Swordsman v Quechas?

[benjai]

I've just started playing prince again after long and tiring monarch ones. I decided to use Incans for the first time as well since the had aggressive which was interesting plus everyone's favourite financial.

Pangea map with 7 civs. First stop was to get bronze/iron working so I could rush workers/settlers and chop down all the dreaded jungles. With 4 cities in place, I started forming my attack plan against Salidin. At this point he had a few horse things (chariots? I forget), and archers in each city. So I decided to build 2 swords plus around 4 quechas. When they were ready I quickly shifted them to the nearest city. Both swords survived and I think I lost 2 quechas. Another quecha was ready by now and after a couple turns healing, nabbed his second city again losing a quecha. By this time I noticed a stack of one axe + 5 warriors coming around the back so I quickly made peace and got a free tech off him.

Next was the americans who had just build pyramids in washington. Romans had just declared war on them conveniently but washington still had 5 archers. My 2 swords by now had city raider 2 and strength 1 (from aggr). They were slicing though the archers like butter even though they had 40% cultural defense. In contrast, every other quecha was dying. In fact, I think they could only kill the wounded archers. I managed to take out 2 of his citys before calling peace and getting another tech. By now the swords had city raider 3 and strength 2!

So question is, should I even bother with the quechas? Not a single of the swords died and they are now almost invincible in taking out cities. The quechas in contrast died half the time. Not to mention that they got taken out by the occasional horse guy roaming around.

I read another thread saying how quechas were overated and I can see the point. My quechas are going to obsolete relatively soon I think. Should I have declared war sooner? I don't think I would have got very far with out the aggresive trait boosted swords.

 

[ElJojo]

Well there's no point IMO of building quechuas once you have swordsmen. Quechuas is useful for very early rushes. Against a city with defense bonus they're agoing to have a tough time. I mean an archer with garrison I in a city with 40% defense bonus is almost out of range for a quechua with base Str of 2.
Quechuas are cheap and effective when cities are too recent to have real bonuses. You can take an ennemy capitol in the very beginning and enjoy the nice spot for exemple and that's a huge advantage

 

[voek]

you used them way to late

Use quecha against the early barbs (= great) and for 1 or maybe 2 early rushes, before you have iron or even bronze (within city borders).

I use them to cripple the enemy civs (1 or 2) and keep them hanging around their city's, pillaging and hunting down archers outside city's. I don't bother losing many quecha's to conquer the citý's. I try to get bronze and/or iron and finish it off with axe/swords.

Advantage: they haven't built up and are easy prey for your swords for they won't have anything better then archers.

Offcourse, some have early UU, like the Aztecs, who you should avoid. But in general i don't do early Quecha's conquering, just crippeling.

But it all depends (most used words i think in this fora), on map(size),difficulty, opponents, etc etc

Read and learn here how to use quecha's. There are tons of post.

Good luck.

got outposted

 

[Zombie69]

Yes, you waited way too long. Quechuas can take out one or two civs before you even get Iron Working. Once Swordsmen are available, there's no point in producing Quechuas anymore. But then again, once you have iron working, you should have the game almost wrapped up by then!

 

[petey]

Once Swordsmen come in, Quechas are obsolete. A Quecha has a base strength of 2.2 (starts with Combat I), so against an Archer, it gets its 100% bonus, giving it 4.4. A Swordsmen has a base strength of 6.6 (gets Combat I) and if the Archer is in a city, it gets an additional 10% bonus, giving it a strength of 7.2. By the time you're building Swordsmen, you likely have a barracks, so if you give the Quechas the Cover promotion (+25% vs Archers), they go to a strength of 4.9. If you give the Swordsmen City Raider I (+20% vs cities), they go to a strength of 8.4. They are a far better unit.

The only reason to keep building Quechas is that they have a much lower cost - 15 shields vs 40 for Swordsmen. Based on the final numbers, it could still be worth it to whip out more Quechas for the attack (you can build 8 Quechas for the hammers that get you 3 Swordsmen), but Swordsmen are much more likely to survive and get more promotions to make them even more useful.

I'd say can the Quechas and build Swordsmen and Axemen once the techs and resources become available.

