Your Best Tips for Warfighting on Immortal - I always lose

So I can beat the game at Emperor (level 6), but almost never win at Immortal.

I play conquest games. I turn off culture, science, and diplomatic victories (bc I find them dull).

But I find the AI's quantitative advantages at Immortal to be brutal. And they backstab so much that it's effectively like fighting the whole map.

So please give me any succinct, focused tips for Immortal. I have already done general things, like watch MadDjinn on YouTube. I am looking here specific ideas, specific things I am not doing that will help me up my game, because I am basically stuck now.

Thank you.

At which point do you attack? Composite or crossbows?
How many units and cities do you have when you start warring? What have you built in those cities? Which social policies did you pick? Tech path?

Janskey said:

At which point do you attack? Composite or crossbows?
How many units and cities do you have when you start warring? What have you built in those cities? Which social policies did you pick? Tech path?

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Well usually, I get attacked while I am still trying to get up my first few cities. I can survive, but then the war become a grind I can't win bc the AI can ridiculously outproduce me.

On the other hand, if I attack a lot, I get a reputation as a warmonger. So it's kind of a bind. Fighting was a lot more fun in Civ 4. In this one, it's way harder.

I usually take tradition and then commerce and honor mixed, depending on how much fighting I am doing.

What does your capital look like and when are you hitting certain military techs? One of the hard lessons, especially when moving up difficulty, is that you cannot just brute force it with military unless you close out the entire game quickly. You need to back up your war-mongering with decent infrastructure, which means a strong capital and knowing when you can focus on military techs, and knowing when to put them off.

I know a lot of folk suggest just keeping a small-ish military of ~6 composite bows, which is fine for Emperor and below, especially when staying peaceful. But truth of the matter is sometimes you need quite a bit more firepower to deal with the pure amount of spam an Immortal and Deity AI can throw at you. Last game against a war-crazy America, I had ~16 combat units and it was still a slug-fest to finally break him. Of course after that it was a quick sweep across the map, but the point is some AI's are more stubborn than others.

If your cities, especially capitol, are growing slower than usual, that would hamper production, science and sometimes gold. For early attacks, only rely on raids and not annexing unless you are definitely certain that your opponents are too weak to defend themselves. Aim hopefully for extracting tribute and peace from them. At that point, some of your units would be more experienced and more able to fight later in game.

Although you disabled culture victory, you still need culture for policies and tourism to rebuff ideological pressure. Don't ignore it.

Although you disabled diplo victory, secure as many militaristic CS' as possible. AI's love sending spies to those CS' and they know how to use coups.

On any map, except maybe the flat maps, if you have a coast near you, settle a city or 2 on it. Coast means lots of gold and growth using cargo ships.

robertkelly260 said:

Well usually, I get attacked while I am still trying to get up my first few cities. I can survive, but then the war become a grind I can't win bc the AI can ridiculously outproduce me.

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Usually, getting attacked means you have too few military units and/or expand too close to the attacking neighbor. Try to avoid looking too agressive or weak, because AI actively makes use of that (especially on higher difficulty levels).

A decent army is needed anyway these days, since even barbs are typically quite annoying otherwise.

Hmm.

What about taking investing in Honor?

Curiously, I find that taking Honor at the higher level in a war game is actually a bad idea, bc it depresses your economy compared to your opponents. Increasingly I got to commerce after Tradition.

But do any of you have any very specific tips for things that really change from Emperor to Immortal? The game seems to get much harder.

Are you actually losing cities, or are you just failing to progress like you want? I have yet to win a domination victory at Immortal, but I sometimes grind on after losing a CV/SV/DV to turn 400+ (just to experiment) and except once I was able to own the map in this post-game play. If I had the other victory types turned off, I would not be in position to pursue a domination victory until then anyway. Or does turning off victory types dramatically change AI civ behavior?

Have you pressed on to see if you can win with artillery or bombers or GDR? Or are you frustrated because you cannot start your domination win sooner? Have you tried going tall until closing out Autocracy, and they steam roll while you have that 50 turn bonus?

I think it is mostly about build orders or timings.

But also about the basics, you can't skip growth and tech.

What I mean by timing, is that if you are aiming to attack with CBs, you need to prioritise those techs, make sure you have enough bows to upgrade, and make sure you have enough money to upgrade them. You'll need to attack with those CBs before the IA gets too many units or city strength, or else you'll have to bribe the AI for war as a disraction, but that's not always possible.

