Hey everyone! :)

I'm thinking of trying to test my military might by playing a game of Always War with 30+ civs on a huge map. However I'm having trouble deciding which leader I should focus on. Here's what I've planned out:

Ramses is my favourite so far, with two of my favourite traits, Spiritual and Industrial, and two very nice starting techs, The Wheel and Aggriculture, Egypt will start off strong. Add in a very nice early Unique Unit for iceing on the cake. While I think his Unique Building is sub par, I think his traits and UU easily make up for that.

Second is Hammurabi. Babylon also starts with The Wheel and Aggriculture, but his UU is an Archer with a 50% bonus vs Melee, permitting easier field defense instead of holing up in cities and letting my enemies pillage my lands. The UB, Garden, has a health bonus which whill probably go unnoticed in this game. His traits are pretty good, too. The Aggressive trait bothers me because it doesn't affect his UU, however Organized is always welcomed because it helps out with the high cost civics I like to run.

Next on my list is Mansa Musa. The Mali UU is a 4 Strength Archer which I can use very similarly to the Babylonian Bowman. His UB is fairly early too, and it's a UB which never goes obsolete. The +10% gold will definately be welcomed in every city. His traits, Spiritual and Financial, are both very solid traits. His starting techs are The Wheel and Mining, both very good for an Always War start.

Other leaders I've considered:

Boudica for her UU and traits.
Charlemagne for the Rathas.
Shaka for the Ikhandra.
Tokugawa for his traits.

I'm leaning the most towards Ramses due to the UU more than anything. What are your thoughts?

It depends if you want to keep cities or not......

I had tried boudica once and she's off the roof if you burn and move :)

r_rolo1,

Interesting strategy. Though with 30+ civs and a huge map people will be scrambling to fill in the gaps and I'll need to be taking a lot more cities than I burn. So I may have to opt out of the whole "Burn and move" strategy.

If you're looking to keep cities, you might try Kubla Khan, creative/agressive makes it easy to capture cities and expand quickly. Furthermore simply haveing the agressive trait puts you one up for military units

You could try using Stalin to build Pyramids and switch to police state for early bonus to troop production. Fast forges is nice too. Plus he's aggressive, which opens up the medic promo with a barracks. Quin Shi Huang would work also, but I like to let my evil side out when playing as Stalin (If I had absolute power, I would...) and listen to Russian military music.

With 30+ civs i hope you have at least some on other land masses... Boudica sounds good, hatty might be good, charlemange is an idea. Churchil might also be a good idea(especially at higher levels). With 30 civs and always war you won't be building much wonders, creative will be a huge boon so if you want egypt you should go with hatty...

UUs really aren't all that relevant save for some situational plays you can try for. Mostly the leader traits are what is important because by the time you get to your 3rd or 4th civ (having destroyed the previous civs you met) you will likely be coming up against walls and more archers than you want to deal with. So every civ, regardless of UU or UB, will eventually be relying upon catapults to win wars. So as for what traits you should go for, you should try to get as much land as fast as possible and of course be able to hold it and quickly improve it. Therefore: Aggressive, expansive, and imperialistic are traits you should definitely consider. If you have at least 1 of those traits you should be (at the very least) on even footing with every other civ in the game.

Traits that are less helpful:
Organized, takes way too long to do jack crap by which time you might have already lost
Industrious, in a free for all, there is nothing you will build that will be worth the lost time and hammers that could have otherwise been building workers, settlers, and units.
Philosophical, if you're trying to GP farm in an always war game there is something wrong with you.
Protective, attack other people, don't let them attack you. If you're doing unrestricted leaders then a protective leader on Mali MIGHT be worth it, but in all other situations there are better traits you can pick up.

Creative, Charismatic, and Financial can all have their uses and give you definite advantages that would be almost impossible to not make good use of even in an always war game. As long as you pair them with one of the first three traits I mentioned there's no reason you shouldn't do well in the game.

Start techs are mostly irrelevant because of how cheap they are, but starting with mining does allow you to tech bronze, build a worker, and immediately start chopping. Other than that your start techs should weigh very minimally in your civ selecting.

If you want to keep cities, my bet is shaka. Clearly a barracks that cuts maintenance is the best deal you can get ;)

With all the exp that will be coming in, I'd go with Cyrus. Imperialistic for a huge supply of great generals, and charismatic to take full advantage of them. The happiness bonus is, just that, a bonus, as there will be no one to trade with for happiness resources in an always-war game.

