Pre-Artillery domination tips

Hello all, I've been playing this game for well over a year now. It may seem surprising that I only play on Emperor and that I'm god-awful at pretty much any war without Artillery.

I'll typically bump it down to King, open up with Shaka, usually I take out the first AI by the time I get a few Impi's, take his capital, raze second city, it all goes well. Then, the rest of the world hates me, won't trade, my luxuries got banned in WC and I can't do anything to stop it. I keep on running out of happiness, my economy sucks so I can't do things like bribe CS's for more happiness.

Then I try another invasion because I'm stuck in this hole and the only thing I can do is just try to take out the rest of the AI's. I start losing more of my units in one turn with XB + City bombardment and either can't take the city because I lost most of my army, or I take it and have no army left.

I realize that there's a lot of very strong players here that are very good at helping idiots like me out. Can anybody give me some tips on early-mid game war? How many cities? Go Tradition? I usually open Honor-Build SoZ and then fill out Liberty before finishing Honor. Is there a better combination? How many ranged units? Just X-Bows or Comp Bowman? How many Catapults/Trebuchets? Is it worth it to go for Wonders? Is Statue of Zeus worth building?

It took me something like 5 years to switch to Immortal, so 1 year isn't that surprising to me.

Key units pre Artillery are:
UUs like Impis, Keshik etc
Composite Bows
Xbows
Cannons

You don't really other siege units. On a coastal map, you can include Frigates to some extend. What you really need is a good start and that's why you typically do not start with honor. you start with Tradition (easier) or Liberty (if you get tired of easy tradition starts). Instead of building Zeus, it's much better to invest that hammers in units. You need to observe the tiles around your targets. Early range units do not have indirect fire, so you need a clear sight. 4 Comps + 2 Melee Units (even Warriors work) are enough to take a city that is not build on Hills Easily. If he has too many units, try to lure them out before assaulting the city.

The most important thing is to have those techs and units fast. So often it's a good idea to pre-built Archers and save some money to upgrade the and rush immediately. And that's why your economy is more important than the honor bonuses in the beginning.

Have you ever tried England? Their Longbows have 3 range and are prefect to capture the whole map without any casualties. Maybe give them a try to get comfortable with range rushes.

DocRock said:

... you can include Frigates to some extend...

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I find Frigates to be very effective at domination, especially if you give them the Bombardment I(or II) promotion(s).

DocRock said:

...4 Comps + 2 Melee Units (even Warriors work) are enough to take a city that is not build on Hills Easily...

Click to expand...

You can get away with archers if they haven't unlocked Oligarchy and/or picked Goddess of Protection.

DocRock said:

...If he has too many units, try to lure them out before assaulting the city...

Click to expand...

Indeed, this seems to be one of the keys to a successful early rush. Don't underestimate horsemen.

If you want tips watch Acken's Babylon Deity domination LP. In it you'll see he settles 2 cities and starts from there capping Lisbon and(iirc) Persepolis with archers.

Have you tried Attila? He can be devastating on flat land, and if you build barracks your horse archers will be on the way to Accuracy III very quickly.
Although I haven't played Mongolia or Arabia, ranged units that can move after attacking seems very OP.

Zulu are a domination civ but they depend heavily on melee units which aren't the best.

I recommend you try switching to Mongolia - as far as pangaea domination goes they are probably the best. The Keshik comes at the perfect time.
Essentially you can build your early cities, get some infrastructure going & find some horses, build Heroic Epic etc and have enough time to prepare a huge army.
Keshiks move fast and their ranged attacks mean that you should have minimal casualties. One key point is make sure you have about 2-3 horsemen units before you hit chivalry and don't upgrade them to Keshiks - the reason is you need melee units to capture a city and footmen will slow you down too much, Keshiks & horsemen move at 5 tiles a turn - speed is the important part here.

Simply put conquer capitals and only hold or raze cities that get in your way. Normally once you take a capital the beaten AI will surrender and at that point don't try and hold any more cities - just make sure you get open borders if you need.
More cities means more unhappiness so as a rule don't hold any city that doesn't have a unique luxury. Don't try and destroy all of an AIs cities as that will waste turns, essentially you want your Keshiks & horsemen to be able to seize every AI Capital before those units go obsolete.

Few tips from me:

First, make a plan. What cities, to keep, what cities to raze to give your new cities room for growing, and what cities you can leave to AI, and what cities you can leave for your CS allies to burn (this one can be important...a city burned by CS is one less city counting for warmonger penalty), and what cities you can liberate. Your order of actions should be: Lure the enemy units to defeat them outside of cities, capture what you want to keep and burn what you want to burn that's along the way. Then it's time to think a bit. Best thing you can do is to do one turn blitz-basically, you position your troops to capture all remaining cities to burn and cities you want to liberate in one turn, thus minimizing the warmonger penalty. In the same turn, after you do all you wanted to do, negotiate peace.

