What to Build? Infantry and combat stats and tutorial

Hello everyone,
Please read the whole post before commenting, thanks.

Costs:

There are several costs to take into account. First there's resource cost (there is already a well written guide on this subject), then there's time cost (which is vital in terms of massing up large numbers of troops, then there's food cost (how much food does a certain type of troop eat up?), then there's population cost (how much population does each troop take up?), and lastly there's the deployment cost (how much food does the troop eat when it's being sent to attack somewhere?).

Based on the resource cost guide already written, swordsmen are the most survivable troops you can get for your resource cost if you mass them and warriors have the highest attack.

Time cost:
At the time I'm writing this, it takes me 12 seconds to make one warrior and 2:56 to make an archer.
Based on Exercise, 7 warriors can kill 1 archer... and all would die. this means that if you were to cancel them out, warriors would be most time efficient to make as it takes 7x12=84 seconds or 1:24 to make 7 warriors, when it takes 2:56 to make 1 archer. So warriors win in this category versus archers. I won't bother calculating the rest of this stuff, someone could make a spreadsheet using excel and calculate all the troop vs troop type time efficiencies and post it, but for me I'm just writing this guide for the smarter than average layman who will read this and go "omg archers pwn"
Based on time to recruit, warriors win. I'd say if you don't mind suiciding an army in order to take out an enemy's forces, warriors are the best troops for you. They'd destroy anything in their path, BUT they also die in the process.

Food Costs
(the upkeep of food that each type of troop eats up constantly) pikemen takes the cake and wins a medal in this category. It has the highest attack per food consumption out of all the troops. So for those of you who like to keep a larger army, and realize that this would mean upkeep, pikemen are the most efficient. If you're low on food production (which shouldn't happen, if you're smart about it you should always have enough food for your troops) Or you simply love to be efficient with food (which could happen.. for example if you have a city that you want to defend but the main purpose of that city is to supply your other cities with resources... which means you won't have as many farms... then your supplying city should make pikemen for the most part for food efficiency) then Pikemen should be your best friends.

Population Costs
(how much population is required to make a troop): Once again you can calculate this for yourself or help me out by replying with the numbers and I'll update this post, but I've found that Pikemen are the most efficient in this category). This MIGHT mean that you'd want to make a massive army in a city with pretty much nothing but farms and cottages with only a CRAPLOAD of pikemen, but before you actually go and do this read on to see why this isn't something you want to do.

Deployment costs:
This one's hard for me as I only recently joined this game so I havent' all the units researched and I'm not sure on how to find this out aside from actually trying to attack a certain city with each troop type to find out their deployment costs... I'm thinking this might be the same as food efficiency which would mean pikemen would win BUT since we're dealing with traveling over distances, the troops' speed might be a factor so I'm not sure on this... someone please help me out with deployment costs? (The units for this is (Food)/(Distance) for each troop type. Then again another thing to find out is if the distance or the speed have anything to do with it, and if the army moves at the speed of the slowest troop type, etc. I suspect that either cavalry or pikemen might win in this category.

After all the cost analysis archers don't seem to be so great eh? Read on. I just wanted to present the whole picture and not show one side of the story. The other units are definitely useful, but Archers really do rock.

So let's see... remember that it takes 7 warriors to cancel out an archer? Well, if you attack an archer with 6 warriors, the archer survives and all 6 warriors die.

If you use the Exercise option found in your rally point and play around with many different scenarios of 1 troop type versus another troop type, you'd find that if you matched up 2 different troop types with each other, and if you're using the same amount of food consumption on each side (if you're balancing each side based on having both sides with equal food consumption) you'd see that for the most part Archers dominate everything but gets owned by cavalry, and Pikemen own everything else other than archer armies of the same food consumption. And when these armies of pure archers fight against other armies of similar food consumption, and when you compare those results with the results of other different troop pairings and calculate food consumption losses, you'd see that archers are able to greatly reduce their losses with their range. Cavalry, because they're fast and can close in on the archers can take them out. And Pikemen dominate everything else and have the least losses out of all the melee infantry due to their range (yup they've got good range for melee so they hit all other melee types first, also explains why pikemen dominate swordsmen (7 pikemen beats 6 swordsmen... and it's 6 and 7 due to food costs if you were paying attention).

