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Panando

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  1. Melee cav shouldn't really beat archers in a straight up head to head battle. Just barely winning is okay, but they shouldn't like, be arrow proof or something. The strength of cavalry is their speed, which gives the ability to raid the opponents town, kill reinforcements and generally wittle an opponent down around the edges. A good general strategy with cavalry is to split them into two (or more, depending on your micro) groups - starting with groups of 5 or so - and ruthlessly harass the opponents town - it's really important to try and save at least some badly injured cav and send them back to the civic center to heal - typically it's possible to do this because of the speed of cav. Because of your split harass the opponent will be forced to split their army up. Once you've got them splitting up their forces, you should try to maneuver all your cavalry together and mob half their army with your whole army, preferably with a pincer attack so that your cavalry don't get in each other's way. Once the other half of the enemy army arrives, run away and heal (but letting the healthy cavalry stay and harrass some more). Note that the greater the extent to which the opponent keeps their army together, the greater the ease you'll be able to disrupt their woodcutting and prevent them training more archers. Basically, they are in a lose lose, if they keep their army together, they will have their resource gathering badly disrupted and lose economically. If they split up their forces to better protect their territory, they run the risk of getting pincered. This is the strength of fast melee units, that you can cause an opponent to disintegrate by not giving them a moment's peace from harassment and exploiting any mistake they make in deployment of their forces. Their strength should not, and must not, be in straight up battles and they should require a significant numerical superiority (or cost superiority) in order to decisively win a battle. Also I by no means claim it's an unbeatable strategy. A player who gets archers and skirmishers has the option of gathering resources with their army when it is not actively defending, while the player who gets sword cavalry in large numbers simply cannot use them in any role other than combat and if they fail to be effective in that, they lose economically big time. This is why sword cavalry harassment must be ruthless and constant, not giving a moment's respite and if possible housing-blocking the opponent by killing houses thus preventing them getting countering units. The effective defense involves trying to gather resources while fending off the harassment, which would likely involve a mix of spear and ranged infantry. Spear cavalry also present a more or less hard counter but suffer from the burden of uselessness for other roles.
  2. Presently civs are arranged alphabetically. But gauls and britons are both Celts, and much of their strategy, such as build order, pertains to Celts, rather than Gauls or Britons. For example, as Celts they enjoy the bonus housing for many structures, most their buildings build quite a bit faster, they have a farming bonus, have small houses (good for walls), and Phase I skirmisher cavalry, phase II sword cavalry. They suffer from purely wooden barracks (I consider a partly stone barracks a bonus as it relieves wood pressure) and fairly abysmal Phase III which mean it's probably better to win the game in Phase II, although the ram is not a bad addition to their phase II units as it permits breaking open turtles. They basically have one huge difference. Britons get the Celtic Slinger which costs stone, and Gauls get the Skirmisher which costs wood. This allows Britons to use their starting stone to train a few slingers without increasing wood pressure, this is ideal for teching as fast as possible. Gauls on the other hand can train skirmishers in abundance on a purely wood and food income which is good if you want to spend longer at Phase I. At Phase II this difference disappears as they both have access to both units. They have some trifling differences as well, Britons which get war dogs and Gauls get naked fanatics. I'm not sure though if either of those units are of any great value. For Britons puppies can be produced using food alone and don't eat into housing - that's interesting, but do they change the outcome of a battle? Naked fanatics are a more normal unit. Neither unit contributes to economy so are really just things to dump resources into once you no longer care about cost-effectiveness. I imagine the Celtic cavalry will be game-deciding in competitive matches anyway, the only thing Celts could wish for is a cavalry archer, but their cavalry options are nearly as good as it gets and they can produce them quicker than anyone thanks to their great economy.
