[NFP] Statue of Zeus

Maybe Statue of Zesus is the Anti-Cav buff? They get a whole Wonder to make them cheaper...

AC do still need a buff. I think the key thing would be just improving the base strength of some early AC units, and giving AC a promotion with defence v ranged.

Beyond that, they would do well being a bit cheaper. I’ve suggested Walls maybe giving a production bonus for AC (which is along the same idea as the SoZ in a way). That would make AC situationally cheaper and tie them up with defensive infrastructure more. You could instead tie the bonus to other infrastructure - warlords throne perhaps, or just encampments. Alternatively, you could play around with how flanking and support works for AC, again to make them a bit better situationally.

ZoC v Cavalry is a terrible idea. There are plenty of posts about it. Can’t muster the enthusiasm to go through it again, but yeah part of it is making Lt Cav pretty irrelevant.

 

Also, as somebody mentioned elsewhere, just having another early wonder available makes it easier to get your hands on one. So the early wonder game should be made more interesting with this addition.

Iron and Horses aren't difficult to get your hands on, and you'll usually find one or the other. Whenever I found myself without iron, pushing for Crossbows always felt like the natural option.
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Anyway, I'm looking through the promotion trees on civfandom since I don't know them by memory. Here's a change I'd like to see. Let me know if I'm missing something obvious.

Current Light Cav Tree:
I - Caparison - +5 CS vs Anti-Cav
I - Coursers - +7 CS vs Ranged or Siege Units.
III - Spiking the Guns - +7 CS vs Siege Units.

Better Light Cav Tree (imo):
I - Spike the Guns
I - Coursers - +7 CS vs Ranged units only.
III - Caparison

 

I guess if archers and Crossbows would got minor nerf Anti-cav might became more useful.

 

Are the units completely free or do you still pay maintenance? If the former, then it looks more attractive.

 

I'd go down the historical route on this one, and just remove melee units' strength vs anti-cav.
Then in order to balance it out, have anti-cav be a weaker version of standard melee units, but with a reduced cost - being effectively the "poor man's warrior".

Historically, swordsmen especially were not a common sight on battlefields, as it required a precious resource (iron/steel, in much larger amounts than a spear), and also required thorough training in swordsmanship.
The common foot soldier however used a spear or pike (occasionally axes), not swords, as swords were usually reserved as the weapon of choice for the warrior caste that usually wielded swords (as well as metallic armour).
This was also because armies didn't usually provide their soldiers with weapons, who in turn had to bring their own weapons. The average commoner certainly couldn't afford a sword, but they did usually possess spears or axes (which essentially are just a pointy stick for hunting, or a tool in the case of axes).
Especially regarding spears, the use of a spear was lesa about individual combat skill technique (training which commoners usually didn't have), but more about cohesion and formation discipline, which was far easier to drill.

Fun fact: Even regarding something as macabre as beheadings, swords/axes also had a symbolic relationship with caste.
For instance (in Europe at least), beheadings with an axe (while usually a lot more clean) were considered a punishment for commoners, while beheadings with straight European greatswords (which were a lot more messy!) were reserved for nobles and warriors, as these were considered more "honourable" ways to die for a person of their rank.
This was sometimes even an important distinction for the executioner, as he could be paid more to execute someone with a greatsword than with an axe!

 

Why is this bad? Main point of Light Calvary is to pillage and plunder quickly and also take out ranged units quickly.
It is way too effective early, just two promotions and you get 3 pillages per turn. I think that AC should punish Calvary units more seriously.
Maybe not in the form of ZoC but possibly added movement or CS in friendly territory (to emphasise that most AC units bar UUs should primarily be used defensively), or some movement penalty when calvary moves near AC units.

 

Part of the problem is that because AC tend to come an era apart from the melee line, it can be tougher to balance. Although perhaps if they just lined the values up based on the era, and then gave melee only +5 vs AC, that would balance better. Then you would basically have things kind of go in cycles. So each era you would alternate between the anti-cav unit or the melee unit being the strongest of their era, as opposed to now, where there's not even a huge gap between swordsmen and pikemen, especially since Pikes still aren't really all that strong against cavalry.

 

I'd personally like to see anti-cavs get first strike when defending Might be too strong as an innate ability but would be fine as a promotion ability.
Maybe that or make their attack cost 0.5 movement less.

