Hwacha are amazing!

[dankok8]

One of the better UU's in the game... A Catapult with +50% against melee.

Haven't had a lot of prior experience with this unit but played an Immortal game with Wang Kon the other day and Toku is the nearest neighbour. He expanded well to 9 cities by 600 BC when I attacked him. Cramped starting position and decided to go Construction to break out. 20 Hwacha and about 10 Swords/Axes to actually kill softened defenders. Took 27 turns to conquer him and lost 8 Hwacha and no other units. Needless to say, he had some Archers but a ton of promoted Axes/Swords that the Hwacha shredded. For comparison purposes, I decided to re-simulate the invasion but with stock Catapults instead of Hwacha. Basically before each attack, I would use World Builder to put in Catapults and remove the Hwacha. I lost 23 Catapults and 2 Swords and the war took 39 turns.

Just sort of eyeballing the odds, a regular Catapult would get 5-10% odds attacking cities while the Hwachas got 30-40%. Major difference! Against Archers there's obviously no difference but against Swordsmen and Axemen, the Hwacha removed 3 and 2.5 modified strength, respectively, and it results in way better odds. Generally when attacking cities in the classical era, the Swords/Axes are better city defenders than Archers anyways.

And another small difference in Hwacha's favor is the they are also far superior in attacking stacks outside of cities. They get 60-75% odds against melee units on flatland. In fact a few turns into the war, Toku sent a token counterattacking force of like 10 units and I shredded them with Hwacha when they parked on a flat tile next to one of his conquered cities. With normal Catapults, I have clearly losing odds and would have to sacrifice 2-3 to destroy or redline that stack.

 

[Gumbolt]

My army of HA will flank and destroy them all. Of course the AI is not that clever enough to build these. They get no bonus against catapults outside of city tiles. These fights will be 50/50. You get no collateral damage against siege units.

Overall in a balanced well defended stack the Korean UU is great. A few spear and HA can help.

Not shocked at how few losses you took with the UU. Lot of fun playing Koreans.

 

[Morningcalm]

That sounds great! I haven't played as Korea often in Civ IV just because the Protective trait seems boring to me. But the hwacha do sound like great fun to use.

 

[pmurnion]

Agreed. Just finished a Korea game on Deity. I actually took one of Henrik's scenarios from this forum but instead of playing the suggested civ (Sumer) I chose the oreans,solely beacuse their starting position was beside two elephants and II realised they have the catapult UU. So I thought these guys will be good for an elepult strategy. I didnt realise how great the hwacha is! I overran the Mongols, elephants shreedding their keshiks , but they had a lot of spear which would have been a problem but the hwacha shredded them. The interesting thing is tyour point about the open field combat. Catapults are usually a pure siege weapon, the hwacha is an all rounder. For an elepult strategy hwachas replace all the 'extra' ax/spear support. This is the beauty of this strategy and this civ - mass spam hwacha/elephants and you have your army (assault / siege / spear defense all in). I was using hwacha successfully against middle age weapons like mace and pike, really great unit.