longhouse (from the manual)

[Aardan]

I'm playing a game as iroquois right now. I have to see the longhouse does not get less useful as the game progresses. There are simply too many reasons to leave your forests standing. Right now I have about 60 gold from trade routes and I'm only spending 5 gold on roads to link up the few spots where the trees didn't connect. Not to mention that, my cavalry can go from one end of my empire to the other in 3 turns.

My starting area was a peninsula that had a lot of forests scattered about, with a hilly region to the north (germany) and a to the west a choke point leading into a huge area covered in forests. I put up three cities in my starting area, then rushed the forest area to the west to capture the city states there and establish some cities before the AIs could cut down the trees.

I'm combining the iroquois special ability, the mohawk warrior trait (which is preserved when you upgrade the unit) and the +33% home-field advantage in the tradition tree to maintain a super-bad-ass defense army.

This is my first game on King difficulty and none of the other civs have been able to make me lose ground in the west where all the trees are. Germany captured a city off of me once, but I hit them back hard, grabbing all of their iron cities and leaving them pretty much harmless.

tl;dr version: Iroquoise are pretty good, and the longhouse is awesome, you just have to be aggressive early on to get those forested areas before they get cut down.

I used The iroquois the other day and had a strong game mainly due to the Longhouse. Built trading posts and got hammers and money out of those forests. My only problem was with the trade routes. All my cities had touching borders yet it was not counting them as trade routes for some reason. When I finally build roads, it gave me the pop up that my cities are now connected through trade routes. Not sure why. Any ideas?

 

[Kordanor]

Well, I was wondering at first too, but the reason is quite simple:
Forest WITHIN Borders count as roads.
Therefore you only get the speed increase on forest within your borders.
And for the same reason the forest only counts as road within your borders.

So, if you have lets say a situation like this:

<City><Forest>|<Forest>|<Forest><City>
And the | represent your borders you will have to build a road in on the middle forest tile at first.
As soon as you expand your borders with this tile the forest will start to count as road and you can delete the road again.

I think this UA and the UB are pretty cool. The only problem is, that it is extremely situational. For SP this is not a big deal. If the starting position sucks you can just start over. But in multiplayer you basically lost your complete civ abilities by starting in an "empty" area with just two tiles of forest next to your city. The Mohawk ability however is only decent for defending.
The Civs aren't really balanced, but unfortunately I have to say that this isn't the only aspect of the game which wasn't thought through, but that's a different story.

 

[isau]

What is actually really great about the Iroqs is their forested cities become nearly impenetrable fortresses. This is because you can upgrade all units to use promotions for "Rough" terrain, so they always have the bonus. The units can also move in any direction quickly as if running along a road. You pay no maintenance for this. If somehow someone does conquer the city, they get no benefit from any roads you'd built. The bonus also works on "jungled" tiles and can be used to make pretty decent science cities in the center of uncleared jungles.

 

[Hurler64]

Hi gang,

Saw this posting and I could not resist commenting. I am currently playing a prince level game as the Iroquois on Marathon speed and I have to say it's the funnest game of CIV I have played to date.

I started on the coast surrounded by forest tiles with Ivory to my North and deer tiles all around. A little exploration uncovered that I was on a peninsula covered by 95% forest tiles. The peninsula was cut off from the main land by a river and an excessivly hilly area. At this point in the game I have control of the entire peninsula and share a tenuous border with the overly aggressive Aztec Empire. We have gone several rounds with me on top each time. I am am angling for a diplomatic victory so I am resisting the urg to wipe those annoying Aztecs off the map.

That being said I love playing the Iroquois when there is an abundence of forests around. It makes fighting a gorilla war that much more entertaining. In any case it's 150 BC and I am building long houses and lumber camps through out the empire. The next 2000 years should be really interesting.

Hurler.

 

[Kordanor]

Actually a diplomatic victory is only a faster "side effect" of conquering the world. If you just wipe out nations after they have conquered city states, you will gain their reputation for the whole game, basically making a victory pretty easy as you get votes for your victory and the benefits of the overpowered city states. To accerlate this you need to wait for the right time of course and until them all your defensive boni (speed in forest+hohawk strength in forest) might be valuable (well, enemies can just bypass, normally no need to attack them while in forest) but as soon as you start to attack other nations you don't have much profit of your defensive skills. Being offense is pretty much more effective, probably the only exception is a cultural victory.

While I like the feel of the Iroquis I think it's basically like you said: They are great in guerilla warfare.
But guerilla warfare is for nations which are dieing and want to survive as long as possible. It's not for nations which want to win.

 

[Countmonte8242]

I actually like the longhouse replacement, its not my favourite Ub though, that would be the floating gardens because I used to like my old lake strategy, settling on a coast with lakes near you, each one giving 3 food and 2 gold with lighthouse, with floating gardens they will give 5 food +2 gold, which makes them epic tiles, now if that ain't something uber cool, I don't know what is . In addition the floating gardens still gives the water mill bonus and +15% additional food. Its ace.

Does this actually work now? I played a game with the Aztecs the first week of release specifically to try this out. I got the +2 food on lakes from floating gardens, but the lighthouse didn't add an additional food to the square. So unless something has changed since then, you can only get 4 food from a lake as the lighthouse / floating garden effects don't seem to stack. Maybe it was a bug they fixed though.

 

[Countmonte8242]

The temple replacement makes sense and seems fair.
The Wat isn't too bad either but disables the option to get additional science from jungle spots (which are still kinda bad with 2 food or if possible on hill with 1 food 1 production with no way to be upgraded).

Not sure, but it sounds like you're saying you can't improve jungles. You can put trading posts on them and still get the science bonus for a 2 food 2 gold 2 science tile.

 

[Countmonte8242]

Two things would be cool to see that would make the Iroquois UB / UA allow for a truly different playstyle and feel.

1. Allow forests to grow into unimproved tiles the way they did in 4. The bigger the forest is, the faster it grows. I don't see why they shouldn't. The game takes place over thousands of years, forests should grow.

2. Longhouse gives a fractional food bonus from forest squares as well. I dunno how small it'd have to be so as not to be op, but it'd give the improvement a bit more than the marginal benefit it has now over the workshop. And it'd make sense, the Iroquois should be able to get more food out of a forest. Again, it'd have to be fractional so as to not be OP, between 0.25-0.5 extra food per forest or something.