 

[benjai]

Well the thing is, I was fairly busy building workers/settlers in the beginning to be able to build many quechas and I beelined to iron working since there were a lot of jungles. So by the time I was able to build more quechas, I could already produce swordsman. Plus, in the early stages, the opponents don't have archers yet. The time from when they have archers to when I got swordsman was very small. I think that if there were a low number of opponents then they would be very useful for harassing. But with 7, it just doesn't seem worth bothering with. I'm think I'm going to try out the pretorians next....

 

[Yzen Danek]

As others have pointed out, you deployed Qechuas too late to be of great service to you.

A basic Qechua rush strategy goes like this:

Start building a Qechua and researching Bronze working. Send your starting Qechua out to pop huts and find other Civs.

When you find another Civ nearby, as soon as that second Qechua is done, declare war, take out their worker (this alone saves you a big chunk of time and resources), and send your units to a defensibile square right outside their capital. From this point on, they won't build anything but archers to try to take out your Qechua, and they won't succeed, especially as you've got more Qechua on the way. All their attacks do is level up your units. Depending upon what level you're playing on, you may want to give the first unit to hit level 3 the medic promotion; on Immortal and Deity levels, the AI can crank out archers so fast that they'll wear you down without it.

Right now you're about 15-20 turns into the game and you've already effectively ended the game for one rival, and only spent 30 hammers doing it.

Bronze working is discovered. Chop out a barracks and two or three more Qechua with the Cover (+25% vs. archers) promotion, and send them over to harass your rival. You may be able to take them out now, but usually the odds aren't good until you let them attack you enough or until you get to attack archers in the open enough that you get one of your Qechuas enough experience to promote to city raider II (10 exp), which is when the odds start to favor you heavily. This can take a few turns, but this shouldn't concern you, as your expeditionary force really isn't costing you anything; back home, you can just continue development as usual, aided greatly by that free worker.

Ideally, you see bronze on the map now and can chop out a settler, hook it up, and chop out a couple of promoted axemen to take that city right away.

In the very best games, this rival you've just eliminated was researching a religious tech, and you've just gotten yourself a holy city right off the bat. Regardless, one of your first three cities is a captured capital, which are always superior locales.

Obiously, this strategy isn't failsafe; there are a lot of conditions where it won't work at all. It's heavily favored by smaller maps, slower game speeds, larger numbers of Civs, and any map with a lot of contiguous land masses.

 

[fugazi]

What I usually do is, produce quecha's with low production cities and swordsmen in the high production ones. This means your troops will balance out with enough fodder and such.

 

[Wreck]

A few more comments to add to Yzen's.

When playing Incas, it's particularly important to site your first city on a plains/hill. This is worth at least three turns to get because it will increase your early production that much.

Stealing the enemy worker is vital. Don't declare war until you can steal it.

Also, if the enemy has managed to get bronze working and has a copper mine, it is of highest priority to pillage it. This generally won't be true for your first victim, but sometimes will be for #2. #1 will sometimes have horses, which are similarly high priority for pillage.

Other than military resources, though, don't pillage. You want the enemy to build archers, in order to get experience for your quechuas. You need that experience to attack.

You want a stack of at least 2 quechuas next to each enemy city. One quechua is not enough, even fortified on a woods/hill. A quechua alone will last a long time, probably, but eventually the enemy will get lucky and kill it. Against a larger enemy town, I don't feel comfortable until I can get 3 quechuas there.

If the enemy has more than one city (which is probable if you're playing on the higher levels), you want a quechua pair on each city. If you're feeling particularly lucky, you might leave a city free, to let the enemy continue to colonize. More cheap cities, but more work, and also you get AI city placements. Up to you. If you have good exploration (so you can be sure the AI won't be able to start the next city and hook up copper/horses), then it's probably fairly safe.

It is difficult to take enemy capitals with quechuas alone, because the capitals fairly rapidly get to +40% culture, or even +60% if they have founded a religion there. Generally I wait for axes or even swords for this. However, with enough quechuas, with city-raider promotions, you can do it.

