Swordsmen vs Spearmen

[darkace77450]

Does anyone prefer Spearmen over Swordsmen? Even with Greece's access to Hoplites I still find myself building Warriors and upgrading to Swordsmen. I prefer the Tortoise promotion for defensive units over the Spearman's bonus vs cavalry units. Another hangup I have with Spearmen is that their upgrade, Pikemen, comes from Military Tactics, which is a dead-end tech. But maybe you guys are having getting good work out of them?

 

[gimper42]

I view spearmen as a huge waste of hammers. Archers work better versus horsemen and are a lot cheaper. And, like you mentioned, military tactics is a dead end with no other reward. I prefer to skip that tech entirely.

 

[Quillan]

spearmen are awful. I almost never build them. They need a serious buff to be considered and the upgrade path (including techs) needs to be adjusted.

 

[Klinn]

Only time I've built many spearmen was the Jadwiga's Scenario where you are flooded with horsemen and knights. Needed them to help keep the cavalry at bay while my crossbow guys shot them.

 

[teks]

Spearmen are really bad.
It costs 50% more then a warrior and is 25% weaker then a warrior if the two met on an equal battleground. The greeks can get past this, but then we face another problem. Spearmen get promotions around defense, but its defense against melee, while melee and mounted units get tortoise to defend against ranged. ranged defense is better.
Then promotions, where warriors upgrade right to swordsmen, while spearman stick around until the dead tech for pikeman.
Finally, we have pikemen themselves, who are also very flawed, since they cost more then a knight, yet can just barely beat a knight on an equal battlefield; all while still losing to swordsman units from the classical era. Swordsman units which are less then half the cost of a pike.

It doesn't get much worse for a unit then that. A shame too since their final promotion is actually pretty good.

Now, there is something to be said about how they don't cost resources and do counter mounted, but I think I'd rather stick with archers and warriors unless I was playing the Greeks.

 

[kaspergm]

There's definitely some number tweaking that needs to be done here, I agree with what people above have said! Can't remember when I last build a spearman (actually that's a lie, it was two hours ago, to fulfill a city state quest, but that's also the only reason I'd ever build one).

 

[Wr4ith]

Nobody mentioned the different promotion tree, spearman have more interesting bonuses in my opinion. +1 movement can be very useful, first upgrade can nearly balance the penalty against melee, and the third one, though hard to get, give great bonus to units around them. So it isnt bad idea to have one unit with this aoe bonus.

 

[Leyrann]

They're good if you're up against Scythia or something like that, or someone just decides to build a ton of horses (maybe they don't have iron). And of course there's the possibility you don't have iron.

That said, they probably deserve a buff compared to Swordsman. The biggest problem is, I think, that you're supposed to be able to stop barbs with warriors, while every barb camp is guarded by a spearman. So, if warriors can't battle spearman, you can't battle barbs early on. Sadly, the upgrade of warriors, the swordsmen, then automatically wreck spearmen, while for the majority of the time that you have spearman, you're up against swordsmen.

PS Might be mod-related, but I have a bug with Gorgo where my hoplites always get the +10 strength, even if there's no hoplite adjacent. Not that I mind...

 

[UWHabs]

I did build/buy a spear, but it was only to get the eureka for MT to be able to upgrade a pike, and that was only because England declared a surprise war against me with lots of knights. But I really didn't need to, because as everyone mentioned, my crossbows did enough damage to them that it really didn't matter what I cleaned them up with.

They either need to be stronger, to utterly destroy horses and be able to hold their own to a certain extent against swords, or they just need to be so cheap that you don't care about using them as cannon fodder.

 

[Wr4ith]

PS Might be mod-related, but I have a bug with Gorgo where my hoplites always get the +10 strength, even if there's no hoplite adjacent. Not that I mind...

I have same problem with pericles without mods. I think it deserves to be written in bug reports. I dont know if this bugged modifier is actually applied when you fight without adjecent spearman or only tooltip is bugged.

 

[teks]

Nobody mentioned the different promotion tree, spearman have more interesting bonuses in my opinion. +1 movement can be very useful, first upgrade can nearly balance the penalty against melee, and the third one, though hard to get, give great bonus to units around them. So it isnt bad idea to have one unit with this aoe bonus.

I did.
Swordsmen get +10 defense vs ranged at rank 1. That promotion is far and away superior to the spearmen getting their penalty removed vs. melee. We gotta weigh the ranks. We can't wait until our third promotion for a decent unit, and even then, swordsmen get +10 when they are fighting in a district, which is a very competitive bonus. I haven't tested this, but doesn't this mean that a swordsman can park in a district and get a combined +20 combat strength vs. ranged? That's huge.

