Your preferred promotions?

[Solo4114]

I was digging around on the site at the promotions listed and was curious as to what people find to be useful promotions.

Obviously, city raider is great if you're going to be attacking cities (duh). As are the obvious "+X% vs. [unit type]" promotions, if you know you'll be fighting a bunch of them. But I'm curious as to what people think about things like the Drill and Combat lines of promotions. I personally had no idea you could get as high as Combat V or Commando, or Drill IV, and I actually have to kind of question (a) how useful these are and (b) the point of having them in the game when (in my experience at least) most units don't last past 3 promotions before getting killed.

So, assuming you'll be able to keep a unit alive long enough for three promotions, and assuming you're NOT running civics/using wonders that boost your units' experience, what promotions do you guys find useful?

Personally, I like the Woodsman promotions early on, given that they let you maneuver quickly through wooded terrain, give you a good defense bonus, and that the AI often will not effectively clear forests or jungles. Later on, amphibious can be pretty useful, as is the ever-popular "medic explorer" (which I like to call a combat medic).

 

[senwiz]

It depends upon what you want to do with the unit. I use Drill a lot to get the first strike jump on my invasion units, Medic to get some health pumped into them, the defenses if they are supposed to garrison a tile, city, hill, or jungle.

Honestly, this is the hardest question, IMO, to answer, just because it depends on how you play it.

 

[Dizzy75]

Never actually used Commando - the requirements are steep and it seems like you'd want it for a stack of units to be effective, but then all the units in the stack would have to be level 6 (?) and have only Combat promotions. I'm not sure what kind of unit would benefit from it...

 

[emills]

with an agressive civ, the specialty promotions are not that hard to get since you start with combat one and at level 1. Pinch is one of the best promotions for the mid to late game and all an agressive civ needs is barracks to get it.

An agressive civ can get up to combat IV on barbarians alone, making the combat IV axeman the ultimate barb fog buster (+40% vs all opponents, +50% vs melee and 10% healing in neutral lands). Forested hill? Hah!

If under heavy attack early without a metal, I will use garrison archers to defend a city and drill archers to counter-attack out of a city.

IMO, all mounted units should get flanking promos.

 

[johnny_rico]

I like the flanking promotions for my mounted units, espcially for those units that already start with a retreat bonus. Put one of those in a stack with a mounted units with various combat promotions and the pair of them will do a lot of damage and live for a long time.

In my most recent game, I had a knight with combat 1,2, & 3, shock, and blitz. He ran around with a pair of flanking knights and survived until the endgame.

Whoa! Weird emills, I was interrupted in the middle of posting; when I first replied to the thread your comments were not there. Ditto on the flanking.

 

[Crighton]

I've found the Ambush promotion to be rather usefull, for me it makes the gunships actually usable since they get much much better odds vs enemy tankes which leaves my tanks for the main crunch.

Commando is useless since the requirements are so steep (granted if they were lower it'd be exceedingly unfair advantage).

 

[Ray Patterson]

Commando can be usefull, though it is hard to attain. If you give it to one or two (well if you can manage two...) Cavalry/Cossacks, you can use them to pillage deep in the enemy's territory (resources ideally of course). And since they have 4 combat promotions they might stand their ground/scare off counter units. It's steep, but possible.

Otherwise, early mounted units of course can very well use shock, and cover is nice for them as well sometimes.

 

[Dizzy75]

Also, I:

- Generally avoid Combat except as prereqs for other promotions
- Try to avoid Cover except when necessary, since it becomes obsolete fast
- Get lots of CR melee units in an early war so I can upgrade to rifles/inf later
- Get Drill or Drill + CR for suicide siege units (they're low strength so I just want them to get some extra licks in before they die; also they're relatively cheap); CR + Accuracy for siege I want to keep

I like to specialize units - seems to be the best bang for the buck

 

[mucco]

Combat! By far my best promotion. It's always useful, an its strength only grows over time. If you take all that shock, pinch, cover stuff, you could end with the wrong units in the wrong places. If you take a lot of combat units, you have a granted and solid all-around promotion, that never obsoletes.

