Playing wide warmonger for the first time and need help

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I decided to take a break from playing tall diplo/science victory like usual, and I tried my hand at warmongering wide.


Here's a summarry of the game I played. Booted up on a continents map on king difficulty on a small map, spawned next with morroco and the netherlands. It started off nicely as the shoshone, started with liberty tree, took the capital of the netherlands fast in classical era, I left them alive with their 3 cities, then eventually in the renaissance I went and took all of Morroco's cities, but 1, I raised 2 and resettled them, and took the capital. Leaving morroco on a 1 pop city.

Here's where everything went wrong, I got the diplo hit massively with everyone, including my best ally russia, who was very close to a culture victory. I tried to take out russia, but they out teched and out trooped me. Leaving russia to a culture victory.

I know it wasn't the most descriptive summary, but I just need general tips on how to warmonger and play wide effectively.
 
Continents map: exterminate every major civ on you starting continent before you get in contact with the 'other' one. Others will not know what you did. You get warmonger points only with known civ.

Warmonger harder, faster.
 
Some initial thoughts:

What sort of timings? If you take down your continent before you meet the other one you are pretty much guaranteed a clean slate.

Also sounds like your war machine might have been a little slow if you lost to culture and only took down two AIs in that time?

Did you have any "war buddies"? Getting war against a common for can be helpful.

Any opportunities to liberate city states? (Did you capture any city states? Usually bad form).

If you're "out trooped" you need to whittle them down - let them come to you and stack up promotions.

Did you give open borders to Russia (or anyone else)? Not a good idea if you've got weak CPT (or usually ever I find).

Timing of conflict with tech? If you're out teched, you can't usually go on the offensive. Burning a GG or two to create choke points can help soften them up while you wait to hit your next tech.

I'm still making a similar switch so I'm sure others will have more.


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Some initial thoughts:

What sort of timings? If you take down your continent before you meet the other one you are pretty much guaranteed a clean slate.

Also sounds like your war machine might have been a little slow if you lost to culture and only took down two AIs in that time?

Did you have any "war buddies"? Getting war against a common for can be helpful.

Any opportunities to liberate city states? (Did you capture any city states? Usually bad form).

If you're "out trooped" you need to whittle them down - let them come to you and stack up promotions.

Did you give open borders to Russia (or anyone else)? Not a good idea if you've got weak CPT (or usually ever I find).

Timing of conflict with tech? If you're out teched, you can't usually go on the offensive. Burning a GG or two to create choke points can help soften them up while you wait to hit your next tech.

I'm still making a similar switch so I'm sure others will have more.


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I never did give Russia open borders, except when I got them to war Morocco with me, also Russia found me first as they probably rushed to get astronomy. So they found me pretty early. For a while they were very friendly even after my first war with Morocco (Took their 2 cities.)

I did end up capping a city state as it was directly between me and Morocco, and it was Morocco's ally, so I had no choice to take it or to send all my units to Morocco damaged. Then Russia founded the world congress just before I took Morocco's capital.
 
If you're going to warmonger-to-domination, you have to fight early and often, and not worry about whether anyone likes you. Waiting for the Renaissance to take out a second civ is way too late.

I just played a game as Aztecs at emperor on a pangaea. At the start, I was planning on going tradition and using floating gardens to grow four cities to massive size while heading for a science victory. But things changed quickly. I put my second city on the shore of a lovely lake in the face of China to my west. While I was doing that, I got forward-settled by Sweden to my east, Portugal to my south, and by the Shoshone to my southeast (after they marched their settler across at least a third of the map). So I decided domination was called for.

I took out both of Sweden's cities as soon as I could, using jaguars, archers, and one horseman. I razed their expansion and puppeted their capital. The Chinese were the first to denounce me, so I decided that they were the next target. I moved my forces west, upgraded the archers to composite bows, and captured Beijing (leaving them with two other cities even further to the west).

