Upgrading units

[Ricci]

Old units are excellent under hereditary rule. It's a course of action that you can take before adjusting the culture slider. Just throw your old useless units into a troubled city for the .

I think the upgrade cost is a little high. Actually I wouldn't mind it, but the AI's cost is half. It's rather annoying that their entire army gets upgraded in a couple turns.

Well, it is half, thanks god!! It was set at 15% of the human player cost in warlords.. that was game breaking. Now, it is just a very good bonnus, and the AI doesn't use it automatically unless it has lots of gold, as a wise human player would.
To be truthful, lets say upgrading units is the alternative to use an economic system (commerce and all the infraestructure asociated with it) in favour of a production system, whereas you have better developed one system or the other will make you rather take this alternative more or less. Also, it is a formidable way to put up a competitive army from obsolete units in a rush (marathon speed being specially sensitive for this matter as raising an army might take for too long in times of need/unexpected war).
The trade off between gold and hammers being upgraded is precise to me, keeping it's consistency with the buying option enabled with Universal S, it also adds a small price to make veteran units and succesive upgrading meaningful (ie: if you upgrade a phalanx to pikeman and then to rifleman it will cost you a bit more than upgrading the phalanx directly to rifleman, to account for the standing of a competitive "in between" pikeman).

 

[tiznoast]

But upgrading isn't economically feasible for keeping you #1 in the military game.

I couldn't disagree with this more if I tried. Getting together 3K-4K gold to upgrade, say, 15 catapults -> cannon is a great way to have a huge spike on the power graph. I am an upgrading junky, and it's an extremely successful strategy.

 

[UncleJJ]

The cost to upgrade in Marathon is the same as in other speeds. Well, I'm not absolutely certain of that, but according to the formula given above, it should be 900+ to upgrade one unit and it's certainly not =P

It's 170 to upgrade from Spearmen to Pikemen in Marathon, is that what it is in Normal? If so, then there's your answer right there--In Marathon, it's cheaper and easier to upgrade your army than it is to build a new one.

I don't play marathon but just for you I started a game and noted the hammer costs I was surprised to see that they are double normal while the game speed is three times slower. That accounts for my mistaken impression above. In my defence I did "guess" the upgrade costs for marathon. A spearman costs 70 hammers (35 in normal) and a pikeman costs 120 (60) so the difference is 50 hammers and so the 170 gold you mention would breakdown as 50 * 3 gold + 20. So the upgrade formula holds in terms of hammer costs, my mistake was to assume hammer costs were in line with game speed. I have learned something today

 

[Exel]

My experience of running the game on reduced upgrade costs shows that the game is much more sensible with cheaper upgrades. For one the AI wont have huge hordes of obsolete units (Archers in the Industrial era) and generally most units you see in combat are up-to-date. The upgrades still don't have to be free, so massed upgrades will still feel in your economy and need planning.

The settings I've found good to use are 25gp base upgrade cost + 1gp for every hammer. The default values are 20gp base cost + 3gp per hammer.

 

[UncleJJ]

Personally I don't delete units unless I really feel the need to. More often, they get light garrison duty, so my core cities have obsolete crap. Leftovers accompany my attack stacks because any warm body will do when the object is to spread out collateral damage. So an early (just got Infantry) Industrial attack stack might have 8 cannons, 4 trebs (if I don't get around to upgrading them first), 2 Machine Gun, 3 Infantry, 6 riflemen, 5 ridiculously upgraded CR melee (usually a CR-III, Combat I or II swordsman that I've been milking for West Point purposes, and some axes, maces, or other such units who also have insane xp), a healer or two, and several weird stuff like crossbows and pikemen to better absorb any mass siege attacks/airship attacks on my stack.

My attacking stack looks like that too. I carry obsolete units to finish off any severely weakened enemy that got lucky and killed or forced my attacker to withdraw. My stack had 3 artillery, 5 machine guns, 8 rifles, 8 cannons, 2 grenadiers, 10 cavalry (including 2 Medic 3 Generals), a knight and horse archer. Several of my rifles have the interesting Guerilla 3 or the Woodsman 3 promotions which I'm most impressed with. Others have CR3 and several of the cavalry are Combat 3, March or Combat 2, Flanking 2 both of which are great combos.

I'm probably being too sentimental but last night I had my last horse archer reach 26 exp and level 6. I don't think I'll bother to upgrade him to cavalry as I'll have gunships soon and he may as well be my honary first test pilot A Combat 3, Flanking 2 gunship should be rather fierce even if he does cost 350 gold to upgrade. Much better than the ordinary 5 exp point gunships from barracks and Theocracy.

This is a strange game since I had the Great Lighthouse and some castles so I held off researching Economics and Corporation until the last moment so infantry are not available. That meant I had a weird situation occur that I've never encountered before. I am running Nationhood but can't draft any troops. Riflemen have been replaced by SAM infantry when I researched Rocketry and I haven't researched Assembly Line yet. Nationhood is still a great civic with the +2 and 25% EPs but I really wanted to have one more round of drafting rifles (for garrisons) before infantry replaced them. That was something I learned yesterday

 

[Rusty Edge]

A well timed Great Merchant is also key.

I don't find much trouble in amassing the gold needed for upgrades... A Great Merchant or more often just trading non-sought after techs to civs with a lot of gold does the trick... (what harm is there in trading drama, music, constitution, etc, etc to the AI? None really...)

I often upgrade to appease my frustration at missing a big Wonder by a couple of turns .