I think that the value of Martyrdom is related to a few factors, that it might be useful to list here.
First and foremost is the difficulty of converting the unit - otherwise you wouldn't even be talking about Martyrdom in the first place.
Immediatelly next is the offensive value of the enemy unit being converted. It may be a unit that is dealing a huge lot of damage to your units and structures (in this case Martyrdom is worth what you will save) or it may be a unit that will kill your priest for sure and you want to (at least) get that value for the Priest.
Finally, there is the element of chance - if in any case you don't want to risk a conversion and lose the priest for nothing - then you pay the price to be sure.
Rarely will you consider the intrinsic value of the unit being converted - simply because there are none worth that much of a non-recoverable resource such as gold.
My best conversion so far with Martyrdom was funny. The Hitite enemy was sending waves of Scythes my way, but I had scouted his town with a priest (a priest is the best scout that there is).
His scythes were better than mine (of course, I was Bab, not all techs, miss Chain mail and Metallurgy) and, despite the fact that I was using ballista towers to hold, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would be overrun. In fact, I suspected he would not bring in Catapults (my scythes had alraedy murdered 7 of his Catapults) but instead armored elephants, which can kill towers easy and resist the scythes.
It was then that I found that he had ONE Heavy catapult left alone near a huge cluster of his houses. Together with it were 1 HA, and a couple of CA. I thought I had no chance to convert the Catapult, becaus the CA were in my direction - so I martyr'ed the Catapult, tore down most of his houses and his Scythe production fell to a trickle (and he took quite a while to notice it, LOL!...) so I Scythe-flooded him and, despite the inferior quality and the fact that he already had quite a few elephants (of which I still managed to convert 4, at the cost of one priest) I managed to make better because he never really got around the loss of the houses.
So you see, I have 2 cases, the earlier one might have won me a victory, but this one certainly did!...
How come I had forgotten this one? But here it is. Houses are SO important in flood wars, when you have Scythe ot CA fights, remember this, to look for his houses, they'll be clusterd somewhere, a few Scythes sent there can make all the difference.
If you have a good Priest Civ and enough Gold, always research Martyrdom when you are going against a very powerful Civ, like Hitite. You never know.
To be honest, I used Martyrdom very seldom and mostr of the times because I knew the stupid Priest was doomed!
Priest Civs where you can spend 600 Gold on Martyrdom:
Choson
Assyrian
Babylonian
Carthaginian
Egyptian
Persian
Phoenician
Roman
Shang
Sumerian
(edited for typos)
Wise_Max is the slowest player on Earth.
But Wise_Max has a lot of fun playing. So, he always wins
even when he loses the game. And he made Friends.
Is that Wise or what?...
[This message has been edited by Wise_Max (edited 11-21-2004 @ 05:53 AM).]