  3. But that's how it currently works in Alpha 17, wall towers don't fire any shots unless you garison a unit. Only 2 units can be garrisoned. All tower upgrades apply to the wall tower too, but the upgrade which gives one 'free garrison' does not allow an unmanned tower to fire shots, but it does increase the firepower of a wall tower with at least one garrisoned soldier. I don't think needing garrisons is a big deal though. The thing is the damage rate of an unmanned tower is pretty abysmal anyway, that one shot isn't going to do anything, stuffing five units in it is essential to get some real firepower. Now wall towers damage is equally abysmal, but the thing is that, with upgrades, wall towers actually provide more firepower than towers, because you can pack them more densely. With upgrades, 2 wall towers is very nearly as much damage as 1 tower (7 shots, vs 6 for the 2 wall towers), and has so much more health. How you garrison your towers is up to you, but I think most players just garrison on demand. In this case, there is much more likelihood that a wall tower will survive long enough to receive it's garrison. This is absolutely correct. Whether using default wall towers, or building standalone towers behind a wall, either way you don't get enough firepower to meaningfully protect a wall if you 'play it straight'. But if you exploit the ability to build stone walls as short 'dumbbells', getting 2 wall towers in a short space, you can pack in much more firepower. You could of course make a wall of dumbbells, a wall entirely of wall towers, which would offer some impressive firepower and have a horrendous amount of hitpoints, and be virtually immune to melee as only a few melee units could attack each tower, they really do take forever to go down when attacked by only a half dozen units. It'd be expensive though, but might be entertaining to wall off narrow chokepoints with wall towers. A civ which only has elephants at city phase would have enormous difficulty breaking down a wall composed entirely of wall towers, assuming the wall is properly backed by archers and deployed catapults.
  4. One of the interesting aspects of the Romans, is they are the only civ with a Phase I hack unit, this makes them the potentially fasted civ for destroying enemy buildings, you can kill the enemy buildings without even teching to Phase II. Now granted hack infantry are not that great, but it is interesting that Romans are the only civ for which teching to Town phase is kind of optional, the swords and skirmishers can do everything. While romans don't have any great economic advantages (unlike Celts) you can train a goodly number of swords from your starting 300 metal and the barracks is partly stone, somewhat relieving wood pressure in the early game. I think part of Roman strategy might be to exploit the ability to kill buildings very early. Killing a couple of houses can really throw off someone's build and might block their unit production for a frustratingly long time. Also it is possible to bumrush a CC and tear it down with roman swords, an opponent might expect they can hide in their CC from such an assault as they could against any other big Phase I attack. So training an unreasonable number of swords instead of teching could end a game very quickly.
  5. I feel the current wooden walls are okay in terms of hitpoints and cost, but are strategically very nearly pointless. From a pure strategy game point of view, a wooden wall serves to buy some time when performing a risky strategy such as fast-teching, where you need to delay the enemy a little while to give your few ranged units a chance to weaken them or buy the time to produce more units. Or to give time to bring your army to bear. Or to make a weak harassing force turn around and go home. From a balance perspective the wall doesn't need to delay an attack for long. If the wall lets a player go without units, if an opponent effectively gets stone-walled by a stone wall, then the game balance is off. In most cases, players will prefer to wall off their base using buildings, as this involves very nearly no additional cost. On maps and for civs where this is possible (obviously much easier with cheap houses) the only real use for a wooden wall is for a gate, although gates are not really needed for a component player as there is enough strategic value in having a chokepoint, or you can do a total walloff with a barracks which has it's exit on the outside, and later remove a house to make a hole. Walls are not really practical when there aren't already natural chokepoints. The problem is that walling the enemy out is the same as walling yourself in. It is essentially giving your opponent an unopposed victory as they can either expand or tech more quickly and so will have an advantage in resources and/or technology. The expense of building the wall is never going to be recouped and early in the game wood is *the* limiting resource. That