Becoming a better warmongerer.

[Simplicity4]

If there's one thing I'm terrible at in this game, it's warmongering. I can win up to immortal, and I've won on domination. But I'm horrible at fighting wars. And it seems to come down to two things for me:

1) Happiness - Even if I were to puppet my enemies, my happiness rating is usually trash after conquering even one city. I can usually grow without conquest up to my happiness cap (and if you can do that, why bother to conquer up until that point... you'll just get negative penalties on diplo and happiness). So then when it's time to start eyeing neighbors... I'm going to wind up on negative territory.

2) City conquest. Conquering cities is tough. Conquering a mildly defended city is next to impossible for me. Usually, it comes down to do I have a tech advantage? Yes? Then I can pull off city conquest.

Advice?

 

[The_Quasar]

If there's one thing I'm terrible at in this game, it's warmongering. I can win up to immortal, and I've won on domination. But I'm horrible at fighting wars. And it seems to come down to two things for me:

1) Happiness - Even if I were to puppet my enemies, my happiness rating is usually trash after conquering even one city. I can usually grow without conquest up to my happiness cap (and if you can do that, why bother to conquer up until that point... you'll just get negative penalties on diplo and happiness). So then when it's time to start eyeing neighbors... I'm going to wind up on negative territory.

You should be helping to managing Happiness by the use of your culture, by picking the right Social Policies. I tend to arrange to have a few more Happiness as I go towards conquering. If you have a large amount of puppetted cities, consider annexing a couple, and immediately buying a Courthouse. This will gain you a few extra Happiness too.

2) City conquest. Conquering cities is tough. Conquering a mildly defended city is next to impossible for me. Usually, it comes down to do I have a tech advantage? Yes? Then I can pull off city conquest.
Advice?

You don't need a tech advantage to take down a city... what you need is sensible use of what you do have, and preferably use siege units to take down the defenses, then if you can, go in with something with more than 1 movement point. Take advantage of the AI's ineptitude with unit placement to trap and kill dangerous units.

Above all, don't build too many cities... you normally only need to build a maximum of about 6. Too many cities = Happiness problems.

 

[Waywocket]

Wow, I'm not certain I've ever built six cities. Four is my usual max, but for a domination game it's often just two (probably three most of the time).

Don't be afraid to annex unless you really want to pump out SPs, and consider selling marginal cities to whatever AI has the most cash - unless you feel that's too cheesy in which case there's always the option to raze.

 

[PhilBowles]

2) City conquest. Conquering cities is tough. Conquering a mildly defended city is next to impossible for me. Usually, it comes down to do I have a tech advantage? Yes? Then I can pull off city conquest.

Advice?

Don't attack piecemeal - organise two or three strong melee units and three or four siege units in one place before declaring war; they'll take a city quickly, and usually it's a simple matter to move on and do the same to other cities with the same army. Warmongering is often a binary affair - if you have the right mix of units to take the first city, you can often ride over an entire civ with similar ease, but if you can't take that city (often if the enemy has stuck a lot of units at your border so you can't attack), you can often remain in a stalemate for the rest of the war and find it difficult to get units into positions where they coordinate well.

 

[Simplicity4]

This seems like good advice for taking over one civ. But I'm talking about taking over 10 civs. Or at least their capitals. So you can roll over a civ. You can't raze its capital. So that's at least one puppet you have to maintain. But even if you do raze everything but the capitals, the unhappiness shock of doing so should put you into deep negative land, no?

 

[prince_caspian]

You don't have to take every city - you can give away some unimportant ones, or those hard to defend, while you try to get the happiness level back up again. You can play the AI with each other if you give away the right cities.

Like The_Quasar says, you need to have the right SPs in place like Piety -> Organized Religion or Honor -> Military Caste - they don't just help, they are essential SPs as puppets like building monuments, temples and walls. Of course, if you can enter industrial Autocracy is definitely the game breaker for happiness.

Another is taking cities which have luxs you don't have or those with happiness wonders like Chichen Itza.

 

[durian]

Be a selective conqueror! Whenever I plan conquest, I always try to capture cities with luxuries that I don't have first. I never take cities that I aren't really useful to me since those will just add to unhappiness.

Capturing a city is much easier if you bring some siege units and other ranged units along with you. I usually weaken a city to half HP before sending in my melee units. (Unless I have a tech advantage)

 

[Chee]

I too am not a great warmonger, but can win on Emperor level every time via other means. I can easily roll over a couple of civs close to me but then I get slowed down by the happiness limitations too.

I do tend to puppet everything though as it annoys me when I raze a city and the AI plants another city in it's place. I have gotten into the habit of selling cities that are of no use, usually to the weakest civ who isn't a threat to me.

After a couple of civs are taken out I tend to lose my momentum and focus.

I think Piety is a must in domination games though.

 

[Peng Qi]

Build lots of trade posts. Too many farms will increase your unhappiness a lot and make it hard to occupy cities.