I'd also like to see anti-cavs get their +1 movement bonus from either a 2nd or 1st tier promotion and make Redeploy do something different. Melee not getting any movement bonuses via promo was kind of an edge that anti-cavs originally had over melee, but Commando (a 2nd tier melee promo) giving +1 movement starting from Rise and Fall onward made it swing very much in melee's favor imo.

 

There is also another historical thing: the invention and spread of the bayonet basically made every musketman a pikeman, granted them strong power against cavalry and contributed to light cavalry's downfall in early modern period.

However in the game we have a strong Industrial-Era light cavalry unit while the anti-cav unit (pike and short) stayed at the Renaissance Era.

 

I'd definitely look into era unlocking as well, yeah.
What bugs me in civ 6 (it's only a minor annoyance, but still) is that massive amounts of melee units is just so historically inaccurate!
Spears and pikes dominated battlefields for thousands of years, and for good reason too.
They were cheap to train and equip, very efficient in formations, and in case of a loss you could always raise another army of commoners with spears of which there was a much higher supply than the warrior castes.

Granted, the pike fell out of favour (as someone commented) with the invention of the bayonet and (partially) mixed formations of muskets and pikes, but sheesh, in game you hardly see a spearman at all these days (and certainly not from the human player).
I'd generally look into giving melee and AC similar upgrade paths as well, just for balance reasons as that would make the "poor man's warrior" (AC) be easier to tune combat strength and production wise.
Right now the AC promotion tree is either too specialized, or requires too much micro managing to be effective with the adjacency bonuses.

 

This is not correct. Spears were used over swords on ancient battlefields because they are quite simply better weapons under the conditions of ancient warfare. For much of history, swords were side arms. They were used as a fall back when the main weapon, typically some spear/lance variant or high-drawweight bow, was lost or inappropriate.

 

Th

That was kind of what I was getting at, hence why I stated "effective in formations", as spears dominated for organized warfare.
(I didn't comment on a 1v1 melee, as that was generally not how warfare was decided, but even in a 1v1 a spear was mostly superior because of the range it offered the wielder, according to the sources I've read).

One does not simply charge right at a phalanx with swords, but apparently in civ we do.

 

Alright. I still maintain that would you wrote is a bit misleading. Cost was not the main reason for the scarcity of swords (btw Iron/bad Steel was much cheaper and more widely available than bronze). Even professional armies of powerful, wealthy states used spears over swords. Swords were indeed often a status symbol for the nobility/warrior caste. However, they still typically used other weapons in battle (with some exceptions).

The role of swordsmen or the equally silly axemen in Civ4 exists for the purpose of gameplay. Semi-realistic ancient combat would be fairly dull in game form.

 

Honestly, this wonder will probably buff the AI more than anything else as they're far more likely to build it than a player will.

 

If you want to compare the production costs of both alternatives, you need to compare them under the same conditions (ie without bonus policy cards or with them)
Without policy cards: 440H for units VS 400H for SoZ
With policy cards: 315H (with Agoge) for units VS 348H (with Corvée) or 320H (with Corvée+Autocracy) or 286H (with Corvée+Autrocracy+Brussels) for SoZ

You also need to consider the timing of when you unlock the alternatives.
Building the units Tech: Archery + Bronze Working + Masonry; Production: 3 Archers, 3 Spearmen, 1 Battering Ram
Building SoZ Tech: Bronze Working; Civics: Military Tradition; Production: Encampment + Barracks
The second option is obviously slower as the main bottleneck is Military Tradition (and if you beeline it, you won't have Political Philosophy/Autocracy).
I don't think this is a coincidence that they are releasing this wonder along with the Gaul civilization since they get a massive boost to early game culture.

The main value of the wonder seem to lie in the +50% production bonus to anti-cav.

I could see this wonder become a bit of an annoyance in the hands of the AI (similarly to the Great Wall in Civ V) if you are going for domination with a cavalry-based army.
However, its requirements are similar to the Terracotta Army which only gets built late (or never) in the hands of the AI.

The niche of the wonder seems to be of a defensive nature, so I find it weird that they are giving you a battering ram among the free units.

I could see this working with an Impi rush since
1. The Military Tactics tech, becomes the new bottleneck
2. The total production cost can be lower with SoZ
3. You can pre-build Spearmen / build Impis with the additional +50% production bonus
4. You want to build a Barracks anyway since you want you Impis get the Thrust promotion as fast as possible.
Not like an Impi rush is a strong thing or anything, but their production cost now become on par with swordsmen.

