NEVER Build Walls!

[Oni of Chaos]

Well if you're Celtic on a Highlands map you should probably build *some* walls

 

[Endure]

As others have said, I almost always build a wall if I get a city that's a key chokepoint, or if it's an important border city.

Other then that, yeh, I don't bother with them

 

[TheMeInTeam]

A whipped wall glitches an approaching AI stack. Even with commanding #'s, they'll sit there and bombard it down, allowing you to whip or draft even more units. Very stupid. It comes with a penalty of a lot of anger in a city, but at the potential cost of their entire stack if you can reinforce with siege and a halfway decent stack of your own in time.

I've turned a war or two around this way. AI comes in with 9+ units, only to sit at the wall for 10 turns while I'm finishing up or taking peace elsewhere and rushing over. A couple suicide catapults later, I wipe out a ton of their stack. They're still beating their heads on that wall...not attacking.

Also comical is if you somehow kill the catapults, the remaining AI units tend to suicide into walls and even castles. That's a lot of kills for low WW.

Situational? Absolutely. Never? My !@#%.

Also, you need them for the "best defense" event, and +3 global AI relations can turn games by itself .

 

[Bandobras Took]

All made possible though intelligent use of Walls and later Castles. Incidentally, I was at war with Montezuma until the Industrial Era approaching modern -- but I didn't attack him until I was good and ready. That lonbow unit accounted for over 60 kills and much of that was because the AI had a horrible time taking down my walls and castles.

And the rest of my Civ kept on happily developing, building wonders, keeping Persia Jewish for the money, etc.

 

[PreLynMax]

Nopeola. No walls! Nyet. That's because you can spend the shields on units instead. You can use those units to discourage attackers, beat back attacks more effectively, and go on the attack.

Meanwhile, because all civs expand, at least at the beginning, you end up having to build walls in over half the cities to be effective. And in the part of the game where they most matter, walls are much more expensive than units. And you can't use them when you go on offense, which you need to do to win a war. Historically, the biggest walls were failures.

Even for places like Istanbul, I'd rather spend the effort on naval units or armies than walls. You don't need no stinking wall if both sides of it are your lake.

When I stopped building them, back in civ2, my games went much better.

Are you an absolute noob or something? What happens when your only down to few units and you have a stack of 15 knocking at your door? You can't use world history as an excuse for being a defenseless noob. So what you're saying is if you build 50 units, (stiffling your ecomony), you can discount people attacking you? And the fact that I build walls and castles and never, ever lost a city with walls or castles on it, even with small stacks of units means that I can't win a war? Walls are more expensive than units, because it's worth it.

A golden rule for civ strategies is, NEVER say NEVER. The poster already is flawed from the start when he gave his title for his strategy essay.

Actually, it's not an essay at all. It is closer to a paragraph showing a one sided and poorly thought out statement. I suppose it is for the best though, if he were to expand on this, there would no doubt be more flawed information.

(I'm not impressed)

Amen, bro. I agree with you wholeheartly.

 

[Winston Hughes]

I'm playing as Gilgamesh of Spain, I have stone, and I'm going for domination.

If only I'd read this article before starting my game, I would have:

*Saved myself the tiny number of hammers it took to get Walls and Citadels

*Given no bonuses to my espionage/trade economy

*Avoided wasting my time building those all-conquering CRIII Trebs.

 

[Atlas]

Dude,

Try playing some Muiltiplayer Civ.

 

[azzaman333]

Walls and Castles are the triggers for some random events, so if I've got no important buildings to build in a city, a cheap wall might as well get built.

 

[Gooblah]

Nopeola. No walls! Nyet. That's because you can spend the shields on units instead. You can use those units to discourage attackers, beat back attacks more effectively, and go on the attack.

True. I agree with this. However NEVER SAY NEVER! There are many situations (being a Celt, controlling a chokepoint, and gunning for a Castle) where building Walls is a smart choice.

