Why am I not allowed to build Warriors later in the game?

r_rolo1 said:
The mechanics of combat in Civ IV play strongly against the zerg type rushes, unless the Zerged unit can do collateral damage ( that is completely unbalanced in Civ IV, with firaxis showing little imagination to solve it ( just disallowing siege of killing in BtS and making it extremely vulnerable to mounted units of that era ... not exactly elegant ( and to say the truth not even a real solution... but that is another issue ) ) ), due to the way that the diference in strength is magnified by the combat formula ( more details in the War academy article " Combat explained" ). If you want to do a zerg rush in Civ IV, just dust out the vanilla or warlords disk and mass catapults....
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And by mid-game, with smart placement of production cities and a robust economy, you can build enough of any unit to zerg-rush fairly cost-effectively.
 
What works in Starcraft will (most likely) not work in Civ 4. One Axeman in a city could cut down tons of warriors, and if you send them at a Maceman...No, not happening :P
 
After reading this I decided to WB warriors vs. mech infantry.
Now I decided to do worst case scenario (max promoted mech infatry, with all promotions possible for archers, gunpowder, seige, and melee units, in a city accross a river, on a hill, with legendary culture, which has built walls and a castle vs. 0 experience/promotion warriors). I threw over 1000 warriors at the mech infantry but did 0 damage. So I thought about the War Academy article about combat I just read this morning, and I realized what was killing me were the 3-6 first strikes (requireing me to win 2 of the first 3 rounds and the fourth round to do any damage, if it only gets 3 first strike, let alone 6).
In response to this I removed the drill promotions, the next try I put ~200 against the mech infantry and did about 30% damage.
I got bored so I quit at this point, I may finish my test later.

The moral of the story: when facing lots of weak units first strikes rule.


Oh, and don't use warriors against mech infantry FFS.
 
^ LOL hehe >.>

What I was suggesting is that say, even if the city had 30 Mech Infantries garrisoning it, all those MIs are completely fresh with no promotions. You damage it down to ALOT using bombers, and also completely remove the City's defensive bonus. Now, say they're at 5% Strength. Fortified gives it +50%. And well... lets just say that whatever other bonuses the Mech Infantry has, it totals up to 4 Strength after all that damage.

Now your warrior each has combat 5 and City Raider I, II, and III promotion. You'll now be able to take that city if you had like 100 or so warriors.

Why you have 100 level 8 warriors is completely beyond me >.>
 
Did you just say most popular? I can't understand why that's true. I bought StarCraft, and it seemed primitive in my face.
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One player already mentioned part of it. It is perhaps the best balanced RTS game ever invented. Every unit has one or more strengths and is suceptable to one or more units or strategies that another faction might possess. While graphics and features may be lacking these days, when it came out it was graphically on par with the top games out there and matched most of them in features and innovations. It remains one of the most highly polished and finely tuned RTS games out there.

Its popularity is unquestioned. 8-10 years after the fact the thing is still sold and still avidly played. Blizzard appears to be good at that. It is also arguably the greatest RTS game ever invented. Beyond the well balanced, strategic multiplayer, the obvious thought put into the various units and their attributes...it has one of the best stories you'll ever find in a RTS game. (not that there's TOO much competition, given that story isn't a huge facet of that genre)

It has good voice acting, writing, memorable characters and sequences. There were literally moments that had you 'NOOOing!' and 'Oh Sh*tting!' in a game that basically consists of collecting resources and moving pieces around. You became engaged in the single player. Outside of the old Red Alert games that had some dark wit here and there, how many RTS games have actually engrossed you in the story?

Great game. I'm not a huge RTS fan anymore, but I still dust that one off every so often.
 
I still play Starcraft more or less every day, and watch live streams from Korea to keep up with what's happening on the pro scene. Those Koreans aren't human I tell you.

SC is very well balanced, partly because it don't really play by the old paper-rock-scissor counter that pretty much every RTS uses. Instead what matters is how you use the units and in what combinations. The counter to zergling+lurker is marines+medics, while the counter to marines+medics is, get this, zerglings+lurkers. At least in the earlier parts of the games, the terran should be adding some siege tanks after a while to avoid getting overrun. And then there's the more expensive casters... Most units in the game has several counter but it's all down to skill and usage of said units.

It's also very fast paced and if you lose attention for a short while it can be devestating.
 
say1988 said:
After reading this I decided to WB warriors vs. mech infantry.
Now I decided to do worst case scenario (max promoted mech infatry, with all promotions possible for archers, gunpowder, seige, and melee units, in a city accross a river, on a hill, with legendary culture, which has built walls and a castle vs. 0 experience/promotion warriors). I threw over 1000 warriors at the mech infantry but did 0 damage. So I thought about the War Academy article about combat I just read this morning, and I realized what was killing me were the 3-6 first strikes (requireing me to win 2 of the first 3 rounds and the fourth round to do any damage, if it only gets 3 first strike, let alone 6).
In response to this I removed the drill promotions, the next try I put ~200 against the mech infantry and did about 30% damage.
I got bored so I quit at this point, I may finish my test later.

