Axes Still Rule

[Roxlimn]

bastillebaston:

The statement I'm getting here is:

Civ is boring because I only like to play it one way, and that one way always wins because I don't even bother to play unless I have everything I need to make it a cakewalk.

Uh...

An Axe Rush doesn't "rule" if you have to like, restart the game a couple times to win. Each of those reloads is an autoloss!

It's not the game mechanics that are "forcing" this repetitiveness. It's repetitive because you only choose to ever play one kind of game in Civ IV.

That's like saying that there's no variety in liquor because liquor only means beer, and you don't bother to drink anything else. Duh.

 

[ShredZ]

The OP must be the kinda guy that just plays to win, everyone else sitting at the table is playing to have fun, f-u-n fun.

Its not the game mechanics that are the problem for you and your axe rush, its the AIs ability to realize it and switch to a chariot rush to smack you around with. The AI doesnt have a brain, think about that.

Do me a favour and create a poll: Do you play cIV to have fun, or to win?

1) to win
2) to have fun

The results may surprise you but they wont the rest of us (see first paragraph).

Nobody cares which is the fastest way to win, or which is a sure-fire way to kill the AI dead, well except for you that is.

When people come to these boards to read a new strategy, its not to see how much faster they can kill the AI with a rush, its to see how much fun they can have. If theres anything youve PROVED without a doubt in your OP its that winning does not ensure that you have fun, clearly youve forgotten how. So really, the only service youve done us with this thread, is tell us how not to play to make sure we dont get bored, thanks for that!

I dont care which is the best, most fastest, most killingest, most destructive way to win, why dont you come back in a month and post a new thread telling us the most fun way to play. If you cant handle that, maybe take more than a month, maybe take forever.

 

[Heinz Guderian]

Bastillebaston you are my hero. I love the way you keep going unperturbed by the personal attacks.

Hey, folks: open your eyes. The guy is more or less right in saying that rushing the AI with stacks of death is often the key to victory. How many people here have won a game without ever going to war? And how many people have won a war without ever using the good old stack or death? Not many, I guess. The truth is: the stack of death is the way to go in most circumstances; not always, as bastille seems to be saying, but very often indeed. Too often? I wouldn’t say so, because I totally enjoy rushing the weak I don’t find that boring at all. But I can see where people like bastille are coming from. Some people I guess want more diversity in warfare, and the game just doesn’t deliver that. I’m personally happy with what we have got, but I wouldn’t mind if Firaxis made the choice of war strategies a bit more flexible.

 

[Pomp]

Hey, folks: open your eyes. The guy is more or less right in saying that rushing the AI with stacks of death is often the key to victory.

I don't think anyone would dispute that a strategy that includes offensive war* is usually going to be more successful than a strategy devoted to perpetual peace, or that Stacks O' Doom are usually the most effective way to wage an offensive war. The actual claims he's made are much stronger than that, though.

He's also getting a lot of grief for having simultaneously claimed that the game is too easy if you use one supposedly broken strategy while also admitting that he refuses to play in situations where that strategy does not work as well (i.e. levels above Monarch or any map where he does not have easy access to metals and a nearby opponent).

* - I assume that you (and the OP) are using "rush" to mean an offensive war.

 

[Roxlimn]

Well put. Essentially, he's saying that, "This game is boring! But I only want to consider playing it in the way that I already find boring."

Staring without metals isn't a death sentence.

 

[Moonlit Knight]

Bastillebaston you are my hero. I love the way you keep going unperturbed by the personal attacks.

Hey, folks: open your eyes. The guy is more or less right in saying that rushing the AI with stacks of death is often the key to victory. How many people here have won a game without ever going to war? And how many people have won a war without ever using the good old stack or death? Not many, I guess. The truth is: the stack of death is the way to go in most circumstances; not always, as bastille seems to be saying, but very often indeed. Too often? I wouldn’t say so, because I totally enjoy rushing the weak I don’t find that boring at all. But I can see where people like bastille are coming from. Some people I guess want more diversity in warfare, and the game just doesn’t deliver that. I’m personally happy with what we have got, but I wouldn’t mind if Firaxis made the choice of war strategies a bit more flexible.

He is a troll. He is here to flame and cause disruption. This is obvious because he utterly ignored the below in a post.

Let's turn this on its head. Answer these two questions.

a) You've been critical of what is wrong with civ. How would you improve it?

b) Give examples of other computer games where the AI strategy is better in your opinion.

If he wasn't a troll he'd have answered this but all he is trying to do is critisize and rile.