For a city with no culture, you need perhaps 1.5-2x as many quechuas as there are defending archers. For +20%, you'll want 2.5-3x as many. Generally the first attackers will die, but they'll weaken their archer enough that later attackers kill it. For +40%, you'll want at least 3x as many quechuas, and that's still risky. I'd be comfortable with 4x, but usually that's hard to arrange because the enemy will rarely leave less than 3 archers in his capital, and it's often 4 or 5.

While you are waiting next to a town for sufficient mass to take it, manage your promotions carefully. When a unit gets its first promotion (at 5 exp), just leaving it there is fine. However with its second, if possible (still leaving at least 3 adjacent), pull it back one square so that it will not be the defender, meaning that other guys will get the experience.

The main thing in the quechua rush is: don't be in a hurry. Once you've set up camp next to his towns, the enemy won't do a thing that can hurt you. So you've got all the time you want to take him down.

 

[East St Trader]

You used them perfectly well.

Using cheap units to soften up city defenders is one tactic which has not changed (pre catapult at least).

You do not say whether the cities you took were built on hills and/or had walls. But if so - or had you run into that case - your swords would have suffered losses. Sacrificing a number of cheap inexperienced units to take a city (and to gain your front line guys easy kills) is fine. Losing your best (and most promoted) troops is not.

 

[East St Trader]

I have played once with Quechuas and a point I wondered about is in relation to the most effective promotions. It seemed clear to go for a boost against archers and a boost to attacking cities as the first two but I did not resolve to my satisfaction whether the third promotion should be a ten percent overall strength increase, a second city attacker promotion or, indeed, something else entirely.

From the limited experience I gained the impression I had was that the boost when opposing archers was the single most effective of the promotions (facing archers of course). All the three promotion people went down from time to time when assaulting uninjured green archers in cities but it seemed to be those with three stars who suffered worst and those with the archer boost who were most likely to prevail.

I rarely had to risk anyone with four promotions on uninjured defenders but onn one or two occasions they , too went down so, I suppose I am also interested if anyone has built up enough experience to say what the optimum fourth promotion is if you are still focused on taking cities.

 

[Yzen Danek]

I have played once with Quechuas and a point I wondered about is in relation to the most effective promotions. It seemed clear to go for a boost against archers and a boost to attacking cities as the first two but I did not resolve to my satisfaction whether the third promotion should be a ten percent overall strength increase, a second city attacker promotion or, indeed, something else entirely.

From the limited experience I gained the impression I had was that the boost when opposing archers was the single most effective of the promotions (facing archers of course). All the three promotion people went down from time to time when assaulting uninjured green archers in cities but it seemed to be those with three stars who suffered worst and those with the archer boost who were most likely to prevail.

I rarely had to risk anyone with four promotions on uninjured defenders but onn one or two occasions they , too went down so, I suppose I am also interested if anyone has built up enough experience to say what the optimum fourth promotion is if you are still focused on taking cities.

If you're using the Qechua to take cities, the most effective promotion order is: Cover, City Raider I, CR II, CR III, Combat II, Combat III, etc.

One very nice thing that I rarely hear mentioned about the Qechua rush is that having units that start getting promoted in the beginning of the game can produce some very interesting and powerful upgrades in the later ages.

In one recent Emporer game, I went ahead and let the Egyptians live on after I had taken all but one very weak city, stayed at war (I had a really good set of luxuries to deal with the 'yearning to join the motherland' problem, and backed off their city by one tile so that they would have to step their archers out into the open, and just levelled up my Qechuas on them for a few hundred years. Fast forward to rifling, and combat in the Industrial Age, when I finally decided to start promoting these guys. What could be deadlier than galleons full of rifleman with both city raider III and amphibious promotions, hiding among a stack of frigates? Even more grim for my opponents, lots of the defenders were still crossbowmen and longbowmen, and my upgraded Qechuas also had the Cover promotion. All I needed was a navy bigger than my rivals' and my attackers were completely immune to reprisal. Furthermore, when I took a city, I didn't have to leave victorious attacking units standing there outside the city for a turn; I could just sail the whole armada into port and have everyone available for defense.

Definitely one of my favorite UU upgrade scenarios, second maybe only to the Russian modern age promotion of Cossacks promoted with combat III and blitz turning into gunships promoted with combat III blitz: 4 attacks per turn is awesome.