wood means a slower tech, fewer harassing units, or fewer soldiers which could be harvesting. It's just not viable to spend more than a hundred or so wood on walls. One interesting idea would be if wooden walls could be built in neutral territory, suffering the same decay as scout posts. This would help to distinguish them from house wall-ins, and make them a more useful defence against rushes as choke points could be walled off on more maps. Note that wooden walls in neutral territory would be by no means a guaranteed defense even on maps with suitable chokepoints, as cavalry harassment can arrive very early, definitely early enough to kill or at least hamper the units building the walls. There is a kind of exploit which you can do with walls, you can build the wall then delete the towers. The long wall spans are cheaper and build more quickly than the 'towers', and oddly enough deleting the towers doesn't leave any holes in the wall, if you do it right the wall still seals perfectly (wooden walls always seal perfectly even without towers, stone walls require some attention as if you use maximum length spans it doesn't work, but stone wall spans can overlap if they are less than maximum length, thus sealing the hole). For stone walls this permits building the wall at a cost of 30 stone per span which is way cheaper than the 130 stone for a span with a tower, and the build time is much quicker. Wooden walls do not enjoy such large benefits from deleting the towers, you still save about 1/2 the cost and build time. In some cases deleting towers is a no-brainer as they literally add nothing to the wall, in other cases terminal towers are helpful as they allow extending the wall, and may be required to seal the wall against terrain. There is another kind of exploit, which is deleting (or ignoring) the spans and using the stone wall turrets as towers. Lets compare these wall turrets with normal towers. Wall turrets cost 100 stone, which is 100 metal less than a tower, they build in around 130s, a bit quicker than the ~160s for a tower. They garrison 2 soldiers, vs 5 for a tower. They provide no free shots, while a tower provides 1 (the upgrade adds +1 to both, but it only works with the turret if there is already a unit garrisoned). They have slightly less range. They do not count as one of the 5 buildings for unlocking City Phase, while towers do. At first glance a wall turret is just a cheaper, inferior tower. They cost about half as much, and have about 1/3rd the firepower when fully garrisoned. They DO enjoy all the upgrades which towers enjoy and benefit proportionately more than towers, more than doubling their firepower. But there are two really big advantages of wall turrets. First they have *way* more hitpoints. it depends on the civ, but normally about 3-5x as much hitpoints. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, there is no minimum distance restriction, you can build as many wall turrets as you like, as densely as you like, just like towers in nearly every other RTS game (yay!). They have to be built in pairs with a span, but you can delete the span and one of the turrets if you like. So at second glance it can be summarized like this: Early in the game towers are probably a better choice, as they offer much more firepower, and more protection for units, at this point raiding forces will have trouble tearing down a tower even with it's modest ~1000 HP. Later though, upgrades improve wall turrets more, and enemy units become powerful enough to cut down towers quickly, at this point wall turrets are a much better choice as they can offer up to 10x the hitpoints per resource invested, and can be spammed much more densely. Wall turrets would be the natural choice for offensive towering where the enemy has some serious incentive to kill your towers, and where you want/need to creep forward with the towers (turrets do extend influence, so you can creep into enemy territory). Because wall turrets have so much hitpoints and build fairly quickly it is quite practical to build one even under enemy fire, making them good for offensive towering, or for building them when being attacked. Their damage is lackluster without upgrades, but with upgrades they are quite good. In fact late game it would seem there is very little reason to build towers when wall turrets have so much more hitpoints. When balancing stone walls, these exploits or unconventional uses must be taken into consideration too, namely turretless spans, and spanless turrets. I am not certain what the fixes to these exploits would be, although it might work in such a way that a span without a tower is unstable and is destroyed, and a tower without a span is unstable and destroyed, or if not destroyed, at least suffer some kind of penalty to it's effective hitpoints. This would do nothing to address the fact that 'dumbbell' walls could still be used as uber-tough towers with no minimum distance restriction.
