Instantly killing a vil with a group of 2 centaurs is great, but it takes so much micro to keep those cents alive! I've raided with RC, hips, spearmen, anubites, valks, cents, CA.. and cents are by far the most micro intesive. Cents are very weak in hitpoints and armor, and they just die. Very annoying, but if you can manage it, it works very well.
Typically, with a good build, advance can bring 2 cents in right away, and the hit and run villie killing can start very early.
However, in comparison, RC are alot easier to use and tend to be only marginally less effective than cents, if at all. RC are by far the best raiding unit in the game. Hippikons also manage pretty well, and are one of the simpliest, longest living raiding unit of them all, so tend to dominat when I am raiding with greeks, not cents.
If you compare cents to another ranged raiding unit, the CA, CA can wipe out entire gold mining operations because of their incredible range, and favor is harder to come by than gold.
Other myth unit raiders, valks and anubites, and maybe sphinx, valks survive, and anubites and sphinx are alot easier to pay for and survive much better to be healed.
In actuality, I find the difficulty to raid with large groups of centuars to be high enough to say that they are best limited to zeus with raiding by throwing out 2 right away in classical to start taking out vilies while hips and other human units build a much stronger and cheaper force.
To use centuars in any sort of mass, their speed is going to have to save them from fast human units, like RC, so the upgrade is absolutly neccesary.
Some people can do very strong centuar strangles, but I sure cannot use cents to win the game for me.
Nick: Eten.
Gods: All of them!
Vanilla.