Most useless unit?

Musketmen are quite formidible with the protective trait. I have launched succesful attacks on marathon speed with regular musketmen and completely annihilated the AI with janisarries.

Explorers are very useful in multiplayer games, but completely suck in SP.

I rarely ever build air units, since I am usually going for space victory by that time. It just takes to long to get to flight when I could already have done major damage with infantry, tanks, and marines. However, they can be useful in very tight modern era games.

That leaves the three most useless units: Ironclad, carrier, and machine gunner. I never build any of these, except the ironclad occasionaly to guard sea resources (its only use). Air units are not useful enough to even justify building carriers, so they get my vote for the worst unit.
 
Charles 22 said:
So what would you say 1 fighter unit is roughly the equivalent of? 10 fighters?

The U.S produced over 300 000 aircraft during WWII...

I'd estimate that one fighter unit equals a WWII fighter group, around 200 planes.
1 carrier might be more than 1 ship too.

Ill agree that musketman aren't all crap. Besides, one can beeline for gunpowder while bypassing longbowmen too. However I would always in this circumstance move on to chemistry directly. But in case I needed a few techs to get that, I might build a few.

Machinegunners - you might find a use for 1-2 in an empire

Carrier - never built, but they might have a certain use too. If naval combat was more realistic, or true to real-world practises it would of course be one of the best units. Naval combat is sadaly still a joke - to stop enemy shipping you need to form a SOLID barrier on the SEA. If they ever made a battle of britain scenario it would end quite differently from what happened in real life...Germans could simply sail past the spread-out fleet (or mabye hammer one square with bombers + one destroyer) and then happily sail past and unload 20 divisions on british soil. Wonder how they managed to avoid sea-zones of control and passive interdiction in the game.

Ironclad - hm Ive built one, when I had circumcision bonus. Still slow and it was painful to see the juicy enemies withdraw to open seas and taunt me. Yeap, these get my vote. Also somewhat because they had little impact in real world history (apart from being the forerunner to battleships/dreadnaughts...hm thats actually a big impact).
 
Hmm...I must say this thread is actually very useful, though I thought it was not when I first read it. As has been said by many, all these units have great utility in the right situation, but realizing how short the useful life of musket men is has saved me a lot of time and gold. I used to use Explorers in Civ3 as quick sacrificial pillagers of key resources or sometimes in a pillaging stack to cut off the capital from the rest of the target AI. There extra movement allowed them to pillage and then run back to the slow moving stack. Cutting all trade to the capital would end all foreign trade of strategic resources, but I don't know if this still works in Civ4. Anybody know?
 
Ironclad's suck... I once had a frigate attacking then retreating out of my shore line bombing my city repeatedly until my on frigates appeared on the screen...
I think carriers have a purpose when you’re on a continental map and separated by oceans. The point is to get two or three attacks on enemy transports and escorts then sink them with your healthy fleet before they can land on your shore... this also give you a chance to preposition your troops of they manage to get on shore.
 
If you're going for a spaceship victory, you may want to put off researching astronomy till the last moment, because it obliterates the Colossus (and Scientific Method behind it obliterates the Great Library, so you may want to put off researching that path).

In THAT situation, where you are very advanced but don't have galleons or frigates, ironclads are your only defence on the sea. I played this way in GOTM 10, and I can attest that it is a great pleasure to blow a wooden ship out of the water with an ironclad. I should note that they wouldn't be much use against a human opponent, since the galleons and frigates could simply sail outside the edge of your cultural border, and only enter it when they get an opportunity to plunder some fish or drop off some units. But against the AI they are effective.
 
I like the ironclad. For me, naval warfare tends to be "facing all the enemy frigates who want to pillage my workboats while my army smashes holy hell out of them on land" or just "send out a massive lightly-defended fleet that declares war just offshore, dumps masses of units next to a major city, then makes a run for home followed by the soon-to-be-pillaging frigates". That's where ironclads are damn useful, because they don't even need to move very much and they're more economical than just frigate-v-frigate attrition. I've used them quite a bit.
And of course if Ragnar gets his hands on them, 4 or 5 movement ironclads are pretty nice :D

My vote for most useless has to go to the poor old jaguar. I LOVE the very similar Gallic Warrior, but I have utterly failed to do anything much with the jag. There's a VERY small window where the no-resource thing means a rush might work if the enemy hasn't connected copper, but it only really takes a single axeman to stop them dead in their tracks. You're still going to need horses or copper for dealing with axemen (including barbarian axemen), which kind of defeats the resourcelessness thing. And how often do you not get copper, iron OR horses anyway? Sure you can also rush them straight out of captured cities, but any decent assault is going to involve combat engineers very quickly building roads to the front lines anyway. The unpillageability is nice, but jags+archers are barely going to stop mounted units and especially axes from going through your empire like a hot knife through butter anyway.
Unlike Gallics with Guerrilla, Woodsman II doesn't help the jag that much because they really just don't have the strength to properly exploit it.
Oh yeah, and if you beeline Iron Working, you can pretty much say goodbye to any chances of an early religion too.
Worse, if you beeline Code of Laws to get the earthshatteringly-good Sacrificial Altar (which I think is a better tactic for Monty), you'll just about be at the point where you could really use the extra punch of the swordsman against their cities. The cheapness almost works against them too, since you lose a bunch of production (and effort) if you micromanage production to use two population per whip. I once made a custom Monty without an early UU, and he was a ferocious thing to behold once those altars were up.
It's a real shame because they look so cool, especially with those animations.
 