 

[greygamer]

I had a king game recently and spammed spearmen during the medieval period, it worked pretty well. The AI seems to target your weakest units so it left my battering ram horsemen free to destroy the city walls very quickly with only 1 or 2 ranged units in support.

 

[Victoria]

Nice to see a use @greygamer and that not everyone has given up on them
I normally play passive aggressive and often build 1 just to limit that barb horse encroachment I cannot currently clean which helps later as a pikeman because the AI always has some knights.
Value for money a clubmen is better as barbs have spearmen in their camps amd the upg path.

In the rock, paper, scissors scenario, they are the curled up cheese sandwich you have in a break.
Built mainly for a criteria because they are inferior
They are a dimly lit side alley you just do not feel comfy walking down.

 

[greygamer]

Nice to see a use @greygamer and that not everyone has given up on them
I normally play passive aggressive and often build 1 just to limit that barb horse encroachment I cannot currently clean which helps later as a pikeman because the AI always has some knights.
Value for money a clubmen is better as barbs have spearmen in their camps amd the upg path.

In the rock, paper, scissors scenario, they are the curled up cheese sandwich you have in a break.
Built mainly for a criteria because they are inferior
They are a dimly lit side alley you just do not feel comfy walking down.

If you do find yourself without iron in the early game then spearmen will actually be your cheap melee unit (due to warriors becoming obsolete). The nightmare start is where you are without horses or iron and that does occur occasionally which makes expansion hazardous, as a result you may need to improvise.
The +1 promotion that gives spearmen +10 strength.vs. melee units helps out in this respect

 

[Victoria]

Good point... To be fair I normally do not have iron or horses and tend to rely on a few archers and the said spearman and a couple of barb camp clearers

 

[TomKQT]

If you do find yourself without iron in the early game then spearmen will actually be your cheap melee unit (due to warriors becoming obsolete). The nightmare start is where you are without horses or iron and that does occur occasionally which makes expansion hazardous, as a result you may need to improvise.
The +1 promotion that gives spearmen +10 strength.vs. melee units helps out in this respect

Well, it's not really "if" for me. I've had easy access to iron in maybe like only 20 % of my games (easy = at the range of some of my existing cities or at a place where I would build a city anyway) and any access to iron at all in maybe like 50 % of my games (without having to capture enemy cities or build a city in a completely crazy place purely for the iron).

 

[Gorbles]

Why are we comparing Swordsmen and Spearmen like they're the same class of unit that are meant to do the same thing? The only thing they share is a melee class that enables them to take Cities.

Beyond that:

1. Swordsmen require a Strategic resource, and at least two more Technologies.
2. Spearmen do well against cavalry units.
3. Swordsmen do well against non-mounted units.

So it's highly situational. Spearmen are better in general if you lack Iron, but even then you're going to want to hang onto Warriors if your enemy goes heavy on non-mounted units (actually, you'd wanted ranged units, as Warriors won't scale past Swordsmen very well nomatter how many of them you have). They're two different paths of unit, one that evolves into modern Infantry, and another that evolves into anti-tank (tank being the modern cavalry line).

 

[Jarms48]

I'd just increase the Spearmen melee strength to 27-28. Similar thing with the Pikemen, I'd probably increase their melee strength to 45-48. This would put them on their respective footing to their equal tiered heavy cavalry counterparts, making them a much better hard counter.

 

[Shawanabad]

I usually build just one spearman (to get the eureka boost for killing with a spearman). All my other spearmen are usually barbarian converts (using the apostle ability to convert adjacent barbarian units).
So, I end up having 3-4 of them total in a game this way. I use them primarily as home guard. I upgrade them to pikemen and use them to clear barbarian camps (in conjunction with my 1 home guard crossbowman).

They come in handy too when they upgrade to anti-tank crew.

At least one AI in all my games always seem to beeline to AT crew and attack me with them at some point. I use my AT crew to fight them off (in combination with city ranged attacks, airplanes, field canons), while my regular military of tanks, artillery, and battleships are off fighting foreign wars of conquest.

My preference for offensive war is swordsman. But spearmen have their uses. In my latest China game, my spearmen tied up invading Indian war elephants, while I counter-attacked with chariots and archers (in the absence of iron). Millennia later, AT crew descendants of those same spearmen foiled an Egyptian invasion of AT crews, with an assist from Chinese Bomber Command air base New Delhi. My regular tank/infantry army was a continent away liberating Rome from Scythia during this whole time.

 

[Tamir Lenk]

I only research the Pike tech when it's down to about 2 turns and then only to make potential free techs more relevant (e.g., Oxford University or a GP, or goody hut). Nothing worse than getting Pikes for free in the Atomic Age.