Meanwhile, because all civs expand, at least at the beginning, you end up having to build walls in over half the cities to be effective. And in the part of the game where they most matter, walls are much more expensive than units. And you can't use them when you go on offense, which you need to do to win a war. Historically, the biggest walls were failures.

I don't see your logic here. In fact, I don't even understand this. I'll try to rewrite this to see if I get it:
Since all Civs, AI or Human, expand in the beginning, you need to build walls in half your cities to be effective. And in the parts of the game where they matter the most, walls are much more expensive than units. And you can't use them to go on the offense, which you need to do to win a war.

Where's the 'walls in half your cities' coming from? Also, Walls are 50 hammers. In the Medieval Era (when the AI starts fielding Siege), where they're pretty useful in stalling an AI until you can reinforce cities, the weakest unit (the Pikeman) is 60 hammers! With stone, even a weak city takes only 4-5 turns to build Walls, while they can take over a dozen for a Pikeman.

Even for places like Istanbul, I'd rather spend the effort on naval units or armies than walls. You don't need no stinking wall if both sides of it are your lake.

When I stopped building them, back in civ2, my games went much better.

I assume by 'places like Istanbul' you mean isthmuses and chokepoints. Walls are all the more important in these areas, since they stall an enemy advance and keep the AI occupied as you hammer them down. It protects the rest of your Empire.

Finally, Walls are the prerequisites of Castles. Castles give +1 Trade Route, +25% EP, and even more city defense! The economic boosts that Walls give indirectly are great!

 

[averagejoe]

I only build walls around citys on the border. I dont build them for my inner citys.
Instead of building a unit i can build a wall and rush some reinforcements to the border city. The enemy will proabbly attack the border city. So if i dont have reinforcements close by i either should have recognize the enemy building and moving closer or should not have built my city so close. But i never build them for citys deep in my land area because it seems rare that they make it that far before the modern era. Of course it might be different on the highest levels.

 

[kristopherb]

Slow down there Jkay. I've had a few games where if biuld more units I loose money so its worth biulding them to fill in space. Still its 2 turnsish to build though. 4 turns is 1 unit yet I feel safer knowing my units are in cities then out in the open, so walls help that+25% in 2 turns as compared to +20 in 15turns and it expands like that. So consider walls as on demand culture at the cost of hammers (minus more land then again after the city has got his fat cross i don't care about its culture)
Random question
If both parties in the modern era, And my city is being bombarded by artillery does the artillery bombard the walls. or are the walls taken out of the equation.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

This thread is over a year old and wasn't good in the first place...walls have clear uses, albeit somewhat uncommon on an average city basis.

 

[The Snug]

Random question
If both parties in the modern era, And my city is being bombarded by artillery does the artillery bombard the walls. or are the walls taken out of the equation.

I'm not sure if it uses the walls or cultural defence for its base, but it will bombard the defences 50% slower. Just guessing from experience I believe that the higher of the two possible defense values are used as the beginning base. My canons and destroyers seem to be bombarding a lot of cities with 100% defense.

For builder players who use defensive (turtle) strategies, walls are a must. As already mentioned, in the event of a surprise attack (or a declaration by a second or third civ) they provide time to send reinforcements--or your own relief attack stack--to the endangered city.

Additionally, castles provide ample commerce--especially boosting the spy economy-- for large cities with an additional 25% reduction in bombard rate.

A single catapult can reduce the cutural defence of a 40% (probably the most you can expect for a border city early in the game) city in 5 turns (3 turns for a 20% city).
A walled city would take that same catapult 13 turns. That's a signifant difference.

With a castle it now requires 50 catapult turns to reduce a city defense. If a person cannot see the advantage of this defensive principle, then that person probably also struggles with most of the other mathematical reasoning required to understand the many facets of civ.

13 turns v's 5. Later 50 turns v's 5. Hmmm. Let's ponder this. As someone else already mentioned, this permits the human player to simply sit and carry on with business as usual while the AI engages on a fruitless multi-year siege.

