Worst Unique Unit

[Roxlimn]

TheMeInTeam and Gliese 581:

I realize that the valuation of which unit is the worst is highly subjective, but I have to point out that nearly your only convincing defense of the Dog Soldier's value is when you're playing on the highest difficulty setting possible, and you're so pushed for space that you're effectively ignoring both your military attribute (protective) and your unique building.

Unless this condition occurs, the Dog Soldier's usability is extremely suspect. I would have to say that, community-wide, being in a condition on Deity where Dog Soldiers would have a dramatic positive impact is far rarer than the fraction of Khmer games that EVER have Ivory available at Construction.

For most other any application (including fighting Romans), the Dog Soldier is notably inferior in several ways. You certainly won't find it easy to take a Roman stack apart with Dogs when you're the one invading.

 

[PotatoOverdose]

TheMeInTeam and Gliese 581:

I realize that the valuation of which unit is the worst is highly subjective, but I have to point out that nearly your only convincing defense of the Dog Soldier's value is when you're playing on the highest difficulty setting possible, and you're so pushed for space that you're effectively ignoring both your military attribute (protective) and your unique building.

Unless this condition occurs, the Dog Soldier's usability is extremely suspect. I would have to say that, community-wide, being in a condition on Deity where Dog Soldiers would have a dramatic positive impact is far rarer than the fraction of Khmer games that EVER have Ivory available at Construction.

For most other any application (including fighting Romans), the Dog Soldier is notably inferior in several ways. You certainly won't find it easy to take a Roman stack apart with Dogs when you're the one invading.

Your logic is extremely flawed. You recognize that if you start within near proximity of an opponent on deity, a dog soldier rush can (and does) work (unless the opponent has some particular defensive advantage, e.g. bowman, skirmishers). You then say that this value is only present "when you're playing on the highest difficulty setting possible." If a dog soldier offensive can work on deity, than it can work on immortal and all difficulties below. In fact, the dog soldier is at it's worst on deity. It's pure gold on lower difficulties because the AI looses the advantages of starting with Archers and the archery tech as difficulty decreases. The loss of each such advantage makes the dog soldier an exponentially more useful unit for a longer period of time. If you rush dog soldiers against an AI with warriors, you're guaranteed to win. If you rush dog soldiers against an AI with just 1 or 2 fresh archers, you still have a very high chance of winning. Now, on immortal/deity, the rush is still viable, but they have to have cities very near your capitol (as difficulty decreases, this requirement diminishes), as the AI starts with a force of archers and will have multiple cities from the off with which to spam archers. Put bluntly, a dog soldier rush bellow immortal/deity is easier than a quecha rush.


The dog soldiers usefulness becomes suspect when the AI fields large stacks of archers on cities with large defensive multipliers. This occurs faster as difficulty increases. Then it takes a backseat as a defensive unit (although a good defensive unit), as it is incapable of attacking such cities. But the dog soldier's use has always been either rush or defense, not a regular offensive component of an ancient era war machine. It is that flaw that may make it worse than axemen, but this flaw is only truly apparent on higher difficulties. It's a more specialized unit, that fails outside of its area of expertise (like spearmen). Whether this is an improvement or not depends more on the players play style than anything else.

The khmer elephants anti-mounted advantage (to cite the example you used), on the other hand, is almost never useful (it doesn't even work in cities where such an advantage might have been useful). It is, for all intents and purposes, just an elephant, a rarely used unit.

 

[Gliese 581]

If the dog soldier is useful on deity and the ballista elephant never contributes anything of significance then that's enough to rate the dog soldier higher. I wasn't comparing so much as pointing out some qualities of the dog soldiers that might be overlooked, though.

 

[JTMacc99]

But Seals also have 1-2 first strikes. You see they have March+FS this is a good unit better than many other UUs , or many other UUs are worse than Seals. I don't care if they come too late. They have uses in their era, at least they don't become obsolete so quickly like many other UUs.

