Continents,how to invade the other side?

Tatran

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Aug 23, 2002
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I need some advice for a Conquest and/or Domination win for
continent maps.All solo games have been continents so far,but
I can't achieve a military win on noble.
The problem with my last 4 attempts was one or more Financial
civs on the other continent.Lost to Washington (space race),
abandoned a game as Kublai Khan because Mansa had already tanks
while I decimated Monty and Tokugawa with grenadiers,game no.3
I won very close to Huayna Capac (space race) and my last/currently
game was also a hopeless situation,removed Napoleon and stayed at war
with Hatty until Steam Power,while the other continent with 3 Financial
civs (Catherine,Huayna and Qin) + Alex were very friendly with each other
and Catherine was already building artillery in 1800 AD :eek: .
I was constant at war with one of my neighbours,even in my last game
I didn't have any war weariness,but this looks like the wrong strategy.
In another game I had Gandhi as neighbour and let him stay.Shared his
religion and favourite civic,so no tech problems,but the game end in
a space race with him.
Maybe continents aren't suited for a military win.
 
A continent with 3 financial civs is just bad luck, but maybe it's possible to win such a game too.
I always play continents, and I think every victory type is doable in these maps. The key in my games is always research: the more advanced, the stronger. If you are backwards at noble level you probably had some problems improving your economy. You could try a financial civ (Huayna, who's aggressive too, for a military win). Don't worry about overwhelming your opponent too quickly, wait until you have a military advantage. Beeline for military techs when you hit astronomy and education (obs, unis), use some heavy production cities to produce your entire military and don't convert your whole empire to unit production. Your largest cities should mostly be commerce cities.
This is what I needed to do to beat noble level. If you post a savegame people could check it and tell what you were doing wrong.
 
I've won every victory type on noble except military.(continents)
Lessons from previous games my research was never below 50%.

 
I always struggle on the continent move. I often fail to build the ships early enough to invade. Plus some of the techs cancel out the wonders i like so im late on ocean faring ships. I have not really played the endgame on a military conquest yet so it will be fun trying that on my latest game. I remember the civ 3 days you required a huge fleet just to land on a continent. Its nice to have just 10 or so cities to control for once and not 100-150. Too much work on land moving workers on civ 3.
 
Invading another continent is a heavy drain on your resources. Build plenty of commerce cities to support research, upgrade, city, and unit costs. Build plenty of production cities to crank out plenty of units to destroy their built-up defenses. Also, build a couple of coastal production cities to build up a strong navy to bombard their cities and to carry your troops. Invasion is usually suitable by the Renaissance Era and beyond.
 
Circumnavigating the globe will help give a nice boost to you navy, as well as establishing some nice connections for tech purposses.
 
If youre going for a military win, why are you buidling wonders not related to your victory condition

Everything, must go towards your goal...dont build libraries in cities taht dont need them.

I suggest bumping up your level to prince or monarch, because there youll be forced to learn new strategies
 
Wonders don't do that much. If the Colossus is hampering you from getting Astronomy to go invade, then it's a sign to bite the bullet and research Astronomy earlier. If that makes the Colossus not worthwhile for you, then don't build it in the first place.

Getting weened off wonder addiction is important. Circumnav is a good goal. Early on, try to somewhat beeline to Optics and then send a pair of caravels in opposite directions to circumnav.

Don't be overly concerned about the research slider. You should probably have expanded aggressively at the start. Try to get at least 10 cities by 1AD. That's very doable.
 
Right - how do you pay for that kind of expansion, anyway? I'm normally playing as Catherine the Great (Financial/Creative), and ten cities by AD 1 strikes me as being, well, really expensive to pull off. Is it time to abandon the near-100% research all the time? Or should I be focusing on going mad with river cottages and spamming out cities to use them?

By the way... I play on ... warlord. Oh, the shame! :( By the way, a bit about me - my best game was something like 23000 points and Caesar Augustus on a regular sized Terra map, if I recall correctly. I dominated the world after crushing everyone on the main continent under my Russian boot, and nabbed a city or two on the other continent to complete my victory. Cossacks rule. My main experience was Civilization III (and II, with a wee bit of I, but I never owned I)... sucks I can't spam out settlers with a settler factory like I used to be able to, but truth be told I don't miss corruption.
 
I see no danger dropping down to 50-60 research during a good war. I used to prefer 70% science as a minimum but you have to think long term and building up a huge commerce base to pay for the later game. The science rate normally recovers once the cottages get going on expanded cities.

