Janissaries vs longbows?

[Nescitus]

I typically struggle at Monarch, but for once I got a good game. I rolled Suleiman with a perfect starting location (capital had corn, gold AND gems, 2nd city got access to bronze) and found myself on a continent with Pacal, Elizabeth and Justinian. Pacal, poor chap, was ridiculously close and still expanded towards me, while building Stonehenge. The last Axe attacking his capitol earned me a great general, who created a super-attacker. This super-unit got lucky again, finding a big, fat English city with just one archer to defend it

In the meantime, Justinian proved himself to be a decent AI - expanded, teched, occasionally competed for wonders, becoming close second in both land and population. The chief difference between our empires is that I skipped most of mediaeval techs in favour of Liberalism and Gunpowder.

Now for the question: would You advocate going with janissaries vs his longbows? I have perfect time to prepare, being set up for two consecutive Mausoleum-powered golden ages (Taj Mahal finishes in 1 turn and there is a superfluous great prophet waiting).

 

[Gwaja]

I am not too fond of janissaries really since I don't usually use musketmen for warfare. They are nice unique units though with good bonuses against just about every type of units, but I prefer the Oromo Warriors which upgrades nicely into rifles with those extra Drill promotions.

 

[AbsoluteZero]

If you're going to go as far as gunpowder and nationalism, you might as well go to military tradition and get cuirassiers for 12 strength 2 movement gunpowder units which will definitely beat longbows.

If you really must use janissaries then I suppose they should do ok vs longbows, provided you have some siege to take down the defenses.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Jans are nasty on slow speeds but hard to use on regular ones. You have until the AI makes cuirassers; until that point the only thing they have that wins straight up is muskets, and

1. nothing upgrades to muskets
2. AI is awful with using muskets offensively and rarely builds them under that script
3. Muskets aren't materially better than longbows vs siege

That's the rub though; this UU still needs a lot of siege help and that causes it to suffer in utility on faster speeds. Cuirassers and better flank the hell out of it and in medieval war it just takes the place of the longbow/pike combo in stack/city defense; it can hit defenders harder than low CR maces but not materially harder than cr II + maces to make much difference. They're awful against units behind culture d.

You could try a novel spy + jans approach but their speed is a letdown there; that strategy is typical of say cavalry, not 1moves.

 

[NihilZero]

The great strength of Janissaries is their very early draftability. However, if you have already beaten two AIs you probably have a respectable empire and adequate production potential and are not depending on the draft to save your skin. But yeah, the problem is you need siege, and when you have siege the dfference between Janissaries and regular muskets - or indeed any medieval unit - is pretty irrelevant.

Also, the chances are that if you are asking this now, you probably don't have a Globe City draft farm set up ahead of time, making the sudden power spike that a Janissary draft can give you somewhat less than sudden if you need to build theatres and the globe.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Actually the differences between medieval units is quite glaring, probably the largest until modern wars as the hard counters are really hard and base str variance is comparatively wild to most other eras. For example:

1. Pikes or noobyphants are crucial if the opposition has or will have knights
2. xbows are technically your best anti-melee, but are rarely critical unless you are attacking HRE
3. Longbows are extremely cost-effective dedicated defense; a smaller % of your hammers will go into defending in this era
4. Trebs don't have anywhere near the field presence of cannons, even if you compare each to their respective contemporary units
5. Maces as dedicated city attacks with CR II or III can and often should be used as can openers ahead of siege in situations where they have markedly better odds (and this is reasonably frequent). When using cats over trebs maces do even more heavy lifting
6. Knights are cover vs enemy xbows, longbows, muskets and carry all the normal benefits of 2movers.

The problem is how muskets fit in here. They begin a transition into a time period where base str and counters are far less drastic (renaissance). They beat most medieval units in the field but do lose to knights (which are available earlier) and most things on defensive terrain. They're not much better defensively than longbows but really don't carry the offensive firepower of maces. Their ability to ignore gunpowder isn't strong enough to forgo siege.

Jans take over quite a few of the medieval units' roles and as such can be used to replace them in force of #'s (as you mentioned, probably via draft). However, their window is small and their advantage not much greater than simple experience in the era. At least with say oromos you have an advantage that will spill into future eras.

While the civ that commands them is worse overall, I actually find even samurai to be superior to jans, since they take over a way more usable niche.

 

[whats a navy]

I love musket + cannon war. If janissaries are complemented by cannons then they would absolutely destroy AI and they're relatively easy to build because of draft and treb upgrade.

 

[NihilZero]

^ But again, if you have cannon Janissaries aren't important. You will be flattening everybody regardless, even if you just use axes. @ TMIT - this offensive mopping up is what I'm talking about. When you have pulverised the defence with siege weapons, it doesn't matter much what you use to put the poor bastards out of their misery. In the field and for stack defence, things get more complicated, I agree. The vast majority of combat versus the AI will be attacking their cities, though.

Also, limited as Janissaries are, I would argue that they do enjoy a decent window as far as longevity is concerned, because you can get them very early. Compared to other offensive liberalism strategies involving steel or rifling, the set up time is very short - only gunpoweder is needed outside the lib path, and if you don't want to draft you could even take that with lib to get them even faster. Suleiman is PHI so he's well positioned for a ludicrously early bulbed Lib and you can field Janissaries for a long, long time.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I think yes, attacking makes sense. Bring a lot of trebs, though. But your stack will be pretty well immune to anything they throw at you. You can probably just suicide a couple of trebs at a city, then clean up with the Jannissaries, rather than having to bombard, if you want.