The moral of the story: when facing lots of weak units first strikes rule.


Oh, and don't use warriors against mech infantry FFS.
Click to expand...

This is fascinating, and it outlines my love of playing first strikers like samurai, and frontloading drill promos on all my defense and most of my siege. By your analysis, First Strike is often more healthy for your combat odds than the in-game stats suggest simply because--like you say-- it's extremely strong against weak units. More easily than Str or Garrison, it allows a unit to go from one battle to the next retaining more life, useful for a sustained offensive or a defense against an AI's stack. First Strike is the counter to a Zerg rush. As such, I can definitely see people's distaste for zerging against AI since it builds so many archers. If you can't get copper/iron or make a resource-free UU like a Jag or Dog, you shouldn't attack a civ early. Going against archers, quality beats quantity- a couple city raider Swords are more cost effective than a zerg swarm of warriors.

However, I propose that this balance changes--if only a little bit-- after archery, during the mid-game, since Gunpowder defenses rely on sheer point strength rather than the first strike. A rifleman with Garrison is more vulnerable to being overwhelmed by numbers than a rifleman with an inherited Drill (perhaps from when he was a longbowman). This is a nice little opportunity for a technologically-disadvantaged human player because the AI almost invariably awards Garrison rather than Drill to its archers.

I'm not saying this shift is world-shattering (it's quite subtle really) but every little factor helps when you're trying to plan out your war schedule.
 
Illusion13 said:
wow that does sound like an awesome technique O.o

Well Zerg rush of Warriors can be useful. Say... You're under both Vassalage and Theocracy, thats 4 free exp right there, 3 from barracks, say you're aggressive which means free Combat I. Some cities also have a Great General specialist in them, which means more exp. All in all you can give your Warrior say, City Raider, Combat, etc etc... At least doubling its strength if you attack a city. Now with things that cause collateral damage, bombers, artillery, etc... You can reduce every unit in a city to miniscule strength. Now that you've fully collateral damaged the 100 unit stack, you Zerg rush it with 200 of your own warriors.

Yeah I know I am probably crazy and on crack at the same time, oh well, just a thought >.>

Thing is, in that Final Frontier mod, I HAVE used bombers and Starbases to completely reduce a stack of Battleships down to like nothing. Then even warriors will suffice >.>
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Bad idea. If you spend 200 turns building just warriors, even in just one city, your empire will be pretty crippled.
@kmad: roflcopter
 
But if you lack production and have tonnes of gold.....the enemy are sending waves of gunships, tanks, and infantry into your territory.......then suddenly 200 mech infantry appear.......
I have often done this on a MUCH smaller scale, especially archer->longbow in newly conquered cities if I need more defenders fast.
 
lol, a zerg rush. like from Starcraft. omg, life is soo much better with people saying funny things like that! Well, I recently watched an old series of BBC documentaries and in one of them, the guy was talking about why the English stopped using Longbowmen even though they severely Pwnt French knights at the battle of Agincourt (or something like that). He explained it like this: the social life of the peasantry became more centralized in towns and villages rather than cottages and hamlets as it had been before. In hamlets, a big thing to do socially was to have shooting matches with your longbow (that you use to hunt to supplement the low-yield primitive agriculture of that time) As agriculture and politics improved, people were a little bit wealthier and started socializing further afield like in villages and towns and thus, nobody was practicing with the longbow because the hunting was less necessary and the social scene now about partying instead of practicing archery. So a hundred years later, you literally couldn't find any ppl to create a unit of Longbowmen because the skills were gone. Thus, the much more expensive crossbowman was introduced which required less skill and the equipment was more factory style and less artisan style.
 
Starcraft 2 out soon :)

Doubt they'll let you build a warriors in the new starcraft although im sure someone could mod a few in??

hehehe

Sometimes a few warriors could be good for fodder. 100 warriors could do a lot of pillaging of AI land. Although 10 mech units would certainly take more cities and last longer. This is assuming the unit support for all these warriors isnt a burden on your finance. i would rather have 100 horsemen or chariots. At least these move 2 and could pillage before the Ai destroyed them.
 
Collateral only works to 40-60%, depending on the unit. You could try to see how many warriors it takes to defend against barbarian axemen.

In a game like starcraft, all units can fight, so unit power goes up quadratically. Civilization, it's always one battle at a time, and it's like some cubic effect on unit strength. So mathematically, it's not a good idea.

Now massing warriors for a zerg rush of happiness, that works well. It can be like north korea, with enormous parades and celebrations.
 
Vicawoo brings up an interesting point.
I thought I heard somewhere in Civ 4 that if you kept warriors for city garrison later in the game (ie. macemen era for example), something weird happens to them and the game says, "This unit is not strong enough to defend...."
Is this true? What is it about? Does anybody know?

~Benford's Law
 
nope Benford's Law, they can stick around forever. i love having just my original warrior guarding my capital at the end of the game. this doesn't work in situations like a coastal capital, a neighbor like monty, massive hordes of barbarians when i'm isolated, etc, but when it does, it's nifty. his loincloth and club are enough!
 
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