 

[AluminumKnight]

Bastille, I will spare you your time if you want. You can skip to the last paragraph of my post if you don't want to read my analogy, because I get the feeling it won't convince you anyway.

I will be using Starcraft for this analogy, even though it is all war, while Civ4 has SO much more.

Let's say I buy Starcraft. I only play skirmishes on a medium difficulty, and I mass zerglings or whatever (just an example, I only played Starcraft a tiny bit) and overrun my opponents with ease every time. Then I go to a Starcraft forum and post there saying that massing zerglings (or some other unit for the other races) is clearly the best strategy in the game and is overpowered. People respond by saying, "Turn up the difficulty." I respond by saying, "No, it's too tedious, I don't want to micromanage." People also suggest, "Play multiplayer." I respond, "No, then other players rush ME, and that's stupid" (sorry if you yourself didn't post this, but I know someone did, just don't feel like looking through all 12 pages again to find it). Do you see the logic fail in this?

But anyway, you probably will dismiss that as irrelevant, so let me just say this: Go away if you don't like it. Apparently you find Civ boring, so go play something else. Let's face it, if they fixed the axe rush/SoD/whatever you're arguing now, there would be some other strategy that would work "best" and you'd complain about that. So save yourself and us the trouble and find a different game to play.

 

[gettingfat]

I can't believe this thread is still running.

Give me a break, the OP has made up his mind, and keeps adding terms in order to come to his pre-determined conclusion (e.g. if you don't see copper/iron, regenerate; if it still doesn't work, build more units until it works; won't play other map types, other level of difficulty, MP..... because "I don't like it"). So why bother??

 

[Bhruic]

Most of the examples I've seen so far are not relevant counter-examples at all. They are along the lines: "but you need to balance the expansion" or "in some circumstances and at some stages of the game, diplomacy is as important as warfare." Yes, but so what? So far I've not seen nobody describing an effective strategy which is generally stronger and has a wider range of applicability than the stack attack rush.

That wasn't really my point. My point was, that at some points in the game, making a stack rush is actually detrimental to your Civ development. In other words, you are going to hurt yourself more by doing it than help yourself.

Sure, there is no obligation to play to win, or to play at all for that matter. But that's entirely beside the point. The point is about a flawed game mechanics, not about the player's desires or obligations.

No, your point was that the flawed game mechanic was making you bored with the game. My point was that everyone else seems to be able to overlook the flawed game mechanic and move on to have a fun and enjoyable game. The fact you can't do so is your problem, not ours. In an ideal world, yes, someone would get right on fixing the flaw, but the reality is, no one is going to do that. So you either learn to live with it, or you move on to another game.

No, your advice is entirely irrelevant to my point. Even if you deliberately choose to ignore an overpowered and unbalanced strategy, the game remains broken.

Right, and so what? If I drop a plate on the ground, and it gets chipped, the plate is going to be broken no matter what I do. But I can easily ignore that, and continue to use it to eat off of. The same can be done here. Arguing about whether or not the plate is broken isn't going to get it fixed. Neither is arguing about stack rushes.

Bh

 

[Littlelisa]

The OP must be the kinda guy that just plays to win, everyone else sitting at the table is playing to have fun, f-u-n fun.

The type that buys a guide for games like GTA, or turns on God mode in a FPS
He may as well grant himself some nukes with world builder

 

[Amask]

this thread is getting to be idiotic
there are lots of hardcore fans of the game that attacking the OP personally, not his argument, and typing some bull that has nothing to do with anything

instead of ignoring them, the OP seems to revel in it
keeps saying that he hasn't heard any valid arguments against his statement

there have been MANY in those 12 pages
but he just dismisses ALL the intelligent arguments by saying "Yawn", and keeps focusing on the arguments that don't make any sense

so back at ya buddy, you're complaining that you didn't see any intelligent arguments... well there have been quite a few, but so far WE haven't seen any back from you...

ciao
enjoy proving to yourself that you can't have fun when there were so many suggestions on how you can, in fact, enjoy the game and not because of an artificial limit (such as "no axe rush")

 

[polypheus]

...My point was, that at some points in the game, making a stack rush is actually detrimental to your Civ development. In other words, you are going to hurt yourself more by doing it than help yourself.

This is why the argument that Axe rush is the dominant strategy to winning under nearly all settings/conditions doesn't make a lot of sense.