 

[Ray Patterson]

Well to make sure that promotions are not irrelevant, simply do not promote units before their first battle (which is often their last anyhow...).

 

[Diceclock]

The best way to promote is not to promote upon creation. I constantly move units around with training points still on them, so when I need to attack something, I can customize the unit on the fly for that specific battle.

I never attack with my catapults, just bombard defenses. Because of that I've found it useful to give them Medic Promotions, so with 5 sitting in the stack, I get 50% healing on offense.

A mounted unit with +1 Visiblity is key to almost any war. (Flanking 1 -> Visibility 1).

 

[Ray Patterson]

uhm, I'm pretty sure medic isn't cumulative, but other than that it's a good idea. Although I would prefer Accuracy, which also requires 2 promotions.

 

[DarkFyre99]

The best answer I have is: it depends.

It depends upon the unit, the opponent, and the situation.

There are far too many different situations to say what my "preferred" promotions are.

Three games ago, I had a nice tech lead on one of my enemies, so I gave all my tanks "Drill" promotions. Those cut through the enemy's riflemen and cavalry like a knife through butter. They rarely took damage, so they didn't have to wait to heal. They pressed the attack as fast as their supporting artillery could keep up.

Took those same tanks against an enemy with a slight tech lead, and they didn't do nearly so well. Fortunately, they were veterans of the last war, so I didn't lose many (lost a level 7 tank, though) but my advance was slowed by the need to stop and heal... which gave me time to bring up more artillery to replace those I lost softening up the enemy.

Much earlier in the game, I had a situation where my neighbor declared war on me, and I didn't have access to catapults yet. I kept a pair of axemen with Woodsman I (and later II) in the woods right beside his nearest city along with a spearman with Medic I. I laughed and laughed as he kept sending his own axemen against those two. They eventually reached Level 5: Woodsman I & II plus combat I and shock, so that was one of the few games I was able to build West Point.

During that war, I was attacked by Alexander as well, and so had another group of units stationed on a hill along their route to my territory. When Alexander sent his chariots and horse archers, they were met by spearmen defending my improvements on that front. When he sent other units, they were annihilated by my horse archers or axemen.

 

[Pantastic]

Some promotions are only good in the early game, like cover and to a degree shock. I mainly use cover for warriors and early axemen (especially as an aggressive civ), and generally use those guys as the first attacker. Sometimes I'll put it on crossbowmen/longbowmen if my opponent is running crossbowmen around and I don't have knights. Some axemen get shock just to be a 'super-axe', and I often have a maceman or two in each army who gets it too. when deciding if a unit is worth upgrading, I completely ignore obsolete promotions like shock and cover in the gunpowder era.

"City Raider" units normally get the city raider promotions first, when they get their 4th promotion they'll either get combat promotions or pinch since I'll probably be upgrading them a lot. Though sometimes an early axeman will end up with cover and city raider, I try to avoid that combo on later units because the cover goes useless later on.

I usually keep 1-2 "medics" in each army, they don't fight much so tend not to rack up promotions. These tend to be spear/pikemen in the early game, and since they don't get much XP I'll usually rebuild them in a new era instead of upgrading them. Usually I have 4 cats/cannons/artillery with the city bombarder promotion (enough to take down defenses in 1 turn) and collateral damage promotions on the others for stack weakening. For city defense, I usually have 1 with city defender promotions, 1 medic (usually spear/pike in the early game), and additional combat units if needed.

Aside from the city raiders, artillery, and medics, a good army needs some units to fight in the field. What I use varies a lot on this, depending on resources and what my opponent has. Drill is pretty wimpy as a single promotion, but a drill IV unit can just vaporize an enemy unit they've got even a mild advantage over. I tend mostly to use straight combat promotions now, I used to like shock and formation more but I got tired of ending up with a unit with 4-5 promotions 2 of which are useless. I do like 1 maceman with formation and 1 pikeman with cover to help with obnoxious stacks. In the gunpowder era, most of my units pick up pinch, since it's useful pretty much to the end.

