Advice for newbies: The strategic resource choke

I know all the experienced players out there know this already, and even the newer players may have thought of it, but I just wanted to bring up a strategy that I have found to be very effective and has helped me out in my games, up to emperor level, and I imagine it is useful at higher levels too.

I'm sure most people when they start playing Civ think
1) wow, swordmen are awesome, they get a city attack bonus and have 6 STR, I'm going to build them

and then

2) crap, axemen counter swordmen and come sooner. Only noobs build swords then. Good players know to just attack with axes. My stack of axes kills your noob stack of swords.

Ah...but not quite. Everyone can build archers quite early (or the AI immediately on monarch and up), but to build a better unit requires a resource, either horses, copper, or iron. The ancient age gives you chariots, spears, axes, archers, and warriors. The early classical age adds to this horse archers and swords. Now you might think these units are worthless, because the ancient era units counter them nicely. Spears beat horse archers and axes beat swords. Well then, if you want to beat up on an enemy in an early war, the key is to choke before you attack.

Now you might ask, why not wait for catapults? Well...sometimes an AI is expanding ridiculously fast (like Cathy, for example), sometimes you get boxed in with crappy land. Sometimes you want to hit the AI hard and fast. You could just attack with axemen, bring enough and you will win the battles, but archers kill a lot of axemen, especially on hills, and especially if they're protective. The swordsman is really much better at killing archers. Also, the horse archer unit is stronger than an axeman, gets another promotion from the stable, and has a withdraw ability. If you can use horse archers or swords against enemy archers you will take their cities with few losses. What's imperative is the choke.

To choke, you essentially invade your enemy's land and pillage their strategic resources. Any copper mines, iron mines, and horse pastures are pillaged, and thus after that point they can only build archers.
Now, to be fair, choking actually describes a strategy that diminishes the enemy's economy over time and I'm only talking about one aspect of choking, but I want to keep this article focused on the strategic aspect.

How can you pull this off effectively and easily? Well, you need to see your enemy's land. Scout, make it a priority to scout. If you can get open borders and take a look - do it. Not only that, you need to see the resources yourself. You need to tech Animal Husbandry, Bronze Working, and Iron Working to see the resources. Once you find where strategic resources are in his/her borders, you must plan to invade.

The key here is to invade right away, and this is why it's part of a strategy called choking. You don't wait until you have a big army. No, you build a small number of choking units, declare war, go into his/her territory, and sit on the resource. Ideally your choking units would be axes and spears, and they would fortify on the resource. That way your enemy will take losses if they try to dislodge your forces. If they have their own axes/spears/chariots they will lose them fighting you, and will only be able to replace them with archers. Once your opponent is down to nothing but archers you don't even need to build axes/spears anymore, and can instead pump out swords/HAs.

You don't need to take his/her cities right away. The whole point is to invade and pillage ASAP. You can sit on the resources and deny your opponent from grabbing them. At that point you can take your sweet time finishing them off. You can opt to build more cities and develop your land before you even try to take any of their cities. You can do this because time is on your side. Until Feudalism they can't build anything but archers.

If worse comes to worst you can even choke with your own archers, or perhaps even warriors. I had a game where I choked out my enemy using cover promoted warriors (I was an aggressive leader) and they were fortified on the resource. My oppononent tried to dislodge them with his archers but failed because he took about a 1 to 1 loss ratio and warriors are cheaper than archers, so I managed to keep the copper away from him while I built up.

So, to summarize.
-you might want to choke if you get boxed in by another Civ and you don't have much land and/or the land is of poor quality. Or maybe it's a civ that you know will be trouble and you'll have to fight them eventually, or perhaps you're stuck on an island with 1 Civ. For whatever reason, you've decided to go to war ASAP. Now you can choke to make the war easier
- tech AH, BW, and IW ASAP and look for the resources. Find the nearest one and settle near it to hook it up. Find out where these resources are in your enemy's territory. Tech writing and get open borders to see their land if need be
- build choking units, these can be anything from warriors...but ideally should be axes and spears combined.
- declare war, invade, go to the resources, pillage them, and fortify your units on top of them (or if there is a hill or forest right beside the resource, you can fortify there)
- keep an eye on the AI and make sure you can deny them the resource. Now you've bought yourself time. You can continue to develop your empire while keeping them small, weak, and resourceless, and take your time buildnig a force of swords or HAs.

