Why is the Khevsur unit hated a lot?

[Leathaface]

It is stronger than a Swordsman, it gets bonus Combat Strength on hills which can be helpful in certain situations. The only negative I can see it is requires Military Tactics, though I haven't played Georgia yet.

 

[Mr. Shadows]

It would be wonderful if it replaced the swordsmen, but it doesn't. It unlocks at Military Tactics which means that it comes late and you can't upgrade anything into it. That makes it so awkward from a strategic standpoint that you're objectively better off upgrading chariots to knights.

 

[Pietato]

Costs TWICE as much as a swordsman, cannot be upgraded to, is weak off hills, average on hills, is linked to a horrible tech, and is outclassed in every way by a Knight.

 

[Sostratus]

If you want some cold, hard numerical smack-down of the khevsur- see my post in this thread.
I strongly recommend it because there's a lot of generally useful information in there that people often seem to have misconceptions about.

To give a super condensed TL;DR:

This fact about combat strength

It is stronger than a Swordsman,

and this fact about production costs

Costs TWICE as much as a swordsman

combine so unfavorably for the Khevsur that if you aren't fighting on hills, it's literally better to just keep building swordsmen. As in The equivalent production army of swords will defeat the khevsurs.

The hate ultimately stems from it being a touted "bonus" of the civ, when it in fact is a 'noob trap.' (it looks like an upgrade -41 strength!- when it in fact makes you worse off.)

 

[Rosty K]

Well, it's a kind of a swordsman upgrade, but comes too late and at a dead end tech. I've played as Georgia. Once you have them, it's already time to upgrade to musketmen anyway. And it doesn't upgrade from a lower tier unit, you have to build it. So it might only be useful if you absolutely can't get niter anywhere.

 

[acluewithout]

I’ve bravely defended the value of Pikes, Berserkers, Samurai and MT before and elsewhere (with I think almost zero success). So, I’m not saying this lightly; Khevurs are rubbish.

I haven’t played Khevurs, but 40 melee strength given the cost to build them (seriously, they’re just as strong as a Legion, which is an era earlier and so much easier to research and build??), and the relative strength of Knights, they seem very very poor. The bonus for hills seems weak - if it was hills and forest (both +melee and ignore terrain), and melee strength was also buffed a little, they might get to the lofty heights of Samurai, ie kinda ‘okay’. But at the moment: rubbish.

The MT placement is particularly silly for Georgia too - presumably G will want to tech along the bottom machinery / fortification tech path to get their special walls, so they’ll be wanting to rock x-bows (or even knights given they’ll research chariots). So, why would they want some random melee unit?

[Edit: wiki says melee is 40, but it might be a little higher. Also, really do read @Sostratus ‘s post. It’s very good. Someone should really pin it.]

 

[Sostratus]

wiki says melee is 40, but it might be a little higher.

It is in fact 40- just made a little typo thinking of pikes.

Truly, even ignoring production costs entirely, we can see how absurd that is:

• Classical: Swords 36 (Release: 35)
• Medieval: Khevsurs 40
• Renaissance: Muskets 55
• Industrial: Redcoat/Garde 65

Surely just looking at that and presuming muskets and swords are loosely balanced, (that's a shaky but passable assumption), it seems like khevsurs should fall closer to 45 than 40. (If you extend this tree and realize that atomic/information era units are essentially at the same tier, then this +10 design almost perfectly holds as the lines ends two upgrades later at 85 strength for mech inf.) Ranged (crossbow to field cannon, 1 era gap) and heavy cav (chariot to knight to tank) also follow this loose +10 each era principle. Spears to pike&shot would as well, if only pikes had 45 instead of 41 strength. They got totally khevsur'd too lol

For those who don't know, a difference of 10 combat strength equates to a neat +50% modifier on combat power (1.5x more damage dealt, 1.5x less damage received.) That's a pretty clean progression on melee units. It's why anti-cav deal +10 to horsies, melee deal +10 to anti cav, and archers and xbows have 10 less melee (defensive) strength than ranged (offensive) strength- the devs like that clean 50%. Why they chose to deviate the way they did with the military tactics units- only they know, but I'd guess they finalized pikemen first and put the other MT UUs in around that, then patterned the khevsur on those existing UUs (namely berserker.)