I'm experimenting with using cavalry units more, currently I like straight combat promotions + blitz on most of them, but I haven't really settled on a pattern. When I have ivory I'll use elephants with the shock promotion since there's nothing but pikemen that kills them easily, but I tend not to upgrade them down the road.

Most of the time I don't use guerilla much or woodsman aside from my exploring warriors and scouts. They come in handy if you need a unit to guard a particular spot (a guerilla longbow sitting on an iron mine is nice) or if the terrain is going to force a fight in a certain spot.

 

[Pantastic]

DarkFyre, what I usually do for West Point/Pentagon is nuture one unit up to 17 xp, letting him be the one to pick off damaged or obsolete units, then as soon as he hits the big 17 run him right back to my capital and station him as a garrison for the rest of the game.

 

[Sparta]

For the most part I tend to follow a pattern similar to what Pantastic mentions. I also have occasionally tried to get a medic catapult in my stack of siege units, although that can be hit or miss depending on whether you've got enough spearmen/horse archer/other medics and bombardment totals already. If you're short on accuracy cats and medics though, I like having a medic catapult in a (usually secondary) stack, since it can bombard and serve its purpose as a medic as well. A cheap and easy way to get catapult experience is attacking the siege units left over after you've wiped out everything that's not useless in a city garrison (and they quite often get a decent chunk of experience for such, in my experience at least).

I also really like to get March promotions on mounted units when I can, especially if you've got a wide frontline exposed. It really helps them to be able to cover a lot of ground and not waste time healing.

Commando seems like it'd be sweet, but it seems that every time I try to get a couple units with it, it's too much effort to get it by the time they'd be really effective (and I don't relish the notion of sending off level-four+ units solo). I can't remember what happened the last time I thought that'd be a good idea, but I probably finished the game before milking the last necessary promotions for the proposed pair of knights. Besides, who wants to risk some of their highest-ranking units deep in enemy territory? I could see very selective usages for it (lone important resources), but I don't necessarily think it'd be that useful in common scenarios.

City-Raider-upgraded riflemen and grenadiers are so powerful (especially in single-player) that it almost feels like an exploit. Which I suppose it kind of is.

 

[Smokey McDope]

I see lots of love for city raider. I've said it before, sure, city raider owns the AI, but in a multiplayer game a human opponent won't idly sit behind his walls while a big city raider stack marches up to his city. Instead, he's going to intercept the city raiders with his combat+shock/pinch promoted units and destroy them before they even get near a city.

That said, I use combat promotions extensively. Of course, barrage is assigned to siege units. If playing an aggressive civ, I can usually manage to get a nice stack of around 5-6 macemen/grenaiders with combat 4 + commando. Yes, this is a very powerfull promotion, especially after railroads. However... 2 movement units with flanking 1/2 + mobility are almost as good (pre railroads), and a lot easier to score, especially for non aggressive civs. In short, I'm a combat guy, who likes the promotions available from combat prerequisites.

 

[Pantastic]

The AI will attack stacks too (though it usually isn't doing it as a plan), so I'd never send a pure city raider stack out except under special circumstances. I always have plenty of fighting units to accompany them, especially since the AI will often send city defenders out to attack even if it's suicidal. The flip side of city raider not being good in a straight fight is that in a stack with some city raiders and some others, the city raiders won't be picked to defend unitl the others are worn down; you'll often suffer a big attack but end up with undamaged city raiders ready to size the town.

 

[Willem]

Because of that I've found it useful to give them Medic Promotions, so with 5 sitting in the stack, I get 50% healing on offense.

No, Medic doesn't stack like that. Only one unit with the promotion will have any effect, the rest will just be backup.

 

[Lord Chambers]

DarkFyre, what I usually do for West Point/Pentagon is nuture one unit up to 17 xp, letting him be the one to pick off damaged or obsolete units, then as soon as he hits the big 17 run him right back to my capital and station him as a garrison for the rest of the game.

I'm 90% confident you don't need your level X unit to be alive when you want to build the Pengagon. You only need to have had one unit reach that level at some point.

Same goes for the Heroic Epic, I'm sure of it.