 

Anticav are weak because of 2 things:
1) Pikes
2) Swords
First of all let us look at the first 3 anticav units

• Spears, 25
• Pikes 41
• Pike & Shot 55

Does the pike being 41 instead of 45 stand out to you? It should. Why is the pikeman weaker than it should be, when knights and crossbows aren't?
Well, what does it matter that pikes are artificially weak? For one, it makes them very unappealing units just by themselves. If I nerfed Musket to 51, you'd likely feel less inclined to build them too.
But the fact that pikes are quite weak (and unlock very late) means that not only do you not want to build them, you don't want to build the units that upgrade into them.

This leads to the second point. Any chance that existed of players utilizing spears in large numbers, and then limping through pikes to get to pike and shot, evaporates because of how brutal swords are to anticav. They murder spears at +21, and they still beat pikes by +5. Any concept that pikes are "cheap" (they aren't) and spammable is undone by the existence of a unit which is available an entire era sooner and costs half the production.

So not only are pikes bad, but players won't even build many spears because swords are killer. Thus, there is nothing left to upgrade into pikes in the first place. Now you are basically looking at Pike and Shot as the first point in which the AC line makes sense, but games are often decided by then. (P&S are actually very solid units, though.)

 

Rather than think about the straight costs (with of without production bonuses), I’m thinking if I want 3 Archers (yes), 3 Spears (usually no) and a Battering Ram (maybe) I would much rather have them ASAP. Built normally you might have the Archers in 3, 6, 9 turns and the Spears in 12, 15, 18 turns with the Ram finally joking in 21 turns. With the Statue you’ll get them all at once in 21 turns. These numbers are just made up since it will depend on production, but the point is building them one by one means your first few units have already had many turns to move to the front, pillage, fight, clear barbs, whatever. The Statue units lose a speed advantage and get even worse when you consider the wonder probably needs to be built in your core whereas units can be built anywhere (eg closet to the front). if you built the 7 units in 7 different cities you may even get them all 3 turns total versus 21.

I’d say this wonder fun but weak. If probably crank it out if playing as China but otherwise ignore it. It will indeed be super annoying if AI prioritizes it and it pops just as your Horsemen are about to strike!

 

1. AC are mostly already good v Cav - +10 is very strong. So, adding in ZOC v Cav doesn’t “correct” anything.
   
   
2. Light Cav are already pretty weak combatwise, really - they tend to have slightly less power than Melee units of the same era, they have resource requirements (albeit usually easier to meet than Melee and HC), they can’t use Rams / Siege, they can’t use Oligarchy, and their promotions don’t give them much protection against Ranged or give them additional combat strength. Yes, they’re okay at pillaging, hit and run, or taking an already weakened or poorly defended city, but overall they’re pretty tame. Give them a hard counter like AC ZOC v LC, then they’d go from sort of niche to totally useless.
   
   
3. Hard counters are just bad design. You just end up with, if you build this, I build that. The way units interact is better being more situational. The current relationship between AC and LC is better, because LC can still move (which is their main upside), but AC can deny them territory.
   
   
4. As I said, AC are already good v LC. He reason AC are actually bad is (1) as @Sostratus has explained, they are mostly underpowered for their cost, (2) the get chewed up by Ranged (which makes them poor on defence, but also makes their offensive abilities eg using Rams a dead letter), and (3) they don’t have a good niche beyond counter for cav. What I mean by the last one is that the main units have a Rock Scissor Paper structure (Melee Beats AC, AC Beats horsies, horsies beat Melee (sort of)), but it’s an asymmetrical relationship because it’s not just a flat +10 between each unit type (ie LC don’t get +10 v Melee, instead hey get more movement), each unit has different resource requirements (Melee hard resources, LC easy resources, AC no resources) and lastly they each have their own niche use (melee hit hard, LC pillage, and AC are cheap and cheerful / well defensive). Part of the issue here is that AC aren’t particularly better at their niche than normal Melee, meaning AC don’t have a good overall use-case. So, to fix AC, you need to buff their strength generally, give them some defence v Ranged, and critically, have them fill their niche better (or give them a new niche).

Hence, my suggestions. ie buff Spears and Pike strength; Promotion with Defence v Ranged; have certain infrastructure make them cheaper to build (so they are better at being cheap and cheerful, but some set up is required).

Agreed.

I can confirm P&S are quite punchy, and @Sostratus game mode makes Spears and Pikes much more playable. I still don’t think buffing strength alone is enough, but it does go a very long way to make AC worth it.