We all concede that if you are playing small maps with few civs and few total cities in lower difficulty levels and you have early access to copper and use a Civ that starts off with mining, then yes Axe rush is very powerful. Each city you conquer is a large percentage of the total area and total number cities of the game and can really make you a leader and win the game. But this is a pretty contrived situation. You could say that Quecha Warrior rush is a "dominant strategy" is you limit its application to dual maps! In huge maps with lots of Civs it doesn't make sense that it is the "dominant strategy".

1. If you have no early access to copper and need to quit/restart until you do, that's hardly a sign of a "dominant strategy".
2. If one can play as successfully (if not more successfully) conducting war sparingly, defensively and only when it makes sense to, how is the early Axe rush a "dominant strategy"?

Yes we all agree that even if you like to play a peaceful, builder type game the need to station a large military for deterrence and defense (esp on higher difficulty levels) is mandatory. However, having a large military doesn't make the game "broken". Its like saying that you need large number of workers every game so the game is broken because you need them every game.

But I just don't see how/why early rushing/conquest is such a dominant strategy.

If I can expand peacefully to my ideal number of cities and have access to enough resources, why would I be better off warmongering than just peacefully building and keeping a mostly defensive force? The answer is that you wouldn't be. You'd be wasting time/resources to build an offensive force to take cities you don't need, can't support, to weaken an enemy that really is no threat and might even serve as a great friend and buffer and trade partner.

If there are like 11-18 other Civs on huge maps with tons of cities and land why would you be automatically better off ALWAYS attacking and weakening neighbors if you don't need to? Okay so you take a few cities, razing most since you don't need them/can't support them and weaken some neighboring Civs (let's say 2 Civs), it has zero effect on the dozen other Civs that stayed out of war. It fact you've set yourself back a little having to set production to mostly military units to quickly mass SoD rather than build libraries, markets, harbors, etc and having just a couple of cities devote to a defensive military.

If I have friendly peaceful neighbors that are buffering me and conducting wars against aggressors, why would I want to then attack these neighbors and then have to be bogged down with having direct borders and wars with these aggressors myself when these neighbors can do the job for me?

Yes there are situations and settings where an SoD, early rush makes sense. But there are tons of situations where it doesn't make sense and where you'd be worse off. Myself, I would say that on Huge maps, emperor level, I have found early rush/early conquest/warmongering to make sense in only a few cases, in most cases, I am far better off building and developing and stationing defensive forces and conducting good diplomacy.

 

[InFlux5]

At 12 pages, I don't know if this thread is still worth posting in, but I am going to step up to defend the OP.

There is an objective portion and a subjective portion to his argument, and most people are criticizing the subjective part. Clearly it's just his opinion that micromanaging cities, missionaries, and the like for non-military victories is boring.

It's the objective part that people seem not to be addressing: an early axe rush is the most powerful strategy in most games. Now it's obviously true that there's nothing forcing a player to use the most effective strategy. One can certainly choose not to pursue such a strategy, and that point has been made many times over.

The fact remains that, in the back of our minds, we know that we could simply walk over our neighbors if we wanted and if we have copper relatively close to the capital. I think it's reasonable to argue that this is poor game design.

I, for one, have always felt that civ focuses too much on war, though this has been less and less true of each version. Things like culture and diplomacy have been fleshed out as the game progresses. But the underlying fact that war is the easiest and most effective path to victory has never changed.

For those of us who don't find war fun, we have to deal with this in some way. You can set up your game to not be conducive to war, or you can make a conscious decision not to pursue warfare. But can't an argument be made that no one path to victory should be easier or more effective than the others? That's clearly not the case and in my view that's bad game design.

Nonetheless, the circularity of the OP's logic is inescapable. If you aren't willing to actively pursue other victory types, or raise the difficulty while accepting all that comes with that, then at some point you have to consider that this game isn't for you.

The OP clearly has a compulsion to go for the fastest and easiest win possible, and in my view that is the root of his problem. With this type of game, it only makes sense to play that way on higher difficulty levels, where it's actually a challenge; yet he refuses to do that. If you refuse to raise the difficulty level, then of course it's going to be easy to win quickly every time, and the game is going to get stale.

There are multiple difficulty levels for a reason. And the fact is that closely managing your cities is required on higher levels. So your wishes are irreconcilable.

 

[polypheus]

It's the objective part that people seem not to be addressing: an early axe rush is the most powerful strategy in most games. Now it's obviously true that there's nothing forcing a player to use the most effective strategy. One can certainly choose not to pursue such a strategy, and that point has been made many times over.

