The Emperor Series IV: Hannibal

[Gumbolt]

The spoiler for the leader is not working! Did you add an image?

Overall not looked at map but I am guessing a chariot followed by numidian rush would be interesting. (assuming horse??)

Plenty of forest and grass land to abuse. Financial leader too. Could be a nice lil war game really.

Agriculture looks a good starting point.

 

[GGracchus]

Fixed, sorry. I stole the picture of him from the old NC V game(hope bleys dosen't mind)

 

[GGracchus]

AZ - Hanny and Numidian rush might make a good next LP from you

Yes, AZ; LP the map!

 

[Bei1052]

In short, they're bad.

They're awesome.

In a 1n1, Praets are still ALOT stronger than Numidians, and Numidians are far from being a direct counter to Praets. The only thing that sort of counters Praets are Elephants, apart from that they're simply unchallenged in their timeframe.

This isn't completely correct. Without any promotions or terrain bonuses/penalties, the Praet will beat the Numidian Cavalry more often than not (65.9% of the time). However, a two-promotion shock Numidian Cavalry-- which is an easy barracks plus a stable-- will beat an equally promoted Combat II Praet more often than not (66.2% of the time). Of course, if you play correctly and get HBR ASAP, the your opponent shouldn't have reached either Feudalism or Theocracy, meaning you shouldn't have to worry about anything greater than a one-promotion Praet until they get either the aforementioned techs, settle a GG or have their units game some levels through combat, meaning your Shock Numidian Cavalry should be getting about a 69.9% chance against Combat I Praets. Sure, Elephants would do better against Praets, but they are more expensive to build, require a resource which is rarer than horses, require few more techs to build, have one fewer movement point and don't start with Flanking I. For all intents and purposes, Numidian Cavalry are quite awesome. They only really falter when trying to kill Horse Archers or trying to capture a city with archers, though a few Flanking II cavalry will generally do just enough to allow your other units to mop up.

 

[ahcos]

Okay, so if the Numidians are awesome, for what purpose do you use them? They're significantly worse at rushes (read: attacking cities), which is one of the strongest use of HA rushes in general. If you're fast, and you should be, you won't even face too many units in open field, making Numidians even worse as cities are always defended by archers ~

Regarding the discussion about praets, read page 2, i answered that already.

Numidians are better than the really weak UUs, but they're not even average, they're slightly below average. "Awesome", for me, should be comparable to the top UUs like the fast worker or the Queucha, and Numidians are far, far away from breathing the same air as those units. Just take a look at the units here http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/civilizations and tell me that Numidians are better than 75% of the other UU, which should be the least to call them "awesome". Long story short, they're bad, although not as bad as a Ballista Elephant or Landsknecht.

 

[MarigoldRan]

Okay, so if the Numidians are awesome, for what purpose do you use them? They're significantly worse at rushes (read: attacking cities), which is one of the strongest use of HA rushes in general. If you're fast, and you should be, you won't even face too many units in open field, making Numidians even worse as cities are always defended by archers ~

Regarding the discussion about praets, read page 2, i answered that already.

Numidians are better than the really weak UUs, but they're not even average, they're slightly below average. "Awesome", for me, should be comparable to the top UUs like the fast worker or the Queucha, and Numidians are far, far away from breathing the same air as those units. Just take a look at the units here http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/civilizations and tell me that Numidians are better than 75% of the other UU, which should be the least to call them "awesome". Long story short, they're bad, although not as bad as a Ballista Elephant or Landsknecht.

Spoiler :

I did a Numidian "rush" (post-Alphabet) on this map at emperor level and it worked quite fine. Wont' reveal anymore, cuz of spoilers, but the idea is that since you start with a lot of forests: pre-chop everything, get Mathematics, run slavery, and produce like 20 Numidians.

The main advantage of Numidians is that it doesn't expire until feudalism. In contrast to, for example, the immortal, which expires against spears and swords. That's why their late rushes are effective.