I do tend to underrate the value of the first strikes. Regardless, I was more trying to figure out why people rate the SEAL as a worst UU than to make a case for why it is a bad unit.

Look at the top five in this poll. On there are a Marine, a War Elephant, and Knight. I suspect that I am not alone in saying that given the right circumstances, I have been known to build a LOT of any one of those three units in a game. What puts them on this list is the fact that as a Unique Unit, they didn't get anything great as an add-on. For the Elephant and the SEAL, most of us use them for attacking cities. The unique part doesn't do much (or anything) to enhance the normal use of the unit. Plus, in the case of these two, you can certainly have games where you either can't or don't need to ever actually build them, which kind of sucks.

The camel archer is a funny one. If they had just given it a 25% increased withdrawal chance instead of 15% and no requirement for either horses or iron, people would probably appreciate it more.

 

[Roxlimn]

PotatoOverdose:

Actually, my logic is perfectly sound. We simply aren't working with the same reasoning. If my logic was flawed, you would simply have to point out the fallacy, no in-depth reasoning required.

IF you start in close proximity on Deity, a Dog Soldier rush could work, provided the AI wasn't Protective and doesn't start on a hill - it has many caveats. On difficulties lower than that, it's a little more useful, but it still retains those caveats, and the range is limited.

What you lose is a valuable classical age unit, which is a big loss for such a situational offensive capability.

On any difficulty lower than Monarch, where the AI starts with Archery, a Warrior rush would do nearly as well, in which case you still lost your Axeman without any real gain.

Specializing such a focal use of the classical age war machine into such niche roles is an extremely suspect advantage, IMO. It's not, IMO, really dependent on playstyle. You can always take advantage of it, but getting an Axeman instead of a Dog is no loss except in very specific scenarios, and gain in many standard scenarios.

The BE's anti-mounted advantage may see fairly rare use, but in most cases, the BE itself isn't any worse than a normal Elephant. Ivory is not so rare, IMO, that you could count an Elephant as a rarely used unit. If it's not within your borders, you can always trade for it, the same way you can trade for Iron and other strategic resources. The Elephant is a powerful enough unit that it's nearly always worth the trouble to seek it out, if it's on your continent.

JTMacc99:

I don't think it's a fair charge to say that it's a fault of BEs and Knight UUs that the base unit isn't all that essential. You could level the same charge at Jaguars and any Swordsman UU, including the Praetorian.

What I mean here is, if you're Roman and you're playing any map that encourages the formation of blocs (basically almost anything except Pangaea and Archipelago), you're not really assured of getting any good use out of a Praetorian, especially if you successfully pull off a rush with Warriors or Axemen. In that scenario, you're better off postponing further wars until contact is made with the other Civs, or after you consolidate, at which point the Praetorian could simply be a discounted Maceman - a benefit in itself, but not so strong as many account.

The thing is, I think that it would be dangerous to put any major upgrade on units as powerful as Knights, and Elephants, and Marines - they are already very powerful as is.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

TheMeInTeam and Gliese 581:

I realize that the valuation of which unit is the worst is highly subjective, but I have to point out that nearly your only convincing defense of the Dog Soldier's value is when you're playing on the highest difficulty setting possible, and you're so pushed for space that you're effectively ignoring both your military attribute (protective) and your unique building.

Unless this condition occurs, the Dog Soldier's usability is extremely suspect. I would have to say that, community-wide, being in a condition on Deity where Dog Soldiers would have a dramatic positive impact is far rarer than the fraction of Khmer games that EVER have Ivory available at Construction.

For most other any application (including fighting Romans), the Dog Soldier is notably inferior in several ways. You certainly won't find it easy to take a Roman stack apart with Dogs when you're the one invading.

Dogs are a first class choking unit. I didn't realize they were even viable in that role on deity until it was recently proven. Certainly, if you get to the AI and pillage its horses (if it even has any yet), you have almost free reign to pillage all of its other tiles and keep it useless on difficulties below.

