Knights of the round table strategy

[Addicted]

Through repeated experimentation it has proved extremelyrewarding to have a dozen veteran horsemen (and 1000 gold) resting, in cities that have barracks, awaiting upgrade to knights the moment chivalry is discovered.

Preferably this happens before your nearest rivals have any, nonetheless these dozen early knights, if used wisely, soon become Elite, capture numerous cities, create Great Leaders and generally kick start a highly successful war. One which need only end when you want it to, when you have enough cities and on your terms.

Naturally I am not suggesting that one only requires 12 units. Obviously they work best when supported by a well rounded military and one would probably want to continue creating more units (especially more knights). The point I am making is merely one of timing…Having a dozen or so of them the moment you discover the advance (rather than waiting for them to be built (trained?) is incredibly advantageous in my experience.

The rest of this document assumes :
That you agree knights are great, ideally you believe using your knights well is a fundamental part of any successful game.

That you have either tried this tactic yourself already, or plan to.

Okay, so we are agreed, damn useful. My problem is this : The three civilizations that do not have knights. Their equivalents are fine, lovely in fact, especially the Chinese Rider – love it to death. But Horsemen do not upgrade to Riders. Horsemen only upgrade to knights – if you can’t build knights you can’t upgrade Horsemen.

I feel that the whole point of the Horsemen unit is its upgrading potential. Horsmen-Knights-Cavalry. Wonderful. Rider, Elephants & Samurai all upgrade to Cavalry as if they were knights. They are treated in all ways as if they are that civilizations equivalent to knights except that horsemen do not upgrade to them.

To me this is a mistake. Horsemen should upgrade to knights or equivalent in my opinion. I am not suggesting it was an accident by the makers of the game, I assume they have done it intentionally, their theory probably being that it would give those three civs too strong an advantage. By I do not agree.

I also feel strongly about the continuity in a role-play sense. Take the Chinese for example, by making their unique unit the Rider, we are suggesting that at this time in history they have mastered mounted combat…so surely their current stock of horsemen would be retrained (upgraded) and go off to cause havoc.

Anyway…I am sure you catch my drift…if you haven’t tried it, please do…its fun…once you have experienced using these dozen or so early knights…then tell me that you don’t think the Chinese etc. should be able to also enjoy it…

Please vote, only once you have tried the tactic out…if we get enough weight behind this movement, who knows…they may be sweet enough to patch it for us.

The vote is this :

I believe Horsemen should upgrade to knights OR equivalent.

Or :

I believe the Chinese, Japanese & Indians already have something better than knights and thus should have that set against them by Horsemen being pointless to them.

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

hmmmmm

I`ll try out a game with a non-knight civ... never played any of them since i want my GA earlier or want other civ adavantages like the panzer.....


but I guess you are right, they should upgrade...

 

[History_Buff]

They probably should ubgrade, but its too hard to program. The editor as it stands cannot support this. The editor will have to be upgraded first.

 

[Dillo]

Huh? that can be done in the ed.Last time I looked anyway. All you have to do is set the "Upgrades too" from none to knights, and set the prereqresite.Whats so impossible about that?

 

[BillChin]

With my style of play, I find upgrades to be of minor game value. A player can almost as easily have a bunch of cities producing Cathedrals or Banks or something and then switch them to knights the moment Chivalry is discovered. Producing a similar effect for the three civs that can not upgrade.

I favor a strategy entirely based on Horsemen conquest, so I think they are the best units of the Ancient age. Later in the game, Horsemen are still useful as garrison troops and pickets. Backed with catapults or cannon, horsemen can still take cities guarded by pikemen and musketmen. Without them, horsemen can still scout and pillage, so they are far from useless.

As to the question of how the game should be, I vote for an upgrade path for all units, though some units may require more refitting than others and cost a bit extra. Tough to turn a Ironclad into an Aegis cruiser. How I think of it, is the men get new equipment and training. While I am at it maybe allow army and navy units to switch branches for an additional cost and loss of elite status, though that is really stretching it.

This situation looks easy enough to fix with the editor for those who really need this minor fix. While you are at it, provide an upgrade path from swordsmen and the War Elephants etc.

 

[OneInTen]

The problem isn't upgrading FROM a UU. It's upgrading TO a UU.