The idea is to get MORE than the enemy has in defenders. With flanking, the initial attackers have a decent shot at surviving every fight. The second group of attackers kill the softened-up. With this, you can win virtually every battle (with some losses that can be replaced). So build up the economy first, then "rush."

Finally, their speed is nice- it prevents the comp from pop rushing defenders. This is one feature where they're much better than the awfully slow-moving praets.



EDIT: Focusing on shields is a good idea since gold will rain upon you from the skies because you're financial.

EDIT 2: The problem with immortals and war chariots, two of the premier "rushing" unit is that you have a very short time-frame to work in. The computer gets spears, and suddenly all your immortals are useless.

The time-frame for Numidians is much longer.

 

[GGracchus]

@Marigold: Just put it in spoilers! People playing is always welcome and people can constructively criticize your gameplay. That's the point of this series. Also, how often do people want these games?

 

[ahcos]

Okay, and which part of what you've described will not work with HAs every civ is free to build?

 

[MarigoldRan]

Okay, and which part of what you've described will not work with HAs every civ is free to build?

The comps don't build HAs until they're attacked (unless of course, you're the Mongols). They also tend not to get stables.

At that point, your Numidians are significantly better-promoted than their HAs. Remember, you're charismatic!

Finally, you're assuming the comps have horse. With the free flanking 1 promotion, it's pretty easy to get the Mobility promotion. At which point you move your mobility guy to a horse and pillage it.

Scout the comps first with a worker or something else that's non-productive, place the mobility dude in the right place, and there you have it.

 

[ahcos]

You got me wrong. I was asking what exactly makes the Numidians so fantastic from your point of view, what makes them so much better than the standard HA? They're not necessarily a bad UU because they're bad, but they're clearly worse than the unit they replace, just because of the fact that what you want to do with HAs in general is to go out and take cities, and this is where Numidians are significantly worse than HAs as they're bad against Archers.

You can make up for a good portion of the bonus vs. melees Numidians receive by just promoting some of your HAs to C1/Shock, but you can't make up your the lower base strength Numidians have vs. Archers by promoting them to anything at all. Flanking will help them survive the uphill battle more often indeed, but what you want is take the city for what you'll need to actually damage or kill the defenders. There's a good chance that you won't even scratch the defender with a Numidian, and therefore will need more of them before you can execute your first strike.

Numidians are indeed better vs. Spears, but

a) the AI doesn't amass them even when getting facestomped by mounted units all over the place
b) pillage the metals, profit. You can't pillage any kind of arrow manufacture.
c) Archers are the most common defenders, and you'll face alot more of them compared to spears.

 

[AbsoluteZero]

You got me wrong. I was asking what exactly makes the Numidians so fantastic from your point of view, what makes them so much better than the standard HA?

You keep getting hung up about archers. On the difficulty I play you are very unlikely to HA rush an AI with no metal. So the biggest roadblock to a HA rush is fortified spears / swords in cities. That's where NC shine. When you count the extra withdraw chance NC aren't terrible vs archers. They are a lot better vs archers then a regular HA is vs city spears / swords.

a) the AI doesn't amass them even when getting facestomped by mounted units all over the place

What difficulty is this? I've seen deity AI crank out spears like no tomorrow when I'm HA rushing. I'll sometimes face 3 per city!

b) pillage the metals, profit. You can't pillage any kind of arrow manufacture.

Easier said then done. Unless on a low difficulty or slower speed keeping the AI away from metal after 2000 BC is usually next to impossible. They get it somehow, either via trading or that far away city on the tundra that you didn't know they had.

c) Archers are the most common defenders, and you'll face alot more of them compared to spears.

In my experience once the AI gets copper / iron it builds metal units almost exclusively. So unless you attack real early ( hard to do with HA's ) you will face a good 2-3 metal units for every 2 archers in a city ( deity difficulty again ).

