Momentum

[CivIVMonger]

What are some ways to gain it? It is a powerful force, knowing that you are going forward and the AI is going backwards can sometimes drive you to victory. But how can you gain it? I know expansion is a good way to gain it. (Especially via a REX.) What about when you are preparing for an assault, nothing is happening and your fellow opponents are only growing stronger. By the time you are done doing whatever you were, they are very poweful. I guess all I'm saying is that is there a way to stay ahead at all times once you start to get in the lead and get your momentum flowing? (Relatively speaking of course.) I have never really tried using spies very much though, would they help? You would think that causing the city to revolt of unhappiness for 8 turns would cause that. I know I am not making much sence, but I am asking a valid question about a ground-breaking factor.

The AI, if you leave them alone, will accumulate momentum constantly until they are unstoppable. (This has happend to me many times, I spend more than half the game, up to nukes actually, trying to stifle them, but they always end up winning.) How do you shatter thiers and grow yours?

[DaveMcW]

Decrease the difficulty level.

Or improve your own play.

[Bei1052]

Amass a small invasion force and raze their capital and/or cities producing 200+ BPT.

[CivIVMonger]

@<DaveMcW>
I ment strategically, but thank you.

I like the second Idea.

[the reverend]

Momentum depends upon land. The more land you have, the stronger your economy will become and the more production you will have once fully developed.

Now, say you have an opponent who has a good deal more land than you, but is currently behind in tech. The only way to stop his momentum is to attack him now, while you still have an advantage. The longer you wait, the stronger he will become, and it will be nearly impossible to win.

Generally, the way I deal with a runaway opponent is to give up on the game. I figure if I can't beat him now, and he's only going to get stronger, there's no use in wasting my time. The only viable option is to go after the weaker civs first to increase your power. Whatever you do, though, try to keep a runaway civ out of wars, since he will probably conquer his opponent and become even stronger.

[shyuhe]

Chain capitulation.

[Neal]

This is an interesting question. The key to stopping someone else's momentum is to figure out if they're putting all their eggs in one basket. If they're building one massive stack, grab as many Catapults as you can (or a few Nukes) and crush it. If they've got one massive Super-Specialist Science city, take it. If they're focusing on Culture, end the existence of one of their Legendary cities. Unfortunately, the AI tends to be a generalist, taking the blessings they're given by the map generator and expanding generically from there. So, in that case, yeah, your only hope is really to knock them down a few pegs, either by yourself or with a bribed attack dog. Just be careful that the war doesn't feed into your enemy's momentum as they swallow up your buddy or turn your buddy into a brand new threat.

In terms of establishing your own momentum, it's all about the early game. Everything is cumulative in this game. If you have three cities when your opponents have two, that's a huge advantage, even if it only lasts a couple of turns. More land means more cottages (or specialists), which means more money and research which means bigger and better armies. Once your momentum is rolling, you just have to not stop. Don't take a peace treaty if you're winning, don't stop building units just because the current war is won, et cetera. Just because you have new production centers closer to the front doesn't mean that those older ones should start building Monuments and Libraries. Unless that's your goal.

(My current KotW game deals a lot with this subject, so I'll be interested to see where the discussion goes. I'm basically switching Civs every 40 turns, so it's practically a case study on establishing, slowing down, or stealing momentum, even momentum that I've set up myself in a previous round. )

[CivIVMonger]

Thank you, that was a great in-depth discription.

To further the disscussion, at about what time do you declare and start the fighting. I will guess ASAP, but at about 1AD, you need to start recovering and that might even take 500 or so years after 1AD. After the recovery, you should be plenty strong and at this point, the quality/quantity of land is all that matters in terms of total power. So roughly speaking you will have a tough time fighting someone with more land than you. Should you try to take on the opponent immediatly after your recovery? That will require time to produce the SoD, however. So it might even be 1000AD before you are ready to fight with an archaic stack of swords and cats... I know that I stretched the scenario a bit, but the story unfolds the same way.

Here is my way to prevent this via a quick recovery; As soon as the last good city spot is taken or not available, start to build (or whip if viable.) Courthouses everywhere, along with markets on commerce cities. Then, instanly produce a large queue of workers, in every able city. Meanwhile focus only on growth and B-Line up to Monarchy or build Mids to get HR. After the workers are done or you have enough, start to build units to defend and get +1 happy for each one. Work as much food as possible. Workers should be improving every workable tile in your empire at this point. And you should start building your SoD after all this is done. I know this is a rough discription with no minor details and/or things that might happen in the real game. In a strategic sence, does this sound like something you could do in about 200/300 years on Marathon? (I know that no one plays marathon, but it is the quickest for things like this.) Thoughts?