The fact remains that, in the back of our minds, we know that we could simply walk over our neighbors if we wanted and if we have copper relatively close to the capital. I think it's reasonable to argue that this is poor game design.

It depends on what you mean by "most" games and why it is the "most powerful strategy". On huge maps, emperor level, assuming you have early access to copper, you have two paths.

1. Build few initial cities (maybe 2, 3 at most), then tech to BW, stop expanding via more settlers to build workers, mines and roads as quickly as possible then mass Axes to rush nearby cities/Civs to get the optimal 6-8 cities.
2. Aggressively expanding with building lots of settlers and research archery before BW so build archers for defense and build those same 6-8 cities yourself in locations you want.

Why is (1) so much better than (2)? I don't get it.

If you are on a huge map, you're simply conquering cities near you that should have been YOUR cities had you expanded aggressively in the first place. So you're just conquering the AI's EXCESS cities and not really weaking him. They may not even be in great locations so if you need to raze, rebuild, then that's worse than just building and claiming those areas in the first place! Furthermore, lots of neighboring Civs have standby settlers ready to pounce so razing/resettling is not really viable as you generally end up creating new land for neighboring Civ to settle!

Even if you, say, weaken him, there are tons of other Civs and tons of other cities, it hardly does much for overall relative ranking. Nor is it always necessarily a good thing to rush/conquer or weaken peaceful neighbors that can serve as great friends, buffers, trade partners when you don't need to if you have enough cities, resources to satisy your own empire's needs. Okay so I've weakened, say Hatty and Cyrus and now Alex, Monty, etc can pick them off and both border me, I'm "better off"???

I just don't buy that the early Axe rush is bar none the "most powerful strategy".

In fact I would say that (2) is the more dominant strategy because it works REGARDLESS of whether you have early access to copper or even access to copper AT ALL!

 

[bastillebaston]

He is a troll. He is here to flame and cause disruption. This is obvious because he utterly ignored the below in a post.

You posted you request... how long ago... 12 hours ago? And you label me a "troll" because you have to wait for a reply for more than 12 hours? Learn to be patient, man. Besides nothing compels me not to ignore your requests. However, I shall be kind enough to answer your two questions. I hope you will equally kind, and apologize for your rudeness and lack of faith.

Let's turn this on its head. Answer these two questions.
a) You've been critical of what is wrong with civ. How would you improve it?

The short answer to that is that improving civ is simply not my business, it's Firaxis business. This is what they are paid for. I am not paid to find solutions to their problems.
The longer answer is this: my personal opinion is that the current version of the game is radically broken, and that there seems to be no way of fixing the combat system. At any rate, I've tried various mods, but none of them adequately fixed it. The whole thing has to be redesigned from scratch. If you are looking for suggestions I have no new suggestion to offer other than the obvious ones: a decent AI, some sort of supply lines, less reliance on military units spam and more strategic choices, especially in warfare.

b) Give examples of other computer games where the AI strategy is better in your opinion.

Again, giving examples of other computer games is besides the point. Despite its deep flaws, civ is the best of its genre. Europa Universalis is in may ways worse than civ. And I don't really like the Total War series. But perhaps a combat system more like Medieval II total war (without the RTS) might be better than the current system? I have no strong opinion on that. Having said that, I do however strongly believe that the SoD rush is overpowered and that civ is broken for that reason. Whether other computer games are any better or worse is irrelevant to the point.

If he wasn't a troll he'd have answered this but all he is trying to do is critisize and rile.

So, according to you, whoever criticises (and makes you wait for an answer) is a troll.

 

[Littlelisa]

Praetorian rush

But yeah, unless your playing a map with 1-2 other civs, where you could rush them with your starting warrior even, building up some cities and then a proper army is always better. Archers usualy best, as you can get unlucky and have no copper or iron. (Though it seems the Axe rush maniacs would then quit and restart)

Most an Axe rush will do is weaken your nearest neighbour, so you can expand into their land easier, but you weaken yourself as you spent your time making Axemen instead of improvements/wonders etc



Ah well this thread is repeating itself

 

[Drawmeus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_strategy

"In game theory, dominance (also called strategic dominance) occurs when one strategy is better than another strategy for one player, no matter how that player's opponents may play. Many simple games can be solved using dominance."

In a subset of maps and conditions, the axe rush is a dominant strategy. If that subset is all you play, it is the dominant strategy for games you're playing in. It is NOT a dominant strategy in BtS, because it is only a winning strategy if a particular set of conditions are met (a consequence of this is you're only playing a subset of BtS games, which is almost certainly also true of everyone else but don't be surprised if many/most others don't have the same reaction as you since the subset of games they're playing is very much different than the subset you're playing).

