Modern Warfare Without Oil: Or, How I Learned to Love the Artillery

axident

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Modern Warfare Without Oil: Or, How I Learned Not to Worry and to Love the Artillery



Although I'm a longtime CIV I and CIV II vet, I only recently started playing CIV IV (with Warlords). Now, I like the idea of strategic resources, but the standard resources distribution can be a real bear... this is the first game that I had to play where a) the game lasted into the modern age and b) I wasn't anywhere close to oil.

Anyway, so I'm on Monarch, Standard everything (sea level, map size, fractal, temperate, etc.) as the Incans (industrious/financial, culture-producing granaries, buff Warrior as a UU). I start off in the Southeastern portion of a continent with stone nearby (cool!) and the Arabians (led by Saladin) to the west.

I don't go for religion, but I go for an early Stonehenge/Great Wall/Pyramids triad and would have pressed on for more had someone not beaten me to Hanging Gardens, after which I focused on Great Library.

So I start expanding westward to try to block off expansion, about 1 city farther than normal, as I intended to backfill later. Unfortunately that bastard Saladin sneaks in a settler to settle my to-be-backfilled area, and not even in a good tile!

He has to build a road through some neutral ground just to link up Squatterville, though, so I take my UU/warrior-equivalent on a pillaging spree throughout that neutral zone so that he has to keep rebuilding that road.

That doesn't seem to have stalled our pal Sal much, as he keeps expanding so that I'm shut out of the west and northwest; remember that I started in the southeastern corner of my continent. Thankfully nobody is north of me, or I'd be really stuck in a corner. I expand one additional city northwest to try to stem any more Arabian settlement my direction, but what we're just doing is pushing north our settlement wars as his next city is just as far east, but this time even farther north, brushing up against the tundra/ocean. That kid Sal loves to build cities, that's for sure.

War is inevitable once I see that Saladin has yet to hook up to his copper city, which is directly northwest of me. Since I only see archers, I gamble that he doesn't have copper anywhere else, so I go hard Swords instead of hard Axes. I build some barracks, switch to Police State, and churn and/or whip out about 8 swordsmen. 4 are my death squad that will kill Squatterville, which is getting squeezed by the culture coming off of my capital city and my initial blocking city--Incan granaries produce +2 culture. So after declaring war, it takes just 1 move to get to his Squatterville, and the next turn my 4 swords massacre his 2 archers. Its location isn't optimal, so I raze it. The other 4 were supposed to take down his entire copper city and not just the resource, but he hastily reinforces it, so I let it go and let my original swordsmen reform to take his next city. I'm stilly cranking out swords, but not whipping them. Repeat city after city until I get Construction, at which point I make some cats that are useful for continuing my westward march all the way to his capital, which has a ton of +cultural defense by then. I capture it and lose a lot of cats in the process, and then I leave him with one crappy city in the west, as I am already buckling under the maintenance penalty, and I also need him alive to extort some tech and money. (Later on he would actually declare war on Mansa Musa and take Mansa's squatter city that is on the far northwest corner of my part of the continent. I dogpile on and raze/replace the Arabian city while Mansa razes what USED to be his OWN CITY haha.) I could not go farther west of the old Arabian capital, because that was flooded with Mansa Musa's longbowmen, and beyond them lay some Koreans and Zulus. Mali and Korea were nearly tied for first place, with me trailing badly and Zululand not far behind me, and I didn't have more than swords/cats vs longbows, so it was time to try to tech up.

To make a long story short, I never did quite catch up on tech. I was abysmally slow getting to Liberalism, as I limped to CoL and had to pause to courthouse everything, plus I had no religion or shrine or any other wonder after my initial stone-based triad, other than Great Library. (Eventually I'd build Statue of Liberty and Pentagon, but everything else got gobbled up, including Korea's Taj Mahal and Mali's Spiral, as if Mali needed the Spiral given that it had the holy city/shrine to the entire continent's religion!) My cities bordering Mali took forever to wrest back even a little bit of their fat crosses, so they were kind of half-cities for most of the game, not to mention that one of them was built 1 tile away from the ocean.

Eventually Korea and Zululand go to war, which is bad because they weaken each other enough that Mali starts dominating. Mali also has the Spiral and extremely powerful holy city/shrine, as mentioned before.

Then things get interesting. Spain and Japan are on the other side of the world, and though I do some trading with them to try to keep the peace, Izzy suddenly goes crazy and tries to take my capital, landing a big stack of conquistadors and trebuchets in my back yard. All I have are some cats and swordsmen nearby, but luckily I had industrialized by then and had some railroads to ship some reinforcements to wear down her conquistadors with cannons long enough for some other, brand-new cannons to mop up.

In the meantime, Zululand makes vassals out of Arabia (come on Saladin, surely you could have picked a stronger master), Mali declares war on Zululand, and Zululand's vassal Arabia is forced to declare war on Mali. Arabia manages to actually capture Mali's city in the northwest corner of my part of the continent. :lol: I raze/replace the Arabian capital with the remainder of my original army and a musketman, Mali razes its own former city, and then... Mali busts 2 big Zulu cities and makes vassals of Zululand. As if Mali weren't strong enough before. :(

Okay, this is getting interesting. Spain bogged me down a bit, but just as I sign a peace treaty with Spain for some much-needed gold and some crappy tech, Japan declares war on me. I was going to go all-cannon and run over Mali as fast as I could, but I decide instead to hold off Japan as long as I can, develop artillery and tanks, and go from there.

