June 19th, 2017, 12:35
(This post was last modified: June 19th, 2017, 12:35 by Nelphine.)
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Horsebowman are far better than barbarian cavalry, so your early game goes even better. This let's you get neutrals and the key lairs to buy a war college in 1401.
But I don't believe one horsebowman can hold a node for years by itself. The strategic value of a bezerker is grossly high enough that the AI won't consider even attacking despite being able to slaughter it with possession or confusion.
Similarly, bezerkers don't just go toe to toe with nodes like sky drakes or great drakes - they slaughter them with minimal casualties. The weakness of bezerkers is their resistance but nodes don't target resistance. Doesn't work on all nodes of course, and air elementals almost always run away which is annoying, but you can still get a lot.
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I'm trying to decide if I can somehow fit sorcery in. Flight is better than wraith form, aether binding is stupidly good. I really don't use death for anything other than random undead troops and a few wrairhforms... And that all important early production bonus from omniscient.
I'd also like an explanation about omnsicemt nature settlers - how are they better than marketplaces?
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On NY current game: sharee got chaos surge after great Drake. This was amusing since I kept stealing doom mastery units from her. Her great drakes are strong, but, not strong enough.
Then she got meteor swarm (damn her spell binding enlightenment). That started wrecking my node/tower garrison's, and surprisingly was destroying ~5 buildings over turn.
Can't keep that up.
Melded the 12th myrror node (she never had any) Went on warpath and razed everything.
Very rare globals are still ultra strong for impossible AI!
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Quick calculation of settler value:
At size 3 you get 9-12 gold, 3 food and 2-3 hammers.
And this amount keeps growing.
It takes longer for the returns to pour in, but they're very large. You need a few spearmen for unrest control, and you increase your exposure to attacks.
If there's a single silver or game tile, your profit rises massively. And you get the opportunity to build additional marketplaces.
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And it costs you 100-200 production to make it plus a varying length of upkeep (both for settler then the swordsmen); I'd much rather let the AI pay for all that, build bezerkers to take their fortress, then take their city after they've already got a sawmill built for you and can't defend it because they're banished. Impossible AI simply have too huge a production and growth bonus; I consider that part of my own Empire, it just happens to choose where to go without my input - kind of like a grand vizier for settlers.
On the other hand, a marketplace pays for several more bezerkers immediately. (My game I just won, my capital produced ~120 bezerkers by 1414.)
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You guys both play on low resources and max power output, right? Both of those settings devalue settler/city income vs node income.
June 20th, 2017, 15:40
(This post was last modified: June 20th, 2017, 15:45 by Nelphine.)
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I do. I 'should' play on poor power as well (the so get far more from it then I do), but I like higher strength defenders in nodes.
I play on poor minerals because I hate raise volcano ruining minerals for me, and I want to avoid getting frustrated with the game. I play to have fun.
But my choice to avoid settlers is regardless of settings. If it was poor power, rich minerals, I'd do the same.
The AI can build the city faster, so it is ALWAYS more efficient to let them do so, and then conquer. Nodes don't change strength, so letting the AI get them is purely giving them extra power. So, against impossible, I firmly believe in taking nodes, and conquering cities. (You should do this even on hard, but it doesn't matter as much.)
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Conquering cities is always more beneficial on high difficulty - if you can afford and win the additional war it comes with (or can't avoid it anyway)...and if the AI's race is something you can actually use.
...but only on high difficulty. And only if an AI does build on your continent. If they don't, you absolutely need those settlers.
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Why? Just go their continent and conquer there. As long as you can fortress strike the AI, and hold the cities you take, it is always better to build troops and conquer their cities instead of building settlers. The only time you build settlers is when you need those cities to successfully fortress strike your opponent.
Take my last game against shared. I conquered all 3 arcanus wizards, and only built a single setller (to get a barbarian city on the coast).
Only then did I start building settlers, but I shouldn't have. I should have just gone on and killed sharee, in about 1409.
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Please note that the comparison isn't conquest vs settler. There are far too many variables involved to make a quantitative analysis of that. The comparison is marketplace vs settler. Conquest and settler don't rule each other out, just like conquest and marketplace don't rule each other out.
I'm sufficiently intrigued by this discussion to create a "Marketplace VS Settler" spreadsheet that will let give me a better answer, stay tuned 
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