So now you're probably thinking, jeez let's make craploads of Cavalry and Pikemen because Pikemen own and Cavalry can counter Archers... Think again.

This is like the most elite secret and I'm sharing this with you.

So let's see, Cavalry owns archers eh? Try this: 1000 cavalry kills 2000 archers with 606 cavalry casualties and all 2000 archers die.... not bad eh?
Now try 1000 cavalry fighting against 2000 archers and add 1 swordsmen on the archers' side. Suddenly we see that the archers just killed all the cavalry, and have only 398 casualties. Now add a warrior on the archers' side. You suddenly see that the archers have no casualties, and their side only loses 1 warrior and 1 swordsmen but the other side loses all 1000 cavalry. O\_O' This is why attacking archers with melee without archery backup is NEVER good. Ok, add 1 archer to the side of cavalry so that it's
1 archer
1000 cavalry
VS
2000 archers
1 swordsman
1 warrior

result: the 1 archer dies along with the 1000 cavalry. BUT on the other side we see that 681 archers of the 2000 died. Why's this? and how exactly did the cavalry get killed when the archers' side only added 1 warrior and 1 swordsman?

It's due to range and movement. Imagine this.. if a horseman wants to attack an archer, he'd ride up to the archer and kill him. But if someone get's in his way, he'd have to stop to kill that someone before he could move on to the archer. Well each time he has to stop, the archers get one extra round to fire on the horseman. If you add melee troops of different speeds into this equation and add multiple stops along the way, a group of archers become hilariously strong.

Try this:
2395 cavalry
Vs
1 worker
1 warrior
1 pikeman
1 swordsman
2k archers
1 cavalry
1 cataph
1 trans
1 ballista
1 catapult

Result: all the cavalry dies, all the archers survive and some of the fodder dies. Nice eh?

But then there IS a counter to this. Add an archer to the cavalry side:
1 archer
2395 cavalry
Vs
blah ... (see above)

Result: 2026 cavalry dies along with the archer, BUT all 2000 archers on the other side dies. But before you celebrate and think cavalry is the best counter to archers, calculate the costs of making that many cavalry and the costs of making that many archers... surprising isn't it? The archers come way cheaper.

So how do you effectively counter this? I'd say either have more archers than the other guy, or if you remember that warriors take less time to amass, you could potentially make a giant army of warriors, and a handful (not just one, since a small handful of archers, of like maybe 10-20 can take out enemy fodder better and allow the warriors to keep running towards the archers without stopping) of archers and attack the archer user that way. BUT the end result is you'd still lose most of your warriors in the assault. But it IS the most efficient way to counter the archers aside from amassing your own... the problem with amassing your own is, the other guy already has a headstart on you. If he has say 5k archers and you only have 1k, good luck trying to make more archers than him, since he's got a 4k headstart on you.

This is why archers are best, and warriors are second best because they can counter archers, and pikemen are third due to high efficiency, and then cavalry the fourth place if you're fighting against a noob archer user who doesn't understand the concept of using fodder.

Well, hope you all enjoyed this guide. Also hope you all who've read up to this far, understand how doomed you are if you don't like archers, and how screwed up this game could potentially get once enough people read my post as now a lot of the people (those who spend time reading up on a game in the forums) will start amassing archers and using fodder to protect them.

Haothehare

PS if you are in SS1 watch out for me,Conan of Freemen because I pwn noobs left right and center

PPS, oh and swordsmen are better than cavalry cause they're highly survivable and can kill warriors and cavalry when in bulk... though pikemen can kill the same things AND kill swordsmen too. so I wouldn't bother wasting time with swordsmen other than using them as fodder.