So umm, how do you exactly ill a base with high combat defense?

Like the bases with 100 defense...

How exactly do you kill them?

They basically one shot my ships, and don't even flinch at most of my damaging units.

I like to play a lot of 10 ai vs me games, so naturally I have to go on the defensive until my bases are pretty much entirely built up, but by that point I cannot destroy these bases.

I'm kind of used the the civ 5 system where, at the very worst, you just entirely surround the base and sacrifice like 5 or 6 guys and still take the base anyways.

Best way to take down a high defence city is to mass your army and overwhelm it with numbers. Use ranged units to safely bomb it down. High tier ships are also excellent for that task.

Keep one fast melee unit in the rear to swoop in once the city HP is at 1 (or two if you can't reach the city within one turn for some reason). If you attack via sea you can use your ships to cover embarked units (since the city has to attack those first before it can target the embarked unit).

At a certain stage of the game defense seems to be king as the units are not that strong. So if I run into a really strong city early (usually elodie) I may choose not to attack it. Later on units get stronger and can take out cities by overwhelming them with forces easier.

Also, making sure your affinity level is equal to or greater than your opponent is a *huge* help. Actually, improving your affinity is probably more important than any other factor.

But yeah... there are certainly situations where you just *can't* take a city. Even if you build tons of units, if the terrain is unfavorable and/or your affinity isn't high enough, you just have to accept that sometimes cities are unconquerable at the moment.

By the way, ships seem to have much better attack strengths than their land counterparts for any given affinity level. The downside is that they're both relatively fragile & expensive.

You can just stay at war and kill units and pillaging tiles until the offer something for peace. Sometimes they offer that city you had no chance of taking.

SIEGE IT! SIEGE IT TO HELL! Especially with those higher affinity units that can shoot from 3 tiles away. And also this:

Minor Annoyance said:

You can just stay at war and kill units and pillaging tiles until the offer something for peace. Sometimes they offer that city you had no chance of taking.

Click to expand...

Seriously, sometimes you kind of forget the value of pillaging due to the excessive focus on attacking units and cities. It's easy to forget that pillaging really puts a dent on the enemy faction, taking away valuable resources that they can use to produce/buy things that will make your job of taking a city even harder.

Cmon! Arty, Arty, and it will be easy target.

I dont have any problems in taking the cities in civ5/BE. Once you have an appropriate amount of arty, the city is not a problem!