That build order will dictate everything, including how many cities you can expand to before the attack or what you spend your money into.

But your problem seems to be even sooner than that if you are getting into wars. For instance, don't settle inside 7 cases from enemy cities, they consider that as agressive and will have a high chance to attack you. (Or at least be prepared to defend, if they DOW you, you won't have diplo penalties.)

If you want better advice i think you should play a game and post all your builds, research, and actions (maybe even sceenshots, growth and where you settle is essential too) so people can point out where you might be making mistakes.

Immortal is difficult but is still manageable even in rare occasions. Emperor also is difficult but in rare occasions sometimes. .

robertkelly260 said:

Hmm.

What about taking investing in Honor?

Curiously, I find that taking Honor at the higher level in a war game is actually a bad idea, bc it depresses your economy compared to your opponents. Increasingly I got to commerce after Tradition.

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Commerce is a trap, IMO. There are easier ways to get happiness than finishing the entire tree, and if you are actually successful in war, gold quickly adds up. In many games I just use internal trade routes (since war has a tendency to get externals killed off anyway), and I still end up with way more gold than I need.

This is a round-about way of saying that if you want to mix in Honor, you generally can make it work.

Commerce isn't needed.

Aesthetics isn't needed (in fact you can practically ignore culture--GW culture boosts along with the 2 per garrison from Honor is enough, along with the great works stolen from sacking cities).

Full Rationalism isn't needed, although you will likely end up picking a few (Secularism certainly, but Free Thought and Sovereignty are lower priority).

TBH, all you really need is the starter tree, a couple into Rat, then Ideology tenets. The rest are optional, so feel free to take whichever you want. If you are struggling with warmongering, chances are it has nothing to do with policies. Probably overall population and tech choice, I'd guess.

Some thoughts about combat management:

If you take too many cities early to mig-game, the AI's will gang up on you because of all those warmonger penalties. In some games, you may not be able to keep a single friend.. If you find yourself in this kind of situation, the best defense is to have initially built all your core cities in easily defendable positions. Without that benefit, just defending from your many enemies will chew up too much of your resources. All care needs to be taken not to anger all civs at one time.
If you manage to keep a good relation with one or two civs, that will greatly help with your trade / RAs and enable you to bribe them to go war with your enemies.

It may be a good idea to have a separate military city/cities and focus your capital on science, gold and culture. Helps in keeping up with the AI in those respects.

Map plays a role in tech development - if the AI has a lot of land around them (for many cities), expect to be left behind in tech. In those cases the better bet is usually to just beeline military techs and play aggressively, as waiting for you to actually catch up in tech will be too late and by the time you have done that and built up your army, the AI will very soon have completed the space ship.

Some people recommend building your infrastructure while teching quickly up to artillery; however the problem with that approach is that one or two of the AIs will usually have Great War Bombers already up and running in the year 1500 (on deity). You'd need to get your artilleries up much earlier to have any real benefit from them.

One way to improve your tech progress would be modest early conquests, and I feel this is the best option. Taking multiple cities with CBs isn't necesserily the best option, because if you delay it to XBs you will be able to build more happiness and gain more from the occupied cities.

You can also war with cannons/musketmen, but then you have to use sacrificial troops - otherwise the cities will absolutely destroy your siege units.

I have played a LOT of deity/domination games, and I'm still not good at it. I have accumultaed a lot of experience though, and I would say the approach that works most of the time is to use mixed unit types (after the initial CB spam). If you have some melee, a couple of mounted units, lots of bow line units and a few siege engines, it will be much easier to take those cities.
Mostly people talk CBs and XBs, but I think Trebs and Cannons are very helpful against cities.
The trick to keep them safe is to make sure you always have at least one (cheap) melee unit within city range on yellow health when you move in your siege engines.
The city will almost always target the weakened melee unit first which will allow your siege engines to live. And once they do, they are much better against cities than the bow line units.
For feeder, you can use even scouts or un-upgraded warriors.
When the citied start to have ~40 defense, your musketmen will actually be able to take a hit from the city and another from an inside XB, and still barely live. Cycling melee units, thus, becomes quite useful.

On a late medieval war, I use melee to take the hits, bows to kill enemy units, horses to pillage and trash their bows, trebs to take down the cities. If you can keep your melee units alive, they will actually become quite useful with Cover II and march... Also, Trebs/Cannons can be surprisingly effective against units as well, when you are slowly moving in on your target city.