At that point, pretty much everybody hated me. Over the course of two turns, I was DoWed by the Shoshone, Portugal, Austria, and Mongolia. I lost Stockholm to the Shoshone while hurrying troops back across the continent, but managed to recapture it (permanently). I fought defensively while waiting things out (and upgrading to crossbows, pikes, trebuchets, and longswordsmen). First the Shoshone and then Austria offered peace along with one of their cities, which I declined in favor of taking all their current gold and GPT. I could then concentrate against Portugal. I captured Porto and Lisbon (leaving them with one city for the rest of the game). That left Mongolia in the war. Fortunately, they had already captured two city-states, so I was able to liberate both of them (decreasing a little of the warmonger hate) and take their capital.

People still weren't fond of me, but I controlled five capitals (mine, Sweden's, China's, Portugal's, and Mongolia's) -- which meant that four civs would not be a danger for the rest of the game. The Shoshone and Austria were weakened by the war. But Austria had built the Great Wall, and the Shoshone capital was on the other side of Austrian territory (though reachable on a narrow front). The only potential AI threat was Byzantium, who was also hard to reach but was mostly focusing on religion and culture -- until they decided to wipe out was left of Mongolia and capture two of the three remaining Chinese cities. So I just waited until better troops came along (including artillery to take down the Great Wall) before finishing things off.

In addition to warring early and steadily, I first filled out Tradition completely and then started filling out Honor. (Nobody else was really a science threat, so I could delay Rationalism.) The Aztec UA along with complete Honor yields a lot of culture and (eventually) a fair amount of gold -- which is important since no is ever going to pay full price for your luxuries.
 
Playing wide takes practice and research. Lowering the difficulty level to the required level could make you more cconfortable in your wide research. As you research, an opportunity may arise and most often who knows what the ai may propose. The ai could be foolish into your civilization and then you could take their cities from there for example. As long as youre doing research and are able to quit and restart when things get too difficult, everything could be ok. Just make sure you do your research because thats what counts.
 
I started playing wide on warlord. you get a bit more gold and happiness while you have to balance what you do it helps getting your empire started. In the beginning you want archers and a couple of spear men for when the attacks come. Trebuchets are nice but all you need is archers and upgrade them when you have the gold. Being nice to the other civs is ok as long as it benifits you but don't hurt yourself those slobs are just speed bumps on the road to world domination
 
i think the most important thing to keep an eye when going for domv is diplomacy. who to atack, why and when. i usually play on immortal standard pangea and sometimes i get dynamite before having taken my second capital
usually is ok to get a capital early game with composite bows, but it might not be a good idea if your target is friends with everyone else.
keeping friends is very important in this game the game, and you want to bring them along with you when you go to war, because it will give you a strong positive diplo modifier and maybe some good cities for your expansions (as well as the capitals you want)
if you have another warmongger on the game, its a good idea to let them take 1 or 2 capitals before rushing into them. this will make you friendly with pretty much everyone else and you still get those capitals for yourself
try to stay friendly with your strongest oponent and go first for the weakest targets. sometimes you want to wait for some key ai to pick ideology first, so you can stay friendly with them
when the time comes, you may backstabb your last target. even if they are strong and have more military might than you, using nukes, bombers and paratroopers should be enought to take your enemy's capital city and maybe one or another capital they have taken during the game in no more than a couple of turns

so basically i think mastering warmmonger means mastering diplomacy. not being out teched is pretty important, too, but that's not something to masterize because it's actually pretty simple: build an early nc, use your post renaissence social policies for rationalism and beeline science technologies (or at least dont delay too much, as sometimes its worth going for military techs when a nice window of oportunity for warmoggering appears)
 
It truly does depend on what difficulty you are playing on (wide warmonger is nearly impossible on DEITY) and what map size (smaller the easier)

Im gonna assume that you are playing on the biggest map(if you are not this guide would still help you and it would be EASIER because the map is not as big) I am also going to assume that you are playing Immortal difficulty(Never beat deity with Wide empire :sad:).

1. if you want to go Liberty, As soon as you start off go scout -> then monument. And for the Policy order go Liberty opener->republic->collective rule->citizenship->meritocracy.

