Indians

[TylerDurdon]

Costs a fortune to upgrade Praeletorians/Spearmen all the way from there to macemen to riflemen to infantry to mech inf. It's way more cost effective to simply build new ones - upgrading only the ones with the best upgrades (Mech Inf with three star city attack!).

What I do is usually have my army of swordsmen and archers as city defense. When I get to riflemen I create new ones and send them out - 2 to a city - killing off the archers since they only have one promotion to two for the riflemen. Then I upgrade the promoted units in my army.

sorry.. I meant promoted... not upgraded.. my mistakes... its true that it cost a fortune to upgrade them all!!! but like you said.. you pick the best one... build new one and personnaly I uses the old stinky one to "lure" ennemy out of cities, speading them around their territory (human fishing bait ) well thats what I did in GOTM 1.

This brings up an interesting point. What to do with Swordsmen/Proetorians. I've found that their best use as swordsmen is taking barbarian cities and protecting against the odd early war.

Proetorians, otoh, are good for attacking other civs early in the game. It all depends, though, on how far away the enemy is. Too far and it takes too long for replacements to get to the front and you're stuck with a war of attrition. This is why I like the fast workers so much. They're always useful. Too many games I've played where my UU was useless due to circumstances such as enemy too far, stuck on an island, enemy is a step above me technologically thus obsoleting my UU. Never happens with Fast Workers.

I never said that Proetorians were better than Fast worker... but proterians last in MANY cases ways more than only 40 turns. Other UU dont even last 40 turns (Panzers, Red Coat, etc) making Proetorians with Immortals the most powerfull "war" UU in the game. For all the reason u mentioned: no obsolete, only UU usefull in peace time, I agree Indians UU are by far the most reliable

 

[botski]

WTH is UU and OCC. TYVM.

 

[onedreamer]

No they're not. The Indian workers walk faster, they don't work faster. Sure, walking faster means that you can walk on to a hill and start a mine the same turn, or you can walk in to a forest and start chopping on the same turn, unlike regular workers, but even that is a 1 turn bonus at best. Given the length of time it takes to build a mine (4 turns or more IIRC), it's at best a 25% bonus.

Not really... generally I group 2 workers together to road stuff, especially hills. 2 normal workers will need 2 turns to complete a road on a hill, while indian workers will need only 1 turn. That means 100% faster, not 25% ...

 

[botski]

WTH is UU and OCC. TYVM.

I found my answer, nevermind.

 

[Xavier Von Erck]

I really love playing with India. I always put the civ I have to random. Got India for my current game and you can really note the advantage it has with the lack of anarchy and the foot-speed king Workers. It's a never-ending UU, I love it.

 

[zeeter]

That lack of anarchy cannot be understated. There are something like sixteen civics in the game, plus the religion. There are various reasons to change them; new advance, switching to war, found religion. In Civ3 there were only two or three times that we would change governments. Usually I would shoot right to Republic, then to Democracy. Sometimes later in the game I'd go Communism if I wanted a war and had researched everything. That's two, maybe three periods of anarchy in the whole game unless something weird happened.
With Civ4 I find that I'm frequently changing civics. With changing situations I'm always going in there to pick the ones that serve me best. To do this without anarchy is a tremendous advantage. Especially on the harder games where you get a turn of anarchy for every civic that changes.

 

[csrjjsmp]

Their workers can outrun tanks....

 

[zeeter]

Their workers can outrun tanks....

They should outrun tanks. Tanks are slow. Modern Armor being the exception. I think they can get up to 40 mph in combat mode. IIRC, combat mode for WWII type tanks was up to 15 mph, and 20 for traveling.