It's also strong defensively - an overwhelming and hammer efficient unit against everything in its time except mounted, which spears counter quite heavily.

It's hard to even imagine you can't see value in a unit that can rapidly choke neighbors and defend against even the most powerful early UUs in the game, but there is YET ANOTHER reason dogs are good: they're resourceless and come with a key economy tech.

Yes, that means you get effortless defeat of barbs without diverting research to archers or gambling on metals. You KNOW you have access to a unit that will soundly defeat any barbarian you're going to see in the BC's.

These abilities are not unique to deity. And while axes can do this too, axes are not as effective anti-melee, and they're going to be slower in 99% of games, assuming you can even get them in time.

I put dogs in the 2nd tier, behind things like prats, immortals, quechas, janissaries, oromos, and war chariots but ahead of most others.

 

[Roxlimn]

You're assuming I want to choke the AI. That doesn't always work if you have a lot of AIs all around you, and even when it does, it feels kind of cheap.

I'm sure the Quechua is an even better choking unit.

Besides that, it's not "overwhelmingly hammer efficient" either. Against archers, it's strictly inferior to a normal Axeman, whether you're facing them on offense or on defense. This is markedly apparent if the AI attacks you early with Archers, and sometimes it does.

Any advantage it has in dealing with barbarian Axemen are, I deem, merely compensatory for the disadvantages it gets against barbarian archers.

Yes, Axemen aren't as good anti-melee, but they're better at attacking or defending against anything not melee, which is two of the three units types even early on.

They're slower, yes, but again, unless you're playing the highest difficulty levels wherein you have to consciously exploit every AI programming weakness you can manage (even going so far as to consider choking), then it's simply not very relevant to most games being played community-wide. Very few people routinely play Deity for fun.

 

[Molybdeus]

It's not really fair to compare dogs to the Quechua, since every other unique unit in the game looks bad compared to them. You don't even need to choke and hold territory if you're playing as the Incas.

I don't like Dog Soldiers, but they do have uses. I would just rather have a normal axeman in most games. Being next to an opponent with either a city on a hill or the protective trait is fairly common. They are great in multiplayer, though.

 

[PotatoOverdose]

You're assuming I want to choke the AI. That doesn't always work if you have a lot of AIs all around you, and even when it does, it feels kind of cheap.

I'm sure the Quechua is an even better choking unit.

Rushing/choking is a personal play style choice. If you don't like doing it, than a uu that's good at it certainly won't be the most appealing for you. However, saying that the dog soldeir is a poor uu based on personal preferences isn't the best argument(e.g. I prefer not to use the praet because I believe it is overpowered; however I do not deny that it is a superlative UU).

Also, when I said your logic was flawed, I was referring to your argument that dog soldiers are used predominantly on deity, and since most of the community doesn't play on deity/immortal, their usefulness is lower than that of a ballista elephant. You stated this here specifically:

Spoiler :

that nearly your only convincing defense of the Dog Soldier's value is when you're playing on the highest difficulty setting possible, and you're so pushed for space that you're effectively ignoring both your military attribute (protective) and your unique building.

Unless this condition occurs, the Dog Soldier's usability is extremely suspect. I would have to say that, community-wide, being in a condition on Deity where Dog Soldiers would have a dramatic positive impact is far rarer than the fraction of Khmer games that EVER have Ivory available at Construction.

Again, the specific logical fallacy is that the deity tactic is not useful to the community at large because it plays on lower difficulties (where said tactic would be more effective in fact) and therefore the ballista crapshoot is more useful.

Besides that, it's not "overwhelmingly hammer efficient" either. Against archers, it's strictly inferior to a normal Axeman, whether you're facing them on offense or on defense. This is markedly apparent if the AI attacks you early with Archers, and sometimes it does.