G. Khan. The UU + UB is awesome for always war. Fast and strong in early games. Cheap settlers, so have most cities pump UU and one for settler.

But this would need alot of eco to fix up.

How do you get 30 civs?

You can either choose for a resourceless UU or a civ with nice starting techs / traits / a nice UU - Sumeria comes to mind! The vulture is insane, you get early cultural border pops with creative, can build very effective garrison units thanks to protective and get access to courthouses when you tech priesthood.

Sounds like win to me. Thanks to protective, you can also build walls in new cities pretty quickly, ever thought of that in combination with CG2 archers?

+1 vote for Shaka.

Every city will have a cheap Barracks in it.

One more vote for Sumeria. And also for Kublai, Zara, Hatty, Cathy, and the invisible creative/charismatic.

At first because I really would like creative: no time lost in building stupid culture stuff, a better and quicker visibility in your borders, bigger cultural borders (which means less movement for the opponents), and finally cultural defense: nothing to sneeze at.

Then, Sumeria for all of its military stuffs (vulture + protective) and cheap courthouses, Kublai for military and über horses units, Hatty for War chariots, Zara for cheap buildings and Oromo, Cathy for imperialistic, and the invisible for charismatic. Too bad he's not here =)

In these, I would take Kublai, Sumeria and Zara over Hatty and Cathy.

30 civs are going to be packed in pretty tight which would help an early rush capital grab, which has me thinking of Quecha, but Hyena Tupac's traits aren't great for this, which is a shame.

Julius Ceasar gives you GGs, reduced maint from ORG, and Praets; I vote for Julie.

Thanks to everyone for your input!

I tried one game as Ramses on Monarch. After teching both Animal Husbandry and Bronze Working and finding not only no Horses nor Copper in my city's BFC, but none in the known world nearby (granted it wasn't a BIG known world) and every single one of my enemies with Archers surrounding my poor army of Warriors, I decided to call it quits.

However, I tried it again, this time as Shaka on Prince. Oh wow what a difference that made! The AI not starting with Archers was the boost I needed to get going. I'm now slowly conquering those around me, and trying to expand into the few spots still left open.

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc199/kesshisan/CivIV/AlwaysWar/ShakaHugePrince01.jpg

Here are the 6 cities I have, and I plan on building a 7th where that selected Axeman is, just southwest of the Horse near the 3 Incense. Tech is going a lot slower than normal, but that's to be expected with this game. Here's my technology status:

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc199/kesshisan/CivIV/AlwaysWar/ShakaHugePrince02.jpg

I'm going for Meditation because I captured Buddhism and it will be more efficient to use religion to pop my boarders instead of trying to build Monuments everywhere. The question is, where should I go next?

Priesthood will help with Writing faster and unlock access to Temples for larger cities, and permit me to run a Priest Specialist so I can eventually pop a Great Prophet for the Buddhist Holy Shrine. But Writing right now helps me with the technology situation and puts me closer to Currency, which will be a huge help as I plan to have lots of cities really fast.

Shaka's Unique building is INCREDIBLE! It's the first thing I whip in every city, and because Aggressive grants a +100% bonus to hammers while producing an Ikhandra, that means they come out basically as fast as I can get a city up to size 2. And the Unique Unit is both a fast spearman, and a superpowered scout. I use Impis for all sorts of things. From running ahead and seeing where the enemy is, to herding workers into the cities before taking them over. I never knew how useful a 2 movement unit which retains defensive bonuses could be!

So far this has been both really challenging and really fun. However once Alphabet comes around I'll probably be doomed as I left on tech trading. Oh well! :p

I believe that asoka is actually a very good leader for a few reasons. Firstly he is the best at coping with war weariness, which must be an issue in these games due to his UB(unless it doesnt exist when in always war mod), also he is able to quickly switch between wartime and better economical civics due to spiritual as well as afford to run these expensive civics due to his organized trait, so despite his lack of agression, you may be better off in the long run as in my experience, asoka is the best at sustaining war for long periods of time! (Also fast workers are cool!)

