New Player Wondering About Military Strategy

NZdice said:

I thought I had it down after these comments, but now I'm realizing there's never iron on any of these maps. In civ 4, only like 1/4 starts had no iron nearby, but now it seems like this is 1/2. So, you have to trade, or make nice with an iron city state. So, I did this, built a ton of swordsmen, tried to attack my neighbor, and he had lots of pikemen, which quickly decimated me. I guess I now just have to wait to out-tech him, and then upgrade the swords to guns

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I would not fight an early war with only Swords and no Comp Bowmen. Really, you'll be a lot better off with 4 Comp Bows and 2 Swords than 6 Swords (needs less Iron, too!). The goal of the swords is not to deal damage but to prevent their pikes from attacking your Comp bows (so they should do things like fortify and pillage, not attack). Eventually all their troops are dead.

Melee units are also really terrible for taking cities (except battering rams and siege towers), and IMHO so are Catapults, they just don't do enough damage and die too easily, especially against a Tradition civ. I don't like to war early, but if you must do it, do it with Comp bows.

After reading the OP, I think a more important thing to understand about Civ5 is that it doesn't have the same level of city specialization as Civ4 had. Civ4, especially when considering the specialist economy strategies, had extremely specialized cities, where these three cities were all in hilly terrain and had farms feeding mines which made your military, these two cities had nothing but cottages and supported your economy, and these four cities had high population potential and had farms feeding specialists which was your source of technology.
In Civ5, cities are usually less specialized and more versatile. True, only one city can have HE, Brandenburg, etc. and getting all these in the same cities makes it the most effective source for units (and, when using purchasing strategies, is where you will make all of your unit purchases), but it's more important in civ 5 for cities to get what is needed at the time. So, during peacetime, you may have one city making units at a time, but that will often shift between two or three cities as one city will take a break from unit spamming to build it's infrastructure. Maybe later it's wartime, so 3 or 4 cities will make units, and again they'll shift around so they can still get other necessary things, like walls and castles at border cities, or cities in safer locations rebuilding trade units. If economy is good, while International Games is being contested, while someone declares war on you, you may have all cities building towards IG and let your gold take care of your unit needs... It's more about having cities that are flexible enough to address their individual needs and helping towards your empire goals than it is about this city has this function and that city has that function.

docbud said:

^^I loved your explanation and descriptions!

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thanks! Sometimes I feel foolish after writing large paragraph explanations but I love civ lol. Glad someone enjoyed!