Well, then obviously AI has not reached a competency level to deal with your abuse of its design flaws.
I think it's unfair for you to say this, you're only making wild assumptions about the way I play. I merely mentioned a few strategies that are an alternative to the "massive SoD" which you said was the "only" way military action succeeds in civ. As for exploiting the AI? Yeah, you're totally right, why would I stop Hatty from winning a cultural victory in 50 turns even though she hasn't defended her cities with anything but musketmen yet because she invested everything into culture? That wouldn't be a good strategy, it would just be exploiting the game and not simply using strategy clearly defined in the Art of War.
"He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared." - Sun Tzu
Yep. The AI has an established and widely-accepted inability to defend its coastal cities. Using that strategy every time you need to attack an AI is a borderline exploit. A human player would adapt and crush you.
Well, first of all I never said that I use that strategy "every time I need to attack an AI," you just assumed that. Again, I merely pointed out that it was one way of going about things that is an alternative to the "massive SoD that walked through the enemy lands." You should stop putting words in my mouth, along with making rash assumptions as that is just another sign of a losing arguement.
One word: exploits. You'd be crushed by a human player who can actually adapt and fix the holes in their behavioral algorithms.
Ok... this is just a rash assumption again. Have you ever seen me play the game? You're just piecing together a large assumption based on a statement I made about it being good strategy to attack the enemies weak points.
You. You clearly do not understand the term "positional tactics." It means flanking, striking weak points in a battle line, or otherwise moving your troops in such a way that you have an advantage. Every soldier is in a position, but that doesn't mean he's using positional tactics. I always find it hilarious when my debate opponent not only grossly fails to understand a well-understood and accepted term that he would have known the definition of if only he had looked it up, but also makes an ad hominem attack regarding my intelligence level because he doesn't understand what the term means and thinks he does.
In my interpretation, "postional tactics" are on a much larger scale in Civ. Doesn't taking a city on the back-end of an empire that is poorly defended using ships fall into the definition of "Flanking?" Doesn't attacking the weakest city you have access to equate with "striking weak points?" Sure, it's not "advanced micromanagable positional tactics" like you are trying to describe, but to say that positional strategy doesn't exist in civ at all is absurd.
Secondly, I never made an ad hominem attack on you, I merely threw back an insulting word you used about the AI earlier in a rhetorical form. In your post, you directly applied that term to me and then in the next breath you are condemning ad hominem attacks. Hypocrite?
Human player would crush you.
How do you know? You've never played a game with me or seen me play a game. You have no idea whether I'm good at the game or not, and frankly it doesn't even matter.
False. Your troops need to move. Troops don't usually heal while moving. If even one man in their stack has a medic promotion, the best you can hope for is that their troops will have taken one airstrike each while yours have taken two.
You are right that troops don't heal while moving, but if you have big enough stacks (plural - and as you should at this era of the game) you will have more troops that can be air struck in a single turn. You should be able to move a few turns and heal all the damage from 3 air strikes. Of course, this doesn't always work and I don't feel the need to make a ridiculous blanket statement to try to make myself seem right about everything. I was merely providing an example of yet another thing that can partly neutralize the advantage of enemy airships.
You're avoiding the argument. You're attempting to justify a broken unit by saying "well, if you're just massively in the lead, you can counter it easily!"
I'm not avoiding the arguement, I'm establishing a precedent in the civilization series. It's only your opinion that the unit is broken.
Oh I can beat them, they're just not fun.
Wait... I'm avoiding an arguement?
Dodging the argument again. Tell me one unit that you get at approximately the same time as airships that can destroy an airship and I'll give you a cookie. And remember: a unit that you'd only have if you have a massive tech lead doesn't count.
You've become so fixated on the destruction of the airships that you're not seeing the bigger picture. Airships dont need to be destroyed right away because there are effective ways to neutralize them. Besides, ANY unit that can destroy another unit can kill an airship. How? You capture the city it's based in. Gimme my cookie
. How to capture cities with airships in them? I've described that to you in several forms, apparently they are all exploits though. I probably should just send my troops into enemy territory one by one to make sure the AI can keep up with my strategy.
Yeah, I guess if you suck that could be true. I generally lose about 20-25% of my attacking stack most of the time at the most. Of course, if you actually take into account what type of unit your opponent has the least of and bring appropriately-upgraded counters for each of those units (i.e. use strategy), you can pick off those weakest units and then you will have a massive, massive advantage in attacking the rest of the city's stack.
