What are the Best Units for Defending Cities in Each Age?

[BenDover]

When conquering tactical cities throughout the game, it's important to not lose them again to the enemy. Sometimes we can go back and forth conquering the same cities turning it into a stalemate until one or the other builds better units. I'm still learning how to adapt to the environment and what the enemy is throwing at me.

Clearly archers help out a ton early game, and replacing them with longbowman help out, but what about further down the tech tree? What should I replace (archers, for example) with when a reach a certain age?
What should I use to defend myself from siege units?

 

[elitetroops]

Best defense is to attack, especially against siege units. When you go to war, bring enough units to finish your opponent quickly. The AI usually has one stack of doom, which you should wipe out as early as possible. Plan your attack so you can do it under favorable conditions. If you have a lot of CR siege, you might want to attack it while it's in a city. If you are doing mounted warfare, you probably want to take it out in the open field. Under no circumstances do you want to let it attack you. When the stack is wiped out, you will mostly face random scattered units, which your own stack should easily be able to handle while conquering the rest of the enemy.

After taking a city, I usually only leave behind those who need healing, together with a GG Medic III. The rest move on toward the next city. When the troops behind are healed, I hopefully have gotten one defensive unit there from somewhere, which then stays as the only defense needed while the rest of my army moves on.

But to answer your question, typical city defenders are:

Warrior -> Archer -> Longbow -> Rifle -> Infantry -> Mech inf.

Depending on what opposition you are facing, you might want to throw in other more specialized units. You might also want to skip archers altogether and replace them with axes.

 

[lymond]

My first comment is that if you are losing captured cities and wars are turning into stalemates, then you probably have much bigger issues than what defenders you should use. I'd need to know more about your game and strategies for war, but it sounds like you are not building enough units are the right units when you go to war.

With that said, Longbows are one of the best city defenders in the game - for a long time actually - and the natural successor to archers. However, when I'm at war, depending on the time a game I'm running, I can very well leave cities undefended if needed. All depends.

Later, Rifles and Grens are more than capable, especially if Protective and Machine Guns are excellent defenders and collateral proof.

One of the best ways to defend against siege units is siege units, as they absorb collateral damage. However, generally, my best defense is a good offense. Not that certain Mounted Units do a lot of damage to siege units of a given era, such as Knights on Trebs. If a Knight wins a battle against a unit in a stack it will cause flank damage to the siege units in the stack. Enough hits and you can wipe out all the siege.

 

[Pengu]

Well, let's say for arguments sake you need to defends you cities.

As the AI attacks with a mixed bag of different units, so should you defend with different units. While archers are the basic early defender, putting in some spearmen and axes amongst them could help alot since if the AI has horse archers, swordsmen, axes and spearmen those units do better than axes and as defender the AI always has to attack
it's worst opponent in your city. Later on Longbows become your main defender, but won't hurt to have a few crossbows in case of macemen and a few pikemen in case of Knights. Then on hills archer and longbows become even more useful.

But if the AI has too many siege units sitting on the defense if you aren't on a hill
could be bad as the collateral damage would be too big.

 

[Pisskop]

I like spears, archers for early game. These progress to longbows and (usually) crossbows. Don't really bother with pikes early and don't even get engineering until rather late usually. I go for feudalism or machinery first, typically. Riflemen don't quite beat out longbows, not totally, so I keep the longbows until railroads, or upgrade if I do start seeing a need to. By this time I typically have enough money to start throwing around some.

Machine guns get replaced by a mixture of mech-infantry, artillery, SAMs, and armour... usually whatever I happen to be making at the moment. If the game is going on long enough for these units to appear I usually start nuking and curse my failure.

 

[Iranon]

If cities exchange hands repeatedly, it should be on your terms - i.e. you're ceding them to bring City Raider and/or collateral to bear against a 0-defense city to wipe out an opponent's military. you don't need, or want, dedicated city defenders for this.
Note that this doesn't work too well if the opponent brings along significant numbers of archers or longbowmen because those get a bonus simply from defending a city.

Bonuses are additive, not multiplicative. This makes archers strong in otherwise weak cities defending against City Raider units; if bonuses favour us anyway units with higher base strength may do better.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

What ever random junk you are taking cities with. It just means you aren't whipping enough units.

 

[Sisiutil]

Excellent responses above. Let me attempt to build on what's been said a little.

In the initial phase of a war I try to have a plethora of siege weapons (cats, cannon, artillery, air, depending on the era), not just for eliminating city defenses and inflicting collateral damage on city defenders (crucial roles for siege), but also for the purpose of dealing with the AI's stack. The siege weapons will mete out the initial collateral damage. This will especially, I'm hoping, reduce the effectiveness of the stack defenders. I'll often retain old siege units rather than deleting them for this purpose, especially since the AI often includes a mix of units from different eras in its stacks--thus, cats can still be surprisingly effective even in the gunpowder era. (Just be sure to have a way to deal with the war weariness that will result from heavy losses of obsolete siege weapons; coaxing the enemy stack into your own cultural territory to be killed is one way to do this.)

After the siege units are done I attack the stack to destroy it, usually with mounted units--and not just for the reason lymond mentioned, that they'll do flanking damage to siege units, though that's certainly handy. In addition, (a) I give mounted units flanking promotions to increase their chances of survival in a fight; and (b) the extra movement point also increases their chances of survival, as they can retreat if damaged whether they are victorious or lost but survived thanks to a flanking withdrawal.

Basically, mounted units are great stack attackers because there's a better chance your hammer investment in them won't be lost. But you need to help them out with those siege attackers first to reduce the strength of the anti-mounted defenders in the stack.

 

[Negator_UK]

The best unit to defend cities with is the "Stack-of-Doom" unit, and you should always have one once the early stages of the game are out of the way.

That way when someone attacks you can move your SoD and either defend the city or retake it and move onwards.

If you must garrison a city then the defence style units are the best (archer, longbow, rifle, machinegun etc), but you can also vary the defender by having, say, a pike to back up a longbow, because knights can ignore a longbows first strike.

But most of the advanced players seem to use whatever warriors are left over from fogbusting to garrison right to the end of the game, so I suspect if you are having to decide what units to defend with you are already on the back foot.

 

[alex15]

Some units might better then others for city defence, but evry unit got his counter anti-unit. i.e if some defending city with tons of axemans you can try attacking him by chartions with bonus upgrade against meele units.

Best army is probably for defence and counter attack is probably mixed army - siege/archery/meele/mounted instead of archery only, unless you are protective or something

 

[fantsu]

Machineguns

 

[JoeyB98]

I'd say it depends on what sort of game you're playing. If you're doing an early rush, obviously Archers are a waste of shields. However, if you want to play a less aggressive game, I would say:

Ancient - Archer
Classical - Archer
Medieval - Longbow
Renaissance - Longbow
Industrial - Rifleman
Modern - Machine Gun
Future - Mech. Inf.

Note that Machine Guns only get bonuses against Gunpowder units, so if you are far ahead in tech, they may actually be less effective than older units.