Samurai unbuildable after gunpowder tech

[Elliott]

So I shot myself in the foot somewhat by researching gunpowder as the Japanese because it's taken away my abilty to build Samurai, this is a problem seeing as I have no source of nitre so I have locked myself out of building any melle units for the time being.

It's strange for a number of reasons first being Musketeer has only 5 more combat strength than the Samurai while the Samurai costs no special recsorces and fights at full strength all the time. It's hardly superior even if I did have nitre I'd probably be building Samurai still. I wanted bombards mostly.

Secondly this hasnt happend for other unique units I've used, the redcoat can be built after researching infantry and elephant after gaining knights so why does it happen with Samurai?

I've heard other people having issues with losing certain units like warriors to swordsmen when you have no iron I think it's definitly an issue worth raising.

[Hathur]

Pikemen are your only solution for melee in that case until you tech up (which is unfortunate since the tech for it is a dead end and basically near useless). They shouldn't make units go obsolete if their upgraded version requires a new resource, it was a bad design oversight.

[ScythianUA]

it is a game...and it is ok when people have such problams...it is a stratagy in first place...if you don't know where to get iron - it is your problam...don't have nitre? - find it and conquer it until it's too late...or just buy it!
there would be no sense in "strategic" resources if they would be planty on the map!
l2p b4 whine about mechanics =P

[Stanley]

Had exactly the same issue yesterday

[ScythianUA]

but tbh samurais suck big time in this game
you can't upgrade your warriors or swordmans to it and as you say it become absolute when you tech gunpowder...and it is in tech that you don't realy need to tech and it is much expansive AND not that much better than legion...
so only way to make it "usefull" - focus all your start on euricas and rush to it asap
so it is like: find another civ (for writing), kill 3 barbarians (for bronzeworking), make a trade rout (for money), build 3 districts (it is very easy for japan, for mathematics), and finaly kill some unit with spearman...
and probably you will need to focus feudalism in policy tree to get card for 50% speed building medieval melee units, cause samurais are damn expansive...
still it is damn hard work to get that unit asap

[Elliott]

I aquired nitre quite soon after it just seemed strange my civ lost the ability to train samurai. The issue here is its not consistent with other unique units I have used. The English redcoat and Indian Varu both remained buildable after new units in their lines became avaliable so I expected the same to apply the Samurai, what good reason is there for them to be different?