Learn the AI's attacking logic. It seems quite simple, from what I've gathered so far...although I'm sure that someone more knowledgeable about it can correct me, it seems to go like this:
First, the AI looks for civilians to capture or kill. Second, it looks what units it can mob and defeat within one turn. This part seems a bit flawed. It appears to me that AI checks only for base strengths and perhaps regular terrain bonuses to determine what it can mob, disregarding the promotions. So your unit, if it has some significant promotions, can survive that mobbing for a turn and be a good bait, for example a melee unit with Kilimajaro and Drill III promotion positioned on hill will survive a lot more that AI expected.
Third, if it still can't find target, it checks for injured units within range. And last, it picks target bsed on type. Cities often attack melee units first, that's why they're common meatshields.

My last tip, milk your first enemies for everything you can before moving on. Workers, gold from pillaging and especially XP. I tend ot farm enemy cities for XP a lot. Pick a nearby enemy city, preferably one with few hills in second ring, grab at least two or three melee units and ranged unit or two. Move your first melee unit into covered tile within second ring and remaining melee units into third ring, tiles next to your first melee unit. Your ranged unit should move to third ring next to a nice hill in second. End turn. Next turn, move your ranged unit on top of hill. Third turn, start bombarding. If your ranged unit was at full health, enemy city and troops in there should focus on your meatshield. When it is sufficiently weakened, rotate the meatshields. Keep this up until you had enough. As for promotions...your melee units should go for cover, then medic promotions, ranged units should go straight for range promotion, then logistics.
Best time to farm Xp is right after you capture what you intend to keep, and use cities you intend to burn as XP farms.

Speed is the essence of war(assuming you build enough units).

Get them...fast. You better attack with 6-7 CBs around turn 65 standard speed than 30 turns later.

Primitive artillery, seige units, catapults evolved into trebuchets and then cannons. Units that could help attacking seige units are archery and melee that can help guard your seige weapons against units that want to destroy your seige units.

It might be a bit off topic, bit I have finished a game of Korea Domination / Immortal today and I was so amazed by them. They have two UUs - a ship and a siege unit (replacement for the Trebuchet). This gives Korea a great strategic advantage. Let's see, there are several unit types (in general):

- Melee
- Range
- Siege
- Horse
- Ships
- Flying Stuff

What really annoys me with many Civs everybody loves for domination (like Mongols, england, China) is, that their core units became more or less irrelevant after Artillery. While Range rules the early eras, Gatlings are a bit "meh" because of their 1-2 range and no indirect fire. So all your pretty Longbows and Chokus become a bit useless. As well as the Keshiks, because they lose most of their promotions and end up being a Cavallery. In my oppinion, Horse-base units are next to worthless compared to the other ones. You always need Melee units, but they are never outstanding. Range loses much of their power... That leaves us with: Siege units, Ships and Air-based units.

Well, as far as I know there are no units that upgrade to Bombers. So let's leave them out here. Siege units from Artillery onwards are outright amazing, an army of Mobile Artillery will win everything. This also is true for ships on all maps except Pangea and maybe Large Continents. A few Battleships and Destroyers will easily (!) take over every coastal city.

Now let's take a look at Korea's unit. A ship. And a siege unit. Both pretty good for their era! Especially the Siege thing is a unit killer par excellence. And here comes the important part - both units will stay with you to the end of the game! They never become obsolete. You can them to the best units in the game and keep all their precious promotions. So just start a neat little war as soon as you get them and you can easily upgrade your units to artillery with Logistics instantly! The difference between experienced units and fresh ones is amazing, believe me.

Furthermore, with Koreas UA, you simply out-tech everyone wibtout even focussing on it. You can focus all your energy on military units and still win the tech race at 0 BC. In my game, i rushed the other continent with mobile Artillery and Singhai was throwing Pikemen at me! On Immortal! To be fair, he also had some Cannons and Musketmem, but still... Pikemen. And no, he wasn't small and undeveloped, he was prety much on par with the other AI.

So you might give Korea a chance for Domination. Then you can use their UU before Dynamite. It was such a fun game.

DocRock said:

It might be a bit off topic, bit I have finished a game of Korea Domination / Immortal today and I was so amazed by them. They have two UUs - a ship and a siege unit (replacement for the Trebuchet). This gives Korea a great strategic advantage. Let's see, there are several unit types (in general):

- Melee
- Range
- Siege
- Horse
- Ships
- Flying Stuff

What really annoys me with many Civs everybody loves for domination (like Mongols, england, China) is, that their core units became more or less irrelevant after Artillery. While Range rules the early eras, Gatlings are a bit "meh" because of their 1-2 range and no indirect fire. So all your pretty Longbows and Chokus become a bit useless. As well as the Keshiks, because they lose most of their promotions and end up being a Cavallery. In my oppinion, Horse-base units are next to worthless compared to the other ones. You always need Melee units, but they are never outstanding. Range loses much of their power... That leaves us with: Siege units, Ships and Air-based units.

