Attacking another continent...fact or myth?

[ChicagoCubs]

Also, if there is any space on the other continent, even if it is ice or tundra squares, I will settle a city. Ideally, you want a coastal hill tile for the city, but any coastal tile will work. I don't care if this city ever become productive, but i will stack all kinds of defenders in the city and build some city walls. The coastal tile is important so you can bring the transport into the city, unload the troops and move or fortify on the same turn.

This city serves as a beach head, and lets me stockpile troops over time. Depending on the location of said city, you might have limited choices on who you can attack.

 

[a4phantom]

That's a good strategy, although you have to get an early start to find any open land, and your city may flip due to culture. Seriously, the easiest way by far is an open borders deal with someone on the continent. Then you don't need those battleships (they can defend your coast) and you can use heavy bombers from the beginning. Of course, you need an open borders agreement, which isn't always possible, but you can usually get one. Also, as soon as you capture a city, move all your bombers and units to it from your basing city in case the war with a neighbor gets that open borders agreement cancelled. Culture bomb it, and if you have flight rush an airport.

 

[ChicagoCubs]

The open borders route is the safest and easiest assuming you can keep the agreement with that civ. I have had that civ cancel the agreement right after my initial attack. The fact he cancelled didn't bother me, but since the system "moved" my units out of his territory, my forces were scattered and they were picked off.

 

[KMadCandy]

it can be a lot of fun or a long frustration with lots of MM moving around units depending on your mood and when you do it. generally the earlier you do it the bigger hassle it is. i used to only do continent maps, now i do pangaea when it suits my mood. my "what type of civ4 game" choices are determined by my mood 100% of the time since the games can be so different.

my current game is team coop with hubby, which adds advantages in the prep stage since we can both make units and boats. we did not ever open borders with the folks on our continent since we didn't want them in "our" area. we were lucky in that a religion we'd founded spread via river or coast to them so we could change and be all happy happy joy joy with them until it was time for them to die.

once our continent was truly "our continent" since the bad guys were destroyed, we used caravels as early as possible to meet the future victims on the only other continent to spread our religion for spying purposes (and to give them the chance to trade techs between them, there were only 2 civs on that continent and my understanding is that civs will only trade techs once they've met 2 civs, so otherwise they'd not have done any trading with each other prior to meeting us). we took full advantage of open borders for missionary purposes which provided advance info about the units, terrain, and number of cities we'd be facing.

we timed our invastion of continent #2 at astronomy. we had the units ready and shipped them over soon as soon as we'd made our galleons after astronomy. this required approximately a zillion galleons (stupid 3 unit capacity). we had no airports obviously. but we did have the tech advantage since we were teamed, so the number of units we needed was less than it would have been otherwise and the burden of making them was shared between us. it has been a blast. victoria got demolished last night and washington's the last victim left.

the wars have been hella fun even with the prep work, particularly since it's hubby's first Warlords game so all the "which promotion, oh yay a GG what the heck do i do with him?" dimension is nifty.