  6. The advantage of women is they provide significantly more income than men, as women cost about half as much. I am experimenting with a build where you get about 50 women then build two barracks as the wood accumulates (that is, in excess to that required for building houses and fields), even after the barracks are complete the CC continues to produce women while both barracks pump out skirmishers which are set to woodcutting - once 800 wood has accumulated Town phase research is initiated (of course if the enemy attacks you can produce citizen-soldiers from the CC too). In principle this women-heavy start will tend to significantly out-produce a player who goes a more modest number of women and gets a single barracks. It's probably one of those things where attack timing is everything. But if you can complete the two barracks - which will be remarkably quickly considering you haven't spent a single wood on soldiers - then you can produce citizen-soldiers from 3 buildings, which will probably be enough to drive out an attack when combined with the firepower of the CC. If a player gets few women and attacks early, and the attack fails, the women-heavy player will have dramatically more income and will win. If they get few women and don't attack early they'll also lose to superior income. In order for women-light to beat women-heavy therefore *requires* effectively timed harassment which is successful in seriously hampering resource income and better still killing a lot of women. The harassment must be so successful that it completely offsets the resources lost from sending the citizen-soldiers across the map instead of having them gather - which is quite a big ask. And there are a number of ways to keep women alive, such as garrisoning them in houses or just running them around. I think 0ad early game might be kind of like Starcraft II, where players often get 1 or 2 expansions, full of workers, before investing in any fighting units, the balance of the game is such that it's possible to get a lot of workers and still fight off a rush by a player who goes military-heavy from the start, as the player with a lot of productive workers just has so much more income to work with, that the attack can be defeated due to the time lost by the attackers, crossing the map, giving the defenders time to build a big enough force to win, despite starting later. 0ad early game optimal strategy is definitely going to involve getting a lot of women before citizen-soldiers, the question is whether "a lot" is around 25 or around 50, and it'll depend on civ as well. But I suspect that this strategy where you just crank out women until you can afford a barracks, then build 2 or more barracks (while continuing to crank out women, as they are the most resource-efficient gatherer), is going to be a big one, and maybe the equilibrium strategy which is hard or impossible to beat and the most reliable way to win will just be to perform this build even if you know the opponent is doing it. For reference, at the moment in the time a man cuts 10 wood, a woman has cut 8 wood. This still leaves women at least 50% more cost-effective than men for woodcutting. Even if women only cut at half the rate of men you'd still considering getting them because they don't cost any wood. So presently women provide a huge income advantage over men.
  7. The sword cavalry don't cost that much actually. They cost 80 food, 35 wood and 20 metal - and a buildtime of 12. They also cost 2 housing, which has a nominal cost of 30 wood and 9.6 buildtime (by a citizen). Compare with a spearman, which costs 50 food, 50 wood, buildtime of 10, and a cost of 1 housing. The adjusted cost with housing is thus: Sword cav: 80 food, 35 + 30 (65) wood, 20 metal. Spearman: 50 food, 50 + 15 (65) wood. Food is the easiest resource to secure so the extra food doesn't matter much. The wood cost is identical once adjusted for housing (although cav are easier to keep alive, so might be more likely to keep occupying their housing). The metal cost is low, and at that stage of the game metal is easy to secure. Your starting 5000 metal supply will be good for 250(!) cavalry and if maxed out on workers will easily support 3-4 barracks non-stop batching 5 sword cav at a time. With aggressive harassment the critical resource in the early game is really wood as on most maps the easily protected supplies are quickly exhausted. As calculated above, cavalry actually cost the same amount of wood per unit as spearmen and archers. They also only take slightly longer to produce. Thus I think it's not unreasonable to produce armies of cavalry of comparable numbers to soldiers. If you build 5-6 farms around your CC, and put 10 guys on metal, and harvest enough wood, then you can easily run 2 barracks non-stop producing batches of cav, 40 cav is only 4 batches and would take around 3 minutes to complete. Of course in an ideal game you don't just produce 40 cavalry and have them sit on their arses until you charge them into the enemy lines to die like idiots, you rally every batch to the opponents base and