NEVER Build Walls!

[TheMeInTeam]

What I mean about Marathon (SP) is that castles will be around for many more turns and therefore provide more wealth which I can use to upgrade my obsolete units.

That is smoke and mirrors. In terms of research rates, they're around the same amount of time at the same cost relative to tech speed as they are on normal. However, their opportunity cost is MUCH HIGHER on marathon, where units come at an obscene discount and are much faster than on other speeds (speed that is also relevant during bombardment, mind you). Marathon is probably the speed one should LEAST bother with castles...they buy the least amount of time to react on marathon and offer no greater economic incentive than on any other speed.

 

[obsolete]

I see people constantly using the arugement of that trade-route being important, so it's worth the investment. However... a hammer being worth 3 Gold.. do you honestly think it is that good an investment? Knowing fair well that its expirey date is so short?

It stands to reason, if your trade-routes were so important, then you are going to beeline FM even faster, which not only gives you the free trade-route, but it does so INSTANTLY, in ALL your cities. This requires no build investments. Also it comes with many + diplo modifiers.


Now, if you were playing a TEAM-GAME, then it stands to reason you COULD perceive an instant of purposly delaying FM (but you will need it eventually anyhow). However, it is most likely you are NOT having any open borders/trades with the other team(s) anyhow.

Capiche?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Building castles is good if you're spain at least though, and that's worth mentioning. CR III siege is just so fun when mass produced. Much as I like the UU, the UB might give the better effect.

Obs makes my point another way ----> is that commerce you're going to get before the thing is obsolete worth a) the hammers you have to expend up front to build it and b) the alternative builds given those hammers? The answer is almost always "no". Sure, if you're getting a super unit (citadels) or you know an AI is about to come in with 20 units and 4 trebs it might be worth getting a castle up on your borders, fine. Maybe if you're doing one of those convoluted EP only after alphabet games it's nice too, since the AI delays education and thus economics quite long but will get engineering pretty quickly...but that is almost by definition not optimal play.

If they obsoleted later they might be useful becuase the EP could help a lot after a renaissance war gets you up to 20 cities. Building jails + intelligence agencies en masse to overwhelm a small tech-strong empire and steal away is nice and the castles might have been useful there if they lasted until well after rifles. But they don't. Rifle bullets fire right through 2 feet of stone wall and knowing how supply and demand operates kills any hope of economic windfall from that stone.

But if you're playing down you could always build them just because they look cool, and possibly to farm diplo from yet another broken event (+3 global diplo? Seriously?).

 

[frekk]

Walls (and castles) are definately worthwhile in key cities, as a force multiplier. *Especially* on Marathon, because the larger the unit-counts, the more that force multiplier will be. One unit won't make as much difference as giving a 50% bonus to ten or twenty units.

The other important reason to build defences in key border cities is that they give you time to react. The AI will usually spend some time battering down the defenses, which gives you some rounds to bring in reinforcements. In this way, you can cover a bunch of cities with minimal defenders and just have a response force covering a section of the border - and still be able to absorb the stacks that are thrown at that section without much problem. You can hit the attacker with some siege and riders and whittle down his forces (and hopefully eliminate his siege) before he attacks. 1 or 2 (or even 4 or 5) more defenders in that city won't help.

Obviously, walls are not for interior cities, or for fronts where you're being aggressive and taking land. They're for fronts you're not focussed on - for guarding your rear when you're throwing your forces in some other direction. They're also handy for coastal cities, because you just never know when something might hit the coastline and those will never become interior cities, they'll always be exposed.

 

[PieceOfMind]

There are a couple reasons you might build a castle (For the sake of this discussion I am going to assume the wall is included in the cost).

At Normal speed, castle is 150, 75 with Pro xor stone, 50 with Pro AND stone.

Only under exceptional circumstances would I suggest building a castle with neither Pro nor stone. Otherwise, the building is often worth considering.