 

[huerfanista]

I've been playing around a bit with a Sulieman jan bulbing strategy that I wasn't aware of until AbsoluteZero demonstrated it in his xbow rush video: using GSs to bulb along the MC/ machinery/ GP line. It works something like this: you beeline alpha, math, and aesthetics while avoiding fishing (which opens up the sailing/ calendar/ compass line), meditation (which open philosophy @ CoL), theo and CS (which open the paper/ edu line). After aesthetics, you can bulb MC and machinery (600BC is easy to achieve here). You need to trade/research feudalism, then research guilds. Once guilds is in, a GS will bulb GP either completely or with a turn or 2. If you've avoided contruction, trade for it now and your next 2 GSs will bulb engineering and chemistry (again, either completely or within a turn or 2). I've gotten GP + engineering by the 100-200AD timeframe on emperor, and I'm not a skilled player.

Sounds great, but in practice I've not been able to leverage it effectively. For starters, you're giving up CS (bureau), lit (shot at the GLib, although probably easily tradeable for the HE, but also the NE with its gpp-boosting power), phil (yet another powerful boost to gpps, unless you can manage to build the SP to unlock pacifism). You have to give up seafood, which often provides the best gp-farm sites, and if you roll a seafood start you'll be giving up a lot. OTOH, it's easy to keep your gpp pool free from GA pollution and Sulieman's PHI trait can get you plenty of GSs if you focus on this early, especially if you can trade for CoL to open caste and have a couple of good gp farms. It also requires you to stay relatively small until you've gotten the prereqs out of the way (alpha, math, aesth). YMMV.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea that I thought I'd throw out there. Unlike some of the exotic bulbing/oracle strategies out there (ie, the "edu from oracle" strat, etc) it doesn't require any wonders (although it's quite possible to follow a "oracle feudalism" path which is a big boost if you can get it - it provides nearly ironclad early defense, and opens CoL for an early caste, although it delays the alpha/math/aesth prereqs a bit). As always, there are some big trade-offs. I've yet to see a significant gain vs going for cuirassiers/cavalry for a big renaissance breakout.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Seems kind of complicated - why not just go CS/paper, bulb most of education and research Gunpowder? then you don't have to ignore fishing/sailing? You'll have bureau and unis - can bulb philo, too, if you want, and pick up pacifism, too.

 

[pi-r8]

The main problem with any sort of fast musket strategy is that muskets (or jannissaries) just aren't that good against longbows. They'll do ok, but not good enough to smash through the defences of a high-level AI like you need. If you want to use muskets or janissaries against longbows, you'll need nationalism so that you can draft overwhelming numbers of them.

 

[vranasm]

I once did jans+cats war with Mehmed. Wasn't that bad.
That bonus against archer units is somewhat useful, but I can't see doing all out muskets war like you do with cuirs, which are close by at the time frame

 

[Nescitus]

Thanks everyone for the advice. Finally I waited for Cuirassires to make a mixed stack, and took half of Justinian's empire in 10 turns, then suing for peace before economy crashed (he had a Statue of Zeus). The border was close to his cities, so there was no problem with speed difference between the units.

 

[Higher Game]

If you like to liberalism --> steel, you might grab cannon quickly if you can manage to get economics first too. You don't have to if you have enough hammers, though, since janissaries work fine after defense is blasted down. Maybe give up 1 trebuchet/city for a little extra help. If you're loaded with commerce but hammer poor, the economics race and nationalism start to look really good.

The janissary actually has a really long lifespan against AIs that lack horses. The worst you might see are grenadiers, and I've used pinch knights against them. Rifles end their era, but you might still finish off an AI that gets rifling if they're badly damaged and you have cannon.

The cuirassier might be a good unit, but it's on an unneeded tech, requires horses, and doesn't like pikemen.

 

[JammerUno]

Jans are no oromos, but if you're planning rifle/cannon warring, and your ottoman, it's usually better to go GP>steel>rifling and start your warring with jans/cannon and upgrade to rifles when you get there.

Oromos on the other hand, are just plain awesome.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

With Jans you really needed to have Lib'd Steel, you should be doing this around 600 AD on Monarch. Then you can crush your continent.

 

[G-Max]

Jans are an excellent contribution to any medieval or renaissance-era Stack of Death.

 

[huerfanista]

Seems kind of complicated - why not just go CS/paper, bulb most of education and research Gunpowder? then you don't have to ignore fishing/sailing? You'll have bureau and unis - can bulb philo, too, if you want, and pick up pacifism, too.

Bulbing the edu route forces you to research GP manually and furthermore is blocked from bulbing expensive military techs like mach, engineering, chem (instead you're forced to bulb things like compass, PP, SM first). And if the goal is war, unis are not what you want to be building at that time. Where's your seige? If you're going to trade edu for eng, you'll be bombarding castles.

Bulbing up the mach/GP line gives you Jans, knights, trebs, and 2 workshop improving techs (guilds + chem) for increased production. You can get engineering long before the AIs do, so you're not running up against castles in your first war.

As I said, I haven't really made this work all that well. It's definitely a niche strat, and may very well not be worth the effort. But it could very well be due to my own shortcomings in implementing it.

 

[Gwaja]

I think I will try this method with Sully or Mehmed sometime on Emperor. It could be interesting and I need to take my games with a different approach.