Strategy Thread - for quick strategy questions and answers

[SevenSpirits]

Elephants. They're always banned. I get that they may create a map balance problem between the haves and have-nots. But is there a game that shows why BTS is clearly a worse game with them than without them? Is a timing attack with them more of a problem than, say, with aggressive Praetorians?

The only display of them I've really seen, if I'm allowed to talk about it, has been in the ISDG where I wasn't overwhelmed. Especially since, even defensively vs Knights, longbows are often still a better build.

If you have ivory, the combination of elephants + catapults is so strong as to make medieval military techs unnecessary for you. And they do have to be balanced among players or it's just completely unfair. So now everyone has the same units and there are no significant military considerations to an entire era of techs.

ISDG had highly varied team skill levels and diplo allowed, which tends to make military balance fairly irrelevant in that era anyway. (No one's going to have a serious military conflict between roughly equal powers that early in the game, when there are runts to kill and you can NAP everyone else.)

[WilliamLP]

Basically what Hashoosh said. If you don't have elephants and your opponent does, you have to bring overwhelming force to kill them. If you both have elephants, it becomes a boring slugfest with no tactical counters or correct unit composition choices - whoever has more elephants will win.

Is that really true? It seems like spears defend against them equally for fewer hammers, and longbows are better defensively in a lot of situations for the hill bonus and ability to get the CG and Guerrila line of promotions. Spears and cats beats elephants and cats for the same investment, so they at least have to bring some axes, which is at least more complicated than the metagame you describe.

No doubt they change the game, and I guess I trust the old time MP vets who say they're broken. I'm just curious how it would actually play out in practice. Given that there are already some units that are basically must haves that dominate their era: like axes, cats, knights, rifles.

I guess I can see that elephants replace the function of pikes (while being beefier), crossbows (but worse at attacking into ancient melee stacks with spears), and longbows (but worse inside cities).

[Sullla]

Spears definitely do not counter elephants. Let's say that you try to build spears to counter my elephants. How are you going to get that spear vs. elephant matchup that you want? If you're attacking, all that I have to do is cover my elephants with a couple of axes, and you have no chance. The low base strength of spears makes them almost useless against a mixed stack, and even hitting with catapults won't help that much when you're trying to use strength 4 units offensively. Conversely, if you're trying to defend a location with spears, I can hit your units with catapults and then send in the elephants, after which the jumbos will get huge odds anyway. The base strength of spears is too low in both cases. Even if you can get that coveted spear vs. elephant in open terrain matchup, elephants get two promotions in a city with stables, at which time they can take C1/Shock and still win that matchup. You need C2/Formation on spears to win decisively against elephants, and that's very difficult to pull off.

Trust me, there's a reason why they were long called uberphants in the online community, and MP map scripts were specifically designed to remove ivory from the resource pool.

[thestick]

And the counter to Cuirassiers before Rifles? City Garrison Muskets?

[SevenSpirits]

And the counter to Cuirassiers before Rifles? City Garrison Muskets?

Rifles are at approximately the same tech level as Cuirassiers (and Grenadiers and Cannon are close too). If you don't have renaissance military units yourself, you defend with slightly weaker units + catapults.

[Gavagai]

Elephants. They're always banned. I get that they may create a map balance problem between the haves and have-nots. But is there a game that shows why BTS is clearly a worse game with them than without them? Is a timing attack with them more of a problem than, say, with aggressive Praetorians?

The only display of them I've really seen, if I'm allowed to talk about it, has been in the ISDG where I wasn't overwhelmed. Especially since, even defensively vs Knights, longbows are often still a better build.

I have played a Pitboss game with Elephants allowed. It was hell.
(Especially given that I ended up with no Ivory.)

EDIT: In that game I was protective Native America and was able to produce formation Xbows. They served as a weak counter, giving me odds slightly below 50% in the open field.

[Gavagai]

A question of my own: what happens if more than one team reach victory condition at the end of same turn (e. g. one team has a spaceship arrived, another has its third cultire city at 50 000 culture and the third one has a border expansion which puts it above domination threashold).

[Hashoosh]

Same thing that happens if two teams finish a wonder at the same time. I think this is only a pitboss occurrence, otherwise it follow the normal turn sequence.

[Krill]

This actually happened in a tournament game once, originally it turned out that the team with the lower team number in the game setup won (ie Team 1 would win before Team 2 etc). Then It was changed that on the turn that hte VC were met, if there were more than 1 team that met a VC, the team with the higher score won. However, I don't know if that got changed afterwards. You should ask Speaker, he played in that game IIRC.

[spacetyrantxenu]

How scandalous. I wonder if there were hurt feelings involved with that one!