Well at least I know who my first target should be....
Give me the save or prepare to be destroyed!
Give me the save or prepare to be destroyed!
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Arise, Riders of Rohanna! Ride for Molach! [SPOILERS!]
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Hm. Yup, no play no kill.
At least getting the chance to test out stuff. I'm not too sure about the GotN though. It costs 4 HAs, not too bad. But warrior -> HA upgrade costs 133 gold, mounted merc 120. HA get 1 more strength, 1 FS + immune to FS and 10% to deal 5% defensive strike, mounted merc get possible defensive bonus and ability to instantly buy. Don't think I need it while preparing for attack, but once I start rolling and if I could take a city, instant reinforcements. . Plan A - straight to stirrups after basic. Build horsemen while teching, then upgrade after some 100% gold turns. Gives me about 10 HA's around turn 100. Then revolt to conquest and just pour out HAs and ride over the world, upgrading warriors/horsemen when able. Or keep tech on and get religion/catapults for defensive purposes. Plan B - get currency first. Also throw in construction for defensive catapults/offensive chariots. And BW if jungled or I have bronze. Reach Stirrups a lot later - main point in getting there would be to upgrade any warriors/horsemen with good exp fighting barbs. But would have a lot better econ - and able to raise my army faster. Wonder how full farm spam and building HA with conquest would fare - do they have enough str to last into the end? I kind of think so, but would need to keep my stack always bigger than my foe, so every withdrawal is a win and not a loss on counterattack. Plan C - builder mode, get all the goodies first. Should depend a lot on Diplo. Anything I don't get by turn 150 might not get used - thats about when the endgame will start, i fear. Anyway, will be ...useful...to see the land first. What is North of the starting hills (I guess I can move settler up there before settling 1W if he has the 4-move starting bonus) Also wonder about the plan to send my starting warrior NW towards the held demon warrior - scout will be south, dying - so capital will be open for about 12-13 turns. Hopefully low chance of enemy capital capture then.
Mercs get weapons, though, while HAs don't. With bronze, that makes them even in base strength. HAs are probably excellent when you get them, but I don't think they really scale aside from upgrading to the national unit they upgrade to. More importantly, perhaps, is that mercenaries will be your only mounted unit that actually gets defensive bonuses. This means they might make decent stack defenders if you're ever on a forest/hill, and you can actually fortify them in cities reasonably.
I found that, against AIs, the biggest problem for me was that I needed either high retreat chances or high casualties to make a dent against their free promotions, though, so the fact that hired units start with 0 exp was annoying. Of course, then I switched out of the exp-granting civics and it wasn't any different from my newly-produced units.  Given that these PBEM games aren't as plodding as my singleplayer, I'd personally say that, if you have bronze reasonably accessible, you should plan for chariots and otherwise go for HAs. I'm not sure about full-on builder versus military as soon as you can, but upgrading all my highly-experienced warriors did work nicely for me. I'll go look into relative beaker costs and get back to you. Currency is pretty out of the way, now that I think about it. The one big advantage of HAs is, as mentioned, they're immune to first strikes. It looks like, ironically, Horselord is going to keep you from getting that on almost anything else. The other way to get immunity to first strikes is with Flanking III. Unfortunately, the game doesn't seem to let you take Flanking promotions if you're already above 80% retreat chance. HAs and Horsemen (and, it turns out, Knights, Shadowriders, and Magnadine) start with a base 35% retreat chance. This is nice, but, with Horselord, that's 45%, with Flanking II it's 85%, and then the game won't let you take the 10% and immunity to first strikes from Flanking III. Chariots (and, it turns out, mercenaries) only have a 25% base retreat chance, so you can just manage to squeak it in. (for 10 exp that didn't go to combat promotions, admittedly) I wouldn't take it on all my units, but it could potentially be useful to have some around for breaking stack defenders. You could use HAs for that too, of course, and they get 85% at only Flanking II. tl;dr: I found HAs didn't scale well in the late game due to their lack of weapons. On the other hand, these games rarely reach the late game, right? (February 19th, 2013, 13:03)Ichabod Wrote: I remember reading that the only way to get Flanking 3 HAs with the Hippus was to upgrade flanking 3 horsemen into HA. Is this still possible? The problem is getting the horsemen to that XP treshold, I guess. This is still possible, giving 95% withdraw HA/Knights. I noticed that I could build both horsemen and HAs when getting stable & stirrups. However adding a siege workshop meant no more regular horsemen, just chariots. So in the endgame, build the RotNK in a city that doesn't have siege workshop and spit out 10 xp horsemen, promote flanking III and upgrade. Can even do it after warhorses, just make sure I have 4 knights alive in build queues, then I can still build horsemen (and chariots) --- And for some reason thought mercs didn't get weapons as mounted mercs. Sure they do. So again, not turning off tech, but continuing through to currency could work out. And big decicion seems to be BW/Masonry/Construction (900) or Archery/Stirrups (1245). 345 beakers cheaper, which one could call 345 gold....actually 431 due to fin trait. 3 free chariots. And BW means better warriors with bronze, masonry can mean tile improvement, construction means I can farm anywhere and grab some catapults for defense. It really does seem better. Warriors & Horsemen upgrade to chariots, no worry there. 133 gold, 64 hammers 'rushed'. Regular horsemen too, 85 gold for 40 hammers rushed. Horsemen actually cost more then warriors to rush per hammer but not much (yapping on about them because capital in God King can build them pretty fastas fast as warriors, so saves some cash when I reach the upgrade point. Also gives some barb-busting abilities) Okay so if I get bronze I think it's decided then. If we get that far. ...
