Essay & Discussion: Expantion and Future War plans

I have looked through the save and maps and it has come to my attention that we have the Dutch to the north of us and the Indians to the west. By the look of things, we would not be able to fully create a strong core for our civilization and we would be making a build formation that looks simmilar to a squished play-do. By the looks of the map, we are lagging in terms of settler production since by the looks in the map, the Dutch and the Indians have already established aprox 3 cities (By examining the borders of the civilizations)

The Dutch city of The Hague has already been desginated as the front of the culture war in the attempts to flip it so I forsee no total war on the Dutch in the near future. The city there would have high priorities building culture producing buildings to push back the Dutch city of Hague's borders and eventualy flip it to us. We have to do this quickly befire Hague's borders expand to level 2.

I have sent Clubbings to the northeasternly direction to find any free land to settle before the Dutch gets their hands on them. I do hope that we do aquire lands there before any other civilizations have set foot there. With the upcomming granary to be build in Camelot and cattle within proximity of the city. Camelot would be esential for the expantion of the east. There is still time for exploration since by the time the first settler is built, the lands east of the Dutch would be unvaled.

Future wars, I predict would happen after we have established a strong core or cities and that the battle fields would be in eather the Dutch or the Indians (if we unvail both civilization's unexplored borders). Right now I am not advocating for war at the moment for we have week military, both offense and defense. Before any wars happen that we should work on our defense first. As of now there are no defenders defending our cities, I have sent a request to the governor to build barracks and spearmen in the cities that are not settler/worker factories and distribute the vet spears to the cities in our empire. For our army, our offense is very weak consisting of only 2(1 in production at the time of this post) warriors that are on exploration duties. As of now we dont have any techs to produce units that are stronger than the warrior. Swordsmen dont come untill the Iron Working Tech and the iron resource. Before we head to war, we need to aquire a resource of iron in our exploration stage and produce up to a minumum of 10 vet swordsmen (The city with iron connections should host a barrack to produce vet swords).

The Indians would be cake walk but the Dutch would be a challenge since they apperently there are rumors of horses that the Dutch has aquired "so THAT'S where that horsie came from. [The] Dutch are gonna give us a run for our money" (Chieftess, 4/19/05). If we should go to war when the conditions I have stated (Strong cores, sword army) the civ that we should focus most of our energies on, are the Indians since they apperently do not have any access to the horse resource. Once the Indians are conqured (or at least have their growth stunted) and the cities of the Indians are fully annexed into our empire, then we can focus on attacking the Dutch by conducting the "Pac Man" attack (This attack is named after the way Pac Man eat's the orbs). But if we do plan to attack the Dutch, we would need countermeasures against any horse units the Dutch has to throw at us.

I would say take out the Dutch first, since they may threaten our strength in seafaring and they grow fast. If we can isolate India in the corner, that would be perfect.

As stated in the essay I wrote here, If we take out the Dutch first, we would need to aquire countermeasures against their horse units.

I think I saw a horse near India, too, so even if we attack India, we'll have that problem. Maybe we should pull a DG2 and do an iron working warrior-gambit.

Chieftess said:

I think I saw a horse near India, too, so even if we attack India, we'll have that problem. Maybe we should pull a DG2 and do an iron working warrior-gambit.

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Hmm, the key there is to get a hold of a iron resource (Just one will do). Now comes the great discussion if we dont have access to iron. Then we will be forced to eather fight in a culture war untill we get a source of iron or fight a poor man's war with archers untill we get iron but this is a very risky operation. I perfer obtaining an unclamed iron than fighting a poor man's war with archers to aquire iron.

I love a good old fashioned "Poor Man's War" with 20 archers waltzing up to the AI's capital, which typically has 3 spearmen, and then some. We need that trade discussion to go up now, though.

BTW, it does look as if the Dutch may take all of the south if they could, possibly creating a run-away civ.

I think we should take out India first, though, to get some core cities. It seems everyone has atleast 1 cattle in this map! :s (or some other +1 food source)

First, we DO NOT want to get pinned in. We need to go to war soon to expand. I say we take out the civ nearest to us with the least cities. The bad part is that we don't know how many cities they have. So let's travel deep into their land i suggest with another warrior close to home.