Tokugawa is quite a good bet I think. I've played normal games in which I was almost always at war with one or two AIs and the fact that you can build cheap walls and put protective archers in your newly conquered cities lets your stacks free to attack. Park two Archers behind a wall and watch the AI suicide his units on them! When you get Samurais you're going to have a load of fun, and then every gunpowder unit is like a UU too, with its three promotions giving you extremely good defensive and offensive units.

Boudica is crazy good too. I've played a game in which I was lucky to have two neighbours that fought each other for a very long time (while I was happily expanding :D), settling lots of GGs as Military Instructors before I killed them both. Adding my own GGs now I have 3 cities able to produce Commando units (one with HE+WP, one with a military academy, and one with Ironworks), plus many more MAs and a few MIs here and there. That makes taking inland capitals on the first turn of a war a piece of cake. If that's not great for Always War, I don't know what is! The plus in an AW game is that you don't care if your religion is different from the AIs, so once you get a religion you'll automatically want Theocracy. You'll probably run Vassalage until you get Nationalism. With barracks and West Point that makes 11XP, you need one MI to get to the 13XP needed for Commando, one more if you switch out of Vassalage. Two more in cities without WP. Man, my mouth is watering just from thinking about this!

that's a rather crazy setting, but if i had to do it I would go for shaka

The top 3 for this would, in my opinion, be Charlemagne, Julius and Asoka.

I would probably go for Charlemagne. Not knowing where the next attack comes from makes an active defense more problematic, hence strong city garrisons will save a lot of headaches (on the offense, siege units do most of the work anyway and it's hardly relevant whether the cleanup units have one more promotion or not. As for stack defenders, Charlie's UU shines here even though it doesn't benefit from PRO).

Castles are also a lot better than usual: not only will their defensive bonus be more relevant, no foreign trade means that Economics can be delayed for a long, long time. As such, PRO becomes a valuable trait even before the gunpowder age.



Julius can start pushing very early and afford the gains while Asoka is incredible for fine-tuning the empire and alternate between all-out war and periods of consolidation. Under these circumstances, I would favour ORG over FIN since I assume we'll be forced to focus on production over economy for much of the game.

that's a rather crazy setting, but if i had to do it I would go for shakaAn added bonus of being Shaka is that it takes him off the board. I would imagine he would be in the top five of the succesful AI civs in this scenario.

Well, Always War means the AIs are always at war with you, not with each other. And most of the time they are likely to be peaceful with each other since they'll get the shared war bonus, plus since you're not on the trade scene they'll trade more, etc. So Shaka will try to take land from you, but if you manage to keep him at bay he's likely not to get enough land from the others to really compete with them. The advantage that Shaka, Monty and others like them get in a normal game comes from the fact that they go to war often and, when done against AIs, they'll likely win, thus giving them a larger production base. (which is all that they care for anyway) This will likely not be the case in an AW setting.

If random, Boudica of the Romans.
Otherwise Shaka.

Alexander of Greece. Great early military thanks to Aggressive with a UU that can take on a defensive and offensive role as an excellent all purpose unit. Philosophical really lets you capture a lot of territory and tech with specialists while your economy is ruined. UB adds one extra happiness so that's somewhat useful too and helps with WW which is lower with Always War, but I'm guessing still significant.

If unrestricted, then Boudica of Rome. CRI/CRII and CI/Shock Praets out of the gate = ultimate destruction. :lol:

AFAIK there is no WW in always war mode (wouldn't be fair, would it?)

AFAIK there is no WW in always war mode (wouldn't be fair, would it?)

cabert,

I have war weariness, but I haven't been attacking too much outside of my own boarders lately. Most of it has been territory defense, so my WW hasn't really gone above 20 or 30 points, not enough to cause any unhappiness in a size 6 or 7 city. I'm pretty sure that if/when my WW raises to a very high level I will eventually start seeing unhappy citizens.

AFAIK there is no WW in always war mode (wouldn't be fair, would it?)

You have WW in AW....

Well, that only means that you really have to finish the job fast or to use the normal anti-WW effects measures ( PS + jails .... or globe if OCC )

what about churchill? I'd think financial trait would help with unit upkeep/supply, while protective would eventually give you super-powered redcoats. might be a little slow in the beginning, but come rifling:ar15:

Churchill is protective, not financial :P

IIRC war weariness is reduced by by 1/2 compared to a normal game. This is multiplicative, not additive (ie AW + police state = 1/4 normal, not 0).

it doesn't make sense that your people complain about something you can do nothing about :crazyeye:
anyway, good to know

it doesn't make sense that your people complain about something you can do nothing about :crazyeye:
anyway, good to know

cabert,

It makes even less sense to complain about something you CAN do something about...because why aren't you out there doing that something about it!?

