siege is sometimes irrelevant

Just wanted to share this recent game experience.

I was playing as Alexander at Emperor level. After conquering Rome, I was debating whether to move on to Arabia. My tech, unfortunately, had crashed after Writing and I lacked Construction for catapults. I had no new buildings to build (lacking the enabling techs), and couldn't afford to settle new cities, and Saladin was expanding into the power vacuum of our continent. My choice was to turtle up and do a crash SE or ... attack without siege!

So I attacked Saladin with just Phalanxes and a few Spears, razing everything but his capital and holy city. I'm sure I lost at least 30 Phalanxes taking about 12 cities.

Would it have gone smoother with siege? Yes. But I can't say it would have gone necessarily faster. And by keeping up the pressure, my war booty enabled my "pointy stick research" and I was finally able to get some beakers going even while churning out Phalanxes.

Superior numbers can get the job done even without siege. It didn't hurt that my new units were generally Combat I + 2 promotions, and that Phalanxes are hard to counter, either.

With a high hammer output and little else to spend the hammers on, yes, it may seem that the greater efficiency provided by siege units is unnecessary to some extent.

The truth is, the major expense of war besides extra maintenance of new cities is the unit upkeep and unit supply that you are required to pay for your units. But if your units die shortly after they are produced, then your total army size won't grow that fast, and may even decline. This has a beneficial side effect of reducing your maintenance costs, while at the same time allowing a select few military units that are successful in battle to reap very high XP rewards.

How does WW factor into this? Is it still earlier enough in the game to not really matter? I've seen people just spam HA or Curraissers sometimes with no siege and just win a war of numbers.

This game sounds interesting. Any Screenshots? Were you whipping a ton or did you have some great hammer cities? How many cities did you have in order to build up that nice siegeless force? I'm sure this would have been a lot harder without AGG?

More details please!

If you're doing such large-scale warring, bring cats anyway. Dont bombard then, just attack with them immediately too. It's still a stronger return than axes exclusively.

IMO horse archers are the best for this as their flanking promos give them a very high survival rate for these kinds of attacks.

Another alternative to siege is using the Oracle or a Great Prophet to Bulb Theology for Theocracy. CRII right out the box makes a huge difference and will allow you to press a classical era war without the use of siege engines. Just make sure to build up experience on the smaller cities to hit CRIII before you hit the capitol.

The fact that you're killing your troops will save precious early GPT as well. Once you have siege, your other guys aren't going to die very often, and you'll have to pay for them.

"Reducing army maintenance by not bringing siege"

Yeah that has to be good for morale

Hereditary Rule said:

This game sounds interesting. Any Screenshots? Were you whipping a ton or did you have some great hammer cities? How many cities did you have in order to build up that nice siegeless force? I'm sure this would have been a lot harder without AGG?

More details please!

Click to expand...

I wasn't whipping at all. I was producing units from four mid-sized cities (two of mine, two of Augustus') after learning Monarchy. My cities were generally geared for hammer production plus a couple of specialist scientists where I had the extra food.

I declared on Saladin (protective, mind you) with about 15 Phalanxes and the odd Spearman (Sal had a few elephants running around or I wouldn't have bothered). Most of his cities were defended by 4-6 units. I lost about the same number of Phalanxes taking each city. The "cannon fodder" were given Combat I, Cover, and CR I. Given both time to heal a bit and slower travel time in enemy territory, my army grew as the war progressed despite some heavy losses.

In the end, I had two level 6 units and several level 5s.

Being aggressive helped tremendously due to the immediate access to the cover promotion for green troops.

vanatteveldt said:

"Reducing army maintenance by not bringing siege"

Yeah that has to be good for morale

Click to expand...

My point was that you can't build siege before you have construction, and you won't be able to research construction (or anything else) if you have a bazillion soldiers.

I will avoid seige engines if I have flanking II mounted units with my CRII + III units. Attack with the mounted unit to damage the defender and have about a 50% of survival. Usually this is enough for the Melee units to take the city.

Siege weapons are just there to save hammers. Instead of losing high XP city raider units/losing city raider units before they even get XP you sacrifice 1 or 2 throwaway catas for a city and can keep your stack moving more efficiently.

Naturally, if you've got a ton of hammers and nothing else to do with them you can easily just churn out a zillion units and run them over, but 99% of the time siege weapons are the best option.

vanatteveldt said:

"Reducing army maintenance by not bringing siege"

Yeah that has to be good for morale

Click to expand...

Also, reducing the number of . .. .. .. .. .ing soldiers by sending them to their death. The squeaky wheel gets sent to the front line!

slobberinbear said:

Just wanted to share this recent game experience.

I was playing as Alexander at Emperor level. After conquering Rome, I was debating whether to move on to Arabia. My tech, unfortunately, had crashed after Writing and I lacked Construction for catapults. I had no new buildings to build (lacking the enabling techs), and couldn't afford to settle new cities, and Saladin was expanding into the power vacuum of our continent. My choice was to turtle up and do a crash SE or ... attack without siege!