My problem is no longer combat skill, but management of money and happiness. But that comes after you get to rule the battle fields, so I feel I can share something on combat alone.

One thing I also have learned, is that you can intimidate your enemy by playing aggressively.
If you don't focus only on keeping all your troops alive (which I did earlier), you can deal more damage, move to the front more boldly, and as a result the AI often feels you've gained the upper hand and will back up a bit (and allow you some free bombarding). I have noticed that in many cases, ultra-careful vs. ultra-aggressive may only account to 10-15% more lost units, but 2x or 3x the number of conquered cities in the same time.

Taking cities in phases can help. Take a city even if it has melee units still left right next to it, let the AI take it back the next turn, and repeat until the city is at a manageable pop level for your happiness (also less time before you can build a court house).

Build roads beforehand, to the directions you want to attack. Roads will even allow your trebs/cannons to move and fire the same turn.

Bring workers with you, to repair the pillaged tiles for another pillage-heal-up for yor troops. And, use workers to lure out city-defening units before moving in to attack.

And, if your border cities can be built on a hill behind a river (looking from the enemy's perspective), do it. That way, you will only need two units and walls to defend that city, so your real military can be elsewhere causing trouble to the enemy.

For the early game the most basic issue is city placement. If you can get a city on a hill you get a big defense bonus, behind a river means you can retreat your ranged units behind the relative safety of the river and need to worry less about melee units to act as meat shields. If you can a city on a hill in a forest/jungle at least in the direction of the enemy then you can pretty much slaughter any attack.

Each city should have at least one ranged unit to defend it. I usually build the ranged unit then the settler and send them out together.
Border cities with potential enemies probably want at least a second unit as well.

If your going to found a city near another civ be prepared for war. If your not confident about being able to defend an attack at least then your asking for trouble by forward settling a civ.
If your happy you can deal with them then settle in their face to annoy them as much as possible in the hope they do DoW you to keep your warmonger score down as much as possible.

Get roads running to danger cities as early as possible even if they aren't self supporting as the strategic advantage of being able to quickly move troops around to reinforce cities under attack is worth a couple of gpt and in reality it probably ends up still being profitable as you can effectively defend larger areas with less troops. Not only does this save you gold but it also means you have to spend less time making units which you can use to build up your cities to catch up with the AI.

Try to catch as many strategic resources as possible when founding cities and sell as many as you can. In the early game you don't really need iron or horses and the flexibility the gold you get from selling them gives you is much more useful.

As gold is in such short supply the easiest way to prevent a DoW is to send a caravan to them. Works best in the early game when even the AI is struggling for gold and will likely go negative if they DoW you and thus lose your caravan which they seem to be programmed not to do. This also gives you science to help catch up in the techs.

If you meet a CS before anyone else then DoW it. It's basically a no consequences DoW because no one else knows about it, CS's aren't very aggressive so you don't really need to defend against them but you can use them to train your troops to get nice promotions like extra range and logistics, both of which act as large force multipliers.

The best way to avoid warmonger penalties is to liberate cities and to warmonger later rather than sooner. The second feeds into the first in that the later you warmonger the more likely that other civs will have had wars and taken cities you can liberate. Also the warmonger calculation means you get a lesser debuff the later you war, the short version being that the more cities their are on the map and the more cities a target has the less your penalty so if you wait until later the other civs will have built more cities and there will be more cities on the map.

When it comes to attacking/counter attacking you should do so only when you are ready.
If the AI attacks you then generally once you deal with their initial wave they will either stop attacking all together or just send piecemeal attacks to harass you (train your troops on) so you can generally pick when you want to attack them.
If you aren't planning to take cities you can still farm them for xp (tempt their units away from their cities so you can attack them) or run around pillaging their lands/stealing their workers and settlers to keep them down.

If you farm them (and/or the CS you DoW'd) for xp you should quickly get your ranged units up to at least 3 range which means you can pretty much do as you please then in most cases.i.e. you can decimate any units or cities without fear unless they are in rough terrain.
You then only have to worry about warmonger penalties (see above) and happiness.
Liberate or burn any cities that aren't great/vital to keep the happiness hit down and initially puppet the rest. Later on i tend to annex as soon as they have finished resistance because you can build a courthouse and then happiness buildings which the puppet city manager rarely seems to do. For an extreme example in a recent game i had 4 founded cities and 10 puppets with 10 happiness. I went through a phase of annexing all the cities and queuing up all the happiness buildings they hadn't built and in a short time i had over 70 happiness.