have them run in and generally harass and contain the opponent. Weak cavalry should be hotkeyed out and sent to garrison in the CC allowing them to heal up, saving cav in this way can easily accumulate an extra 10-15 in the CC and they'll usually be veterans too so have better stats than fresh cav. I also did some experiments with the sword cav to determine their damage rate in practise. It turns out that sword cav kill buildings (houses) about as quickly as battering rams (per unit of housing - a battering ram is 2.5 times more expensive and kills a building a little faster than 2 cavalry). Their rate of damage to buildings is thus equal to a top-tier siege engine. Of course in practise their rate of damage is higher, because they move so much faster. They're either easier or harder to kill depending on whether the enemy is using hack or pierce. I think that sword cav, used in a dynamic harassing style with the aim of denying woodcutting and ending the game quickly, are clearly a 'killer strat' for Celts. Every civ needs it's killer strategies, and the Celts don't have anything at City level which could qualify as a killer strat. The only really notable City unit is the battering ram, which might be required for cracking open a determined turtle but otherwise won't win any battles. The question is whether at their current cost, sword cav are overpowered, if the celt's killer strat is better than other civs killer strats. Only testing will show this for sure, but I suspect it is so. I suspect that sword cav are too cheap and quick to train for their effectiveness. They may also be available too easily (many RTS games require a stables building, before the high speed high damage harassing unit can be produced). Celts themselves really have nothing interesting at City level, except battering rams and heroes. Other civs have quite good champions, but as a rule I think that champions are more housing effective, but are less cost effective. In other words, they really only come into their own once players are maxed out. Upgrades can matter, but again only once the game has reached a point where players aren't so much resource limited, as housing limited. A good celt should have won the game long before this happens. The roman spear cav which is available at Tier I, has a nearly identical cost to the sword cav, it costs 80 food and 55 wood, 1 housing with a build time of 12s. The only way it is cheaper in that it costs only 1 housing, I would say that 20 metal 35 wood is 'cheaper' than 55 wood because you can just put citizens on metal and forget about it, while wood entails more micro. It deals about half as much damage to units (due to it's very slow attack rate), and much much less damage to buildings. They can certainly be used to harass an opponent's resource gathering activities and are okay in a fight, but are basically worthless for razing buildings. The enemy will have ample time to react and bring in skirmishers/archers. It's basically a far inferior unit and the only thing going for it is you can get it at the start of the game. I think I'd prefer a ranged cav though, especially since it can't realistically kill buildings anyway. Also later-game spear cav, including champions, don't have much to recommend them over sword cav, they can't kill buildings or siege engines quickly and don't really complement ranged units in any way. So all things being equal, a civ with sword cav is stronger than one with spear cav.
  8. One of the challenges is that melee cavalry (especially celtic) are fairly brutal against buildings, a mob of say 40 cavalry will evaporate a civic center in about 10 seconds - weaker buildings, like say towers, fall quickly even to much smaller mobs. This means that even if you can fight them with your army, they can easily deny expansion opportunities and prune away any building which is poorly defended even momentarily. If it comes to a base race, the cavalry mob will definitely win as they raze buildings and hunt down citizens at a much faster pace than foot troops or siege engines. Furthermore if a mob of sword cavalry catch an army out of position, they will destroy it. IF you could face the cavalry with a wall of spearmen, backed by archers, the cavalry would probably be destroyed, but cavalry have no particular reason to attack head on, they are faster so can just go somewhere else and tear down buildings, and only engage the army when they can get it at a disadvantage. As noted by the OP, cavalry will tear up spearmen, the main reason is that cavalry can bring numerical superiority to bear, due to their superior mobility cavalry can much more easily enclose a enemy army, meaning that each foot soldier has two cavalry attacking it - and even spearmen can't win that way. Although formations may help to hamper a cavalry pincer. Another reason why the celt cavalry are tough to beat is the celts have a naturally strong economy - perhaps the best? Improved farming, and quick to build houses, means that with fertility festival the celts can really boom their economy fast. Being out-resourced wasn't