And to make matters worse, I delayed Sci Method to take advantage of my civic/wonder/monastery combinations, so it wasn't until fairly late that I realized something: I had a monopoly on the world's coal :rolleyes:, but everybody else had at least one oil well, where I had zero. :(

Okay, so I need to divert Mali from increasing its tech lead, so I bribe Korea to war with Japan and Mali to war with Korea--on the same turn, with the same tech: medicine, the only tech I have on Mali and Korea other than assembly line. :lol:

I probably should not have asked Korea to war with Japan, because apparently that did just enough to weaken Korea that Mali--which already had the Zulus as vassals--eventually thumped 2 Korean cities and shortly after got the Koreans as vassals. So Mali dominates the rest of my big continent, Spain is useless, and Japan is pretty useless too, though they did give me some gold as part of our peace treaty after I kept whacking their knights and samurai with my cannons, and especially after I got uranium/fission to FINALLY make ships better than crappy ironclads.

I don't go for non-military victories, as I find them to be too easy, sort of like Master of Orion's non-military victory conditions were too easy. So it's a battle to the death with Mali-Korea-Zululand. Without oil.

I knew this day would come ever since not seeing any oil anywhere near me, so while all of the above was going on, I was researching my way to mech inf as fast as I can, and while I'm waiting I amass the biggest artillery army I've ever built. Not long after I make my first mech inf, Mali vassalizes Korea (as discussed above), which forces my hand: now or never.

Despite Mali's gunships, tanks, marines, artillery, fighters, and bombers offering stiff resistance, I have two stacks each containing 35 artillery, 2 mech inf, and some obsolete crap thrown in, so I have little trouble knocking out the 2 closest Mali cities--one of which is the holy city/shrine to my entire continent's religion (Confucianism). There I park myself to heal and defend against a continual aerial bombardment and artillery/tank/gunship/marine stacks. After surviving the first wave of counter-attackers, my reinforcement artillery and mech inf start arriving at the newly-captured cities, and I combine the remnants of my first 2 megastacks into an even bigger megastack, which you can see in the screenshot. Yes, 82 units. Wounded units and a few fresh mech inf were left to defend my newly-acquired cities. I wasn't worried about losing them, since I had artillery and mech inf still pouring into the front lines (after diverting a little bit to guard my core cities in case of naval invasion), and I was cranking out destroyers and battleships with 2 of my 3 Military Academy cities (one of which had Red Cross), to defend even more against naval invasion back home. So that one mega-megastack was intended to knock out the three big Mali cities in northwestern Mali while the new troops would gather and eventually form a new megastack to knock out the rest of Mali. The game was a foregone conclusion by then, so I stopped to take a screenshot. :)

The culture slider is set so high because of war weariness + we won't fight with our brothers and sisters of the faith + I simply didn't have many religions and thus didn't have many temples in my cities. I stopped by to pick up computers on my way to mech inf, for the laboratories, which is why I was already researching satellites despite not having some of the more basic techs. ;)

Moral of the story: if you are going up against superior tech, including bombers that will decimate a normal-sized stack, and even if you have no oil, mass artillery will still win the day for you. I had so many units packed together than even Mansa's entire air force and artillery/tank/gunship/etc. brigade mostly killed mech inf and wounded several artillery, leaving the rest to hammer a city when it got close enough. Obsolete units en masse are also good; with any luck, collateral damage hits your obsolete swordsman or something instead of a more useful unit. I probably could have started my victory march before mech inf, but I did not want to have to spam lots of marines that wouldn't have fared as well vs Mali's armed forces. Also, I don't use generals for anything but military academies anymore; I don't bother with West Point if I can get the Pentagon, as it's pretty hard to get all the way up to a level-3 military factory without Theocracy/Vassalage/some great generals/Pentagon, and level-2 units are good enough. I did have a game once where I had a tank that I strapped a GG to that ended the game as Modern Armor with almost all upgrades. That thing was basically invincible after it got its combat VI + maximum drill combo, and I used to to kill stacks in the fields while my bombers and regular units took cities. Too late did the AI finish researching Flight. :)
 
82 units in one stack. Nice, rofl. I never had a stack that big. 40 tops but I would be scared if I saw this coming. Very scared!!!
 
82 units in one stack. Nice, rofl. I never had a stack that big. 40 tops but I would be scared if I saw this coming. Very scared!!!

The thing was, I knew I'd be facing some serious artillery and bomber collateral damage in response to my first 2 turns of lighting warfare, so I wanted a combined stack so big that collateral damage was rendered meaningless. That's why I have even my obsolete swordsmen in the mix, hoping that they'll eat some collateral damage in lieu of my good stuff. :) ~80 units was the combination of the healthy parts of my initial 2 stacks.
 
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