Alone on an island

[Xebis]

This will be my third game on Monarch and fifth game overall and so far I'm having a pretty easy time of it. Just a forced load and save now and again because I was so busy city building that I neglected my defenses

Anyway, on my current game I'm playing Large, Continents, no Time or Space Victory, and aggressive AI. I find myself stuck on a medium sized island all by my lonesome for the second game in a row and I'm pondering what my victory options are.

The last game I was on a fairly large continent by my lonesome and I decided to go for a Cultural Victory for the first time. All my other games have ended in a Domination or Diplomatic victory (with me basically voting for my win). This has usually been my preference. In the last game, since I was stuck on an island and I couldn't pick on the other civilizations at an early stage I decided to develop my specilization skills and go for Cultural. By 1650 AD I caculated that I could easily pass Gandhi who had the early lead and I finally won in 1915 after having a war in between because I got bored of just pressing Enter.

In this game I want to go back to the world domination route and I was wondering if you guys had an tips on launching early naval invasions? How possible is this and when should I attempt it? I have no problems launching well organized wars but my main concern is after capturing one or two cities, those cities will be gimped due to the culture imbalance and I would have to carry out protracted wars to gain a solid foot hold on the main continent. This can put me on a disadvantage in terms of city cultivation and research compared to the other civs. I can wait until I'm in the modern era and launch a blitzkrieg against a weak civilization but by the time I get a decent size army and navy going I could have probably achieved a cultural victory.

Any tips to kick start my invasion of the mainland? Also, what techs should I concentrate on? I don't think religions would be of much use to me until I get a foothold on the main continent. Nor is a straight bee-line to Alphabet as important anymore if I can't get in contact with them right away to trade techs.

 

[reveron]

I would suggest (and bear in mind I'm still getting the ropes of the games and my strategies will probably suck) getting missionaries of your religion over to the mainland, scout out the civ(s) you want to take over, launch a coastal barricade, and when you feel you have enough transports of soldiers ready, launch away. But then again it might not work -- I don't wage wars too often. ^_^

 

[tcjsavannah]

I've been playing archipelago maps lately and I've noticed the biggest change from III to IV is that you can attack from ships with any unit. Yes, they receive a penalty for this, but if you can soften the defenses up enough with naval bombardment and if you're ahead of the game tech-wise, you can really do a better job taking coastal cities in the early going without having to spend the extra turns to land.. bombard.. attack.. load and land again. Go with a lot of your melee units and start landing!

 

[Shillen]

Attacking from a ship has a heavy penalty unless you have an amphibious unit, I wouldn't recommend it. But it is useful to transport your troops to the tile next to the city and drop them off there. It takes a lot longer if you're moving through their cultural boundaries by land to get to their cities.

One tip I read in the GOTM forums that is great is to sign open borders with the civ that borders the civ you want to go to war with. You can also sign that civ into a war against your enemy to soften up your enemies defenses before you go in. But the point of the open borders is you can land your troops in their territory and attack from the land. The big benefit of this is not needing as many galleons, having cities you can retreat to and heal up in, and being able to attack with your full military on the first turn of the war instead of having more troops that still need to be shipped over.

Another great strategy for a naval war is to have multiple attack points. The first city you attack the AI will send almost it's entire military towards that part of its empire. It will even take units out of its cities on the other side of its empire. So if you can land a secondary force on the complete opposite side of his empire like 2-4 turns after your initial attack then you will have very easily captured cities. Be ready to hunker down and defend those cities, though, as the AI will turn its units around and send them to try and recapture their cities. But then this makes it easier for your initial force to take the cities on that side. It really puts the AI in a difficult situation.

 

[Xebis]

Hmm, thanks for some good tips guys. I didn't figure to use other civ borders to launch attacks from, that's a pretty good idea. Something akin to the North Vietnamese crossing into Cambodia to attack the South

Anyway, I had already figured that I would need 20-25 units to take the 2-3 cities needed for me to get some breathing room after the invasion. More if I'm behind in tech but that's not very likely. Add to that the need for 5-6 galleons to transport them all seemed to be a pretty tall order for any early-mid game attack but that border thing might reduce the number of units necessary. Let's just hope that my "ally" doesn't take advantage and turn on me too