horse tiles are also much more prevalent so the chances of you being in a range of a horse tile is much greater than iron if you went the swordsman route. If you commit to iron working and you get no iron then you are basically boned as far as rushing goes.

 

[Blitz47]

The reason why horsemen are more effective against the AI than those units is with the increased movement you can typically pick your battles better and go without losing any units at all.

You also get to the next cities faster due to the increased movement, making your whole conquest happen more quickly.

Horsemen are also the most powerful ancient era unit strength wise, when on the attack.

Horse tiles are also much more prevalent so the chances of you being in a range of a horse tile is much greater than iron if you went the swordsman route. If you commit to iron working and you get no iron then you are basically boned as far as rushing goes.

That's my problem with going the iron route on higher difficulty level. I know where the horse tiles are by simply research animal husbandry, which is low cost tech and tell me where to put my 2nd settler or perhaps my 1st city is lucky enough to have it.

Going for swordsman route is a huge gamble, it takes many turns to get iron technology just to see where the irons are. On deity difficulty, cpu grows like a weed, you gotta prune them quickly or else AI will widen the gap too much too quickly.

But, iron route is good in another way, the bottom 1/2 of the tech tree is filled with military units technology, swordsman & archers, later muskets and rifleman so you can keep AI at bay. I don't like the pikeman as much, which is part of the top 1/2 of the tech tree. Your mileage may vary, I just prefer to go with honor and horseman rush on higher difficulty. My own log reveals this, horseman is the #1 military units I built in terms of quantity, only settlers (my #1 most built unit), workers and workboats surpass the # of horseman built.

 

[Lormax]

But, iron route is good in another way, the bottom 1/2 of the tech tree is filled with military units technology, swordsman & archers, later muskets and rifleman so you can keep AI at bay. I don't like the spearman as much, which is part of the top 1/2 of the tech tree. Your mileage may vary, I just prefer to go with honor and horseman rush on higher difficulty. My own log reveals this, horseman is the #1 military units I built in terms of quantity, only settlers (my #1 most built unit), workers and workboats surpass the # of horseman built.

Spearmen are at the very bottom...

 

[Nunya]

He probably meant Pikemen.

 

[Blitz47]

Spearmen are at the very bottom...

my bad, I don't build spearman much, nor pikeman as I rely on horseman a lot, beat the AI before they beat you. I edited my post already.

 

[Nunya]

To be honest the spear line is fairly weak, considering how few mounted units thr AI builds (except unique units).

 

[Blitz47]

To be honest the spear line is fairly weak, considering how few mounted units thr AI builds (except unique units).

yeah, most of my spearman was a result of building warriors who found weapon upgrade. I built 3 spearman and 1 pikeman according to my log file. I have built over 100 horseman + companion cavalry.

This might change if I play MP, but I avoid MP so far due to my pathetic system spec and doubt my system can handle MP well