Firstly, if you have ToA or a city that is earning typically at least 2 from each trade route, the trade route may be worth a bit more than you let on.

Secondly, for 50(Pro and Stone) you get a monument plus a trade route. Considering the Cothon costs 20 more than the Harbour, this seems to fit exactly if we assumed a trade route was worth 20 (I know thad sounds weird but never mind). Also, you can time the whip of the wall so that you can do a roughly 1pop whip earlier than you'd normally be able to do for a 50 building (I think that's right??)

So with Pro and Stone, you could easily argue castles are better than monuments, particularly in MP where that 100% defense in a new city is awesomely intimidating, and the trade route helps get that city profitable asap. The library gives the 2 for 90 and is arguably the better way to get culture instead of using monuments. If Creative the library would win hands down obviously.

The thing with the castle is the separate bonuses always look weak in isolation. Yes, the 1 trade route is weak, yes the 1 is weak, as is the fact the defense can be taken down with a spy and the 25% doesn't seem worth it. Together though they make it at least average IMO. If one were to employ binary espionage, meaning every now and then you blast 100% espionage from your commerce sliders, that 25% could be quite nifty.

Overall, I would argue the castle is mainly for Pro leaders, just as the Drill line of promotions is primarily for Pro leaders.

If the AI were half decent, castles would be one of the best buildings in the game if you had one of the multipliers. In MP, stone or Pro-boosted castles would be much much better than in SP.

EDIT... Actually the whipping of walls is extremely risky now because of the bug in 3.19. Whipping a +200% multiplied wall will waste hammers a lot of the time.

 

[r_rolo1]

The 25% bonus of the castle is not exactly a thing to throw of in no brokering and not tech trading games, where stealing techs is more rewarding in average....

Back to the point: if someone says that walls are useless, you are looking at someone that does not feel the necessity of defending it's cities. That says more about the ratio of their skill compared with the foes he/she normally faces than anything about the real usefulness of the building...

 

[obsolete]

I just knew someone was going to bring up that 25% espionage gimmick. This never works as expected, I assume one reason could be the way the game likes to screw you sometimes by rounding down, haha.

But honestly, FM gets you 30% discount on Spy points for TR bonus.

Is there even a debate anymore?

 

[PieceOfMind]

I just knew someone was going to bring up that 25% espionage gimmick. This never works as expected, I assume one reason could be the way the game likes to screw you sometimes by rounding down, haha.

But honestly, FM gets you 30% discount on Spy points for TR bonus.

Is there even a debate anymore?

Maybe not for people who only know how to play optimally under standard settings, in SP.

 

[The Snug]

it just comes down to play style. Builders need them bcz they don't have an army. War-mongers don't need them because all they have are troops.

 

[kochman]

Walls... I would say "never" is too strong.
I build walls once my borders have expanded to meet those of my neighbors... especially in choke point cities, or in obvious target cities. After playing for a while, you can get the sense of which city the computer would attack if he DOWed you.

So, I end up building walls in a handful of cities. If I do build walls in a city, I try to build the castle as well, for the extra trade route if nothing else!

And yes, the best wall is easily the Great Wall. I almost view it a required wonder for me these days.

 

[popejubal]

The biggest thing that Walls/Castles do in my observation is to lower the rate of bombardment.

If I have whatever% culture and a catapult shows up next door, it knocks a certain percentage of the cultural defenses down each turn. If I have a wall, it knocks down significantly less. If I have a wall and castle, then my opponent had better bring a good dozen catapults to make the bombardment worth his time or he'll be there plinking away with his catapults until I have modern armor.

It wasn't until I got incredibly annoyed with the AI's walls and castles that I realized having them in an appropriate city could be useful. After all, if the AI keeps bashing its head in against a choke point, why not build a castle there?

 

[Agent327]

I'm afraid I don't understand the OT: I almost ALWAYS build Walls - partly because I need Castles later on. (Also, if you want to build units, you'll need well-defended cities to leave behind when you go a-conquering.)