To be honest, I abandoned this game. I was trudging along and doing quite well, and one night around 1am then the game crashed on me. I figured that was a sign to go to bed, and just oozed my way to bed. The next day I started up a new game to test out something, and I forgot all about my alway war game that had crashed on me....

I lost over 200 turns from my last save in the alway war game and I just decided to give up on it for now. :(

Tokugawa would be pretty good, IMO

Yeah Toku sounds good. Is there a Pro/Ind leader?

Yeah Toku sounds good. Is there a Pro/Ind leader?

Yeah, Qin Shi Huang of China.

Large map, always at war, Genghis is the superior. Keshiks reign for quite awhile, putting preatorians and redcoats to shame in their stumbling one move drudge marches.
Shaka, China, Japan- scrap, in MP i refer to these as "those that die and quit soon".

Duh, I just played him in GMaj 38!

He was good, and it was kind of like that anyway ;)

I haven't played the gametype you're talking about, but I like JC & genghis khan a lot for when I warmonger hard in a regular game. Imperialistic is just great. I attach most of my generals to units to make mega city raiders and a handful of combat X mounted units. I like doing this because by the time you hit riflemen and cav and you're doing mass upgrades, your 7-10 best units upgrade for free.

Aggressive is nice for obvious reasons. Organized is good because you can whip courthouses in the cities you acquire, which helps keep your economy from tanking (as hard). I play prince, so take this with a grain of salt.

I encourage everyone who made a suggestion here to try this gameplay. It's really really rough. You have to keep a strong defense and if you hope to expand you'll need a strong offence as well. A lot of your resources will be tied up in supporting the military you have, as well as time will be taken away from building science and money building to build more military units.

Military based leader traits seem nice, but are virtually worthless. Aggressive seems nice, but who cares about your army when your economy is tanking? Imperialistic seems nice, because you'll be doing a lot of fighting, right? Well if you're doing a lot of fighting you'll be getting a lot of GGs anyways. Sure they come quicker, but you won't find yourself short of GG. About the only good use of Aggressive I observed was the quick build of the Zulu UB for the maintenance help.

I'm thinking Financial and/or Organized would be the most useful traits for this type of game.

Toku of Native Americans on Panagea (which means no Astronomy) :P ... then gunpowder/rifle wars is really stacked in your favor :p

@ Kesshi: Which is why 2 out of the 3 I'd consider are Organised and 1 has a maintenance-reducing UB. FIN requires too much diversion from hammers for me to be comfortable with on these settings.

I'd still go for Charly - he won't die easily in the early game and has both military and economic potential in the late game.

It depends on your game plan. If you want someone strong right out of the gate, hattie can't be beat- awesome UU, creative for land grabs.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Cyrus. Imperialistic and charismatic- great warmonger traits plus a super strong early UU. He's one of my favorites for domination wins.

Hannibal has a very strong (but expensive) UU as well and nice traits for a solid economy plus warfare. Ragnar is pretty good with his blend of traits also.

If you're ok with holing up for a while the Toko is pretty good, strong unit traits, although your economy might suck a bit. But once you get to samurai they are unstoppable until the AI gets gunpowder.

My pick would be Cyrus.

I haven't played as him but Tokugawa seems pretty good for his traits, and the Samurai I heard is great for Medieval warfare.

Other than that I would recommend:
Cyrus- Immortals if used right can set you on easy street for the rest of the game

Qin Shi Huang- Strong traits, and the Cho Ko Nu (did I spell it right?) isn't to shabby either

Genghis Khan- Nice warmonger traits and great pillager unit, destroy their economy, then you strike...

Saladin- Mostly because of the Camel Archers :)

Augustus Caesar- Just because of the Praetorians, you've gotta love 'em

I may be forgetting some, mostly because I play as a peaceful player, and never really go to war, but when I do... :backstab:

There is no such thing as easy street in always war games. I lost at warlord difficulty in a game of the month ;)

There is no such thing as easy street in always war games. I lost at warlord difficulty in a game of the month ;)

Well, I haven't actually played any all war games. I was basically just stating the leaders most helpful to me in wars in my regular games. The easy street was on 34 Civs World Map playing as Persia. Once I conquered the middle east I was on easy street for the rest of the game.