Well, let's say your opponent hasn't built as many spearmen as other units. What you then do is bring a stack with a large amount of mounted units; some upgraded with additional withdrawal bonuses, some upgraded with shock promotions, and possibly a few with combat promotions depending on what the rest of the city defenders look like. You also bring a small amount of general city attack units such as swordsmen and, of course, catapults. After knocking down the defense, you need to sacrifice a few mounted units on the spearmen first (unless you get lucky and some withdraw), but once those spearmen are damaged enough that their odds to beat your mounted units are lower than the odds of the other units in the stack, you can use your more fine-tuned mounted guys to damage (more often destroy) the non-spearman units. The problem is that most cities are defended by so many guys that you either need a huge stack for this or it will take you multiple turns. The Medic 3 promotion means that anyone who withdraws will heal up, anyone who wins will be ready for another attack in a couple of turns, and any incoming counter-attack would necessarily have to deal out a massive amount of casualties in order to avoid your guys just being fully healed in 2-4 turns. This strategy is easiest in the early era since the counters are more defined then (and therefore their units stand less of a chance against something they aren't designed to counter), and it's especially easy if you have elephants, which are almost strong enough to kill spearmen on their own anyway. It also becomes less viable as your opponent has more general-purpose defenders; a huge stack of longbowmen with just a couple of specialist units is more effective against a strategy like this than a more diverse defense force because each longbowman will always have a decent chance to kill one of your guys (and when I see a huge stack of longbowmen, I use more conventional "massive attack" tactics).
Actually that sounds like a pretty good strategy, it sounds like a great way to go about attacking a well defended city with weaker troops... Especially if you have Elephants, they do own. I'd just like to point out that it's a widely known weakness of the AI that it doesnt build adequete defensive seige units or always know how to effectively counterattack a stack such as yours parked next to it's city -- which is one of the reasons I like airships -- because it helps the AI repel a stack in it's territory. If the AI was as smart as a human (merely using your own arguement against you), it would counter-attack your weakened units with seige units and then a stack of its own while you are healing. If the AI doesn't even have enough units, that is a different story, but if your weakened stack is parking turn after turn outside his city slowly picking units off... I don't feel that you're using an exploit, however you're putting your hypocracy on blatant display again by asserting that a portion of my wide variety of tactics is an exploit while describing a quite similar situation in your own games. Both involve taking advantage of bad strategy by the opponent, which I don't feel is exploiting anything because that's what you're supposed to do in a strategy game -- react to what your opponents do. If my opponent doesnt defend his coastal cities well but has a huge stack on my border, i can attack his coastal city but still must deal with the stack on my border... and I would define that as large-scale "flanking."
One more question (in all seriousness): How do you "pick off those weakest units" in the AIs stack turn after turn when the defending stack gets to choose who defends and also heals as much as you do each turn (provided medic I or II)? As far as I know, the only way to do that would be to damage all stronger units first. I usually find similar strategies to be too risky for my own playstyle, but thats me. I usually like to live by the Sun Tzu quote:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."
I'm not trying to be an ass, I really want to know how you do it.
My point is that in any given era with two people who are even in terms of tech, each should be able to counter and destroy their opponent's units.
You can counter them by neutralizing their effects with your own airships and destroy them by taking out the city they are in. This is the only way to destroy that pesky early AI Destroyer that keeps hiding in it's port too, so it's not just airships.
Once again, that's not a matter of positioning. It's a matter of "oh, there's an effing mine there, I should go break it because the AI isn't smart enough to defend its strategic assets."
Actually the AI does attempt to defend its strategic assets with usually 2 standard defense units, on harder levels anyways. Please explain to me how attacking and then
positioning your units onto enemy strategic assets is NOT a matter of positioning, just so I understand where your coming from there. I feel we're just arguing semantics here and should probably focus on the parts we actually disagree on
.
No, it's just another ridiculous example of your logic. I just used your exact train of logic to come to the conclusion that nuclear bears would be just as good for the game as airships, since they add another "layer of strategy." Basically, the point is that the argument "it's good because it adds another layer of strategy" is wrong, since nuclear bears would definitely add another layer of strategy and they obviously wouldn't be good.
You're putting words in my mouth again and mis-guilding my train of logic. Airships add a layer of strategy to the game
because they require players to use more creative attack/defend schemes, nerf some existing gambits that some players (myself included) were accostomed to using often, and add variety to an era in which I had grown bored with the repetitive wars. Airships also have some place in the game because they are somewhat plausible in an alternative history as a moderately effective weapon. For these reasons, it is my opinion that airships are a good addition in this game. It's easy to say that my logic is broken if you leave out any reasoning I used to reach my opinions and instead summarize it up in a blanket statement about randomly adding things to the game.
I didn't. I figured if they weren't powered from the ground , that would only leave a form of rocket propulsion- the release of pressurized gas from the rear of the airship... So instead of the sound of sirens as as Stukas go into a dive, a bomb release would be preceded by the sound of escaping gas, kinda like a giant whoopee cushion...
things.