I consider these noob traps to be anti-fun. For the sake of fun, I really hope they address it.

*This is also a phenomenal opportunity to point out a crucial piece of balancing modern Civ games: a problem is not necessarily its solution. What I mean is that if we think the khevsur is too weak, the answer isn't necessarily to just give it more combat strength. As others have mentioned, there are a host of reasons why it's a terrible unit that tie into many parts of the game. When people raise questions like "science is too strong" or "chopping is OP" or "golden ages are too easy to get," we have to think with that lens. We have all these threads woven into the game, and the devs (and modders) need to tease out 'fun' from the Gordian knot of interlinked mechanics.

Otherwise, we end up with "factory stacking is too strong. Better remove the stacking." Which as we now know, has had huge consequences for the viability of end game actions (payback on tier 3 builds, upgrading vs building modern units) which filters into mid and early game strategies (build minimal IZs, focus army around units on upgrade lines, settle as much as possible by the mid game and don't settle late.) I'm not passing judgement on removing the stacking, but it's an example of the ripple effect of balancing with tunnel vision.*

 

[iammaxhailme]

Also, Georgia doesn't even have a hill start bias.

 

[Victoria]

What gets me is when you balance everything out (especially the inability to upgrade to them) it comes off more than slightly negative, then you notice they are 3 GP maintenance while a sword is 2. just facepalm

Sometimes you have to play something rather than looks at its stats to see how it works in reality... and it just does not.

 

[OmegaDestroyer]

Costs TWICE as much as a swordsman, cannot be upgraded to, is weak off hills, average on hills, is linked to a horrible tech, and is outclassed in every way by a Knight.

All of the above. I'll go further and argue that with the exception of the scout, it is outclassed by every other available option at the point you get it.

I pity Georgia. Every other civ has at least one useful unique unit or building; Georgia has neither.

 

[Disgustipated]

It's the main reason I haven't played Georgia more than just the one time (for achievements and whatnot). They really are terrible. Which is a shame, because I like the overall theme of the civ.

 

[NukeAJS]

The fix is so obvious and easy -- make them replace swordsmen, give them the same base strength as swordsmen (36), give them the same production cost as swordsmen and keep everything else the same.

Bam! A better-than-average UU that can potentially excel where it was meant to -- fighting in hills and with zero downsides compared to a swordsman.

 

[UWHabs]

The fix is so obvious and easy -- make them replace swordsmen, give them the same base strength as swordsmen (36), give them the same production cost as swordsmen and keep everything else the same.

Bam! A better-than-average UU that can potentially excel where it was meant to -- fighting in hills and with zero downsides compared to a swordsman.

Or even if they changed all those Military Tactics units to a base strength around the 45 mark (ie +5 from where they are now), that's a start. The other thing they really need to fix is to find a way to get them on the upgrade path from warriors/swordsmen. If they can find a way to do that, then those units get a big bonus since you at least don't have to hard-build them anymore.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Not really hated as much as more ignored, but the thing is that it is a poor UU for an already weak civ.

I think "hated" would probaby best describe the chariot archer, since it renders Egypt unable to upgrade to knights and thus messing with what should have been a very solid set of bonuses.

 

[acluewithout]

I don't see that Kevsur could replace swordsmen - Kevsur are a medieval and swordsmen are classical.

I'd love to know why Kevsur and some other unique units cannot be upgraded from earlier units, i.e. whether this is a deliberate gameplay decision or instead just a quirk of the current game coding. I used to think it was the former, and now I really think its the latter.

I don't play Egypt, but Egypt's chariot archer really bothers me. Leaving aside it's not very 'fair', I think it would be really awesome being able to field two different sorts of chariots.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

I'd love to know why Kevsur and some other unique units cannot be upgraded from earlier units, i.e. whether this is a deliberate gameplay decision or instead just a quirk of the current game coding. I used to think it was the former, and now I really think its the latter.

It's definitely the former. There's nothing "quirky" in the game code when it comes to unit upgrades & unit replaces - it's all pretty straightforward.

 

[Sostratus]

I don't see that Kevsur could replace swordsmen - Kevsur are a medieval and swordsmen are classical.