2. Make sure in your citizen management ALWAYS set it on production focus for all cities. I know that food is important early game. But the reason why production focus helps is that you should still manually select and lock the growth tiles but still do production focus. WHY? Because if you are 1 turn away from growing, and you end your turn. if your city has 3 pop, and you have food focus therefore next turn your 4th citizen will work growth tile. But the food will not carry over from the 4th citizen. you will still merely have the excess food from the 3 citizens only. But for production it does carry over! if your cities are all working food and you have 2 production, your scout only needs 4 production to finish, you are about to grow next turn and your highest production tile is 2 production, you end your turn, you will get your original 2 production AND the 2 production from your 4th citizen. Therefore you have finished your scout in 1 turn instead of 2! Then you can switch your 4th citizen to a food tile. This strategy is very important to gain an early advantage and is vital for liberty empires.

3. Settle your cities where there is at least 1 unique luxury and if possible, a unique luxury AND near a resource that lets you build circus. Remember that with wide empires you do not grow indefinitely because happiness is an issue. You should not grow pass your local happiness! Your cities should grow to around 8-10 pop(2 happiness from Colosseum, 4 from lux, 2 from zoo, and maybe 2 more if you have pagodas and you will never get stadiums since those are too late on the tech tree). After you reached that growth cap you should go to citizen management and tick "avoid growth" and then you should switch as much of your citizens as you can to production tiles and if possible tiles with production and gold like copper as wide empires have a gold disadvantage as they have more building and unit upkeep. But remember to never work gold only tiles. Also when i mean "as much of your citizens as you can" I mean that you should keep some on food to at least keep you on starving, it doesn't matter if it takes 1000 turns to grow as your cities are now production focused.

4.Wide empires have a gold disadvantage (more buildings means more upkeep) Culture disadvantage(no legalism and the more cities you have the more your policy costs go up) a science disadvantage (again, the more cities the more expensive techs are) and a growth and happiness disadvantage(mentioned above). But they have a production advantage so they can train more units. But tall empires will tech past wide empires if the wide empire does not take cities (this will usually happen during late industrial or early modern era) and therefore will have stronger units and Quality>Quantity in civ 5.

5. If you are not playing random Civilization then I recommend you pick these civs:

Huns- Battering rams can solo cities and city states. Basically free city if you manage to upgrade your warrior with an ancient ruin. And +1 production on pastures and free animal husbandry will help early game rush and snowballing. Horse archers are the strongest unit in the game during ancient and classical era.

Arabia- Camel archers OP and kill everything during Medieval and Renaissance, also the double quantity on Oil will help you mass battleships and Air units during modern and atomic.

China-Paper factory makes libraries give gold relieving you of both science disadvantage and gold upkeep. Chu ko nu's are very powerful during medieval.

Egypt- War Chariots are extremely powerful unit costing no horses. Burial tombs give you happiness and faith and requires no upkeep like the temple, this makes all your cities 2 pops bigger!

Mongolia->Maybe... city states are crap anyways but can prevent diplo victory and khans are very good as you will go to war a lot. Though keshiks are an OK unit. Not as good as the camel archer but since the Ai are stupid and this is turn based then you can deal a lot of damage through focus firing as they can move after attacking.

You also play as shoshone I think? They may be "The Great Expanse" but in reality they are good for tall empires and not wide.

I will write more later. I just have to take a break now.
 
Shoshone are definitely good for wide liberty play. You don't even need to buy tiles like other wide civs because of their UA. Early pathfinder upgraded CB allows a very early start to war even on deity.
 
Yes their free tile maybe good. But compared to civs like egypt and China they are not so good. Also the best outcomes of ruins are free tech and citizen and faith. Which is nice but again egypt and china are still better IMO. And Commanche Riders are only Cavalry with 1 extra movement and is barely cheaper. You get military science way too late in the game for it to be impactful for a wide empire. Usually during industrial era you just spam gatling guns and frigates
 
Yes their free tile maybe good. But compared to civs like egypt and China they are not so good. Also the best outcomes of ruins are free tech and citizen and faith. Which is nice but again egypt and china are still better IMO. And Commanche Riders are only Cavalry with 1 extra movement and is barely cheaper. You get military science way too late in the game for it to be impactful for a wide empire. Usually during industrial era you just spam gatling guns and frigates

The ability to choose ruins rewards with shoshone ,and to immediately have all luxes from founded cities ready for improvement is huge and done well can snowball fast.