mentioned as a problem by the OP, but all things being equal the celts should thrash the romans economically. Alternatively they can spend a lot less on their economic development and spend a lot more on cavalry. Technically there's not even really any reason to go to City phase as all they get out of this for their cavalry are some more blacksmith upgrades and an aura hero - they're probably better off spending the metal on more cavalry - and if we skip City there is no need to bother with stone either (all they need to build is a few barracks and maybe a tower, and they get a trickle income from razing buildings ). So celts, if they wish, can really go nuts producing cavalry and omit spending on all higher technology and almost anything other than barracks + basic econ, and they won't suffer for this at all really, since the celtic sword cavalry mob is one of the most flexible fighting forces in the game. You can't really think of anything to add to it which would make it better at smashing armies and razing buildings. I would say that at the moment there is no real counter to celtic cavalry - perhaps the army can be beaten in theory, but when you consider the map control which comes from having a mob of building-razing cavalry early in the game - the Celt will either win outright with an early mob of cavalry, or will sufficiently hamper the opponents economic development to be able to expand freely and come in a little later with a REALLY big mob of cavalry. In principle any civ with a tier 2 sword cavalry could perform this strategy, but I think no others have the combination of a fast economy and a strong sword cavalry. If I knew my opponent was going to perform this strategy I would probably try to rush them before they can produce cavalry. It wouldn't be possible to harm their civic center, but it may be possible to contain them. However this relies on them teching quickly to get cavalry ASAP and won't help if they play in a more balanced way.
  9. This is not truly an advantage, as you can shift-queue a new construction from a citizen soldier (shift queue, so he continues his current job), and then order female or even elephant workers to actually do the construction. The citizen soldier is only required for designation, which he can even do from clear across the map, and thereafter need not participate in the construction at all. I suppose this might be considered an exploit though (for instance one of the advantages of the spartan woman is that she can build defenses, and that advantage evaporates if you exploit remote designation, and the worker elephant tooltip says it can 'help' construction, implying it shouldn't be able to do it by itself).
  10. The basic starting strategy I use is to put all starting units on wood, except the cavalry which should be put on animals, then I construct about 10 women and put them on berries. Also construct a barracks, houses and stuff. Now the important thing is to train lots and lots of infantry for harvesting wood, and later stone and metal. Once the berries run out, construct 3 or 4 farms and fill them with women, but otherwise just train infantry for harvesting (don't spend anything on upgrades at this point, the resources are better spend on more units which will both increase your income and help you defend yourself). Try to have your fighting units harvesting resources in the attack path the AI will take - not possible on all maps, but most will have some useful resources out front. When the AI attacks, try to distract the attack, scout towers and horse scouts are very good for this so try to have one or two out front, as the enemy attack will split up to deal with the perceived threat. When the AI units come in, mob them with all your infantry. Don't worry about the lost income, the AI is also losing income by sending all their infantry to fight. Your infantry should prevail because the AI has had to cross the map, and if you succeeded in splitting their attack group by having half of it chase a horse around the map, then you should win convincingly. Once you've beaten off the first attack (or if the AI doesn't attack, once you've got about 50 population), start teching up. Keep building lots of units and get a few upgrades, but don't bother with towers. Completely harvest the initial 5000 stone and 5000 metal and once it runs out it's time to go on the offensive. Take your army and wipe out the AI's efforts at expansion (because the AI has invested in expanding and in towers - and you haven't -, they won't have enough units to win), and if your army is still capable of fighting, run into their town and kill all the women and as many unit producing buildings as you can. Their towers and fortresses will probably finish off your army, but they'll be so hopelessly crippled it won't matter. Rebuild your army and win. The essence of this strategy is to have enough units to beat off the AI's early attacks, and to go on the offensive in a timely fashion so the AI can't expand all over the map and out-resource you.
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