- exceptions: this will be more difficult against Civs who have an early resourceless unit. Examples are the Natives, the Mayans, Babylon, and the Mali. This is also more difficult against protective civs as their archers are stronger, and they can build shock archers, for example. The Natives are particularly troublesome for this strat as they are not only protective, but get even better archers from their UB and have a killer UU against melee.

anyone want to add something?

Good tips there. One thing to be careful of is the AI sneaking a settler escorted by archers out and resettling a new city near new strategic resources. Spare a couple units to surround the AI's best city to prevent them from sneaking off a settler. If they only have 2-3 cities it may become possible to (when you have enough units) surround all his cities, thus preventing them from doing anything. Tech to catapults and destroy them.

I think Sitting Bull and maybe Mansa (due to high strength archer) are 2 AI you may NOT want to try this on. [EDIT: NVM, you posted a good list of tougher to choke civs}

You don't have to see the resources to choke.

Try Shaka, and just tech BW, and pillage everything in sight.

Edit: Fortifying your troops ontop of your enemy's resources are actually counter productive (in SP), as then the AI wont send out those juicy workers for you to capture. No, roam the country side, and take what you can.

Shaka is, by far, the best for this, his UU is tailor made for it, though Huayna is also fairly good at it, so are the Persians and the Egyptians, but they are equally good at taking cities.

The point of axes are not that they counter swordsmen, but that they come sooner so that you can actually rush your opponent. Swords are a bit late for a rush.

I agree, Shaka is the top leader to use for a choking strategy and plundering in general. Impis are vulnerable to axemen, but they're fast enough that you'd only lose a few before the target's resources are nerfed (then no more axemen), and settler-sneaks can be beaten down pretty easily with patrolling impis as well.

Then you've got all the time in the world to disassemble the AI, like Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs dancing around with the razor blade. Hmmm, what next, maybe cut off an ear?

The choke is a different strategy than the rush. You said axes are better because they come sooner. Sure...you can focus 100% on an axe rush, whip whip away and kill off an opponent. By that time, however, you have 3 cities, you captured 2, and you're researching mathematics, meanwhile everyone else is past currency and with 8-9 cities.
The choke is different. What the choke allows you to do is build up your empire to keep up with everyone, while at the same time weakening your opponent so that you can defeat them easily in the upcoming war. The other point to this article is I was talking about the use of swords and HAs. They are more efficient at taking down archer defended cities as long as the enemy has no axemen. If you axe rush you will probably lose 40-50% of your units. With swords vs. archers you'll only lose less than 20% usually. It's more efficient.

It's a very powerful strategy.

IMO it's worth trying a couple of times just to see how much higher a difficulty you can win on and have some fun. Then go back to perfecting a wider variety of strategies at appropriate difficulty levels. It's sort of like finding a hammer and realizing that you can do alot with it. Eventually you'll want to learn to use other tools as well, even though you really love that hammer.

Choking is a powerful strategy, but it can backfire. Your victims enemies also benefit from the loss in expansion and can settle into areas your victim would have kept them out of.

You need to turn the choke into expansion before this happens..

Yes, good point, it can slow you down if you're not careful. I wouldn't recomment just choking in any situation. Obviously there are situations when other strategies would be better. Got lots of good land? REX. Spawn near stone and marble? Maybe build some wonders...etc. Choking is something I'll use when I know I'm going to fight the civ anyway, and it's something I'll do more often when I'm playing a militaristic Civ, like the Zulu.

This is a great idea, and I can try it in my current game. Thanks!

[EDIT: Hold on, no I can't... Joao has built one of his cities on an iron mine...]

LOL, wow, that sucks, dude.

I guess the obvious response would be, "well, take that city first."

Which I would do - but it's the one that's furthest away, and I'd have to get past his capital first. Which is surrounded on three sides by a river...

