After winning my second game on Deity level with the "Always war" option on and Conquest-only victory (both times having won during the middle-late Medieval era) I'm starting to find it a bit preposterous how peaceful the AI is. They almost never seem to care about producing military units during the early game, expand ridiculously fast to the point where unhappiness screws them over big time, and in general have very poor build orders (often times building wonders when it takes in excess of 100 turns to complete while seemingly never building sufficient military units). Basically, the AI is too peaceful. Way, way, way too peaceful. They're just city-builders. And the way I found this out (besides observing them in World Builder) is by following a certain strategy.
The strategy I've found to be a game-winner in virtually every circumstance is as follows:
1. Prioritize slavery and trade to build early slave market and village hall (and later forge)
2a. Adopt despotism / conscription (or warrior caste if you have overpopulation issues, also better in some cases due to the extra experience) and focus production on both of your cities, do not expand past 2 cities until you've annihilated all your neighbors because city-maintenance is better off spent on unit-maintenance.
2b. Make one city in particular (usually your capital but whichever city has the best nearby production resources is also best) your "primary producer" of military units. Get the population high as happiness will allow (with a buffer of 2-3 happiness for war weariness and slaves) and then let it stagnate by maxing out slaves until there's no food surplus. Use all of your great generals (you're going to have a lot of them) on this city until it eventually starts producing level-3 units, it usually takes 4 great generals to do this.
3. Build Monument of the Dictator in both cities to kill future war-weariness, also rush-research Horse Breeding to get horse archers as soon as possible. Promote all your chariots/horse archers with Looter > Strength > Shock (in that order, also switch shock with other promotions as needed)
4. Use the massive military unit production bonus plus hammers from slavery to swamp the map with fast moving chariots/later on horse archers - the AI won't be able to counter this until they get War Elephants. Prioritize pillaging as many improvements as you can to get massive cash flow from Looter and also cripple all the AI's economies (the primary goal here is to get income from pillaging to keep up your treasury deficit for the entire game)
5. Seek out and destroy workers and disband them when you capture them (preferably within your own territory to get the extra cash), don't let the AI rebuild improvements. Use the same chariots/horse archers you use to capture workers to fan out and pillage.
6. Use great commanders to concentrate your forces on a city when you need to capture - afterwards ALWAYS RAZE WITHOUT EXCEPTION (yes even if the city has a world wonder that's really nice), you won't be able to defend these cities and the city-maintenance will kill you over time, especially on Deity
7. Continue doing all of the above until you win conquest victory
8. End the game with over 2000-5000 gold in your treasury despite having 100% research slider the entire game
They have absolutely no way to counter this, what I'm going to call "Genghis Khan strategy". Mostly because War Elephants are the only feasible counter, but also because they both produce very few military units and also never seem to produce the right ones (Such as the AI mass-producing Axemen instead of Spearmen when my army, which is the most powerful in the world by far, consists almost entirely of Chariots) My second game I played with Aggressive/Ruthless AI on top of the Always War on top of Raging Barbarians and it still yielded this same result as the first game. The funniest part is that in my second game the Barbarians posed a much greater challenge than the actual AI civilizations because at least the Barbs always prioritized building military units.
Can we perhaps add an option (or improve the existing ones) that makes the AI equally as war-like as the above described strategy? Either that or just fix the fact that the AI has no way to counter early game blitzkriegs like this.
The strategy I've found to be a game-winner in virtually every circumstance is as follows:
1. Prioritize slavery and trade to build early slave market and village hall (and later forge)
2a. Adopt despotism / conscription (or warrior caste if you have overpopulation issues, also better in some cases due to the extra experience) and focus production on both of your cities, do not expand past 2 cities until you've annihilated all your neighbors because city-maintenance is better off spent on unit-maintenance.
2b. Make one city in particular (usually your capital but whichever city has the best nearby production resources is also best) your "primary producer" of military units. Get the population high as happiness will allow (with a buffer of 2-3 happiness for war weariness and slaves) and then let it stagnate by maxing out slaves until there's no food surplus. Use all of your great generals (you're going to have a lot of them) on this city until it eventually starts producing level-3 units, it usually takes 4 great generals to do this.
3. Build Monument of the Dictator in both cities to kill future war-weariness, also rush-research Horse Breeding to get horse archers as soon as possible. Promote all your chariots/horse archers with Looter > Strength > Shock (in that order, also switch shock with other promotions as needed)
4. Use the massive military unit production bonus plus hammers from slavery to swamp the map with fast moving chariots/later on horse archers - the AI won't be able to counter this until they get War Elephants. Prioritize pillaging as many improvements as you can to get massive cash flow from Looter and also cripple all the AI's economies (the primary goal here is to get income from pillaging to keep up your treasury deficit for the entire game)
5. Seek out and destroy workers and disband them when you capture them (preferably within your own territory to get the extra cash), don't let the AI rebuild improvements. Use the same chariots/horse archers you use to capture workers to fan out and pillage.
6. Use great commanders to concentrate your forces on a city when you need to capture - afterwards ALWAYS RAZE WITHOUT EXCEPTION (yes even if the city has a world wonder that's really nice), you won't be able to defend these cities and the city-maintenance will kill you over time, especially on Deity
7. Continue doing all of the above until you win conquest victory
8. End the game with over 2000-5000 gold in your treasury despite having 100% research slider the entire game
They have absolutely no way to counter this, what I'm going to call "Genghis Khan strategy". Mostly because War Elephants are the only feasible counter, but also because they both produce very few military units and also never seem to produce the right ones (Such as the AI mass-producing Axemen instead of Spearmen when my army, which is the most powerful in the world by far, consists almost entirely of Chariots) My second game I played with Aggressive/Ruthless AI on top of the Always War on top of Raging Barbarians and it still yielded this same result as the first game. The funniest part is that in my second game the Barbarians posed a much greater challenge than the actual AI civilizations because at least the Barbs always prioritized building military units.
Can we perhaps add an option (or improve the existing ones) that makes the AI equally as war-like as the above described strategy? Either that or just fix the fact that the AI has no way to counter early game blitzkriegs like this.
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