 

[Preston85]

Surely it just depends on the number of defenders you already have. If you have 10 Longbowmen, would another help (adding 10% to the number of defenders) or would a wall that increases all of the 10 Longbowmen by 50% and reduce collatoral damage help more? I'd say the wall but of course you can't move walls, they become obsolete and can't be upgraded when new techs are reached.

I rarely use them, in my current game I have walls because I already have like 15 units defending the city whilst i'm capturing cities in another part of the long border area. I'd rather make sure the units survive (and with more health) than just adding more units that might never see action.

Throw a castle in and thats +100% so you won't need anywhere need as many garisson troops, saving upkeep or allowing more units to go on the offensive. Plus the castle will help pay for a unit.

 

[kochman]

Just as they did in historical times... the beauty of the game once again revealed

 

[essmene]

<3

What is partially missing are random events.

I usually get an event for castles (GW +25 ESP), Walls +1 , a military instructor,...

Do the +25% ESP for castles disappear with economics?


Events:
* Evenst127(wall + money), Event105 (receive money),
* Event131 (settled GG), Quest7 (GW +25 ESP),

 

[obsolete]

it just comes down to play style. Builders need them bcz they don't have an army. War-mongers don't need them because all they have are troops.

Not quite...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I must admit the payback for castles is more likely to be crossed with tech trades banned. The lib path is not so obvious then, and it may be a long time until you see edu/lib if you choose to go medieval warfare...of course hoping your target goes for lib.

 

[The Snug]

Not quite...

Quite. In the thinking of the classic war-monger, they should never be in a position to defend. They are the one who is always initiating the wars by attacking the AI. They would take it as a personal affront if an AI should declare war on them before they declare war on the AI. Hence, the classic warmonger never defends, he simply attacks.

I will say this, the classic warmonger strategy does not work on higher difficulty levels with gigamaps and 50 civs. With those settings, if you attack another AI, 5 or 6 other civs will respond by invading you, and it will be all you can do to simply defend your borders from a polyglut of larger, highly motivated stacks of AI armies. Even if you manage to defeat their stacks and can force them into making peace with you, a new batch of 5 fresh civs will assume their turn at pugilating you. And when you wear down that second batch and manage to sign a cease-fire with them, the first batch, fully refreshed from their hibernating and still carrying a torch in their hearts for you, will resume their hostilities with you.

I can tell you right now, the classic warmonger will find these settings to be a worthy challenge. I would even say that the average warmonger would get their ass kicked, and would then need to learn how to really play the game.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

How does one "really play the game" then? Warmongering does not come independently of empire management. Those bigger armies won't be very scary if it's infantry against muskets, and several of the forum's best players can take infantry against muskets on deity.

At high levels, unless you cook the settings you're just playing to win. Sometimes war is the best option to improve your position, sometimes it isn't. But rare is the time that castles have a material impact, and with trading on it's a poor tech path to prioritize engineering...possibly the single greatest reason castles almost never return their investment in standard games...you usually get access to them too close to obsolescence.

 

[r_rolo1]

And here we go again by the same tired argument that castles obsolete too fast....

Just a nice reminder:

Castles are enabled by Engineering

Castles are obsoleted by Economics

This two techs are not on the same tech path and it is highly discussible that economics is a must-have-ASAP tech ( this is to say that FM is not that much of a civic if you try to get it early in a lot of situations ). You can even get SAM infantry without going to Economics and rifles + arties do the offensive job quite well, probably better than cannons + infantry....

If your castles obsolete too fast that is just because you are teching Economics just a little after of getting Engineering. You aren't forced to do that, you know....

@ Snug

Right and wrong. Yes, conan-style warfare is probably a lot more stupid in those settings you said. Wrong, because mindless warfare is always a poor plan and it only works against low-grade oponents... and you don't need to go to those settings to prove that