I think NukeAJS' idea was to scrap the entire concept of them being medieval, and make them a sword replacement akin to Ngao, Legions, etc.

I'd love to know why Kevsur and some other unique units cannot be upgraded from earlier units,

I scratch my head on this a lot myself. The most logical construction of it, in my mind, relates to some of the points mentioned in this thread:

• Designers come up with a unit upgrade system where the different classes alternate upgrades by era. It'll keep things dynamic and fresh, they think. UUs will no longer be obsolete the moment you get them on the field!
• These gaps mean some units (say, rifleman) aren't represented by design. But what about the redcoat?! Aha! They realize they can fill that rifleman spot in for just England- that'll give them an interesting edge in the industrial!
• Wait a minute. We designed redcoats to be an industrial unit with some extra flair. If we let muskets upgrade into redcoats, then England will have a massive advantage because their melee line will be an era ahead of everyone (ren v ind.) That's way too much power!

Essentially, the unit gaps and UU design came about at a similar time but independently. How do we set a Redcoat's stats? Well, its an industrial unit, so let's make it on par with industrial units (strength 65.) Then, since it's unique, lets throw in that off-continent bonus.
Then they realized that the large size of these gaps was going to do them in: having a redcoat unit without a riflemen unit meant everyone's muskets and bombards (55) will be facing down redcoats (65). This would make redcoats only counter able by field cannons and cavalry. And if you aren't geared for light cav, you're SOL because those redcoats will obliterate your front line and rip those cannons up.
Basically, redcoats are designed to fight industrial units, but only 2 of 6 land unit lines actually have industrial units. So, we can't let them upgrade from muskets.

This policy gets applied to all the other UU cases. The fact that the medieval ones are horribly balanced is another story entirely.

If each era had an upgrade for the lion's share of unit lines, then this wouldn't be an issue at all. But the unit gaps are so common that we can't approximate it as a continuous system even at the design level- it has to be discrete.

(Continuous vs discrete is like if city combat strength updated the same way harvest value does (each tech) vs now, each era. The steps are small enough that City strength ends up being similar in either case. What you can't do is say "A [melee/ranged/anticav/etc] unit gets about 10 more strength per era. I will use this to work out strategies." Because a little under half those units actually exist, so the beautiful broad strokes the game was designed with start to crack.)

...Or, they just didn't feel like adding the conditionals to base units to check if a civ-specific upgrade is available. You'd be surprised...

 

[acluewithout]

...Or, they just didn't feel like adding the conditionals to base units to check if a civ-specific upgrade is available. You'd be surprised...

I think this is quite possible.

I spent ages wondering why Agoge and Oligarchy didn't apply to Anti-Cav. It was like that for (I guess??) over a year. And then they just changed it in R&F. Was that a belated reaction to player comments? ... or did it literally take that long for Firaxis to get around to changing it...?

 

[Victoria]

Was that a belated reaction to player comments? ... or did it literally take that long for Firaxis to get around to changing it...?

One suspects the latter, they will not be idle at Firaxis and with bugs and new releases to work on a lot of game design improvement does not get touched. However they also have spent a lot of time thinking through the whole design and there may be reasons we just have not worked out.
There are many things that just do not work in this game and the spear agoge is a good example, when they added it I made a spear army... and died horribly.
If they are gonna be weak, please make them cheap.
Agoge was not enough.

UU were used by the civs in large numbers in real life but not in this game. The only way to ensure they are used in number is allow an upgrade path. If this means moving things round then fine. England had loads of redcoats in reality, their entire army was redcoats, same with Egypt’s chariots and georgias swordsmen. The game would be great if we saw this happen but it’s only the starters like Gilga chariots or the upgradeable that get them in numbers,

Sea dogs are also a starting unit and I’ll build 3-5 with 3 eventually merging. To me this sort of matches history.

 

[gozpel]

Strangely enough, I have played 268 hrs of Civ6 and have only one win so far. I get sooo bored after 100 turns, which will explain things when I have my real account reinstated.
nstated.

With Georgia and religious!

I built only one of their units to get the era score. It is def too far away in the tech-tree to help them.