Macemen and crossbowmen

There are a couple of points that've never been too clear to me.
They are about Macemen and crossbowmen.

Ok, macemen need civil service, but they both need machinery. In the end, they always become available at the same time.
I don't know why macemen need machinery (it doesn't even sound logical). They could be enabled by civil service only, thus creating completely different tech paths for these two units (like as for knights).

Secondary, required resources are "funny". Crossbowmen need iron (why???), while macemen need either iron or copper.
Macemen are stronger than crossbowmen, so they should have more building limitations than the others; they wear iron armors and use iron maces. Besides, Crossbowmen could also be built with copper only; they don't seem to wear iron armors, and their weapons are made with wood (and maybe a little amount of metal).
I swap their requirements, enabling crossbowmen with either iron or copper, and macemen with iron only.

These two little changes would drastically change the middle ages game. Crossbowmen would be easier to build, and would be enabled by a completely different tech path than macemen. In addition, macemen would pay their superior strength with an higher resource requirement.

 

I have always just put things like this down to the creators huffing paint thinner instead of actually thinking such things through... Like Airships...

 

It`s because the maceman are considered a attacking unit and the crossbowman are primarily a defensive unit.

As you probably know it is extremely annoying when you don`t have a proper counter against the units your enemy throw at you. For instance you will be in big trouble if you only have archers to defend against swordsmen.

Therefore the developers *balance* things out, in this case they are forcing you to tech further in order to get a proper advantage. It is the same with cavalry that with BTS require rifling.


I think it`s OK.

 

@ViterboKnight

A bronze mace would still bang a head just because of the sheer weight , but a bronze x-bow arch would simply bend when pulling the string....

But maces needing machinery .... I agree

 

I askend myself too why it does need machiney too. My guess is, its because that Chain-thingie they are using (is something like this even called mace ) Looks really complicated

 

A bronze mace doesn't work too well when used on a guy wearing iron armor.

 

The AI always gets airships really early and hammers me.

 

I changed Airships to require Physics + Combustion (without an engine it's just a balloon). This means that the natural counter to an airship (the fighter) is only ONE tech away with FLIGHT.

 

Nope, it's actually a Mourning Star (or Morning depending who you ask). A mace is a stick with a big thing on the end, most often shown as a spiked metal ball. Move the ball to the end of a chain, that's a Mourning Star. Add more than one chain/ball and it becomes a Flail.

...on topic, I have always thought it a little silly for macemen to require machinery. Not sure how I would change it, though.

 

I did this too for a while but removed the change again... Doing this is basicly the same as deleting the Airship from the game...


Yes - Flail was a word i had in mind, but couldn't remember

 

It's about a 10-second tweak in the Civ4UnitInfos.xml if it really bugs you... highlight "TECH_MACHINERY" and replace it with "NONE".

 

Oh, I know how I *can* change it I just meant that I'm not sure simply removing that pre-requisite is the most appropriate and still balanced solution to the "problem".

 

Talking about Macemen needing a larger build requirement they HAVE one, its called Machinery. If you beeline Beuro you still don't have your Macemen because you lack the secondary build requirement forcing you to tech back. You don't need Beuro for X-Bows and can do just fine without constructing Macemen at all.

 

the idea of removing the requirement for machinery is good, however i would then add the requirement for metal casting, otherwise you could have macemen without even requiring iron working... i think

 

of course, the exact definition of these differs depending who you ask (and the region).

A flail could have a single ball... and a morning star, while it probably has a chain, may not. Typically, though I would agree that a mace probably never has a chain!

As for the reason to have machinery? Maybe this has more to do with the armor needed for macemen than their weapons? I dunno.

 

Bronze is harder than iron. (Just thought I'd mention that).

 

I don't understand the machinery req, but the xbows requiring iron is okay with me. If xbows were that much easier than maces to get, the game would become even more stalemate because it is that much easier to provide a hardounter for maces, the main attacking unit of that period.

 

Thing is, even if crossbows were easy to get, properly upgraded horse archers eat them for breakfast, along with anything outside of spearmen from the pre-macemen period... Though a spearmen/crossbowmen stack is pretty much impossible to take down on even close to even resources. The downside of that for the builder is that it's pretty offensively lackluster, so they're dumping a ton of resources for the privilege of getting to sit in their territory and twiddle their thumbs - safely.

 

1) Crossbows are stronger than Macemen. Better than 75% combat odds, before any modifications, whether attacking or defending.

2) Bronze is only harder (sometimes) than wrought iron, not cast iron.

 

I always thought of macemen as representing "general medieval infantry", which used all sorts of weapons, rather than specifically being macemen. Because really, it makes not sense at all to have your entire army armed with maces (wouldn't they lose to swordsmen?). So, if you think of it that way, it makes sense for macemen to require machinery, since a lot of medieval equipment required some fairly complex machinery to build.