While certainly not hammer efficient, the Dog Soldier has one major advantage against archers as compared to axemen: They can attack before there are a lot of archers. In all fairness, regular axeman aren't that great at attacking heavily fortified archers anyway. You need 2 to 3(if protective/uu/hill/bad luck with rng) axes per defending archer + barracks which is pretty poor efficiency in and of itself. If I'm going for a well defended city, I might as well wait till cats/swords or spies.

Any advantage it has in dealing with barbarian Axemen are, I deem, merely compensatory for the disadvantages it gets against barbarian archers.

Since when are barbarian archers a problem for anyone? Put a dog on a hill/forest between the barbs and your city and archers will never be a problem. Or just fortify them on a regular plain tile. You could use archers for this just as well. Although dogs are nice for this in that you can hit bronze working and have a counter to barb archers available directly as opposed to then teching hunting archery in the event that you don't have copper in your bfc (as are holkans and quecha).

They're slower, yes, but again, unless you're playing the highest difficulty levels wherein you have to consciously exploit every AI programming weakness you can manage (even going so far as to consider choking), then it's simply not very relevant to most games being played community-wide. Very few people routinely play Deity for fun.

Again, you're attempting to tie the usefulness of the dog soldier to deity. Fallacy. As difficulty decreases, it takes the AI longer to get a force of archers sufficiently large enough to prevent a rush. While it may not be necessary to rush on lower difficulties, it can be extremely profitable (becoming more profitable as difficulty decreases). It can be more profitable to rush sooner with dogs than later with axes.

It's like saying the Praetorian is useless on settler because almost every player can beat settler with their eyes shut and their hands tied behind their back using any strategy. While that's certainly true, it does not remove heavy preat spam as a viable strategy on settler. It will work there just like it works almost everywhere. By the same token, Dog rushing/choking is a viable strategy on low difficulties as well as high with the added advantage of being able to ignore copper for a while. On the other hand (running with your earlier ballista to dog comparison), the ballista elephant will almost never be useful to anyone on any difficulty or setting. Almost.

 

[Gliese 581]

Well dogs are a bit less useful on non-deity because you're less likely to face a tough and early invasion and you have until 1900 bc or longer instead of 2500 bc to hook up a strategic resource or get a spawnbust lock in order to avoid going for Archery.

 

[PieceOfMind]

But Seals also have 1-2 first strikes. You see they have March+FS this is a good unit better than many other UUs , or many other UUs are worse than Seals. I don't care if they come too late. They have uses in their era, at least they don't become obsolete so quickly like many other UUs.

Further to your argument, the value of first strikes becomes greater the more the enemy is injured. This is around the time of the game where you can start using fighters and guided missiles to attack cities and in these circumstances the first strikes can make it a fair bit better than the stock marine.

By the way, the March promotion on the marine I also find to be less useful than it would at first seem. Because with units in enemy territory the problem is more to do with making sure your units have a good healing rate - not just whether they are eligible to heal. Without a medic and in enemy territory Navy SEALs are still only going to heal 5HP per turn. In neutral waters it's 10HP per turn. With a medic with the transport, it's 20HP per turn and that's about the best you can hope for. By putting your transport and defending ships in neutral waters you sacrifice the 10% coast defense for those ships just to have the onboard units heal faster.

 

[Duckweed]

There are some superior UUs, like quechua, immortal and war chariot when there's horse in capital, and praet in immortal and below, do give player benefit for rushing their neighbors and I don't want to play them anymore in normal game. Some of UUs like fast worker, skirmisher, vulture, dog, jaguar, holkan, keshik, impi do have their special usage and not game breaking, so I'd rate them as the 2nd tier UUs. For all the late stage UUs (could be good but I don't need to rely on their unique then) and others, I don't see the worst one since most of time I either use them as normal unit or don't even build a single one.

 

[Roxlimn]

PotatoOverdose:

Rushing/choking is a personal play style choice. If you don't like doing it, than a uu that's good at it certainly won't be the most appealing for you. However, saying that the dog soldeir is a poor uu based on personal preferences isn't the best argument(e.g. I prefer not to use the praet because I believe it is overpowered; however I do not deny that it is a superlative UU).