As for going honour i haven't used honour in BNW especially as it has been nerfed. Well i did actually take the first policy in a Germany game i played but regretted it afterwards as on a standard map there just isn't enough space to make it worth it.
Honour used to be good as it was a double bonus for ICS style play as you got a lot of local happiness from it and because you were ICSing you would annoy a lot of civs and get into a lot of wars so the military bonuses were icing on the cake.
Now most of the happiness has been moved to autocracy ideology and the military bonuses just aren't that great by themselves.

Yeah, I gave up on keeping friendships when I played conquest. If you get lucky enough to find some other warmonger buds you can have some part-game, but peaceful games it seemed impossible the way the whole world turns against you, but once I learned to play isolationist and be self-sufficient it turned out okay. Just expect to be hated and focus on other things to compensate.

You need to rigorously guard your happiness and expand in phases, pausing to assert science and build up infrastructure. Ideally, you should have a hardened army fighting abroad while your infrastructure grows like normal. If you have to keep replacing units too often you fall behind. I also took to striking for the damage factor rather than total defeat. It can get rough attacking those 20+ cities repeatedly especially if they have arsenals or military bases, so I took to devastating the land ahead of me, pillaging with impunity with fast units, capturing and disbanding all the workers I could find, and targeting happiness and critical resources, as long as I also made sure to end CS alliances I could stack up negative modifiers in my favor and sap their gold income. This, even if I didn't win, set them back so much I'd definitely win the next attempt. Also, even if you don't have the military to wipe someone out, if everyone already hates you anyway it is in your favor to do periodic raids to destroy their infrastructure and set them back, if you are leaving their infrastructure intact most of the game then that is why you are losing.

Watch for runaways too, and drag them into war immediately, by either turning other AI against them or making a surprise raid and just pillaging everything with disposable units. Another of my favorite tactics for isolated civs is to set up a blockade and just bombard away, sink every boat and then contain them taking potshots at cities and units, you can do this for years to control someone until you have the invasion force to finish them.

If you find yourself becoming the target and later losing cities you've taken, try selling them upon conquest to another civ. This eliminates the unhappiness from large cities, and often the AI will burn it for you. If they don't, this will probably start a war down the line and distract from you, even generating potential allies.

There's a lot of tips in the strategy forum. But here's some simple ones that I find usual work well:

=> in all cases let the AI come at you, kill as you fall back, once he is suitably weakened you move in. Also, once you start winning if you want a better challenge use the mod SmartAI.
* very early, forget wonders and instead build 3 archers and 1 warrior. Goto the nearest AI civ and kill his units and steal his workers. Don't go for cities or get within city attack range, just harass him. That will keep them weak until you can build enough composite bowman to take all his cities.
* if noone is all that close you just bee-line 3-4 cities and go after the nearest with composite bowman.
* if islands, you just build as fast as you can to frigates, islands are pretty easy to conquest from with all the naval changes

The issue at immortal and diety is keeping up in science. You want the national college up before you start annexing cities. But that is pretty easy to do going trad and just having a 4 city foundation, with puppets for awhile of anything you take.

I really suggest to check the masterpieces Moriarte created last year. There is everything you need to learn about Domination on Deity Immortal domination is no different.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfKwXAFHm6fIR_8H9yJ7D-_A5kZgYKHhf
and check the other playlists.

Build 4 archers, upgrade them to CB later to XB. Then rush artillery after Education before Scientific theory. Then build 4 to 6 artillery and 2 to 3 lancers.
Go to ST, then Flight.
Rule the map.

Look at Moriarte Iroquois LP.

You can also start with Duel map on Immortal, and work your way up to Tiny, then Small. On Civ III, I owned almost half the Hall of Fame scores on here at one time that way (on Deity).

On Duel map, it's really pretty simple: rush him. That'll get your warmongering up to speed. Once you've got the other guy contained, game over. Then on Tiny once you own the first guy, you own half the map. Then on Small, you're up to a regular game. If you still have problems along the way, try some kick-butt civilization like Shoshone on Duel, and work your way on to something more normal.