STACK o' DOOM

I seem to have a problem with massive SoD. I usually play on Noble but every time i think i have enough units ( which usually is 20-25 roughly, i dont count really) i attack and see that the AI always as a LOT more units than i do.

Also, i seem to have trouble raising a SoD in the first place. How long before a war do u start building massive amounts of units? I moved down to warlord so i could try to practice war mongering. Of course i get rammy and i just chariot rush most my close neighbors. But i had aug. next to me and i cant seem to build up a army large enough to take him down!!!

F9

yup, if you have a signifcant higher power rating, go for it! dont be afraid if they have massive stacks, just place ur stack on a hill, or forest, and get the def. bonuses. the AI will attack it.
ur stack should have cats/seige in case they dont attack you. bringing in extra cats never hurts. just make sure you have a good balance. like, 35% siege, 65% units.
mix your unit types as well, a spearman, to counter other units.
maybe some longbowmans to protect city as ur stack moves.
AND DONT FORGET a medic unit!

If you have trouble building up a SoD you are propably in builders mode. Just set all your cities to military production and you will get a SoD quickly.

Important things to have when facing a SoD:
1. Make sure you have enough siege with you. Even if you are just suiciding them on the enemies SoD it means all your other units can mop them up since the colateral damage will take them down a lot.
2. If you can get a defensive position against their SoD use it. A hill of forests are great for that. Make sure you have some unpromoted units that can get the right promotions (woodsmen/guerilla)
3. In BTS make sure you get some horse archers/knights/cuirassiers with flanking. These guys eat the siege of an enemy stack for breakfast.

Gotta have throughput. The size of your stack, and the composition is one thing. That's tactics.

What wins wars is logistics. Kill their men faster than they can replenish, replenish your men faster than they can kill yours.

So the answer is, put all your cities into building troops until you're sure you don't have to anymore.

Killroyan said:

If you have trouble building up a SoD you are propably in builders mode. Just set all your cities to military production and you will get a SoD quickly.

Important things to have when facing a SoD:
1. Make sure you have enough siege with you. Even if you are just suiciding them on the enemies SoD it means all your other units can mop them up since the colateral damage will take them down a lot.
2. If you can get a defensive position against their SoD use it. A hill of forests are great for that. Make sure you have some unpromoted units that can get the right promotions (woodsmen/guerilla)
3. In BTS make sure you get some horse archers/knights/cuirassiers with flanking. These guys eat the siege of an enemy stack for breakfast.

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That's good advice. You need to defeat his SoD or mobile forces before you start taking his cities. Here's a few more points.

4. Try to draw his SoD onto friendly territory, either your own or a vassal's culture. You get great advantages for movement and healing if the battle is on friendly territory and war weariness is much less. Perhaps declare war and wait for him to attack you first if he has a huge SoD he almost always will send some of it your way.
5. Consider building a fort on a wooded hill. That gives defensive units another 25% defence and allows your CG units the city bonus. The downside is his SoD units with CR promotions also work against a fort but that's not usually a problem as you already have 100% defence that can't be bombarded down.
6. Consider fighting him from inside one of your cities. In the early game build walls and a castle there as that will slow down his siege bombardment and give enormous defencive advantage. This is especially useful if he has a lot of mounted troops that will make flanking attacks against your seige units in the open field. Units in cities (and forts) are not vulnerable to flanking. So his stack will be vulnerable to flanking and yours will not. That's the sort of advantage that can swing the battle decisively.
7. Having a good healer is important, especially in enemy territory. Your units only have a base healing rate of 5% in enemy culture so having a Medic 3 GG unit giving +25% makes a big difference to recovery rate.

Good luck. I really enjoy fighting those big battles between my SoD and the enemy one. If you're smart and you have troops that are roughly the same technology as the enemy you can beat a SoD 3 times as big as your own, although you'll take several turns of fight to do so. The amount of GG points you get is astonishing so plan what you intend to use all those generals for.

Stewie0416 said:

I seem to have a problem with massive SoD. I usually play on Noble but every time i think i have enough units ( which usually is 20-25 roughly, i dont count really) i attack and see that the AI always as a LOT more units than i do.

Also, i seem to have trouble raising a SoD in the first place. How long before a war do u start building massive amounts of units? I moved down to warlord so i could try to practice war mongering. Of course i get rammy and i just chariot rush most my close neighbors. But i had aug. next to me and i cant seem to build up a army large enough to take him down!!!

