My ignore list:
- Chariots, unless lacking in iron and copper
- Explorer, by the time I can build these, I have the map revealed or trade with overseas partners, as they're drooling for my maps
- Cuirassier, better wait a tiny bit for cavalry
- Grenadier, as every other unit with a bonus against a single unit in a single epoch
- Machine gun, what's the point in having a substandard unit just because it does not take collateral? Better counter-attack the cannons while you can.
- Paratroopers, you have to devise and entire tailor-suited strategy just for them. But I use marines a lot.
Well I agree with you on explorers and machine guns, the others though not so much...
Chariots are actually the perfect settler and worker escort units with their double movement. They are one of the cheapest military units out there, and have an extremely valuable niche role as anti-axeman, a unit which can have a fairly lengthy period of dominance in the ancient era and can't be stopped by archers nor even reliably by more axemen... If you're fighting axemen with more axemen, basically you're looking at even odds which IMO is very wasteful of hammers in this time period when hammers are pretty scarce. As for the techs to get chariots, well you're gonna need the wheel early in pretty much every game, to hook something up... And animal husbandry you're gonna need fairly often too, to hook up cows, sheep, pigs, etc. Great unit, definitely underrated.
Grenadiers I find to be bloody brilliant. They come earlier than rifles, and they are head and shoulders above muskets in usefulness. Muskets just don't have the strength to really dominate, whereas grenadiers will walk all over any medieval units (including those silly muskets) on the board. Meanwhile, if you're fighting an AI with medieval units, he is likely teching hard towards rifling, and with the gren's bonus vs riflemen, you are already fielding an army to deal with them. With that bonus vs riflemen, and the fact that grens come a lot more cheaply tech wise, I think there's actually quite a large window of opportunity for grenadiers to dominate, and I typically use this period to make significant gains in power during domination/conquest games.
The others I don't find to be quite as strong as chariots and grenadiers, but they do have their uses... They also tend to have a fairly narrow window of opportunity where they really shine though, which I agree is a real deal killer... If a unit has a real advantage for only 10 or 20 turns there's not a lot you can do with it IMO.
As for my choice for the most useless unit that I make a point of not building/researching, I'd have to say Horse Archers. HBR is a dead end tech, and so I usually get it via trade much later on, around the time I'm researching guilds or construction, when I know I'll be building knights or war elephants. HAs I just find aren't versatile enough to justify the investment in them during the classical age. Horse Archer based UUs, on the other hand, can be pretty good... Particularly Keshiks. Other than that or an Immortal rush though, I don't even consider researching HBR on my own.
A fairly close second would be machine guns. I've had games where I built some to defend my cities and then watched them sit there doing nothing for centuries... The tech for them you're going to want anyways, so it seems like they're a "free" unit you get with railroads, but even so they're pretty crap and have no versatility. Usually if you're on the defense, that doesn't mean simply hiding in your cities waiting for the siege... Hell no, that's a good way to get choked to death by pillagers. Better to spend the hammers on infantry or hell even cavalry, so you can defend your resources. What good is a city that's had all its tiles destroyed, and is surrounded by weakened troops but can't reach out and finish them off? Not much. Sure you could build a mix of infantry and machine guns, but let's face it-- if you just made an extra infantry instead you'd have a lot more options.
My final pick for a useless unit would have to be Ironclads. Frankly, it is infuriating that they are so slow. So slow in fact, that other than sheer dumb luck, you will never be able to use its superior strength and armor plating to actually go out and kill another ship. I guess they could be used to park on your fishing boats or something, but IMO that's a waste of hammers when you could just build more frigates, which are easy to level up XP wise, and which can actually (gasp!) cross the ocean when needed. Ironclads bite in the base game, they really ought to have 3 movement points so they can at least catch the odd caravel or something.
It is
