about those stacks. . .

[enelrad]

In a game I played a while back (and abandoned) on warlord, I had a great war going between myself and the Greeks. The difficulty was that we had a long, contended border.

I was ahead in units - they did get fighters to stop my bombers eventually.

At any rate, at one pont, I had my tanks and (idiot) mech infantry with infantry in a city that had to defend itself. With a long border, I couldn't get tanks and stuff up there quickly enough.

The Greeks stacked every warrior and archer they could find in three stacks and came onto my city squares. They pillaged the entire setup and I could do nothing because the number of units they had would have worn down my hit pints in no time at all. The infamous man with stick kills tank. They did not attack - just pillage.

My bombers couldn't hit the broad side of a country all of a sudden and all runs failed. At any rate, they only needed 1 hp to pillage. What can you do in this situation?

My solution was to use 15 nukes and abandon the game. I'm pretty sure there must be a better way.

The annoying thing was that I had 135,000 culture points and they had about 68,000 a tad more than half my points.

 

[BillChin]

I have a relatively simple solution for you. Fan out from the city to protect the squares. Use a few mobile units to form a solid line across the screen or to surround each stack. The computer will have to attack to get across this line and take heavy casualties. If they attack with slow units like archers, your mobile units will retreat when damaged so your losses will be minimal.

Pillaging units move one square at a time. There must be a way to cut them off at the pass even if you only have like six or eight units to defend. You do not have to station all your troops inside the city. Station mobile units outside as pickets so they retreat to the city when damaged. Losing one city doesn't sound terrible enough to quit the game, but I admit there are times when I get so frustrated at a minor setback that I do similar.

 

[enelrad]

Hi,
I didn't quit because of that one city. I nurtured those culture points up to 100,000 and then up and up and the bloody Greeks were always just over half of my points. The only good thing was that when I was at war, it was with them so they suffered the same culture loss as I had.

What I should have done is wipe Corinth off the face of the planet so that they would have lost thousands of culture points.

I was just so fed up with trying to get the culture win that I did fianlly nuke them into the next county - at which point the game was not worth playing any more. I vented a little spleen but got nowhere.

I had a defence line at one point but they had worn that into non-existance - being nibbled to death by ducks. They used the same 2 or 3- stack tactics. 15 - 20 nothing units with hit points to spare. I couldn't move defenders from other points on the line or they would have retaken all of the cities I got. Interestingly, I didn't acutally lose a single city and I had five of theirs that I didn't raze - four more that I did raze.

You get that culture victory in your little pea brain and you stop thinking rationally.

Thanks for the input though. I guess we do ourselves in more often than they do us in.

 

[diamon]

Consider yourself lucky... I didn't know bombers could be used to destroy improvements, I'm being "pillaged" by planes!

TONS of them!

Anyway, I guess I'll just have to whip up some more fighters and keep at it.

I'm veeeeery tempted to push the button and do the nuke route though.....

 

[levasseur227]

I should probably post this in the "I wish it were true forum" but... It is a fairly straightforward matter (notice I didn't say simple) to pinpoint an airforces runways (at least in modern times, the russians in WWII used grass patches the size of soccer fields).

I wish there were a way to attack aircraft at their source, so that you don't have to wait for their bombers to come hammer you before you strike them.

Speaking of bombers, did they fix the air superiority mission yet? That particular ommision made playing in the later ages after flight un-fun for me since none of my planes worked correctly.

 

[Moulton]

Defending a long border is never easy. A few good mobile units in a stack should hold off the warriors and archers. I don't know how they make so many of them... like hordes of barbarians.

On culture... I found out that demolishing the nations culture does not reduce their score. In this war, France Russia and I have about the same culture score, 110,000 for me. I conquered Russia, completely, with help from France... she got 5 of the cities, I got the othe 35. Russia's culture score did not change. It certainly won't continue to keep up , but what she had remains.

 

[Grotius]

Someone asked whether fighters use air-superiority correctly now. They certainly do for me. They're great! Fun to watch, too.

I have a question about the initial poster's bombing runs: bombers won't be able to kill even a warrior, right? They can soften it up, but a land unit has to mop up, right? I know that's the rule with modern land targets; just curious whether bombers can ever kill any land unit.

 

[Moulton]

Correct, bombarding by air, naval or artillery can only cut it to one HP. But a unit with one HP, in foreigh territory, is easy prey.

 

[Allemand]

I had a similar situation in one of my games. I built airports and airlifted in a ton of units. Good way to use up those obsolete cavalry units, if you still have them.

 

[Mesopotamia]

Can you airlift armies?

 

[enelrad]

Hi Moulton,

you wrote:

On culture... I found out that demolishing the nations culture does not reduce their score. In this war, France Russia and I have about the same culture score, 110,000 for me. I conquered Russia, completely, with help from France... she got 5 of the cities, I got the othe 35. Russia's culture score did not change. It certainly won't continue to keep up , but what she had remains.
------------------------------------------------->

Because it was so close, I could have had the cultural win because they would have lost their major producer of culture points per turn. Beombing several 1000 year old temples would help as well.

this probably sounds absurd but I measured the Culture on the histograph. I had 9 cm and they had 4.6 cm. it was that close. with the loss of a major producer, they would have lost that 0.2cm edge that kept me from victory over a few more turns. Unfortunately, i sent the game to the recycle bin in one of my periodic clean up campaigns. It would have been fun to go back and try it.

 

[Borodin]

How do you know what the AI total Culture is ?

 

[enelrad]

I was basing my guess on how much my culture score was and then the measurements I took in the Histograph. I had 9 cm and they had 4.6 cm. If their measurement had been 4.5 cm, I would have won by being double their size in culture. Ah could it have been so . . .

 

[Borodin]

Imagine loosing to a guy that had ony 4.6 cm