[Rooftrellen]

Land is the key to everything. I just finished the take 2 João LHC game today, and though I lost, I feel like I learned a lot about momentum.

After the game, I saw how one AI started gaining momentum, and it was caused by another losing momentum.

The best way to gain momentum seems to be to make someone else lose it. It's quite hard to gain nothing and gain momentum, except in the very early game when there is a lot of untapped land and resources.

The exception to this is a UU, UB, or certain key techs. The Mongol UU has momentum written all over it. It goes around without a care in the world about terrain and kills most anything in its path (particularly since it will take out those bronze and iron mines with ease). Quickly grabbing an advantage and then keeping the advantage you gain.

Kublai gains HBR and archery, he has a flash of momentum by allowing him to get a new unit, and his UU at that. He strikes with his advantage, with war on a neighbor, and tears down all the improvements his neighbors have built. This gives him more momentum (giving him extra gold he would not otherwise have and in relation to those he has hurt). He uses this to build more units and, now, take cities. He kills an opponet or two and takes a lot of land, which he redevelops and gets ahead in research and military.

A UB example could be found in Egypt. An early obelisk in a food rich city can lead to an early great prophet or two. With that, we can lightbulb a new tech, say monotheism. Now that founds a religion, which we can use to spread to our friends (or enemies, if we have converted to buddism or hinduism with some friends already). Besides that, out new GP could be used to make a shrine, which only increases our GP production further. A small flash of chance, when we take advantage of it, can lead to a bigger and bigger advantage.

Let's go a bit later with a key tech and say astronomy. We are the first to astronomy. We use this tech to whip out some ship and send our military overseas. We wage a bit of a war and take some land on another island. We can build up this land a bit and send more units over there, and have another war, and this time, with our army already prepared along a boarder, close to a city, without the need of landing, and with friendly culture already established. If we can fight another successful war, it is simple to just keep pushing and pushing our enemies on the other island, with production cities and friendly culture already there, something we owe to getting astronomy first, and being able to get land and cities on another island.

All momentum is about getting one little advantage, and taking that to make a bigger advantage, and taking that to make a bigger advantage still.

If we want to stop someone else's momentum, we can take the same look at it. Someone has gained momentum, say by taking a number of vassels in short wars. We can stop this momentum by fighting our own short war and taking a few cities of the smallest vassel, and at half his original land, he lost ALL of his vassel's power. We capitalize on this and attack the master directly, and besides losing some land, a big vassel gets more than half the master's land and pulls out of the deal.

I may be too new and not good enough to be doing this, but I have to say I disagree with Neal, above when he says it's all about the early game. I do agree with what else he says (a small advantage of a 1 pop city that your enemy does not half for even 1 turn could just become a bigger and bigger advantage!) but momentum could be gained at ANY time in the game. Just think of the momentum you can gain as the Dutch once you research steam power.

Certainly this is not the early game, even if you beeline it, but if you have many costal cities, you can pump up your production one hammer on each of those water tiles. However, using those hammers to get some more military could allow that production advantage to balloon.

[Silu]

Originally Posted by CivIVMonger

Thank you, that was a great in-depth discription.

To further the disscussion, at about what time do you declare and start the fighting. I will guess ASAP, but at about 1AD, you need to start recovering and that might even take 500 or so years after 1AD. After the recovery, you should be plenty strong and at this point, the quality/quantity of land is all that matters in terms of total power. So roughly speaking you will have a tough time fighting someone with more land than you. Should you try to take on the opponent immediatly after your recovery? That will require time to produce the SoD, however. So it might even be 1000AD before you are ready to fight with an archaic stack of swords and cats... I know that I stretched the scenario a bit, but the story unfolds the same way.

Less railroad thinking, more adaptation. There's no single answer to questions such as this. There are games where its optimal to not fight a single battle and games where you spend 90% of the game at war. If you have potential for a lot of vertical growth, forcing a war can cost you all the momentum you had.

Marathon doesn't necessarily factor into this too much. It's easier to capitalize on one's advantage by war on Marathon than other speeds, but it isn't necessarily easier to get said advantage.