Superlative? Even given the choking powers of the Dog, I would not call it "superlative."

Even so, if we're going to be going all out against the AI, using everything at our disposal, we might as well just play Settler, at which point having a Dog as opposed to Warriors is kind of pointless.

You see, playing at Deity is ALSO a personal play choice.

To be more clear, I'm saying here that putting forth an unusual play style capability in a niche play style choice (choking ability at Deity) is a rather obscure benefit for a UU.

Again, the specific logical fallacy is that the deity tactic is not useful to the community at large because it plays on lower difficulties (where said tactic would be more effective in fact) and therefore the ballista crapshoot is more useful.

I'm going to go on record to say that a Dog Rush on Settler is basically a useless advantage, since you can win with basically anything on that level - but more specifically because you can rush with Warriors instead. Rushing with Warriors, in fact, is doable all the way up to Prince. Why do Dogs?

While certainly not hammer efficient, the Dog Soldier has one major advantage against archers as compared to axemen: They can attack before there are a lot of archers. In all fairness, regular axeman aren't that great at attacking heavily fortified archers anyway. You need 2 to 3(if protective/uu/hill/bad luck with rng) axes per defending archer + barracks which is pretty poor efficiency in and of itself. If I'm going for a well defended city, I might as well wait till cats/swords or spies.

If a Civ is Protective, Archer UU, or you have incredible bad luck, rushing with Dogs is inadvisable anyway. Are you suggesting that it's a good idea to rush Babylon with Dog Soldiers even if they already have ANY Bowmen?

Since when are barbarian archers a problem for anyone? Put a dog on a hill/forest between the barbs and your city and archers will never be a problem. Or just fortify them on a regular plain tile. You could use archers for this just as well. Although dogs are nice for this in that you can hit bronze working and have a counter to barb archers available directly as opposed to then teching hunting archery in the event that you don't have copper in your bfc (as are holkans and quecha).

Been there, tried that. Usually, the barbs bypass the fortified unit and pillage my improved tiles. This is a particular problem if there's a bunch of forests between my improved tiles and the barbs. Ever tried attacking a stack of barbarian archers on a hill with 2 Dogs?

It's like saying the Praetorian is useless on settler because almost every player can beat settler with their eyes shut and their hands tied behind their back using any strategy. While that's certainly true, it does not remove heavy preat spam as a viable strategy on settler. It will work there just like it works almost everywhere. By the same token, Dog rushing/choking is a viable strategy on low difficulties as well as high with the added advantage of being able to ignore copper for a while. On the other hand (running with your earlier ballista to dog comparison), the ballista elephant will almost never be useful to anyone on any difficulty or setting. Almost.

I find that hard to believe. If I play as Khmer, a substantial fraction of my games use BE. In fact, if I play as any Civ, I get Elephants infrequently, but not rarely. If nothing else, the BE's are great units because they perform similarly to a normal Elephant, which is a fantastic unit.

Have you never used them?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Choking requires that you know what you're doing. Also, its benefits are not strictly limited to play against the AI. You can deny its utility or fairness all you want, but that doesn't take away the edge given to dog soldiers from its resourceless ability to choke rapidly. Comparing the dog to a quecha is ridiculous - we're not purporting that the dog soldier is among the best units in the game, only that it is a solid UU. The fact that you're even comparing it to something like the quecha should be telling.

And, as a defender, the dog is just fine vs archers. If you're attacking a stack of aggressive units rushing you, you're going to have better odds with a combat dog vs an archer than you will with a combat I axe vs an axe (which has either combat I also or even shock).

Played to its potential, the dog allows us to lock out the nearby opposition and guaranteed protection of ourselves. The synergy with the UB isn't great, but do keep in mind that it allows for otherwise impossible combinations like dogs/formation archers this early in the game, meaning w/o resources you really can hold any early game unit off, at least until horse archers or cats...but the former might not be possible if you've locked horses out.