In short Expand, develop, expand, develop, and if you run out of space to expand start a war assuming you have been keeping up your military with a city or 2 just producing military units :)

Perhaps you need to brush up your military tactics? Plenty of catapults to do collatural damage and reduce city defence bonus to 0% then throw a barrage of at least 6 or so axemen and swordsmen at the archers or spearmen defending. If a city has +60 defence and you have no catapults wait till you do. No point wasting units :)

Should be enough to take any city with 1-2 defenders. To be fair against archers in the early game 3-5 axemen should be able to knock over a city with 2 archers assuming you used a barrack.

The other issue could be you simply have not produced enough military. On my current game i had a stack of 15 or so samurai and 4 catapults by 1400ad. Lets just say i sent the lot against a city with 4 longbowmen 2 catapults and a pikeman it was under my control 3 turns later. :lol:
 
Concerning conquest on Continent maps: The key to everything, and practically every victory condition on every map, is commerce. If you can take over your continent and build a strong economy then invading the other continents will be much easier than otherwise. Commerce=tech=power. If you don't have a tech lead, don't invade. Invasions are expensive and all that money could have been going to improving your tech position. When invading another continent, choose one opponent and eliminate them from the game. Don't leave even one city. Get them, and their deal-making carcass, out of the game. Who I choose to pick on will depend on relative strengths and relations. I prefer to attack the strongest unless they have the second-strongest as a good friend. If so, I'll pick on the weakest so I can get a base of operations on the continent to work from.

Dr Corbett said:
Right - how do you pay for that kind of expansion, anyway? I'm normally playing as Catherine the Great (Financial/Creative), and ten cities by AD 1 strikes me as being, well, really expensive to pull off. Is it time to abandon the near-100% research all the time? Or should I be focusing on going mad with river cottages and spamming out cities to use them?

How fast to expand will depend on several factors (difficulty setting, distance to nearest neighbors, isolated or not, and on and on). At higher difficulty levels you pretty much have to expand *fast* or the AI, with its bonuses, will out-expand you and gobble up all the good land around you. It isn't quite as easy as some make it sound to go take those cities later, either. I usually don't mind dropping my research slider to 30% in the early expansion phase, but I'm working cottages like mad to get it back to 70% as soon as possible.

Assuming you want to expand as quickly as possible without going below 50% research, here is my strategy for expanding as quickly as your economy allows: If you pay attention to how much each additional city is costing in upkeep, you can pretty well estimate how much the next will cost you. In the early game, keep your research slider at 70% with a small monetary gain each turn. Improve your cities and watch as that monetary gain slowly increases. When you have enough extra coming in each turn to pay the upkeep costs for another city, go ahead and found it. If you keep doing this, you expand at a rate that your economy can support, but where you're not expanding too slowly either. I would never try to keep 100% research all the time, especially in the beginning expansion phases.
 
You'd better find something better for those financial civs to do than just peacefully develop. From the picture, I'd definitely up to research rate. 8 turn research ain't gonna cut it unless you've already managed to embroil the whole world in war.
 
The Tyrant said:
When invading another continent, choose one opponent and eliminate them from the game. Don't leave even one city. Get them, and their deal-making carcass, out of the game.

Interesting. If I'm at war, I often take a civ down to the point where it's weak enough not to pose much future threat to me (eg. 2-3 cities) then I turn on someone else. My reasoning is that if I'm at the point where there's a 2-3 city civ I've been at war with and a 10-city civ nearby, then the 10-city civ is the one that poses the threat to me. Especially on the higher levels where the AI bonuses mean a large civ at peace is probably developing a lot faster than I can. I know I can pick off the weakened small civ any time I fancy in the future, but the strong one might later get ahead, or attack me and cause me serious damage. Plus if I'm suffering from war-weariness then swapping wars gives an instant solution.

What's your reasoning behind wanting to get rid of even the last city?

The Tyrant said:
Who I choose to pick on will depend on relative strengths and relations. I prefer to attack the strongest unless they have the second-strongest as a good friend. If so, I'll pick on the weakest so I can get a base of operations on the continent to work from.

Agree with those. I'll also base my decision a lot on geography - where's the easiest place to get my forces to and to defend. Because of the difficulty in attacking over the sea, a very important issue for me is minimizing the distance my ships have to travel to get the troops across. If there's a point where the continents are close enough (or linked by a chain of islands) that I can get my transports across in one turn, not leaving units vulnerable at sea, that will probably be decisive in choosing where/who to attack). Another factor is how far I've managed to spread my religion: There's good advantage in attacking a civ that you can see all his units in most of his cities because of religion spread - but that does require a short war as it's massively counterbalanced by 'we refuse to fight our brothers and sisters in the faith' unhappiness if he has the same state religion. I'm less concerned about the information from AI having religion spread in my cities because I strongly suspect the AI doesn't know how to use that information very well.
 