Pathfinders upgraded to CB's that ignore terrain costs is also huge.depending on the map having 2-4 CB's before T40 can lead to an early rush taking out an early neighbour.

I agree that commanche riders are lackluster but dont forget the 15% bonus when fighting in friendly lands.

I have always found with the shoshone that the best way to war is to DoW a neighbour and thin out their ranks fighting on home turf.then push to their cap.
 
Comanche riders don'talways get the 15% bonus since cses can gift the unit to a non Shoshone civilization. Not only that but there aren't Comanche riders nor Shoshone in gnk. The mobility promotion also makes comanches move once more so you don't need to be in Shoshone lands for mobility.
 
Just play like normally.
Start tradition 3-4 cities and then go to war in medival with crossbows.
You should attack the AIs with the best wonders.
 
I decided to take a break from playing tall diplo/science victory like usual, and I tried my hand at warmongering wide...I know it wasn't the most descriptive summary, but I just need general tips on how to warmonger and play wide effectively.
It is definitely fun to try different play styles. But the first thing that occurred to me is that you are confounding two different goals: warmongering and playing wide. So I want to suggest experimenting with them one a time. Wide refers to only the number of cities you found, not the total number of cities you end up with. My observation is that the strongest warmongers (whom I can only envy, and cannot emulate) usually start from a small core -- two to four cities -- regardless if opening Tradition, Liberty, or Honor. I think you are trying to learn two very different skills at once. That is much harder, and takes longer, than learning each skill one at a time.

Can you make a wide peaceful game work for SV or Diplo VC? Generally, on the same map, my Liberty 6+ city SV are not as fast as playing 4 city Tradition, but they are more engaging so I enjoy them more.

Can you go to war from your 4-city Tradition start that you are already comfortable with? Tradition is a fine tree for the beginning warmongerer! Like Healthclif wrote, “Just play like normally. Start tradition 3-4 cities and then go to war in medieval with crossbows.”

After doing both of those, then maybe combine the styles to be a truly wide warmonger!

I did end up capping a city state as it was directly between me and Morocco, and it was Morocco's ally, so I had no choice to take it or to send all my units to Morocco damaged.

Taking a CS is making the decision that you are okay with poor diplo with most every AI for the rest of the game. It can be very awkward, and adds several turns, but next time work around the CS. The better choice would have been to kill all the CS units, then go around it.

Then Russia founded the world congress just before I took Morocco's capital.

It would not have mattered, as Russia would have let the world know about the genocide in any case. If you are going to kill an AI civ early, to avoid the harsh diplo hit, it has be before either of you meets anyone else.
 
Agreed. BUT, i am talking about immortal difficutly. if you manage to find a ruin it is better to go for culture, popper or faith rather than an upgrade, and lets just assume that you have a lot of path finders and you manage to find a lot of ruins. The AI can build units twice as fast as you in immortal and also start with more units. Even if you manage to take a city (Which you almost will never as the ai's city combat strength is always absurdly high due to their accelerated growth) then you would still fall behind because lets be realistic. You are not going to capture a captial with just CB's and you are most likely going to capture an expansion, the AI is bad at finding good spots for an expansion so taking a city wont be as beneficial as just settling, furthermore investing in pathfinders early game prevents snowballing. You may take out one opponent but then the other 4(i play on small map) will easily overtake speed ahead of you, with science and infrastructure. The true strength of the shoshone is the pathfinder but not CB's.

Also Cities starting with a luxury ready to be worked is ok for liberty empires I guess but that doesnt really make them a good wide empire civ compared to others like Egypt and China. The reason why Egypt and china are so good is because their UA's and UU's negate Liberty's disadvantages(Science, culture, happiness and gold). Eg Egypt has burial tomb (temple with +2 happiness and no upkeep) and China has Paper maker (library with no upkeep and gives you +2 gold).
 
