Promotion Tier List.

There are plenty of tier lists out there on leaders, civs, and wonders. I haven’t seen a list of rankings for unit promotions, so I thought I’d open that conversation.

Excluding religious units, here are the promotions I care about, in order, with brief explanations:

1. Depredation: pillage with 1 movement instead of 3. Your 4 movement Horseman unit can now pillage a single district four times in a single turn. Paired with the “Raid” policy card, this means this lone horseman will outproduce all the other inputs of the rest of your empire. He will make more science than your scientists. He will make more gold than your whole economy. He will make more culture than your artists. He will generate more faith than your own religion does.

This skill is broken good. I can’t believe it hasn’t been removed from the game. If you have Grandmaster’s Chapel, allowing you to buy units with faith, you can achieve Domination Victory while never hard-building a single unit, thanks to this Depredation Horseman.

2. Forward Observers. With this ability, you can now attack cities without them attacking you. Ranged units garrisoned in the city cannot attack you. It is a sea change in the quest for domination.

3. Commando. Your infantry is a cavalry now. Enough said.

4. Arrow Storm. Your crossbowman can now shoot twice in the same turn and kill anything it sees. When you consider this promotion on the Kheshig Horse Archer, you now have a flying death machine.

All the other promotions I kind of yawned at compared to these. Most promotions are +5 or +7 and make you marginally better, usually in specified matchups. None of the other promotions come close to these four, and of these four nothing comes close to Depredation.