muskets on the move

[pi-r8]

The problem remains getting gunpowder quickly enough.

What route do you use? Education + bulbs or going through feudalism ---> mach ----> guilds ---> gunpowder?

Going through education is more beakers, but it might be faster. Alternatively, one could do a philosophy bulb and then use the resulting tech trades + money grubbing to deficit research towards gunpowder through guilds quickly (PHI bulb isn't very off-track, since you probably want CoL, math, and alphabet anyway and meditation is easy to get).

The other issue is that if you're gunning the bottom path ASAP, you're going to hit guilds first. Guerrilla III muskets will do better than knights on hilly terrain and are 10 hammers cheaper. However, nothing upgrades to them, they come later, and they have limited movement without the hills. While they do ignore walls/castles, knights ignore first strikes. Overall the muskets are a bit better but only if you can get them to guerrilla III IMO.

I find it reasonably hard to use either knights or muskets without support, even against just longbows. Cuirassers are probably the first unit I can routinely get some favorable K/D from without help (I can just barely beat 1:1 attacking into enemy territory with knights, which puts me behind in hammers).

Musket/treb/pike is very strong with tech trades off or on slow speeds though. Muskets soundly own everything in the field around then except knights.

I think the top path is far superior. It's true that the bottom path will get you to gunpowder a bit faster, especially if you can bulb something with a GE. But the top path gives you civil service, and then allows you to do liberalism -> nationalism. Nationalism lets you draft a big army of muskets very quickly. With an overwhelming number of G3 muskets, I was actually doing reasonably well in kill ratio. Most importantly, it lets you end the war quickly before they have time to start pumping out longbows.

Obviously this is a strategy designed for hilly terrain, where knights won't work very well. On flat land, the knights would probably work better.

 

[pi-r8]

The standard lib path is pretty fast and taking nationalism would allow a lot of units to be drafted quickly, but then you don't get good promos.

But even very good lib times like 200 AD would STILL see longbows defending on emp+. I usually win it closer to 1000 AD for immortal. Even if that could be pushed back with heavy bulbing, the problems are still there. This is true for the guilds path also, though it lets you set up the XP for the muskets and allows caste/guild workshops and a run at cannons (though don't expect to tech well for long).

Lib path is probably better since the AI loves the guilds path but then if you're not beating the AI down the guilds path, it has all the units you do and muskets vs parity aren't too exciting except as part of a balanced stack (where melee and archery cower in the field against them and pikes handle mounted).

I just can't picture using them successfully without heavy siege support. Probably the easiest scenario to envision is globe draft (drama isn't a bad trade chip early anyway and the culture/ from a theater is often useful outright) to get a ton of them quickly after liberalism, using siege as support. Looks strong in situations where you can use theocracy, so you get combat or CG I muskets and have access to accuracy promotions on siege. A combat I musket will have decent odds on medieval defenders after only the most minimal of collateral.

One thing I haven't tried is to go musket draft + catapults (not trebs) and not bombard...just go barrage and slam 2-4 cats/city. I'm not sure if the collateral would be enough or not for the average city (obviously the super culture cities could be the few you use spy revolts against). Cats are better for pure collateral than trebs and are cheaper...but I do wonder at the K/D here and the hammer effectiveness of it. You are guaranteed to lose 100-200 hammers here (the price of 2 rifles or so) in siege plus some muskets (80 hammers but possibly less if drafted).

So against an enemy with 10 cities you'd need about 30-40 catapults and at least as many muskets...though some of that could be had after the war starts. The problem with this is that it is comparable in hammers to a rifle, cavalry, or cannon invasion stack but is prone to flanking and involves more units in the absolute sense and earlier. Probably useful against smaller, stronger-tech empires to clip them before they get too advanced (I saw ABCF use treb/samurai on deity against mansa musa once so the concept has been executed successfully).

I think this was my first time using catapults with barrage and not taking down the culture defense. It was fairly effective. At least catapults are cheap, and you can start making them a long time before the war begins. You don't need them on every city though- just for the really tough cities, especially for the first one if (like me in this game) you don't have G3 yet.

I don't think there's anyway to get muskets before they have Longbows, not without getting very lucky anyway. I also don't think you're likely to have globe theater fast enough to help. Who needs it anyway? I say, screw the unhappiness, just use hereditary rule to keep people happy while you draft all of your newly conquered cities down to a managable size, then just let them riot for a while while you're fighting the war. The key is to start with overwhelming numbers, and fight the war QUICKLY.

 

[pi-r8]

In theory this should be very doable with oromos. It might be hard to get them starting with 10xp but you don't need to when you have a unit with 2-3 first strikes to start and is immune to first strikes. This is pretty much the best case scenario for earning xp quickly to get to 10xp for the G3.

If you time your battles just right, and you get your oromos starting on, let's say 5xp, then you'll be at G3 with about 2 victories at high odds, maybe 3 if you really obsess over fighting at greater than 99% odds.

That's true but bear in mind that it's the first war that's the most difficult and crucial period. With the Celts, I had G3 units attacking every city except for the first one, which I had catapults for. To do the same thing with Oromos, you probably wouldn't get any up to 10XP and healed until the first war was over. Possibly you could do what Ian Kognitow and use a GG to promote a stack of them to G3.

Oromos could help a lot, though. One of the biggest problems I had was that often the first Musketmen I sent in would withdraw but not do any damage to the defending longbow. Oromos with first strikes + first strike immunity would be a lot more likely to do some damage.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't think there's anyway to get muskets before they have Longbows, not without getting very lucky anyway. I also don't think you're likely to have globe theater fast enough to help. Who needs it anyway? I say, screw the unhappiness, just use hereditary rule to keep people happy while you draft all of your newly conquered cities down to a managable size, then just let them riot for a while while you're fighting the war. The key is to start with overwhelming numbers, and fight the war QUICKLY.

Drama trades pretty well. You can use it to trade for monarchy, currency, or code of laws for example. And since we're talking about having in that time frame, globe isn't hard.

 

[PieceOfMind]

That's true but bear in mind that it's the first war that's the most difficult and crucial period. With the Celts, I had G3 units attacking every city except for the first one, which I had catapults for. To do the same thing with Oromos, you probably wouldn't get any up to 10XP and healed until the first war was over. Possibly you could do what Ian Kognitow and use a GG to promote a stack of them to G3.

Oromos could help a lot, though. One of the biggest problems I had was that often the first Musketmen I sent in would withdraw but not do any damage to the defending longbow. Oromos with first strikes + first strike immunity would be a lot more likely to do some damage.

Yep. Against a longbow on a hill city that has about 125% defense before considering the attacker, a G3 musket has about 8% chance of not dealing any damage to the longbow.
For the D2 oromo I think it was about 2%. I think the number of times your muskets live to fight another day would easily make up for that lower chance to damage the defender.

With the oromos it's hard to be tempted away from drill IV in the first place. G2 does nothing for the attack (other than movement) before G3 and it wouldn't feel right to give your oromos no promos til they get to 10xp if they're fighting at poor odds.

I think you would have a much harder time doing it so early with oromos, unlike with your G3 muskets.

 

[pi-r8]

I guess I could see using drama to trade for other stuff. I had a hard time just getting a forge, granary, barracks, and dun built in all my cities though. Building 6 theaters and the globe theater seems like a major hurdle to me. It would mean less time to build catapults, for one things.