Well, as far as I know there are no units that upgrade to Bombers. So let's leave them out here. Siege units from Artillery onwards are outright amazing, an army of Mobile Artillery will win everything. This also is true for ships on all maps except Pangea and maybe Large Continents. A few Battleships and Destroyers will easily (!) take over every coastal city.

Now let's take a look at Korea's unit. A ship. And a siege unit. Both pretty good for their era! Especially the Siege thing is a unit killer par excellence. And here comes the important part - both units will stay with you to the end of the game! They never become obsolete. You can them to the best units in the game and keep all their precious promotions. So just start a neat little war as soon as you get them and you can easily upgrade your units to artillery with Logistics instantly! The difference between experienced units and fresh ones is amazing, believe me.

Furthermore, with Koreas UA, you simply out-tech everyone wibtout even focussing on it. You can focus all your energy on military units and still win the tech race at 0 BC. In my game, i rushed the other continent with mobile Artillery and Singhai was throwing Pikemen at me! On Immortal! To be fair, he also had some Cannons and Musketmem, but still... Pikemen. And no, he wasn't small and undeveloped, he was prety much on par with the other AI.

So you might give Korea a chance for Domination. Then you can use their UU before Dynamite. It was such a fun game.

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That's great and congratulations on that. Korea's hwachas are great, I've used them before and have been able to get the domination victory in emperor using honor and then upgrading them with volley, logistics etc. promotions.

A key to pre-World Congress domination is NOT exploring.

Other AIs will only get angry about your warmongering if they know that either you or the other target civ exist. Basically, if you or your target never meets anyone before you pummel them into the ground, you'll never get diplomatic penalties.

Obviously some map types are better than others for this. Continents comes to mind because about half of the other civs are unreachable until caravels. The civs on your continent will probably meet you or your target(s) so they'll hate you all game, but the other civs on the other continent might be salvagable.

Of course, if they (other continent civs) friend one or more of the civs that hate you, and the civs that hate you denounce you, they might jump on the ban-wagon and start hating you as well. A possible way to avoid this is to shower the new, distant civ with gifts ASAP. A free luxury resource is usually enough to keep them from jumping on the ban-wagon. Alternatively, +8 GPT will get the same result if you want or need to trade your extra luxuries. In fact, you can use this to your advantage. By forming friendships with the distant civs, it will be easier for you to get the distant civs to join your upcoming war against the rest of the civs left on your continent when you finally do get artillery. Civs that are fighting the same war as you are not likely to dislike you until your declaration of friendship runs out, and/or they peace-out of the war. So, you can actually delay a civ's hatred for you by (sometimes) 30ish turns. This should be enough time to straighten out your economy and reposition your military to attack your once-friend

diplomacy is an essential part of the Domination VC and also makes it very fun
theres a simple principle - divide and conquer
you can even win a domination victory with nobody considering you a warmonger
use bribery, denounce, liberation:
- bribe some warmonger(s) to attack a peaceful civ so that the capital is taken (must be strong enough for that, you may even gift some hi-tech units)
- once he did the job, make the warmonger to attack you - have a small (but trained) army, denounce, buy land etc - piss him off and he'll attack
- take a capital plus maybe some key cities but ignore/liberate other; take for yourself the capitals of other civs they've taken earlier.
- liberation clears your warmonger score and also creates a loyal ally

effectively, those warmonger civs are instruments of your victory

killmeplease said:

diplomacy is an essential part of the Domination VC and also makes it very fun
theres a simple principle - divide and conquer
you can even win a domination victory with nobody considering you a warmonger
use bribery, denounce, liberation:
- bribe some warmonger(s) to attack a peaceful civ so that the capital is taken (must be strong enough for that, you may even gift some hi-tech units)
- once he did the job, make the warmonger to attack you - have a small (but trained) army, denounce, buy land etc - piss him off and he'll attack
- take a capital plus maybe some key cities but ignore/liberate other; take for yourself the capitals of other civs they've taken earlier.
- liberation clears your warmonger score and also creates a loyal ally

effectively, those warmonger civs are instruments of your victory

Click to expand...

These seem like good tips, thanks for sharing.

Pretty much all ranged units are effective in war. But I'd say Crossbows are the pinnacle of awesomeness pre-Artillery. They are quite effective and come at a time when you don't necessarily have to sacrifice your plans to get them. Do what you do for 100-150 turns then beeline to the Civil Service/Machinery area of the tech tree. If you've started them earlier, they can get the +1 range / +1 shot upgrades around here too. 4-6 XBows (even like 2-3 with upgrades) can easily be the strong part of any offense. Many times I don't even bother with siege weapons until at least artillery.

The earlier range units are effective too, though I find having a really effective horse archer army sacrifices things like getting NC up early enough.

So in summary, XBows are awesome.

CBs and pikemen could be awesome too, especially with commerce. Once you have the early CBs with pikemen, you can also shop for landsneckts by using the social policy in commerce since they're cheap you can buy a couple of them.