Let's face it, there's a cooldown of 2 between each upgrade you can take, so realistically you can only get maybe 2 pathfinder upgraded CB, so yes the true power of Shoshone is able to pick the culture/pop and faith for pantheon without even building a single shrine. However, you seriously underestimate the power of 3 city liberty CB domination. You can take 1-2 capitals with CB even on deity, so on immortal it is pretty trivial to do so. The ability to snowball that early in the game makes it faster than waiting for XB or later tech to do domination. You have to remember that if you want to use CB, you have to do so before NC to give you the largest window. Of course you would tech to XB slower but you have advantage of earlier capitals. I don't even see why you put Egypt as a good warmonger civ. The temple comes too late for any real use except for much later game or peaceful, and their UU becomes obsolete too soon for serious use, they aren't Huns level with their free shock promotion. China is good but it's is probably better to concentrate on science a bit more to get their UU quicker and liberty doesn't do any good other than CB rushes. Going honor for China is probably a better choice as you'll get range promotion fast and your units will stay good until turn 200.
 
Hmm Maybe I did underestimate Shoshone. I took a try at them and they were quite good. Though I really liked Egypt to be honest. Theology is not late. You dont really have to rush when going liberty. But 3 city liberty is very interesting to me. doesnt liberty have to have more cities than tradition? Tradition by default should have 4 cities. And i did mention Huns on my first post. And Composite bows are not as good as Chariot archers (at least in multiplayer) since they are more expensive and only have 1 combat strength more. So I found Egypt to be better than shoshone in multiplayer(As simultaneous turns make a huge difference making Chariot Archer>>> CB). Egypt's UU is also not obsolete untill medieval. And shoshone's UU dont even last for 1 era, in multiplayer Egypt's UU lasts quite a long time. it could last up to turn 100 on quick speed because chariot archers only become obsolete when XB's come, but people usually tech for universities before XB in Multiplayer therefore even when they have pikeman by then your war chariots will already be promoted enough to kill them off. And when you meant going for honor for China do you mean opening Honor first? You never open honor first unless you are bored and are so good that you dont need good culture to win games :). The reason why China is good because their libraries provide gold. Though liberty is warmongering(usually) you still need to invest in science to stand a chance late game. And besides it is very rare to take capitals with CB rush, it is too much of a risk on Immortal difficulty. plus it depends on the terrain of the Capital, if its rough terrain then CB rush is useless and if the enemy cap has more than 19 city combat strength then the cb rush is not worth it. Even when they have 16 strength its not worth it (from my experience the ai purchase walls)
 
Perhaps in MP your claims are valid there as my experience is limited, but on SP deity, AI often reach Medieval before you can conquer the first capital. And 3 city honor is also a strategy for XB rush, especially Chinese. You first tech Philosophy for NC, then beeline machinery. You usually will take machinery before Education, unless for some odd reason you want to delay XB.

Moriarte Liberty guide:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=503931

Peddroelm H-C-A guide:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=529482
 
Hmm Intriguing...Our strategies are very different indeed. I will not criticize your way of play(what is there to criticize?). But I will add my 2 cents. I will admit that I am not good at rushing. To me rushing XB is never good because for my Deity games the Ai has too many expands (I play on pangea but maps like archipelago are easy and Ai do not expand as much) up to the point that it does matter to them much if you take 1 or even 2 cities during medieval. By medieval the Ai have knights and pikemen which will always be the majority of their empire, the ai will have very little XB in my experience. But here is the catch. the AI for some reason have A lot of promotions for their units. its almost like they have a bonus to XPas every time i fight ai units they are always like level 5(or level 6 i dont know but the point is they have 5 promotions) so their Knights>>your knights and crossbowmen and their pikemen->>your knights and pikemen. So in my experience going NC and then beelining for machinery is hard. because if the ai 2x your production and will therefore have 2x your units.

Honor in my opinion as I am not experienced with aggressive all in strategies. is very very bad. you do not get culture and therefore you will not have diversity and you may have bonuses to military(very bad bonuses actually discipline only applies to melee units and warrior code also)But not for your actual cities. So why go honor? all the policies are s**t for me.

So am I doing something wrong? Can you give me tips pls? I need this knowledge so I can become better at MP and using honor in itself. Thank you :)
 
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