- TP

truckingpete said:

The bad part is that we don't know how many cities they have. So let's travel deep into their land i suggest with another warrior close to home.

- TP

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Correction - we do. Press shift-D, and go to "cities" under the AI you want to look at. It'll tell you all of their cities, minus their capital.

CivGeneral, very nice job of taking all the bits and pieces of discussion on this topic that are spread among several threads and consolidating them in one place. I agree with your point on the barracks. I disagree about producing spearmen. I prefer to wage offensive to defensive wars, and wouldn’t expect our enemies to get close enough to our cities that spearmen would see any action at all. (It’s different if you want to include a spearman in a troop stack of combined forces, though I still wouldn’t follow that strategy.) A spearman can do only one thing – defend – whereas an offensive unit can both defend (not as well as a spearman, of course) as well as attack. Because offensive units have more uses, IMO they give a general a bigger bag of tricks.

I also disagree that we should be stationing a sizable percentage of our army in our cities (which I believe you are suggesting). I prefer to send our troops to our borders to project power; marking our territory, if you will. If our troops spot an overwhelming force headed our way and prudence dictates a switch to defensive tactics, it’s easy enough to retreat back into the cities before the enemy gets there.

BTW, I support going to war with the Netherlands first; although this isn’t a strong preference, so if the majority prefers to eliminate India first I would happily agree.

Chieftess said:

Correction - we do. Press shift-D, and go to "cities" under the AI you want to look at. It'll tell you all of their cities, minus their capital.

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Duh!! I forgot about that....

I support going to war to get the resources we need, but to gain land or anything, no. Too early in the game for that. It could be a longterm goal, however. Let them expand and colonize for us then we conquer their territory.

blackheart said:

I support going to war to get the resources we need, but to gain land or anything, no. Too early in the game for that. It could be a longterm goal, however. Let them expand and colonize for us then we conquer their territory.

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So you'd rather be stuck with about 3 cities?

I'm in favore of attacking the Dutch. The Indians we can just box into a corner of the continent, but the Dutch could block us off from the rest of the world, forcing us to have to expand through the sea only. For the war, archers should do fine if we don't have the resources to beat them in quality. We should try to stay on the mountains or hills though, so we can try to stay safe from any counter attacks.

Chieftess said:

So you'd rather be stuck with about 3 cities?

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For now. It's like when you're behind on techs, why bother to research when you can buy? So why bother to waste our energy trying to compete with 3 different AI to colonize (who can do it much better than us) fringe territories? I'm not saying don't expand our territory, just don't go insane and try to compete with the AI. We can conquer them whilst they are tired from the expansion.

blackheart said:

For now. It's like when you're behind on techs, why bother to research when you can buy? So why bother to waste our energy trying to compete with 3 different AI to colonize (who can do it much better than us) fringe territories? I'm not saying don't expand our territory, just don't go insane and try to compete with the AI. We can conquer them whilst they are tired from the expansion.

Click to expand...

But we can generate so much funds to purchase techs. Sooner or later the inflation rate to purchase techs would be highway robery to the point where it will break our account or they refuse to give it to us, no matter what we have on the table.

We want to trim our nearest neighbors back quite a bit so they're not huge at the time their GA comes along. If we don't do this, we may have a chance at demogame history, as the first DG loss.

Agree with Chieftess here. India first, and then the dutch. Up the West coast to take out India, then East to take out the Dutch Capital with a simultaneous push from the south at this point. Start around 700BC, second phase 400BC and complete operation by 200BC. Follow this with a short building phase.

There is no choice but to go to war. I would target the Dutch.

India certainly should be easier to conquer than the Dutch. The advantages of attacking India first are it has fewer cities, we may develop elite units which will be useful in a war with the Dutch, and the flow of war will naturally draw our troops northward, where we'll want them anyway in our Dutch war. Also, it will take fewer troops initially; important in that our production capability is quite limited at the moment.

I think I've talked myself into supporting the early Indian war over attacking the Dutch first.

If we wait to attack the Dutch, they'll get their unique unit, the Swiss mercenary. These 1/4/1 replacements of the pikeman will greatly halt our process. They will get their golden age if we attack them then. They essentially have 30 shield musket men.