The reason the Horsemen disappeared when you could build both Chariots and HAs is because it disappears when all units it can upgrade to are present. Knights are also a valid upgrade target, so if they're available but you have built your limit, they'll come back.
Of course, if you want 95% Knights, rather than 95% HAs, you can upgrade a Chariot to a Knight and have a more effective unit in the meantime if you end up needing to farm exp. (Warhorses require a whole mess of random techs, though, so that really isn't much of a consideration here, IMO. OTOH, that's also where Ro9K is, if you're trying to do that.) BW and Construction also both (individually) open up the Festivals->Sanitation slingshot if you think you can get away with that.  I'm away from the game right now... how much of those 345 extra beakers are Archery, out of curiosity?
Belatedly noticed that I seem to have a lizardman ruin in the ancient forest plain 1E of start. Suppose that was part of the problem that ellimist fixed. I would have had to garrison it right away, as they can spawn lizardmen even if covered in my culture. I guess it'll be gone when I get the save.
Thinking about a wild plan to bulb currency. I can go straight for it after calendar-mining(expansion) - festivals (market to generate GM) - AC-Edu-CoL-Currency (partial bulb). Revolt consumption. Expand, building markets, money changers (for specs) and worker/settlers. Keep some cash in reserve if I'm attacked, then tech the other military techs. BW first. The bulb will be 700-something of 900 needed.
February 21st, 2013, 11:55
(This post was last modified: February 21st, 2013, 12:02 by Ranamar.)
That's an interesting thought... I'm not sure how I'd evaluate it, but one advantage is that we could go for CoL (which gets us Aristocracy) and then decide if it's worth it. Or, put another way, get to CoL and then decide how many merchants in one city it's worth sinking into the proposition. The one problem with aristofarms for us, so far, is that I see lots of hills and plains. Maybe expanding south, once we can hack through the jungle, will give us nice, grassy, flat land to farm, though. Also, once we have Festivals and Bronze Working or Construction, the Drama-Bard slingshot for Sanitation seems pretty doable. We're going to need to watch out to see if anyone else seems to be thinking in those terms, though.
The important question I have is, what is your goal here? Is it just the consumption civic? Is the plan to turn off tech and hire an army when you need it, using Guild of the Nine? (That doesn't seem like an unreasonable proposition, btw...) I feel like just the consumption civic isn't quite enough to make it worthwhile on its own, although a global +45% gold is pretty nice if you're building markets a lot. (+35% is the magic threshold to get an extra gpt from a market.) ETA: Just to get an idea of where I'm coming from, I've done a lot of non-bulb Currency beelines as Grigori for Adventurer Guilds, and I'm not sure they're actually that great an idea after all. Whatever it was, though, I was underusing it. Generating a GM and researching something else in the meantime does seem like it might be a more useful way of going about it, though. You're probably looking at around 20 turns to generate with a single merchant or 10 for two, fwiw. As an aside, if you have more markets than passive beakers, a 0% tech rate will actually send you into negative beakers on your tech. Also, are you looking at the GP priority list somewhere? I don't remember where to find them... |
