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ducki
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quote:
if the units had to compete head to head for a place on players' build queues? At an estimated shield value of 60, it would take five crusaders for a player who builds the Knights Templar to break even on cost, and six for the wonder to provide an advantage. From that perspective, the wonder could rarely be regarded as providing more than a small advantage and would sometimes cost considerably more than its benefits can repay. |
But the whole point of comparing them with their offensive (near-)equivalent is, they don't compete for build-queue space. So, by your calculation, if the KT produces 6 Crusaders from completion until the player has a Cavalry force, it would provide a (small) advantage.
Think of it as an automated warrior-sword upgrade plan - you don't have to touch it once it's built, and when Cavalry come online, you have a comparable slowmover force to accompany/bolster your mounted force, either to add a second front, take border towns, garrison captured towns(instead of tying up your valuable fastmovers) or guard your cannons.
Of course, that particular scenario is more useful for someone that uses combined arms, actually builds cannon, or prefers to use all available build-queues for fast-moving offense and doesn't have garrisons to send along.
So in my mind, a troop-producing wonder that costs the same as many of the big Ancient wonders and half as much as the "big" MA wonders that produces units with a (nearly) equivalent attack value to Cavalry seems very worth it, especially if your calculation about only needing to produce 6+ Crusaders in time for a Cavalry offensive is well within the realm of likelihood for the average completion time to the average Cav offensive. That's 30 turns, very easily doable taking the top branch, though I'm not sure about the bottom branch.
On another tangent, if we inverted the stats, making this a defensively strong 3-5-1 unit, would that make it more worthwhile? I'm not sure that's a good idea, as being able to have a 5-attack unit before Muskets sounds like a nice little bonus anyway. I wouldn't think you'd need many of them to have them "make a difference". We shouldn't, IMO, have them "make a difference" the way a UU can - Samurai(the reason I didn't suggest normalizing the stats to 4-4-1), Riders, Musketeers, all should be naturally more of an influence, whether owned by the human or the AI, than any contemporary unit, especially "freebies".Yes, I know they are not truly free. Essentially you pay shields up front and receive a unit annuity. As long as you get the "freebie" 5 times before (IMO) Rifles, you don't lose out on those shields you invested in freeing up your build queue. So "free" = "freely produced", I guess.
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09-03-2004 20:58
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