If you were looking for dramatic alterations of the early military mix, you bought the wrong expansion. If you only want to play a wargame (yes, Civ is a wargame, but it's much more than a wargame as well), yes, you're probably not going to be satisfied with this one. To blast BtS because of this stuff is just silly, though; remember that this expansion was specifically billed as NOT being about the military.

Bottom line, if you had posted "BtS fails as a Pangaea alternate military history simulator" it wouldn't have been controversial. It would have been more than a little silly, because Civ was never intended to be a military history simulator much less one simulating a specific subset of possible worlds in which there's only one continent, other tribes are ruled by poor leaders, and all the other conditions you've set for yourself, but it would have been uncontroversial.

EDIT FOR ACCURACY: Incidentally, even on the small-pangaea-few-opponents subset of maps, it's not technically a dominant strategy, because there are conditions under which it is not the best strategy: multiple axe rushing opponents axe rushing into each other make for a scenario in which NOT axe rushing and instead teching gives a considerable advantage.

 

[bastillebaston]

you swapped from :
'axe rush is overpowered and need to be nerfed'
to
" 'war sometimes' dominates on 'always peace' "
whats is the clear logical link between your 2 statements ?
I agree with the later and disagree with the former.

The logical link should be clear enough for everybody to see. You wanna see the logical link? Here it is:

PREMISE NUMBER ONE: The SoD rush is the one dominant strategy in warfare.

PREMISE NUMBER TWO: Overall, '"sometimes war" dominates "always peace".

CONCLUSION: Therefore, the SoD rush is the one dominant strategy overall, eg. it dominates BOTH war strategies and purely peaceful strategies.​

FIRST COROLLARY:
The SoD rush is overpowered, as a game such as civ should not have a unique dominant war strategy.​

Commentary on the first corollary:
In fact, the SoD rush its doubly overpowered:
1) It is overpowered because it dominates over all the other war strategies
2) It is overpowered because it dominates even over purely peaceful strategies (e.g. strategies that are incompatible with going to war sometimes).

SECOND COROLLARY:
The Axe rush is a form of SoD rush. Therefore, like any other SoD rush, the Axe rush is overpowered.​

I take it that you agree with premise one and premise two. Given premise one and two, the conclusion that there is a unique dominant war strategy is logically inescapable. This is bad for the game. The game was not meant to allow for that. Therefore, the game is not working as designed.

while going to war at a time or the other beats never doing war (as a quickest victroy strategy), using 1 SoD/axe rush during 1 war is not the same as saying that SoD/axe rush are overpowered.

We may disagree over the definition of “overpowered”. This is not the real issue – that’s purely verbal disagreement. If you look only at the factual statements, and you’ll see we pretty much agree on them.

you are right: 1 SoD will win the battle... but it won't mean you win the war or that the diplo to stop other civ from intruding, or the culture to protect your newly obtains cities are not NECESSARY. or trade so that your powerful 14pop city does not go into rebellion...etc

Irrelevant. Once you concede that SoDs are required to win battles and that "sometimes war" dominates over "always peace", you have conceded pretty much all the factual statements I am arguing for.

Now, once we get the facts right, it seems to me that one evaluation of them follows naturally. If the SoD rush is the dominant war strategy (that’s a fact almost everybody agrees upon), then the game is bad (personal evaluation) for two reasons:

1. because it’s not working as intended
2. because any wargame with a unique dominant war strategy is repetitive, and therefore boring.

 

[Drawmeus]

I'm not familiar with the term "SoD rush"...

I'm just going to point out that the axe rush can't possibly win under a significant number of conditions - namely, conditions where it simply can't reach enemies (or reach them before they're well beyond that level of tech). You can't for instance, conquer a Continents map with an axe rush because there's no way to get axes onto another continent before then.

Long story short: if you play an aggro map, don't complain that aggro strategies win.

 

[Fugl]

Like some others say, try play on different setups

Id suggest playing atleast on Emperor, try continents or the new hemispheres, pick 3-4 maybe on large map, always pick random civ in setup, and maybe most importantly make the best of your spawn and what civilization you get, dont restart unless its like icespawn or something.

Its always new situations and oportunities, and thats the ticker for me

While early war is great for getting big, the wonders you miss to undiscovered lands and possible techtradepartners you lose also could make it a bad deal, and friendly ais elsewhere trading with eachother will maybe get well ahead of you, early expansion has a price, bad economy.