 

[The Snug]

against a human opponent, if ur forced into your town and the enemy is pillaging, game is already over

Well it would depend on what they're pillaging and how important that border city is to you. It is still much easier to defend than to attack. If an enemy stack were to step off of forest or hills, i'll kill them.

 

[vanatteveldt]

Guys, please listen to TMIT: this "article" sucked in the first, died a year ago, and nobody needs an ffing zombie of a thread that was useless to begin with.

STOP POSTING!

thanks!

 

[The Snug]

Why does it matter if it was a year ago or yesterday? I'm more frustrated with all of the new posts that simply repeat discussions what was already discussed 2 years ago.

Over the years I've seen dozens of new posts about the usefulness of walls. I'd rather simply the old posts resurrect and see the discussion continue from there, rather than see new players rediscuss an old topic in a new time.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Why does it matter if it was a year ago or yesterday? I'm more frustrated with all of the new posts that simply repeat discussions what was already discussed 2 years ago.

Over the years I've seen dozens of new posts about the usefulness of walls. I'd rather simply the old posts resurrect and see the discussion continue from there, rather than see new players rediscuss an old topic in a new time.

Very well then. Depending on the investment required (stone, pro), walls may or may not be worth those 13-50 cat turns. In single player, you have to have a serious threat to attack (and on high level play, you usually try to avoid this), in which case you're going to stick a wall in your border city(ies) that will actually see an offensive, usually to buy time to shift your forces over there and siege smack the AIs stack.

However, castles aren't quite the defensive powerhouses your earlier post suggests. How many non-accuracy treb turns does it take to down a castle? 25. 8 trebs will put it very close to 0 in 3 turns, allowing a fairly devastating hit on the 4th turn. 8 trebs is not an unreasonable number.

BTS also suffers from the threat of spies in this case. Now, even a couple trebs are serious trouble since they'll cut your defenses with spies and then trebs will have little trouble vs the rest. Fortunately, the AI does not do this.

The single greatest problem with castles (less so for trebs) is the tech they require. Engineering is a top AI tech and it will go there early, meaning if the player goes there too, minimal trades. But, if the player opts for education and then trades back for engineering, the tech that obsolete the castle's economic bonuses isn't far away. This makes their window to return their investment quite small ----> if that city isn't going to be attacked by pre-cannon siege, it's usually not worth building the castles.

Don't give me the "they count for power" argument. It's nonsense on difficulties where players making a serious discussion in this thread have to try. Monarch+ the power granted by them is close to meaningless, and frequently is.

So walls/castles in their present state are truly a "oh crap, the AI is in WHEOOHRN so time to prep a little extra in terms of defenses" build. At least they're cheap with the builder resource or PRO, and although you won't be making many in 99% of games, they do have some usage.

I'd imagine they also have minimal (but situational) use in MP as well, if only to make those border cities *really* resistant to surprise classical attack. You can't exactly 2nd turn-smack a hill wall city with 5-6 archers (or more) cheaply...even elephants would have bad odds and thus you'd buy time that way in that they'll need to mass more, try to walk past (often on flatland) etc. Or just punch a spy on you or build enough cats to end the problem.

 

[The Snug]

Yeah, last year (lol), I mentioned that castles come a bit too late for me to usually bother with, but I think there are two settings where they become more economically signifcant. The first being marathon, and the second being technology trading turned off.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah, last year (lol), I mentioned that castles come a bit too late for me to usually bother with, but I think there are two settings where they become more economically signifcant. The first being marathon, and the second being technology trading turned off.

I can agree with tech trades off. However on marathon, hammers not invested in your ridiculously cost-reduced units might not be hammers well spent...the opportunity cost of non-units is enormous compared to other speeds. You might be best off just taking down the target first on marathon, if you're in single player. Hurray for multiplicative 50% unit hammer boost in all cities and triple move speed!

 

[The Snug]

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.