Submarines are crap. Their counterunits (destroyers) are extremely common and move faster, and they lack the bombardment value of destroyers and battleships.
 
Hell, any naval unit that can't carry troops is pretty much worthless. I mean, as long as there is no real blockading and transports are completely safe while docked in a city (or moving between cities in a single turn), warships are almost completely pointless. Frigates or battleships bombarding a city is nice sometimes, but rarely matters and is a huge investment to make it anywhere near effective. Getting your fishing nets pillaged is annoying, but that's usually all it is; an annoyance. The replacement cost of the workboat is considerably less than the cost of the warship you'd have to build to protect it.
 
On the other hand, try running and supplying a transcontinental invasion or playing on archipelago with no ships...

As for fishing boats, it's not just the hammers for the boat you're protecting, it's the food and health they supply during the turns they'd otherwise be down.
 
On the other hand, try running and supplying a transcontinental invasion or playing on archipelago with no ships...
Well, you can't do it with no ships. But, it can certainly be done, and rather easily I might add, without any warships.

As for fishing boats, it's not just the hammers for the boat you're protecting, it's the food and health they supply during the turns they'd otherwise be down.
Then, if you prefer, build the replacement ahead of time. You're still out fewer hammers than if you'd built a warship simply for protection.
 
I do like to be able to move fresh troops to the enemy continent without getting them sunk on unescorted galleons/transports.

Also, if an enemy boat comes and sinks your fish and camps on it for the duration of the war as they like to do, you are out 3 food per turn for the duration of the war, say over 25 turns; 75 food is worth more than the price of a warship before even taking the replacement fishing boat into account.
 
I know it's been said a lot by now, but Explorers.

Which is a shame. I'd really like to use Explorers because they seem like they'd be amazingly useful REAL EARLY IN THE GAME, but who the hell runs across undeveloped land of any real size by the time you get Compass technology? Even as Carthage, I don't develop Compass until well into the Classical Age, sometimes even the Rennaisance.

Explorers should have been made available with horseback riding, IMHO. They'd still be rarely used, unless you were a horse-loving civ, but at least they'd have a use.
 
Also, if an enemy boat comes and sinks your fish and camps on it for the duration of the war as they like to do, you are out 3 food per turn for the duration of the war, say over 25 turns; 75 food is worth more than the price of a warship before even taking the replacement fishing boat into account.

Even worse, a couple of enemy ships hanging around one of your coastal cities can completely cut off ALL coast/sea tiles, resulting in starvation for a sea-dependent city. Moreover, you can use the same tactic on your enemy, planting a couple of ships in their waters to slow or reverse their city growth.

In my current game, where 2/3 of my cities depend on water tiles for much of their food AND commerce (financial/colossus), allowing enemy triremes to enter my waters would have been disastrous.

I haven't built a single transport vessel as yet, but the production of triremes and caravels to achieve naval superiority has been a vital part of my war strategy. These ships have helped to keep my cities profitable and whip-ready, gained vital information on enemy troop numbers and movements, and blockaded enemy cities to starve them (which, as well as reducing their commerce and production, makes the resistance disappear more quickly once they're taken).
 
If you're going for a spaceship victory, you may want to put off researching astronomy till the last moment, because it obliterates the Colossus (and Scientific Method behind it obliterates the Great Library, so you may want to put off researching that path).

In THAT situation, where you are very advanced but don't have galleons or frigates, ironclads are your only defence on the sea. I played this way in GOTM 10, and I can attest that it is a great pleasure to blow a wooden ship out of the water with an ironclad... against the AI they are effective.

i'd never thought of that! i often put off astonomy if my economy is doing okay (since it does limit some trading opportunities), and sci method, for those reasons and for monasteries. great idea, thanks!
 
maybe....in my opinion
modern armor and mechanized infantry

because you never be able tech to it -_-'
 
If you're going for a spaceship victory, you may want to put off researching astronomy till the last moment, because it obliterates the Colossus.

Make this decision carefully...the increased trading from Astronomy can add up to a ton of extra commerce. If your cities are all trading domestically because you conquered your continent and don't have Astronomy, you could be really hurting your research rate.

Also, if you end up researching a tech you could have picked up trading with someone across the globe, that's just throwing beakers away. Even if the civs across the ocean won't trade a tech with you, it becomes cheaper to research that tech simply because you have met them.

The Colossus bonus is very simple and visible, but Astronomy is usually worth more if you add up all the side effects.
 
I'd vote to take machine guns off the candidates for "most useless unit" title. Previously, I had always ignored them and bee-lined to get Infantry, which I thought were superior in every regard. Following some tips from another thread, I built some in my recent game and they made quite a difference. In particular, they greatly improved the ability of my stacks to survive against multiple cannon/artillery bombardments because they don't take collateral damage. With first strikes, they also last much longer than you might expect when considering their strength alone.

I'd estimate that building 2 machine guns per stack can speed up any war effort by 10-20%.
 
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