The problem is you specify what a unit upgrades to. Unfortunately this means to upgrade your UU you need to make a complete set of duplicate units below it that only that civ can build so it can run that upgrade chain all the way to the UU.

Firaxis claim that not being able to upgrade to a UU was a design decision. While that idea has some merit, in that it stops you building cheaper units then buying the upgrade to UU, I don't really see why it's any different to doing that with any other unit. Thus I think the real reason is they stuffed up and coded the game with a limitation that units can only upgrade along one path, thus leaving them no option when it comes to UU. Woops.

 

[Psychlone]

Part of the problem with this is the whole unique unit thing. The civs that have UU's in the knight spot sort of screw this all up. To allow horsemen to upgrade into the UU's would require creation of additional horseman units, each able to be built only by one civ, set to upgrade to that civ's UU. To allow the other civs to upgrade from horsemen to knights would be incredibly advantageous to those other civs. While I don't know if it would be a crushing advantage, a human player building a strategy around such a "knight rush" would certainly be able to make that advantage work hugely in his favor.

Nobody can upgrade to their UU, but in most cases that's not a problem because the UU usually comes off a brand-new advance and is something of a major leap forward, and as such, those units should be constructed from scratch.

If you have horsemen left over when you get chivalry, just stash them awhile longer as garrison troops. They don't upgrade to knights, but they DO upgrade to cavalry, just as knights and all the UU's in the knight position do.

As for upgrading swordsmen and such... I too have found the idea tempting, but after giving it a lot of thought, I think having "dead end" offensive units is not a bad idea. However, I could see allowing swordsmen and longbowmen, etc, to upgrade to riflemen or infantry. This would still give them a fairly lengthy period where they were obsolete, which I think is valid. Think of them as poorly-equipped "national guard" troops that eventually get brought up to modern specs. I still think this would give an advantage to human players, however, because the computer seems loathe to upgrade units even where possible. Surely we've all seen warriors running around well after even swordsmen are obsolete, and the computer just uses them as attrition troops or military police for happiness purposes. Even if you edited those units to be upgraded eventually, I don't think the AI would use that function much.

 

[Selous]

or u could make it so that these civs can make knights (as is now they cannot build knights) .... so u can upgrade your horsemen to "almost" as good as your UU ... .... yea and being able to upgrade to cav and not knight equivilent isnt very realistic ... but yea .... would have been nice for firaxis to fix it ..... so that japaneese have there own horsemen as well (looks the same and same stats) but that can be upgraded to samuri ... and so on and so on

 

[Zouave]

Originally posted by Dillo
Huh? that can be done in the ed.Last time I looked anyway. All you have to do is set the "Upgrades too" from none to knights, and set the prereqresite.Whats so impossible about that?

Nothing.

For historical accuracy I made Longbowmen 4.3 and civ-specific to the English. I therefore allowed archers to be upgradeable to pikemen. When pikemen become obsolete archers CAN be upgraded to musketmen.

No problem.

Check to be sure horsemen and mounted warriors have ZOC's. I checked after installing the patch and they did NOT.

Oh yes, if you care anything about realism, REMOVE the airlift function from all armor, horse, and war elephants (!). They never did - and could never - airlift.

 

[SirPleb]

I agree, Addicted!

I only discovered while playing the current GOTM that Horsemen could NOT be upgraded to the Chinese UU. I was extremely disappointed. I would far rather have NO UU at all than have this limitation. I found myself really really wanting to just, please, be able to upgrade my Horsement to Knights, I'd be completely happy with just plain old Knights and have no special unit at all rather than have the UU with this limitation...

 

[Moulton]

While it would be advantageous to have your horsemen upgraded, it breaks the UU. If horsemen upgrade to the appropriate UU, then all units appropriate should also upgrade to that UU.
Leave it alone. I have played the Japanese quite successfully, loved the samauri. made armies of them. When you see the chivalry discovedry coming, simiply make sure you have units building. You can easily change the build order to Samauri, etc, and Have them within a turn or so.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

All you need to do is open the editor, choose units, choose Knight, and allow Chinese, Japanese, etc. to build Knights. Then, horsemen will upgrade to Knights, and the civs will still be able to build their unique unit. Both the unique unit and the Knights will then upgrade to Cavalry.

 

[OneInTen]

Of course you can airlift horses - they take racing horses in planes all the time. Why are warhorses any different in this regard?