[tycoonist]

early conquest (axes/elephants are best) = momentum for the rest of the game

[CivIVMonger]

I agree w/ Silu, there really isn't a single answer, but it's discussions like this that make this site such a goldmine.

To boil it down, utilized land is the key resource to momentum, even if it means taking someone else's.

[Yesod]

I think you're bringing up an important point. Most of the better players in Civ will be cognizant of specific tactics that manipulate flaws within the system to give them an advantage (Just like in any system, whether an arcade game or Wall Street). Obviously it works, but when you ask a question about abstract concepts or the Art of War like this, most people are gonna try and turn it to something concrete and localized.

I think the first and primary concern in any game will be how to generate momentum for yourself; whether you choose a military leader and plan around gambits to keep your war machine rolling, or an economic civilization to gain an edge through technological growth instead of territorial supremacy. For personal momentum you might, for example, choose to play Hannibal and manipulate his financial trait and unique harbor to string a ling of coastal cities that rake in enormous amounts of commerce early on. As you add TGL and The Colossus, you'll perceive the growth of your own momentum. It's not the type of plan that matters, but that you have one that can guarantee momentum given the game's settings you're in.

As far as decreasing you opponent's momentum, I think that's something that is programmed poorly into the AI, but rarely thought about by humans. Usually we wait until we're ready and take all the opponents cities at once. I think it's feasible to muffle an opponent, however.

Take the early choke for example. It's pretty cheap, but it effectively kills all of your opponents momentum early on, when it should be building the fastest. Guaranteed loss. I've tried choking at later points in the game (on Aggressive AIs) and found it can work if you have tech parity. In on case, it turned out that even with 60% of the AI's power, after killing the SOD that came to that one city the AI fixates on I was able to use pairs of Numidian Cavalry and axemen to pillage the AI's capital and biggest cities for an extended period of time. In this case, the AI was Willem and I probably could have taken the cities if I had spammed catapults, but my thinking was that I wanted to try a strategy that didn't detract from my momentum while killing the AI's.

I don't know that spies are really worth it, I haven't found any way to cause long term damage, except maybe by destroying an entire town with one mission in the end game. Another strategy I use a lot is spreading contrasting religions to the AI's to get them to the point where I can bribe them to attack each other. It slows down the tech trading a lot. I think almost everyone does that one, though.

Maybe someone else has some ideas on how to hamper the AIs.

[bestsss]

research computers, turn off research, build internet and meanwhile rush buy units. that's the best momentum once can get. having strong research and building like crazy.

seriously: learn how to exploit the retarded diplomacy.

[ppciv4]

maybe you cannot get a 100% victory
but you can try out all the possible way to lose.

[darreljnz]

I often find the game naturally moves from phase to phase and knowing when one phase is coming to a close and another is starting allows you to keep momentum. The reality is the knowledge only comes with experience and good attention to the game.

The phases I look out for:

• War - Pillaging
• War - Conquest/Capitulation
• World war (last phase)
• Liberalism beeline
• Great person beeline
• Infrastructure - University->Oxford / Bank->Wall St
• REX
• Rapid growth after HR or Calendar
• Circumnavigation after Optics
• Spaceship race

[Ian Kognitow]

Not a comprehensive answer, but: Strategically time and, if possible, chain together golden ages.
--Timing can be used, for instance, in building/finishing multiple wonders in separate cities (like all those opened up by Aesthetics). Also, I've frequently timed golden ages in order to more quickly bang out (still with some whipping) all the universities for Oxford or banks for Wall St.
--The University timing is also a good one since one of my favourite strategies (it veers more towards philosophical or industrious leaders) is to hold a Great Engineer in reserve, commence a golden age after Education, then (in addition to building the universities) speed to Liberalism in order to take Nationalism; and immediately build the Taj Mahal with the G. Engineer to renew the Golden Age. One should remember that GPP are doubled during golden ages, so it can be very possible to spawn further great people (or be well on the way to getting the ones for Physics or Economics) and end up being able to chain on yet a third golden age in short order.
--That triple golden age is something I've regularly been able to accomplish with Philosophical or Industrious leaders up to Monarch level. And those games were effectively won by the end of them.

[azzaman333]

Focus on your weakest neighbours before the stronger ones unless the stronger ones are dangerously close to winning. Once you eat a couple of smaller nations, you'll be bigger than the larger ones and you can eat them too.

[Grashopa]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...=334559&page=2

Take a look at TMITs game in this thread. I think it demonstrates some things mentioned.