Units you tend to skip past

If you've built serious tech momentum it's ok to bypass iron completely.
Your question is particularly relevant to the Americans. The Minutemen are the first 'post-iron' unit so I can def see rushing through to get there and skipping longswordmen. The WW2 bomber is a mainstay of my late game warfare though. The B17 in particular is a terrifying weapon! The WW2 bomber's range and punch, particularly if combined with it's excellent promotion path, make it an indispensable offensive weap. It can be promoted to twin strike capability and specialized to attack virtually all unit types; kick in an extra 2 movement range and you've got hell from above!
As for units I skip, the fighter. It wastes an oil input and requires a lot of (player) labor to wield effectively, has very limited striking power and the range is meh. The SAM is a 'set & forget' weap which, when placed right, gets the job done.
A unit I just started using effectively is the battleship. I was completely unaware of the range it had until a friend crushed me with his. He took out my destroyers before I even realized a naval battle was imminent and then pounded coastal cities from a safe distance - and I mean POUNDED!! Three turns of that and a few tanks and you're civ will never build another workboat.
Of course, my all time not used weap is the anti-tank weapon. My allies always send me one when I desperately need something else :)
Also, I just can't understand why enemy units never walk right up and park next to my Gatling gun... You have to admit, a weapon with a range of one is a bit weird. I mean... Who the hell is going to end there move adjacent to a weapon like that?
 
I would say I never built any horse-based units, or "mounted unit" line, and if ever, any ship units (hell, I even tend to avoid building Work Boats (by accident I can assure you).

All I kneww for happiness is few catapults (pre-G&K I didn't even build those) and melee units.
 
Chariot archers, spearmen, cruise missiles, and cruise missile ships.
 
Don't even know what an anti tank gun looks like. There are other units I use sparingly, but the anti tank gun has so far gone unused.
 
I don't understand cruise missles.

Why spend shields on a single use weapon? Real world applications is good, but in-game, when it's just knocking some hitpoints it seems too weak.

I think they need to do collateral damage with these. Imagine 1 missile damaging ships on the centre tile and all hexes surrounding it plus units under it.
 
I see many seem to skip AA , Mobile sams , and fighters of all kind . Yet many choose bombers . I wud assume most answers then are from people who play the Ai most of the time and not human players . Because how do u defend against bombers without the above mentioned ? But even with the Ai i noticed they build fighters and bombers in good number . So u would be defenseless right ?
The only other thing I can think is some people are so far ahead in tech that they skip those items . No fear of the enemies air game .
 
Chariot archers. They always just let me down. I will sometimes build AT guns on defence, if I can get them to blitz it makes them brilliants helis.

i like chariot archers, cheap mobile composite bowmen, that come early, what's wrong with that?
 
The upgrade line discourages me.

true, knights with range promos is a bit lame, but knights in general aren't so bad. if i have lots of flat terrain and a stretched out empire though, chariot archers make great mobile defenders, where composites are very slow and expensive to build and you have to wait till construction to get them.
 
i like chariot archers, cheap mobile composite bowmen, that come early, what's wrong with that?

They take a strategic resource, they have a rough terrain penalty, they don't get defense bonuses from terrain, their upgrade unit is a melee unit which makes a bunch of their promotions worthless and it takes forever to get to, they take 16 more hammers than a normal archer(which is significant early-game), they're weak to Spearmen...I'm not really sure what ISN'T wrong with them.

Horse Archers are good, Chariot Archers are horrid :p
 
They take a strategic resource, they have a rough terrain penalty, they don't get defense bonuses from terrain, their upgrade unit is a melee unit which makes a bunch of their promotions worthless and it takes forever to get to, they take 16 more hammers than a normal archer(which is significant early-game), they're weak to Spearmen...I'm not really sure what ISN'T wrong with them.

Horse Archers are good, Chariot Archers are horrid :p

they have just one less attack strength than composites though, why build an archer instead of a chariot archer? if you have horses already hooked up, I'd take the chariot archer over more archers which will be expensive to upgrade to composites. as to rough terrain penalty, sure going into rough terrain eats up remaining movement points, but that just means in rough terrain they move the same speed as an archer/composite, while in flat terrain they move twice as far. i'm not sure they are weak to spearmen? if i recall, they are considered 'ranged unit', therefore don't suffer the mounted weakness to spears/pikes. you do lose the terrain defensive bonus though and ability to fortify, but they're not meant to hold ground anyhow, theyre meant to quickly move around the battlefield providing strategic ranged support to areas that need it. the ability to quickly zoom around and finish off a weakened unit several tiles away is very useful, the ability to go back and forth fighting on two fronts as needed, is also very useful. with egypt, given their no horse requirement, you can build about 5 war chariots very early and rush any opponenent with some flat land very effectively.
 
