Unhappiness and War Mongering

I'm very much of the opinion that the best way to punish civ's that are getting on my nerves is to not capture cities at all. Instead I bait them into declaring war on me, at which point I send plenty of cavalry into their lands and start pillaging everything I don't want. Crush their Army. Steal their workers. Pillage their trade routes.

Once their lands are a burning disaster, they have no military to defend themselves and I'm closing in on their capitol I wait for the peace treaty to come, usually chock full of luxury goods and gold, maybe even a small city (which I'll then promptly sell to the highest bidder). Then after that it doesn't matter how many cities they have still have standing, it takes them forever to get them functional again and they're pretty well out of the game.

If I HAVE to capture a city to force their hand into favorable peace terms then I'll just sell the city anyways, some civ is almost always willing to buy it off your hands, but only after I've razed it down quite a bit so it's little threat of really helping whoever buys it.

You can teach the AI a lesson without killing your happiness, and if you play your cards right you can make out like a bandit.

One strategy that you can use (if you're playing on continents or Islands) is to take out all of the civilizations that you can in full before you meet the civilizations that you need to cross the ocean to meet. Then pick when you want to openly be a bastard and not worry about the warmonger hits. In the game, dead civilizations tell no tales.

"One strategy that you can use (if you're playing on continents or Islands) is to take out all of the civilizations that you can in full before you meet the civilizations that you need to cross the ocean to meet. Then pick when you want to openly be a bastard and not worry about the warmonger hits. In the game, dead civilizations tell no tales."

I like this a lot, and I am usually the Mongols so early war with Keshiks should clear the close civs nicely before I go overseas and meet new civs

maddskillz said:

"One strategy that you can use (if you're playing on continents or Islands) is to take out all of the civilizations that you can in full before you meet the civilizations that you need to cross the ocean to meet. Then pick when you want to openly be a bastard and not worry about the warmonger hits. In the game, dead civilizations tell no tales."

I like this a lot, and I am usually the Mongols so early war with Keshiks should clear the close civs nicely before I go overseas and meet new civs

Click to expand...

One problem with this strategy is on high difficulty, the other continent will out tech you severely especially if they're full of peacemonger science civs. You'll end up with no way to deal with the other continent other than to take the time and tech. If you get unlucky you can lose to SV.