Pantastic said:
Ah yes, I forgot about their bonus. However, it can get formation (high promotability from Charismatic and Leadership), which brings it closer to 12 vs 10, there's still the 50% chance to withdraw, and elephants are fairly slow. Assuming it's not absolutely necessary to use it on the elephant, then the elephant can be treated like a later age unit. It can just be avoided. If the elephant does manage to miraculously hunt it down, it still has good odds of getting away.
Pantastic said:
Which with shock would be 12 against 12.5 with the Numidian Cavalry having a 50% chance to withdraw if the fight goes bad. I wouldn't want to try it, but in a pinch the odds are in favor of the Numidian Cavalry. Both of these, units, however, are more defensive than offensive. They aren't of much use if you want to hunt down the elusive Numidian warlord, due to their slowness (it gets 3 moves, so it can destroy something and move twice, well beyond what it needs to stay away from either of these). They can be avoided until you're ready to upgrade to a gunship.
Knights present the first genuine threat to our Numidian warlord. On smoothish terrain, a knight has a chance of attacking the warlord when the warlord doesn't want to fight. If it tries to destroy more than 1 building per turn, or moves ineffciently due to not knowing where are roads are, or runs out of actions with a knight in range, then knights might be able to catch up to it.
If it has sentry, it can see at least two squares away. If it ends its turn away from a road in a safe spot, nothing will be able to hurt it, except for a knight. If it ends its turn and can see a knight, and the terrain between it is flat, the knight can attack it (so it can wander into a trap). Only the knight can do this to it. It would have to move right up next to a pikemen or elephant before ending its turn if it were to be attacked by them (and since it can see them, that wouldn't happen). The unit will be uncatchable without something as fast as a knight. Horse archers could catch it, but you'd need a very large stack of them, possibly several large stacks, devoted to hunting it down in order to get it. The level of promotions you can get by the time you can make knights (like mobility) also improve their odds of catching up to it, compared to horse archers.
Pantastic said:
Exactly. In the hands of a good player, this thing could wreak havoc on enemy civilizations, and force them to devote significant forces to protecting their lands, or suffer the effects of having little to no improved terrain. All the force they devote to stopping this one unit is force that they're not devoting to stopping your army, or to attacking your cities, which makes it all the easier to bring them down or stop them. Until knights come around, it's extremely difficult to have the spare production worth in units to go after this. You'd have to draw off all your own raiding forces and possibly more to deal with this single unit. It's an absurd annoyance. There's practically nothing you can do about it, yet if you leave it alone your economy and your cities will die.
The point I haven't mentioned so far is the most important, and to some extent voids what I have mentioned previously. Not long after, or possibly before you get elephants and pikemen, this unit will have upgraded to a knight. It will have doubled in strength. Knights have 10 strength, so the Numidian warlord would have 17.5 strength against the pikeman's or elephant's 12. That would rise to 20 with the unit specific promotions (shock and formation). It might need to dodge enemy knights, the elephants and the pikeman for a while, but very quickly it would be a knight too. At that point, it would again be the most powerful unit for that time, and you'd need stacks of knights to hunt it. When cavalry come along, this happens again, and again when gunships come.
Because of the sheer mass of upgrades (particularly with charismatic leaders) warlords will always be one of the most powerful units on the battlefield. Typically, it's going to be anywhere from 1.75, to 2 times as powerful as anything else, and have a number of other advantages on the side. Consider modern armor made into a warlord. It would have 75% more strength, and with unit specific upgrades, that would effectively double its strength, i.e. it would be like a unit with 80 strength, but maybe with collateral damage, good chance to withdraw, the ability to attack three times in a round, and to heal on the move in enemy territory, using enemy railroads to do so.
I just checked the civlopedia to find out how much xp you need for a promotion. It says you need 2 xp for the first promotion, 3 for the second, 4 for the third (total of 9) etc. So continuing this pattern, a charismatic leader should be able to get 5 promotions for their warlord immediately, with 5 xp left over (depending on how the rounding works, if there is rounding). A non-charismatic leader will have no xp left over, or might only have 4 promotions if it had any other promotions on the unit before making it a warlord.
With stables and barracks, I believe the Numidian cavalry would start with 6 experience. A warlord made from that could get a sixth promotion, and be well on its way to a seventh. This would let it get all the strength bonuses, or just 5 of them and leadership. After killing a few units, it could get the last strength bonus, or leadership. From there it should get promotions 87% faster than normal. This will get it all those other essentials very quickly, and then it will be ready to set loose on the terrain improvements of civilizations that have elephants and pikemen. Once it's a knight, it can start fighting and getting promotions again. As soon as more powerful units show up, it can return to raiding. This can happen again at cavalry and at gunships.
Pantastic said:
All of these are at best, equal to 25%. However, these are specialized increases, so they only count for 25% in specific roles. Having 25% more units is good no matter what you need them to do. It's just more versatile.
Pantastic said:
This is true. The +2 experience bonus might be worth it on your HE. However, if you don't have a HE yet, and you got your first general well before you'll have an HE, then the production bonus would be better.
). I think it all comes down to the players skill/interest in unit preservation: If the player values highly promoted units, then they would probably want Warlords (with the extra promotions and xp) while those who rely on production of mass number of units (or being able to crank out decent unit quickly) would probably want the Military Instructor/Academy. Personally, I would rather the Warlord with its extra xp as I tend to place an emphasis on being careful to keep getting xp while not being reckless. Just using it on a couple of units - especially already highly promoted units - helps wonders. Plus they can be upgraded for free and shouldn't lose their xp (so a level 9 Axemen can be upgraded to a Macemen and its xp shouldn't go back to 10xp).