Like I said before I haven't really played any always war games because I always tend to play the "peaceful, wonder-spam, kick your ass only if you delcare war on me type of player. Though, I might give it a try just for fun.

That's what I thought ;) It wasn't fun! It was hell! As soon as you meet an AI scout or warrior, you auto DoW them. That rule doesn't apply to the AI who happily trade tech and resources with each other. You end up fortifying at a hill city at a choke point and eventually the AI wears you down.

madscientist also did an AW game for his first "Alexander, God of War" game. He didn't like it much either :)

madscientist also did an AW game for his first "Alexander, God of War" game. He didn't like it much either :)

Can you find a link to that game, by the way? He has links to his second and third attempts but I can't find the first always war one anywhere, must've been so bad he's repressing the memory. :lol:

Someone put a start in here for an Always War game that looked pretty fun. I can't find the thread right now, but it was along the lines of an OCC wherein the player's city was inside a bowl of mountains that contained access to pretty much every resource and the entrance to this valley of delight was over a forested hill beyond a river. The idea was to fortify on the hill and have the AI just constantly throw stacks at your troops all game and then, if you survived, burst out of your enclave with incredibly promoted Mech Inf and conquer the world. Looked fun, but I never got around to trying it out.

1. brennus;
2. mansa;
3. asoka;
4. monty;

spiritual is just uber on marathon(and I don't see how you could take 30 civs. on normal/huge - I assume huge, if you want people to get more then 1 city).

far 5 gilga(the vulture has under 50% against a same promoted axe - but the ub is excellently placed).

Boudica/Shaka

Or their child.

O_O

Or their child.

O_O

Now THAT'S Funny! :lol:

That's what I thought ;) It wasn't fun! It was hell! As soon as you meet an AI scout or warrior, you auto DoW them. That rule doesn't apply to the AI who happily trade tech and resources with each other. You end up fortifying at a hill city at a choke point and eventually the AI wears you down.

madscientist also did an AW game for his first "Alexander, God of War" game. He didn't like it much either :)

I switched playableciv=1 for super barb in PYL V and played it offline. Super Barb is a minor civ that starts at war with everyone, so it's very much like an AW game and my only experience with AW.

Logic dictates that if you find someone, you wipe them out ASAP. It would be very hard on pangaea past noble or so but should be doable even monarch + in continents or archipelago maps, assuming you jump your neighbors.

I switched playableciv=1 for super barb in PYL V and played it offline. Super Barb is a minor civ that starts at war with everyone, so it's very much like an AW game and my only experience with AW.

Logic dictates that if you find someone, you wipe them out ASAP. It would be very hard on pangaea past noble or so but should be doable even monarch + in continents or archipelago maps, assuming you jump your neighbors.


There was a recent SG using the always war setting, dunno if it's been mentioned already as I skimmed the thread.

IIRC it was played at immortal. I think the variant they used was an inland sea map, and then the SG starter went into WB and moved them from their starting position to an inland he created based on the tiles close to their original start.

It was going well (I think) until one (or both?) of their stacks got double nuked by an AI.

^^That was Fox-40 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=284970) . We had the bad luck of losing 2 stacks to pure numbers in the medieval and in the industrial age and that disallowed us of dealing with the more intratable AI of the game in time. It was a shame though:(

We had done more games in AW, if anyone is interested:

Fox-09 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=251581), Monarch, archipelago

Fox-10 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=256218) Emperor, archipelago

Fox-20 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=270822) Monarch, Boreal

When I play a always war game I usually have OCC on so this may not apply.

I think Charismatic is the best trait for this type of game. Like it or not you will be doing a lot of war so -25% xp is great! You can get some great units quick with the trait. Have you seen a unit will all the possible promotions? ;)

I think industrious is 2nd. If you want wonders you don't want to waste too much time in building them because you want to be building unit instead. I like getting mids early in this type game so I can get into representation to boost the economy.

Believe it or not protective is a great trait in a OCC always war game. Get a few drill IV and anti-mounted units and their stacks of dooms won't stand a chance.

Philosophical is great too because this trait can get your economy booming in no time.

This is just my thoughts, of coarse it all depends upon your play style and strategy.