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This is something most of us here have been through.
When I considered CIV4 as a war game with the option of building buildings and optional victory conditions it went a lot better!
Some say alter every building with a unit, I prefer the alternative to have a few unit-dedicated cities that builds almost nothing else.

As mentioned above, have a look at powergraphs.

On a side note, you can learn some about warring and what you need by mixing various units (for example, chariot, archer, axemen, swordsmen) in the same stacks to get a hunch of what is more useful.

You're moving way to slow, on a guess. I also play Noble, and if my SoD is over 15, that's a lot. Early war is good, but not always possible; the bigger window is catching the AI in Rex frenzy. If they're expanding, they usually aren't building offensive units, and if you have enough siege, no amount of Archers or Longbowmen are going to slow you down much. This is just a casual observation, so take it as you will.

My general rule is to be preparing with war for somebody, because even if you never pull the trigger, you at least have enough forces to protect yourself. As far as timing, this means there's never a period where I'm not looking for a weak neighbor to take down.

You should get in the habit, IMO, of trying to keep an eye on what the neighbors are up to. Open Borders = scouting out the neighborhood-- they're going to do it to you! You'll also get early warning if someone further away has evil intentions. In one game last month, a Great Merchant discovered a small attack force (about 8 units) that Ragnar was sending my way (from across the entire frickin' planet, I might add!) Without warning, this might have actually been enough to take a city; with warning, the whip came out, and Ragnar's Elephants met my Pikes (I did mention he was some 40 moves away, right?) I've even taken to sending an early Great Spy around the world as an untouchable scout, because the info gathered is worth a lot more than anything else at that stage of the game. Especially if Toku is in the mix . . .

I target the Military techs like Steel instead of going along the Education->Liberalism path, and this frequently allows me to send stacks of Cannons and Grenadiers at Longbows, Macemen and Knights. With a Medic 3 unit tagging along, my stack moves, on average, just under 1 tile per turn targetting the nearest/best city.

I generally hit a point where a neighbour becomes a menace, and this is when I start building troops to attack. I generally use the power graph as a rough guide, where if I'm equal with my target's power, my offensive force is enough to kill them since I won't have many units sitting back (excluding border cities) unlike the AI which will try and keep 2 Longbows/Archers in all cities all the time.

Play marathon its alot more war friendly.

Slave alot.

One thing I've learned about war, is that it is generally not a good thing to WAIT for a high-tech military advantage to be in before you start building units. It's not like musketeers are totally useless in a war fought primarily by riflemen, so any that you build in the time that you are progressing toward the required tech come in plenty handy. Even if you'll end up only putting them up as city garrisons do they live up to their hammer worth. Every rifleman you don't need to keep garrisoned for happiness protection is another one at the front.

My stacks in the medieval era usually consist of about... 24 - 30 units, whichever fills up about three rows on the smallest screen resolution. Usually 1/3 of it is seige, 1/3 macemen, and 1/3 mounted/crossbows/pikes, and of course one super medic. This can get doubled by the time the industrial era comes along. As other people said, simply choose to prepare for war and devote your entire empire to it. Even if your small, six or seven cities producing a unit every three or four turns can add up quickly, expecially if you have at least one nice military city that can churn out a unit a turn.

And yes, don't wait to start building until you have the tech edge. By the time you create a sizeable army of whatever new unit you got, it might be almost time for the next shiny new unit. At any rate, you don't want to delay it long enough for your opponent to catch up in military techs. Upgrading all your outdated units (or at least your best) right before the battle speeds things up much faster, plus the power spike will get the AI offguard.

It's not too hard to get money for upgrades... the most obvious method is to shut down your science for a few turns. Though personally a prefer to simply move the slider down one slot from where it could be, slowly and steadily trickling in extra finances for the war. Another great tactic is to sell outdated techs to more primitive AIs for some cash, keep your eye out for good deals. And of course, capturing cities will give you lots of extra cash to upgrade your army on the go!


Also if you see an enemy stack approaching your borders or your army, do not just stay put and let them attack you like the AI usually does! Attack the stack, first using seige (preferably not city raider/trebuchet) to weaken them and then kill them with the rest of the units. If you're prepared, they'll lose their entire stack while you suffer minimal losses, expecially if you can quickly heal with a super medic. This can be crushing for your opponent.