 

[ahcos]

Holy crap, wrote like 2 pages, missclick, all gone. In short:

What difficulty is this? I've seen deity AI crank out spears like no tomorrow when I'm HA rushing. I'll sometimes face 3 per city!

Playing Deity for roughly 2 months now with focus on earlygame/opening/first 100 turns, so i'm quite familiar with all kind of rushes by now. Building spears often isn't equal to amassing them like a human would do.

Easier said then done. Unless on a low difficulty or slower speed keeping the AI away from metal after 2000 BC is usually next to impossible. They get it somehow, either via trading or that far away city on the tundra that you didn't know they had.

Didn't say that this is what you always will and have to do, but you can do it, and sometimes it works when they're isolated diplomacywise etc.. You can't pillage arrows.

In my experience once the AI gets copper / iron it builds metal units almost exclusively. So unless you attack real early ( hard to do with HA's ) you will face a good 2-3 metal units for every 2 archers in a city ( deity difficulty again ).

Hard to argue here, but once again, metal units are not equal to metal units. The AI loves to build useless axes instead of spears often enough from what i've seen. C2 HA -> axe, C1/Shock HA -> Archer. Ofc that's also true for Numidians, and your odds vs. Archers are pretty bad with Numidians. Against promoted or PRO Archers it only gets worse, the hit HAs take here is significant aswell but far worse for Numidians, thanks to the combat system.

Once again, this isn't me arguing about how terribad Numidians are IN GENERAL, i know that they have their strenghts, but they suck as a UU. There are games where they're better, and there are games where they're worse, no comparison to 75% of the other UUs that are ALWAYS better regardless of difficulty or game outcome.

HAs or Numidians? I prefer HAs, even on Deity.

 

[AbsoluteZero]

How do you cut a deity AI off from metal consistently? You sound confident you can do this. I've had very few games where I was able to cut off an AI's metal, and usually they started with a choke where I keep the AI to just a few cities. How do you do it with a HA rush?

Typically by the time I attack with HA's the AI has around 8 cities, which usually means at least 2 copper / iron. If I pillage and camp them the AI will suicide units until clears me off. I guess you could build a small stack of axes / spears / swords to camp each metal site ( the ones you know about ), but then you have to march deep into enemy territory possibly taking many turns, and those units might have been better spent just attacking or defending newly captured cities.

In my experience trying to keep an 6+ city deity AI from getting metal is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. It's mostly an exercise in self-frustration.

 

[ahcos]

In my experience trying to keep an 6+ city deity AI from getting metal is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. It's mostly an exercise in self-frustration.

Agree. And usually it's impossible to hold AIs off from metal overall, but then once in a time they only have one source of metal. Guess it depends on the map layout pretty much. On Fractal, i remember at least 3 games where the AI started with one lone source of metal in their reach. If the start generator decides to screw the AI and not the human for a change it's time for revenge. Keeping them off from two sources of metal is possible aswell as long as they're in a favourable position, but then again, that's luck dependant ofc. In general it's impossible to keep them off metals, that's why i said it can work

You got me thinking, i'm at least up to the point now to say that Numidians are at least somewhat equal to HAs, but better? Na. Still a pretty crappy UU compared to what other UUs offer. Usually when i roll Hannibal, i do everything but a Numidian rush.

 

[NetGear]

Numidian isnt all that bad. its str difference of 1. Just grab combat 1 on your flank 2 cavs and now you have str diff of 0.5. Thats a pretty good deal imo for what you get.

 

[MarigoldRan]

The charismatic plays a big role in why Numidians are good. It's synergy. Your exp breakpoints are at 8 instead of 10. Since you pretty much automatically start with five exp, combine it with a military adviser and you're already at seven.

This means that when the flanking bonus kicks in, and your Numidian retreats, IT AUTOMATICALLY PROMOTES.

Also, the flanking bonus stays after you upgrade it to something better. These traits make it a solid/good UU.