Considering choking's strength in both single and multiplayer I'm not understanding the hate on it. Just like any other strategy there are times you want to use it and times you don't. But come on, even the godly praetorian isn't always useful...you might be isolated or lack iron!

 

[Roxlimn]

TheMeInTeam:

That's exactly my point about the BE. Even if you have Iron, it's no guarantee you can use the Praetorian to any good. Having to chase after a sightly rarer resource is no big deal, particularly when you REALLY want to have access to the resource anyway. +Happiness and Elephants? I would take Ivory over Iron any day.

As for the Dog's tactical advantages, I'm highly skeptical. A combat Dog will do better against a normal archer as a Combat Axe against an Aggressive Axe, but an Archer is cheaper on hammers, comes earlier, and it's unbuffed. Having Protective Archers with a promo going against your Combat Dogs is harder to manage than if you had Axemen.

Tell you what. I play BTS. Upload me a tactical situation on Normal Speed where all I need to do is to maneuver the Dogs. I want to be impressed. Show me. In fact, you can start a thread discussing various uploaded tactical situations. I'm very interested. I've been trying to use the Dogs for a while and I've been universally disappointed.

We'll call it the Obedience Training thread.

About choking

I have no problems aggressively pushing other players. It's just that the AI handles the pressure so poorly that I don't want to use it. It's a little like playing archipelagos - the AI adjusts so poorly that you have to jack the difficulty level up twice just to get the same challenge.

 

[Kaosprophet]

TheMeInTeam and Gliese 581:

I realize that the valuation of which unit is the worst is highly subjective, but I have to point out that nearly your only convincing defense of the Dog Soldier's value is when you're playing on the highest difficulty setting possible, and you're so pushed for space that you're effectively ignoring both your military attribute (protective) and your unique building.

Unless this condition occurs, the Dog Soldier's usability is extremely suspect.

Another condition where they've shown good for me is in prince or lower rushes. Because it's resourceless, it's quite possible to pull off a Dog rush that's only slower than a Quechua rush. Fast enough that, at the levels I mentioned, you've got a good chance of only facing warriors in the enemy capital - resulting in fewer troops expended, for a lower cost compared to a traditional axe rush. (And it being slower than Quechuas is a hidden boon for players at that level anyway - we're the ones who typically overspeed the quechuas and wind up with a razed enemy capital instead of a captured one.)

Maybe not feasible on Monarch+, due to the AI starting with Archery; and below Deity, the AI may not be fast enough for the Dog's advantages over an Axe in the role described by TMIT to really show. If so, then difficulty selection (and maybe map type/size) is a big influence on their likelihood to be worse than regular axes.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Warriors work just as well as quechas vs warriors...if you're on prince or below anyone can pull a warrior rush pretty easily...though of course quechas and AGG civs are still best for that due to combat I.

 

[nanomage]

maybe a bit offtopic, since you have been discussing Dogs vs BE the last several pages , but i just have had an idea: what if BE's were transformed into siege weapon? no other changes needed, they just become siege weapons and may even retain the same available promos, but it would make them enourmously strong as city attackers (immune to spears) and against normal elephants.

 

[slightlymarxist]

I'm surprised more people didn't vote for Panzer. It comes too late to make any sort of difference and its bonus is... +50% vs other tanks. Woo.

Dog Soldiers and Ballista Elephants might actually see some use. Dog Soldiers certainly, Ballista Elephants circumstantially.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

maybe a bit offtopic, since you have been discussing Dogs vs BE the last several pages , but i just have had an idea: what if BE's were transformed into siege weapon? no other changes needed, they just become siege weapons and may even retain the same available promos, but it would make them enourmously strong as city attackers (immune to spears) and against normal elephants.

They'd jump to one of the most brokenly powerful UU's in the game .