The importance of building units early to keep your army score up

Heathcliff

Tactician
Joined
Nov 19, 2006
Messages
356
Location
Sweden
Hi,

I have been looking through the guides in the war academy and general advices here.
But I would like to make a point. Often the guides writes like:
Build 2 scouts, go tradition, then build shrine, worker. After that build two-three settlers then two caravans and granaries and libraries and national college...

These are fine advices, but they are forgetting the most important:
You need to build units to keep up the army score or the AI will probably declare war on you and screw up your game. You should check the demographics tab often.
After you have built settlers and grabbed the city locations you wanted, then you should build spearmen until you are not last in army score anymore.
That is much more important than granaries, caravans, libraries and national college.

People often think that:
"Because the AI has such a large advantage on immortal and diety, I have to play optimal and very risky (with no units) to keep up with them."
But that is not true. You have to realize that the AI is very weak at warfare and that you can easily beat a much larger army with better micro.
But if the AI attacks you when you don't have any units you are just screwed.
So play safe in the beginning and when you see that an AI is spamming alot of nice wonders in his capital, just march your army there and take that city.
That is how you beat the AI, despite it having large bonuses on immortal and diety.
 
It's possible to win a peaceful game without building a single army unit other than scout, if you manage to bribe or if you're not in the middle of several aggressive AI. Getting infrastructure quick and expanding is the key to fast victory. You should decide if you want to build an army after seeing who's next to you.
 
Well even if you don't play peacefully it's not realistic to think you can match the AI strength at higher levels. Or you'll just cripple yourself.

But no need for a huge army. A timely composite bow tech does the job with a few archers.

The AI really isn't that opportunistic in Civ5BNW that it would always declare war if you're weak. It's mostly given a % boost toward hostile/war/deceptive approach.
 
Hi,
But if the AI attacks you when you don't have any units you are just screwed.

I am currently playing at immortal level. I tend to be a very peaceful player going mostly for cultural/science victories and as such I generally beeline for the top of the science tree first, which means that I am never really ahead of the AI on war techs, sometimes may be even lower.

I rarely have more than 5 units to defend myself (only 2-3 in ancient/classical era), but I've found that if I have placed my border cities in somewhat defensive positions, I can easily defend myself regardless of how many units the AI sends, simply because the AI is stupid at managing his own units. So, usually the AI asks for peace after a few turns of giving XP to my units (which will make them even stronger for the next war) and maybe even a great general at the cost of maybe a trade route or maybe 2 or three if I am unlucky. Sometimes he is so stupid that I will even capture his border city in my defensive war (if he has one really close to me)...

So no... I don't think you are screwed. It can be annoying, but I've never lost a city to the AI. Even when I am trying Deity, the reasons that I will loose would be because I am failing to catch up to the AI tech in time, not because I lost a war.
 
Well even if you don't play peacefully it's not realistic to think you can match the AI strength at higher levels. Or you'll just cripple yourself.

I thought about 'peacefull war' strategy:
-massing units
-declare war
-take gold/city for peace

Tried this with german before last patch (landsnechts cost half hammers less than pikeman then) on Immortal and it seems to work, but after I took several cities I realized that it is impossible to maintain positive happiness when u get ~20 pop city (so u get 10 unhappiness more than if u conquer it).
 
Well even if you don't play peacefully it's not realistic to think you can match the AI strength at higher levels. Or you'll just cripple yourself.

But no need for a huge army. A timely composite bow tech does the job with a few archers.

The AI really isn't that opportunistic in Civ5BNW that it would always declare war if you're weak. It's mostly given a % boost toward hostile/war/deceptive approach.

Is medieval war viable with tradition? I watch LP videos, peddro and acken would only go to war by CB rush or a full honor xbow rush. The only approach is to wait till artillery and then attack. I often fail if i try to go tradition and war at medieval era. The ai will have muskets by the time when i am able to build enough crossbows unless i beeline to it which will make me falll behind in tech even more. I tried warring many times with xbows to musket but i cant break through at times (i think i just suck at domination really) and this is where i fail and fall behind more as i didnt went into education first. I find it that I dont even have time to build armory for the promotion as itll be too late to have x bows to go war by the time.

Its hard to time the tech and build army at the same time as u need to consider to build university and guilds or ull just fall behind even more in tech and culture. And the lack of culture makes it more difficult when getting pressured by ideologies as i build up army instead of tourism. If I do try pump into guilds i will have no army at all. It seemed the only way is to wait till industrial era everytime so u get in par on technology with ai?

I am not a peaceful player. I seemed to get impatient for war especially when an ai starts running away further. Im really a bloodthirsty ruler :mad:

[this is on deity]
 
I would say that you can win 95% of the time without any real army. It isn't as fun and you may have to take advantage of some exploits but once you know how to manipulate the diplo of the game... you really do not need any army.

That being said, I have more fun playing the warmonger with large armies but it can be 5x the amount of time and work. Once you get really good at it you can finish your game in the low 200s and not have to work as much.

IMHO this game is like the memory game. Once you understand that you have to do a, b, c ... you realize that x, y, z is what is needed to win. If you do not understand this analogy, I am basically saying that this game is very linear or straightforward if that word is easier for you to understand.
 
Yeah, peaceful a.k.a. the "next turn" games run much quickly while a total war requires a lot more real time even though the actual turn time is generally smaller
 
Ok I get it now. Ill try dcl russia again. I failed a couple of times so it was frustrating for me.
 
On some of the Diety DCLs I've sortof tried to do this. The Songhai and Aztec maps are favourable for this.
Aztecs because they get a nice early UU and Songhai because they get triple gold from barb camps.
But even say building 4 early Jaguars you're still unlikely to be strong enough to take an AI out early. I've tried doing this to terrorize the nearby AIs but they build archers really quickly so my Jaguars get hit by 2 ranged attacks per turn (1 from their city, 1 from garrisoned archer). Then they have to sit in the jungle for 7 turns to heal and by that time the AI probably has walls in their city so forget it :D

The other problem with building lots of early game units is what to do with them later. You've spent 7-8 turns building each warrior or archer and you have a few of them but now it's the renaissance era but to upgrade them twice is going to cost about 400 gold. Songhai and Aztecs can justify this because your getting tonnes of gold or culture to compensate but other civs really not so much.
Unless they have a stack of really good promotions they decrease in value as the game goes on and are probably just better off donated to CSs. If you've avoided early wars who wants to pay for a 30 exp warrior to upgrade to a musketman. That's what - 600 gold?
 
I thought about 'peacefull war' strategy:
-massing units
-declare war
-take gold/city for peace

Tried this with german before last patch (landsnechts cost half hammers less than pikeman then) on Immortal and it seems to work, but after I took several cities I realized that it is impossible to maintain positive happiness when u get ~20 pop city (so u get 10 unhappiness more than if u conquer it).

What I mean isn't that you cannot conquer the AI.
What I mean is that it is not a very good idea to try to match the strength of the AI just for its war evaluation (lower the chance of war) because it can have a ton of units.
 
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