How to win Conquest/Domination on Monarch+?

[douglas_21]

How can this be done? (warlords EP) The AI's power rating is so high, and so are matinence costs and unit support costs. The AI can out-tech you in peace time, how can you be competitive whilst keeping up in tech? I'm a monarch player and can only win by space/diplo, and I'd like to do a domination or conquest. I've looked through SG's and such, but the decisions highlighted there are very dependent on the specific situation. What to do? What civ should I play as? I do fractal maps to give myself a challenge.

 

[Mr. Civtastic]

Two things I did for my Churchill Domination win on Monarch...

1:Beelined for Trebs. They dominate their era. They simply destroy cities and are solid through riflemen. With a charismatic leader (like churchill is) I got four promotions on them. Then youll can upgrade them and have siege units with three city raider promotions.

2. Beelined for Red Coats. Then I upgraded all my swordsmen and macemen with city raider. Obviously I had a sizable advantage again (just like I did with trebs).

I tried a decent while before I got this domination win with a bunch of leaders. The only consistent advice I can give is...

-Leverage your UU asap
-Go for an early war with swordsmen and/or trebs
-pick out your targets carefully. In my early war I had a choice between Mansa Musa, Qin (protective) or Huyana. I took Mansa first and it was a cake walk, made even better because in typical Mansa style he had a bunch of wonders
-try to make some allies through religion, either adopting a faith or fouding one.
-Founding a faith or capturing a holy city helps a lot with money problems
-Making a money/science city. I had a city with two gold and five flood plains that just carried my civ.
-I take Vassels more often then not. You dont want them to offer a Vassel to another civ before youre ready to attack, but if they have one or two cities left and its close to your cultural border, finish them off.
-If you can take a Vassel early on thats usually friendly in peacetime. youll have a decent shot at getting them to trade techs with you eventually. Mansa Musa eventually calmed down and we traded for a bit before I blew by him in tech
-Something I didnt know until someone on the boards told me...you can direct your vassels to attack a particular city or research a tech. I had Mansa research Democracy for me while I did war techs, then swapped up.

 

[douglas_21]

How do you direct your vassals? I did not know this could be done. I will try that, thanks. I used to have a GP city, a production city, and a commerce city. The rest were just hybrids. So now I'll try one super-commerce city, and get other cities more focused on production. I've found Cyrus to be an iffy leader, what if you start near greece/a civ with bronze? I'll try an england game now. Thanks!

 

[voek]

You can direct your vassals or partners in war due diplomacy. I think it's the "let's discuss something else" where you can choose the "why don't you attack..." option. Not that they will actualy do it

 

[carl corey]

Hmm, they don't attack the city? Strange, since the "why don't you research..." seemed pretty much an order to me. Each time I had a vassal I could make it switch research, even if it was a wartime vassal that didn't want anything to do with me otherwise (no trades at all).

 

[voek]

Yeah, but research is much easier. It's just one action. Although most of the time it isn't helping me. Most of my vassals are backward in Research after they capitulate, but I think it's a great option.

 

[carl corey]

I mainly ask them to change research from useful to non-useful things. For them. As you, I'm rarely in the position where a vassal could outtech me in a certain area and then offer to exchange the tech. If it's a war-time vassal the trade part will almost never happen, and if it's a peace-time one I'm already stripping him of all his money through resource for gpt trades, so his research goes to the floor anyway. Should be more interesting if they fix some of the vassal states system, like a more cooperative war-time vassal and a less inclined to give his everything for you peace-time one.

 

[voek]

Yeah like a temporary war alliance where both parties can suggest offensive plans or request for help!

The only real benefit at this moment is that you don't have to conquer all his city's, but he will be almost destroyed when he accepts to surrender. The rules to break a vassal-master relation seems useless, since I have never seen a vassal be able to break free (at least capitulated vassals, which are most common).

 

[shivute]

It doesn't matter if the AI power rating is more than double yours on monarch, as the AI is very poor at warfare on monarch. However you do still need a balanced offensive army no matter how small it is.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

The way I win domination or conquest... hmm. I was under the impression that domination or conquest was the easiest way to win higher levels. The enemy has so much of a production and tech advantage that you have to take advantage of it. Let them build your cities, let them build your workers, trade tech.

Swinging the beeline between military and commerce techs can give you a military tech lead for a conflict at almost every era. Culture and religious techs tend to be what you trade for when you trade tech, which is often. I play on Monarch so higher levels might make this difficult.

 

[BARBEERIAN]

You might want to give Shaka a go for an early Conquest/Domination win. Been playing around with him in SP and MP, and I've fallen in love with Impi's. At first glance you might think they aren't good for attacking since it's just a 2 move spear with terrain mastery, but they are probably the toughest 2-move unit of the era to get rid of. Impi time is a bad time for your opponents, but a fun time to be you =). You can pillage with near impunity, you really only need to worry about axemen. But with that wonderful terrain mastery promo you should easily be able to avoid them.

First and foremost is finding copper, second order of business (if it's within reasonable distance) is settling horses. As soon as you can start building Impi's (and a few chariots if you got horses), and NOTHING else except the odd worker/settler/happiness building/forge as needed. Make sure to focus on hammers in each city as much as possible, to keep the Impi factories churning out units at a feverish pace. If you did manage to get some horses hooked up, make 4 chariots to keep your Impi's safe from Axemen.

Send the first Impi you build out to scout/steal a worker from the closest enemy, even if he has metal. Use those fast Impi's to destroy the metal, you don't really have to worry about Axemen if you move properly. Next order of business is pillaging roads so enemy units won't equal your speed (well chariots/horse archers will, but obviously those are quite useless at taking out Impi's). Then just get 2 Impi's per city defender (unless there's axes), and unless it's at +60% defense your going to obliterate it easily. If the capital is too well defended, just choke it out with an impi or two, and move your other Impi's to see if you can take their smaller cities, while beelining construction for obvious reasons. While applying the choke, you want to cripple production as much as possible and bide your time till you get cats on the move.

 

[douglas_21]

I'll give that a try after finishing up my random fractal game. I got Qin, and am going for Machinery then construction so I can get engineering. Then I'll have chokunu + pikemen + trebs to go raid some cities!