they have just one less attack strength than composites though, why build an archer instead of a chariot archer? if you have horses already hooked up, I'd take the chariot archer over more archers which will be expensive to upgrade to composites. as to rough terrain penalty, sure going into rough terrain eats up remaining movement points, but that just means in rough terrain they move the same speed as an archer/composite, while in flat terrain they move twice as far. i'm not sure they are weak to spearmen? if i recall, they are considered 'ranged unit', therefore don't suffer the mounted weakness to spears/pikes. you do lose the terrain defensive bonus though and ability to fortify, but they're not meant to hold ground anyhow, theyre meant to quickly move around the battlefield providing strategic ranged support to areas that need it. the ability to quickly zoom around and finish off a weakened unit several tiles away is very useful, the ability to go back and forth fighting on two fronts as needed, is also very useful. with egypt, given their no horse requirement, you can build about 5 war chariots very early and rush any opponenent with some flat land very effectively.

Well the discussion was about the base Chariot Archer, UUs are a different story in basically every case. I only brought up Horse Archers to preempt someone doing it lol

The reason to build Archers instead is because they take fewer hammers, no horses, have a MUCH better upgrade path for a ranged unit. Having to have Horses and getting them hooked up just to get started building the force is a big turn-off for me. Unless something changed from vanilla to G&K, ranged mounted units most certainly are Spear/Pike weak. The thing with mobility is that it's worthless if there's hills, and a Composite rush will still blow people up on flat land. The other drawback to the mobility thing is you aren't a Keshik so you're still stuck in place when you attack. If I want a mobile attacker, I'll build a couple Horsemen to harass the enemy Composites and get out.

Again though, like was said earlier, the upgrade thing is almost impossible to get past.
 
outside of late game units which arent needed very often, i never make these unless its my UU or leads to the UU with upgrades: spearmen, chariot archer, longswords, galleas, ironclad (needs coal), subs.

but since the patch came out, AI is usually a lot poorer now because they spend their gold so skipping horse units like chariot archers was mostly so i could sell the horses to them. but now i might start using them more instead of just sitting on them because the AI is broke. CA's arent that bad in general but early gold was more useful pre-patch.
 
I retract Part of my previous statements, and have found myself using anti-tank guns more often. Have "move after attack" really helps against cities (as they can strike and pull back to allow stronger units to do damage) and they're bonus to armor and mounted makes them god for supporting the flanks. Not really a bad unit in all honesty, I just nee noticed it had move after attack and thus never gave it much thought. Still will upgrade to Helis at first chance, but who wouldn't want the same unit but +4 movement, mountain moves, and is stronger? Also I never get to stealth bombers in time, and prefer to use my uranium on other things than gdrs.
 
Chariot archers are about on par with composites to start with, but once they get logistics they pull way way ahead. They're not considered mounted for spear/pike purposes.

Like you said Light Cleric, the upgrade path thing is just so huge though. Chariot archer UU's don't really make the chariot archer usable for me. It's the keshik and camel archer that make it really work. The base unit itself is already very good on its own merits. The horse archer is sort of an exception, but that's more because Attila's whole package is oriented around early war without following up, which is the kind of situation where the chariot archer shines.

In terms of skipping units, I've only ever built token amounts of any of the specialized modern era+ units. If I'm going on the offensive I've either got some ridiculously promoted units from the basic upgrade paths that fill the specialized role just as well and do everything else better or doing all the heavy lifting with airplanes.

When I really think about it, the answer could just about be "anything but composite bows." I'll build some siege as an investment if I have the opportunity to get easy xp for them and you've got to have a couple melee and/or horses and a navy if you want to invade overseas, but at the end of the day I haven't found anything yet that isn't best countered by a lot of composite bows.


For something that has basically no historical meaning, upgrade paths are really important ever since they added unit promotions to civ. I can't think of the perfect solution to the problem but personally I wouldn't mind a return to something closer to the simpler civ3 style promotions that would allow them to make upgrade paths more diverse or maybe even remove upgrades entirely.
 
I never get to use longswordsmen. I rarely play a warmongering game, so I use archers only to defend my cities, since they just do it so well. I also almost never use cavalry.
 
Oh yeah I never answered the actual question. :p Well the obvious answer for me is Chariot Archers, but for the most part I tend to skip over Pikemen too unless I'm playing Persia. The exception is if I'm facing Stampy because Stampy is a beast and there's nothing else that can really go heads-up with it in the open field until Muskets.
 
I retract Part of my previous statements, and have found myself using anti-tank guns more often. Have "move after attack" really helps against cities (as they can strike and pull back to allow stronger units to do damage) and they're bonus to armor and mounted makes them god for supporting the flanks. Not really a bad unit in all honesty, I just nee noticed it had move after attack and thus never gave it much thought. Still will upgrade to Helis at first chance, but who wouldn't want the same unit but +4 movement, mountain moves, and is stronger? Also I never get to stealth bombers in time, and prefer to use my uranium on other things than gdrs.

Hmmm didn't realize they had this....
 
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