Yeah, it sucks.

Then maybe you shouldn't choke him. Not a good situation for that strategy. Try something else.

The only time I'd choke on moderate to high levels is if you meet these somewhat strict conditions:

- Spawn on a continent with 1 other AI
- This AI declares at pleased/is aggressive/difficult to get to friendly
- Nobody else will take your choke land
- The AI is far away enough that a rush is impractical or you don't have the resources to pull it off

Choke away. Archers on hill forests, woodsmen axes sitting in their way, whatever it takes. Don't make it TOO expensive, and you'll be fine. It will slow you down, but the land you get will be worth it and probably easier than having to fight off a massive AI or trudge through his cities later on.

No one mentioned taking out roads. I'd get pissed if I saw someone destroying roads I built outside my borders, but the AI wasn't programmed for this, as far as I can tell. If a rival city is built on his horses, copper or iron you can still isolate that city.

Rather than having a super long war during which I take forever to mount an invasion force (which is what your technique sounds like) though, I'd prefer to just build a few ax men, spear men and chariots to add to my sword man army. I can still pillage his copper as I make my way to his city gates, and I'll face a smaller stack of archers once I get there if I act decisively.

noto2 said:

Then maybe you shouldn't choke him. Not a good situation for that strategy. Try something else.

Click to expand...

That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to skirt past his resource-free frontline cities and target the inner core of his kingdom. Once I've finished amassing my SoD, of course. [EDIT: Actually, there'll be more than one SoD - experience has taught me to target your enemy in at least two places when invading.]

btgwynn said:

No one mentioned taking out roads.

Click to expand...

This is a fine idea, and in fact it's something I've done in other games in order to cut off a city from its capital (and its resources).

You actually didn't include the biggest benefit of choking--the free workers. If you can steal them early on, it provides a huge, huge boost to your growth. I actually consider stunting the opponent to be a wash or a negative in most cases because another AI is bound to fill the open land. But sometimes geography blesses you and you can choke 1-2 enemy capitals without exposing the land to an enemy AI. The barbs will settle it, of course, but they don't count.

Woodsman2 promotions are essential to a good choke. Your initial warrior (if he gets lucky and makes it to woody2) can seriously cramp somebody. If he can make it long enough to be relieved by (or get promoted to) a woody2 axeman, the choke is absolutely complete.

Not only that, you need to see the resources yourself. You need to tech Animal Husbandry, Bronze Working, and Iron Working to see the resources.

Click to expand...

you don't even need to research those... if you see a pasture and no resource bubble, guess what... Same thing for iron, since many times iw is researched much faster by the ai - if you have tile yields on, just see tiles with dubious yields(including city sites). Mines on plains/grassland are obvious, same mines with 5 hammers output without "tin producer" event.

In Better AI, I would like to see the AIs react more intelligently to the "choke". We all konw the situation - you sit 2 or 3 archers outside their cap on a forest hill or something, and they'll feel the need to build about 8 or so before they feel safe.

What they need to do is first recognise they are being choked, and second to react in a more intelligent way.

The could...
-Settle on top of strategic resources, as someone noted,
-Choke the other player back, using their own archers and picking high defense terrain on the way to the capital,
-expand in the opposite direction to the choking player. They only need a settler protected by 1 or 2 defensive units on good terrain on the way out. I hate seeing a 2archer choke causing the AI to leave its 8 archers and settler and worker in their city.

They also should be more bloody careful with their workers (excuse the French). When you have a 2 move unit they're still not smart enough to keep their workers out of range.

noto2 said:

anyone want to add something?

Click to expand...

You do not have to see the recources to choke, only to pillage. If you see a grassland with no improvements prividing hammers - you will have to turn on yields to see it - and your enemy has IW and you do not, it is safe to say there is iron there. In order to choke the enemy from using iron you can just keep a unit posted on the grassland and choke him like that.

I am unsure as to keeping the enemy from working a certain tile also keeps him from getting access to that recourse but I believe it does.

As an alternative you can also pillage the road in that spot. Even if it does not destroy an improvement you cannot see it does destroy the route and therefore acces to the recourse.