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Generally, I Faith purchase Monuments and Granaries and save the gold for tile purchases or unit upgrades. That's not to say later on in the game, when I'm getting roughly 4k - 6k GPT, I won't outright buy Monuments and Granaries in new cities. It's just in the early to mid game, I'm a lot more frugal with my gold.
So, personal opinion: Trajan > Caesar by a big margin. Trajan's monuments are effortless and 100% free, and immediately benefit the city, allowing it's borders to expand much faster. Caesar has to conquer or barb smash consistently to really benefit, and then convert gold into culture (or food / granary) from the monument purchase.
Edit: The only real negative thing I can say about Trajan (or, Rome in general), is that Rome doesn't get a start bias. You'd think they would because of the Aqueduct, but they don't. Civs with no start bias are more likely to have bad starting locations.
Trajan, on the other side, has been nerfed because he was too strong ; and is still is the top10 of most pick/ban leaders.
Free monuments help any overall strategy. Moving up the civics tree quickly is of at least comparable importance overall to moving up the tech tree, and probably more so in the early game. Uniques are usually more important in the early game, because later in the game you can manage all sorts of other ways to get whatever the unique does for you, so less benefit to getting something for free, as a passive.
The monuments also of course help your cities annex tiles more quickly. as a side-benefit of the cities' increased culture output. This also is more important in the early game.
The early game rules. You are the most constrained in the early game, so any shortcuts then make you more free to either work on other areas, or to add to the freebies the unique gives you.
Caesar has to give up the free monuments in order to get free gold for conquering cities and barb camps. This only works out in his favor compared to Trajan insofar as early conquest is desirable and practicable in the particular map you find yourself on in any given game.
It's got to be early conquest to derive an irreplaceable benefit, because by the mid-game you can manage to supply yourself with all sorts of other ways to get gold. They did buff Caesar so that you get more gold per conquest as the game progresses, so that's nice, but all the alternate means of getting lots of gold that every civ has available also get more rewarding, so, comparatively less valuable.
The other factor making early conquest the most beneficial for either Roman leader is, of course, the legion. It gets a combat bonus over a vanilla swordsman, which is nice, but its real advantage is that it costs less iron. All the unique swordsman replacements do this, because the devs want to lessen the most common problem putting together a swordsman rush -- iron deficiency.
Well, Trajan's monuments don't synergize with the legion, while Caesar's gold on conquest obviously does. But Caesar needs to act early, to take advantage of this ability to get legions out the door and headed towards his victims of conquest, or the lower iron requirement and the combat bonus no longer help this strategy of conquest his unique commits him to.
Early conquest is hugely beneficial, in that it allows early expansion beyond the natural borders of where the game plopped your original settler down, compared to other civs' starting settler -- and early expansion rules. Well, early conquest is hugely risky, because you have to shortchange other production priorities, and other tech and civics tree priorities, in order to spam a lot of early military. Early development rules, so you shortchange it to go off in pursuit of a war of conquest that might instead turn into a forever war that keeps on diverting you from development. That's a downside as huge as the upside of early conquest.
Caesar's gold on conquest synergizes with the builder charge the legion gets to free an attempt at early conquest from being such a drain on development priorities. You chop out and buy legions while your cities go on producing all the things they would in peacetime.
The result of all this is that Caesar has a more defined and limited strategy than Trajan, whose uniques don't dictate any particular approach.
Caesar should produce more warriors than standard because he needs to explore more widely (to find iron) and more aggressively than is possible with scouts, so he can get gold. He is more wiling than standard to take city-states. He prioritizes getting bronze-working earlier than standard, a task he is helped with because he's been slaughtering barbs with all those warriors, so gets the eureka. He needs to be more willing than usual to settle cities further from his capital if he needs to do that to get iron. Hey, he gets a free road to his cities, and he plans to be a military threat rather than militarily threatened, so a city being way out there near the border with other civs is good rather than bad.
Then, after iron-working is researched, Caesar uses his gold stores to upgrade his most heavily promoted warriors to legions. These legions in turn can use their builder charges to chop out more legions. The resulting army then goes off and conquers a neighbor civ or two, a process which even as it is in progress generates yet more gold. When that task is done, having 2-3 times the land and cities that the starting positions "entitled" him to, Caesar can win any victory type, even against Deity yield bonuses. Early expansion rules, so no big deal that the legion becomes obsolete and gold easier to acquire by means other than conquest, because Caesar now has 2-3 times the cities as anyone else.
