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We need Music and Military Tradition both in order to pick up cuirassiers, which is combined 4680 beakers. Rifling requires Replaceable Parts, for a total of 7560 beakers. It's cheaper, but not CHEAP, if that makes sense.
Let me talk with Speaker and get his thoughts on this. The ability to flank cannons is certainly a huge plus, but we can't draft cuirassiers, and we won't have gold to upgrade knights.
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Grens only get their bonus on attack to rifles, so I think CFC wouldn't want to mass those unless they knew they were getting the upper hand. Rifles can be drafted and have a strength advantage on the attack against both grens and cannons.
Flanking is nice, so maybe we go for Mil Trad after Rifling?
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(July 30th, 2013, 10:05)pindicator Wrote: Flanking is nice, so maybe we go for Mil Trad after Rifling?
The issue is that is a very long ways away. My understanding of our tech situation is that we are very likely not getting both for 25T minimum. For early stages of this possible conflict it would just be one or the other, and one would get to us quicker.
I forgot we didn't grab Music yet, so that balances things a little bit. I think we need someone to do some math and get us an estimate of when we could get each tech.
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I disagree with Scooter, mainly as a question of opportunity costs. I agree that Cuirs are good and we want them, just don't think they're as important.
We're going to be drafting regardless of what else happens. It remains our most efficient method of producing military, and takes advantage of our biggest leads: food production and # of cities. Even if we somehow get NAPS with everyone, I expect we'd still be drafting. Upgrading from Str 9 muskets to Str 14 Rifles is huge. They may not be the best unit for all purposes, but we're going to have them anyway.
Building military, though, is not as automatic. We want to keep some of our investment on economy. We also have to put a lot of investment into catapults. For that fraction we do spend on mounted units, Cuirs are better, but I don't know that they're hugely better.
I just don't think Cuirs are as much of an upgrade as Rifles, given the proportions of our military spending. I think Rifling upgrades more units, further, than MilTrad would.
It'd be different if we weren't on a Huge map in Nationalism with a lot of quick growing mid-size cities and huge resource-based happiness caps. But this is perfect conditions for the draft.
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I think rifles need to be our primary objective. We need to get a modern army ASAP and getting Rifling to draft one from scratch is probably faster than getting a cheaper tech and pumping units out the slow way.
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This isn't a straight Rifles vs Cuirs question. This is a Cuirs X turns earlier vs Rifles question. What "X" represents here is what we need to know, and I don't have the time/opportunity to look into that now.
Also, 2 movers with promos > 1 movers without. The strength difference is an issue, sure, but we need to cover a lot of ground here with our defense. 2 movers + cats is usually the best way to defend. Read our PB8 thread. In that case we were out-teched AND out-produced. Here we are mildly out-teched (less so!), but we are NOT out-produced. The issue is just that we have is the long border to defend, and 2 movers goes a long ways there.
Drafting and building Cuirs are not mutually exclusive choices. An army of Cuirs, Muskets, and Cats can absolutely beat anything that anyone can field in the next 30T.
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So I think there are a few issues.
1) How many Apolyton units do we expect to see, how many will be rifles, and in how many turns.
2) How many CFC units do we expect to see, how many will be cannons, and in how many turns.
3) How many other civ lower-tech units do we expect to see, and in how many turns.
Unless we're going to get a large cuir window (where we can build units before we're attacked in force) and a small or nonexistent rifling one, I don't think it's worth pushing back our ability to draft rifles.
On defense I definitely don't think rifles are poor units versus grens, and if we're trying to opportunistically raze border cities with 2movers knights aren't that much worse (we're only attacking lightly defended cities anyways).
Ultimately my sense is we need our hammers for cats and at least some infrastructure, and the cuirs we could afford to whip won't be enough.
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Scooter mentioned the additional mobility of prioritizing a mounted defense vs. a giant stack of rifles, and I think that has some merit. But our east and west fronts are so far apart that even two movers won't matter there, we'd have to have two large standing armies in place to adequately defend both fronts, IMO. In that scenario, having mounted units in place helps us reposition quickly between the Apolyton and CivPlayers attack zones but how much more useful is that than having rifles in those areas instead? I think in that theater Apolyton and CivPlayers are close enough together that we could use rifles effectively enough that would wouldn't have to have cuirassiers (speaking strictly along zone defense lines here, obviously cuirs are much better if we want to take a quick foray into enemy lands for border city sniping).
So we can probably get to cuirassiers sooner but how much more decisive would they be over what we already have as we slowly make our way to Rifling? I think answering Sunrise's questions would go a long way to finding that out, if there's even a way to do that.
Anyway, pending further analysis and information my gut feeling is that staying the course and researching Rifling will get us the longer term security we need, if we can make it that far.
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Well I don't think mobility is a requirement for this war, it would only be useful in shuffling N and S between CivFR and CP and achieving superior tactical positioning on enemy stacks.
Our primary goals are to fight a delaying action against Poly until we can draft rifles, get rifling, keep our shores safe, hold BbB against CP, and hold both cities on CFC's borders. This is assuming that CFC even piles onto us with the first wave (they might just wait around to see if any of our cities go down) and CivFR doesn't act like an opportunistic bastard against CFC or CivPlayers.
Quote:Here we are mildly out-teched (less so!), but we are NOT out-produced
I don't think this is necessarily the case if our enemies have 10 or 15 drafts. They do have more pop and we don't have THAT much land.
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I'm not talking about shuffling between east and west, that's not possible pre-rails. But of course mobility matters when your western border alone is about 20 tiles and 5 cities.
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