Monsterzuma said:

One thing I've learned about war, is that it is generally not a good thing to WAIT for a high-tech military advantage to be in before you start building units. It's not like musketeers are totally useless in a war fought primarily by riflemen, so any that you build in the time that you are progressing toward the required tech come in plenty handy. Even if you'll end up only putting them up as city garrisons do they live up to their hammer worth. Every rifleman you don't need to keep garrisoned for happiness protection is another one at the front.

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I've found axes useful even in the musket time period - there's usually a use for troop bulk.

A favorite is when an annoying unit attacks your stack and kills something, with minimal health left. Axe'd (or better yet, horse archer'd for not-so-easy retaliation). Even better when they kill the axe to leave a slightly damaged GOOD unit, which you can then kill. All of these are consequently units not in their city...

The problem is that once i take a few cities my SoD gets worn down completly and it takes to long to get reinforcements in.

Stewie0416 said:

The problem is that once i take a few cities my SoD gets worn down completly and it takes to long to get reinforcements in.

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Make better use of unit types/promotions. If I attack someone at tech parity, I expect to lose 0-2 trebs and 0-2 regular units/AI city, unless it just has a HUGE stack inside (which there are ways to avoid).

For example: City defended by 3 longbows (1 CG II), 3 maces, and a knight (not too uncommon in middle ages):

1. Bombard it down...or use a spy. Whatever get rid of the city defense bonus.
2. Hit with a BARRAGE treb (A CR treb won't have the odds here, so do as much damage as you can...this is assuming 3.17 where barrage doesn't suck).
3. Look at the AI stack health. If the CG II longbow is damaged enough, consider using a CR II treb to attack which may already have over 50% odds. If not just use barrage and check again.
4. Once you've lost your 1-2 trebs (this is a lot of garrison troops), now use your top-of-the line troops first - a CR III mace or at least a combat II knight (they kind of sneer at sub-5 str longbows and damaged maces). Continue this until the longbows are gone. Once they are, consider promoting a knight or something to shock to take out the maces, or if the knight was badly wounded by collateral use shock xbows.

You'll lose 1-5 (5 would be *very* unlucky, expect 2-3 normally) taking such a city. For cities garrisoned less strongly, you're going to lose less. You should be able to produce more than enough to keep up with this. Promotions (off vassalage or theocracy) help a lot, as does waiting to promote city attackers (promote stack defenders immediately).

If you have a tech lead it gets even better. If you can war and GP farm scientists and bulb/trade Education you can do some really silly stuff and still keep up in tech.

Build the FP wisely (but also fast) or the 15-20 cities you now have might cost a bit much .

TheMeInTeam said:

Build the FP wisely (but also fast) or the 15-20 cities you now have might cost a bit much .

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I dont have BtS so im not sure if itll work as well, but im sure the basics are still the same.

Btw; what is FP??

I dont have BtS so im not sure if itll work as well, but im sure the basics are still the same.

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Substitute "catapult" for "trebuchet" if you're playing vanilla, promote them on the city raider (CR) line (as opposed to barrage), take a few more, and you're golden.

Stewie0416 said:

I dont have BtS so im not sure if itll work as well, but im sure the basics are still the same.

Btw; what is FP??

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Forbidden palace.

It requires 6 courthouses on a standard map and is a national wonder.

It counts as a 2nd palace for distance maintenance purposes, and these are often more than half of your city upkeep expenses. I've saved well over 20 GPT by building it in the late classical/early medieval, but an extreme example is when I pulled an overseas conquest (lonely Mansa Musa way back when), building it saved me over 150 GPT before I got access to state property!

Generally you don't want to hem/haw on it too long - build it as close as you can to optimally but don't delay it too much.

TheMeInTeam said:

Forbidden palace.

It requires 6 courthouses on a standard map and is a national wonder.

It counts as a 2nd palace for distance maintenance purposes, and these are often more than half of your city upkeep expenses. I've saved well over 20 GPT by building it in the late classical/early medieval, but an extreme example is when I pulled an overseas conquest (lonely Mansa Musa way back when), building it saved me over 150 GPT before I got access to state property!

Generally you don't want to hem/haw on it too long - build it as close as you can to optimally but don't delay it too much.

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DOH!

How could i have forgotten FP AHHHHHHHHHHhh

IM CHINESE FOR HEAVENS SAKE!