Again, this early conquest still has to succeed at expansion, or it's counterproductive. The point is that with Caesar the attempt at conquest is spun off into a self-feeding process that requires less diversion from development priorities than early conquest with any other civ/leader. You have to build more warriors than standard, but that's about all you have to do in the way of diversion of production. Get the warrior built, mostly in place of scouts, and gold and chops take it from there. You have to beeline bronze-working, but that's about the only research strategy diversion from development priorities. If you find no iron on a widely explored map after you unlock bronze-working, well, at least you know relatively early that your early conquest dreams are not going to be realized, so you can change up to a more standard, less specialized, strategy. Of course, if that's how it turns out, Trajan's free monuments are going help you more with this vanilla strategy than Caesar's gold on conquest.
That's the difference between Trajan and Caesar. The former is better for a general approach, while the latter only helps you with the more specific strategy of conquest. Some maps encourage vs discourage early conquest, and the particular case of a map that gives you iron deficiency is really very much against Caesar. It takes legions out of the equation for Trajan as well, but he doesn't need them as much as Caesar. Against Trajan, some maps, both more likely and more deadly on higher difficulty, hem you in so much in your starting position that you can't expand peacefully beyond 1-3 often substandard cities in addition to your capital. Conquest is your only option on such maps, so find and grab some iron or die, and Caesar is better in that circumstance.
On SP the choice between the two is a gamble. You're not likely to be hemmed in at lower difficulty, so Trajan is the safer bet. Caesar is insurance for the case of being hemmed in, and otherwise is more likely to make early conquest a viable option, if early, inherently less safe and more chaotic, conquest is something you want to go in for.
I don't play MP, but my understanding of at least MP in leagues, is that there are several features that make Caesar the worse choice, because early conquest is less viable. If played at online speed, which handicaps movement across the map relative to economic development, legions become obsolete more quickly, and especially early conquest of distant cities is more difficult. Your victims have more opportunity to build units and walls, and maybe even research more powerful units, while your invasion force plods towards their cities. If the league uses better balanced starts, you are not going to get a hemmed in starting location, so you don't need the insurance Caesar gives you in that case. Most importantly, your intended victims are going to have their defense efforts managed by humans, greatly increasing the risk that an inherently hasty and disorganized early conquest will not succeed, and you will instead find yourself in a forever war with an opponent who can actually do strategy, and didn't unbalance his early game by prioritizing units. I would imagine that against humans, what you need for conquest to prosper is to have carefully planned and built a flexible force with all sorts of capabilities needed to counter the far more flexible measures a human defender will devise to throw at you, than any AI opponent will manage. Successful conquest would thus more often have to be preceded by a development strategy that put you ahead of your intended victim in some way or ways that they will not be able to counter before you have taken enough of their cities to make their resistance futile. This more careful, "development first", approach works against the AI as well, but the AI can also fall to a more off the cuff and chaotic early rush.
You have an impressive understanding of how competitive game work for someone who don't play MP, good job penguin.
For informationnal purpose, here are the balancing changes done for these leaders for competition :
Trajan
[Trajan's Column]: Free city center building delayed to Foreign Trade (from start of game)
-> to avoid the free monument in the capitale which is really really too strong in MP. A Trajan who had the chance to have a resource with a culture point like coffee or Jade was almost an auto-win.
Julius Caesar
[Veni, Vidi, Vici]:Caesar receives the most advanced melee unit researched when settling each city beyond your first. Receive a free warrior in your capital at Code of Laws. All units receive +100% XP. Gains 150 Gold after conquering a city for the first time or clearing a Barbarian Outpost, becoming 250 Gold after Metal Casting, and becoming 350 Gold after Steel.
Caesar gains an extra Wildcard Policy slot when capturing and retaining at least one city founded by a major civilization and owned by a major civilization at the time of capture (limit 1 wildcard slot, and does not apply to cities that started the game as a city state)
-> As you can see, Caesar has been heavily boost with free units each time you found a city, free XP for military units and a free policiy so he can compete because he was one of the weakest leaders. The gold bonus is... anecdotical at the best. Rome is not a very good civ for military purpose. Legions are great, even frightening at marathon speed, but far too slow at online. They're great for barbarian cleaning and to chop woods, (they're very good at that). If you time well your colonisation waves, you can collect a good quantity of free Legions that can chop you a lot of builders that make Caesar viable ; but the possibility to really use the Legion as an invading force is non-existant on some maps (Highlands, Primordial, some Pangeas), so we rarely see him. There's military leaders far more frightening.
Unless you play with no barbarians. That setting is just terrible for him.
Well, starting era does matter for him. Trajan gets monuments in an ancient or classical era start, granaries in a medieval era start, the second level of walls in a renaissance or industrial era start, the third level of walls in a modern era start, a sewer in an atomic era start, and nothing in an information era start. Unless it's on a river; river cities get free water mills on renaissance or later starts.
I never play multiplayer (I don't see the point, given that the AI is enough of a challenge for me), but now I'm genuinely curious... how does Trajan with a luxury resource near his capital pretty much an auto win? What multiplayer strategy enables that?