So I attacked Saladin with just Phalanxes and a few Spears, razing everything but his capital and holy city. I'm sure I lost at least 30 Phalanxes taking about 12 cities.

Click to expand...

I'm not concerned that you lost a lot of troops in doing this but you did have to raze a lot of cities due to your poor economy. That probably cost you time and effort after the war to build settlers and then develop the tiles and infrastructure once your economy could afford to expand again. I think you would have done better to have developed your economy before attacking. Something like, research Alphabet (allows you to build research and extort techs) and then research Currency (markets and build wealth) or since you had Monarchy just research Code of Laws (courthouses) and preferably all of those.

The success of your war depends on how strong your economy is. Overexpansion is bad and razing a load of enemy cities is bad, it is often better to wait, build up a strong economy and then take the better developed enemy cities for free (and keep most of them since you can afford them). If you do attack later you're going to need catapults but then you can afford to research them with your strong economy.

Hmm

So would would a mixed stack of Axes and Spears help me with this situation (in spoilers as it's my on-going Noble Napoleon game).

UncleJJ said:

I'm not concerned that you lost a lot of troops in doing this but you did have to raze a lot of cities due to your poor economy. That probably cost you time and effort after the war to build settlers and then develop the tiles and infrastructure once your economy could afford to expand again. I think you would have done better to have developed your economy before attacking. Something like, research Alphabet (allows you to build research and extort techs) and then research Currency (markets and build wealth) or since you had Monarchy just research Code of Laws (courthouses) and preferably all of those.

The success of your war depends on how strong your economy is. Overexpansion is bad and razing a load of enemy cities is bad, it is often better to wait, build up a strong economy and then take the better developed enemy cities for free (and keep most of them since you can afford them). If you do attack later you're going to need catapults but then you can afford to research them with your strong economy.

Click to expand...

On high difficulties, keep taking cities until you can extort alphabet, then build your way to currency/col (or extort them too after partial research).

On lower difficulties, keep the cities. You can probably afford to if you use cottages and turn the slider off enough in advance after securing requisite techs (writing, pottery).

You can go crazy on marathon and push well over 10 cities in the BS's...usually the AI tech rate will hold you more reasonably on faster speeds.

TheMeInTeam said:

On high difficulties, keep taking cities until you can extort alphabet, then build your way to currency/col (or extort them too after partial research).

Click to expand...

I was talking about the advantages of having a strong economy before attacking.

Your advice is contingent on the AI that you're attacking actually having Alphabet. Often they don't; particularly if they've spawned 13 cities (partly into the space left by an earlier war as the OP describes) and usually don't have Code or Laws and even if they do only slowly build courthouses. Despite their lower maintenance costs they have a weak economy and try to spam even more settlers and workers and then garrison troops to wreck it even more. I like to give them enough rope so they hang themselves and meanwhile I build up a strong economy. A successful war springs from a strong economy, that was my point.

I've been slowly grinding into the painful realization that early siege just don't earn their keep in hammers investment if they do anything other than hack at defenses. And even then they should be the plan B for when EP generation can't keep up with the pace of conquest. No construction? Just wait for EPs to regenerate before going on to the next city. (This is where GW comes in again...)

UncleJJ said:

I was talking about the advantages of having a strong economy before attacking.

Your advice is contingent on the AI that you're attacking actually having Alphabet. Often they don't; particularly if they've spawned 13 cities (partly into the space left by an earlier war as the OP describes) and usually don't have Code or Laws and even if they do only slowly build courthouses. Despite their lower maintenance costs they have a weak economy and try to spam even more settlers and workers and then garrison troops to wreck it even more. I like to give them enough rope so they hang themselves and meanwhile I build up a strong economy. A successful war springs from a strong economy, that was my point.

Click to expand...

On the difficulties where I find the AI "hangs itself", city maintenance is laughable. It's fairly simple to turn off research after writing and try to brute force research via deficit or specialists too. Alpha is all you need if you have a lot of cities and a gold buffer.

IMO, high-level (like, say, immortal) AIs don't hang themselves. They take all your land and then they will tech with it halfway decently. The options to the player that are actually viable at anything faster than marathon are:

1. Hit them well before they spam cities and units (or else they're going to just outspam you and you lose)

2. If there's a lot of land, just out-expand the AI. Kills short-term tech, but seems pretty easy to catch up with enough cities (like, 12+)

3. If boxed in a bit but not horrendously, just out-tech the AI then wtfpwn it with rifles or infantry as you can to get enough land. Tech rate will do better if you don't get to 14 cities before 500 AD.

In the short term, the AI bonuses are such that if you build your economy some first, they're a lot more fortified and prepared. More walls, more units, more cities to take, more reinforcements which they can generate very quickly out of most cities. All of this is alleviated by hitting them sooner.

I find that the Vassalage-based approach is a good middle-road path between UncleJJ's and TheMeInTeam's near-opposite approaches.

By concentrating mainly on economic infrastructure during the tech progress toward Feudalism, you set up your economy to go full military once you switch to Vassalage. After you start conquering cities, you can still use the tech extortion method to gain extra techs well after Alphabet and Code of Laws.