DynamicSpirit said:
Interesting. If I'm at war, I often take a civ down to the point where it's weak enough not to pose much future threat to me (eg. 2-3 cities) then I turn on someone else. My reasoning is that if I'm at the point where there's a 2-3 city civ I've been at war with and a 10-city civ nearby, then the 10-city civ is the one that poses the threat to me. Especially on the higher levels where the AI bonuses mean a large civ at peace is probably developing a lot faster than I can. I know I can pick off the weakened small civ any time I fancy in the future, but the strong one might later get ahead, or attack me and cause me serious damage. Plus if I'm suffering from war-weariness then swapping wars gives an instant solution.

What's your reasoning behind wanting to get rid of even the last city?

Hmm... good point about the AI bonuses on higher levels. Right now I regularly play on Prince and am trying a few things on Monarch. I'll probably have to adjust my strategy at higher levels.

Basically, I go for elimination (unless they have some really distant cities somewhere else on the map) for two reasons:
1) I would rather garrison their last cities than have to heavily garrison the border near them. That way I don't have to worry about desperation or punitive attacks. I got into that habit after *almost* being able to wipe out Alexander in one game and Louis in another. Turn your attention elsewhere for just a moment and they'll declare/pillage just for fun.
2) Leaving them in the game means they can still cause some trouble diplomatically, trading techs, asking friends to attack, etc. This is less of a worry because their best deals are going to be made soon after you attack. Soon after you reduce their empire to a few cities they will have traded away anything of value and have little bargaining power left. Still, if I can take them out before they trade their best techs to the others, that means I've stunted the competition's potential. Remember, I try to take the strongest, so they may have techs that the others don't have yet.

I guess total elimination isn't vital, but there are some advantages to not having to worry about that civ for the rest of the game. Granted, the higher difficulty levels might require me to revise this tactic.
 
I got a noble domination victory(really thought i was playing prince, but it felt a bit too easy, now i know why) on continents, but it went right only because I could go by trireme to another continent and achieve tech advantage before going for the third.
I was Huayna Capac, had Alexander on my continent (very near in fact) and Napoleon on the neighbouring continent.
I developped to 3 cities and attacked Alexander. Poor guy had more cities than I did and had inprisonned me, I didn't like this (and I didn't want him to have his UU when I come). So time for war.
I send my axemen to his archers, with many losses but a final win.
After that, I developped a bit (cottage spam), build up good military (longbows/cats/macemen/elephants) and went to the next continent with a very little fleet (2 triremes!) making fast reinforcements while my cats got the defenses down. Very easy because at some points there was only one tile water between the 2 continents!
The war ended with the last french city captured.
At this point, I had the 2 small continents for myself, had discovered Gunpwder, Chemistry, Astronomy,... and was well on the way for rifling.
Elizabeth had found my continent but i didn't know where she was hiding!
So I upgraded my 2 triremes to gallions, built a few frigates, filled the gallions with my promoted units and send them scouting. (My frigates came only a little later). I discovered a continent with English dominating Russia and dirt poor mongols in the far east. I got open borders from elizabeth and Catherine, deposited my troops, and made a few round-trips with my gallions to get riflemen and canons near the mongol borders. (meantime, Elizabeth and Catherine had build up a good railroad system, cool)
I had a good stack in russian territory, ready to jump at kublai kahn. I bribed Catherine into war against Kublai then started land war+frigates bombing. Kublai kahn had really widespread cities, with good culture so it took a while to get them all, but he was backward in science, only could send longbows+horse archers (no keshiks! lol).
I then had a good foot on the last continent (plenty space from mongols). Meanwhile I had built bombers, and airports to bring tanks, infantries and missionaries to the new world.
After that I went for elizabeth (not needed, in fact, i could have built a few settlers for the last few % of land i needed) and took out quickly 5 cities (redcoats don't like tanks). that was fun!

my 2 cents:
* you need to start trading techs+ressources with the newly discovered civs, so they open borders, and let you catchup/outrace them in tech.
* for invasion, you need troops (obviously) and a few naval units
if you can get open borders with one of the local civs, you don't need a massive fleet,
if you don't, well, be prepared for a naval war! you need to bring those stacks alive to the other side!
* better even, if you get a local on your side against another, you won't need too much to bother on taking/defending every city (defending cities takes lots of units!)
 
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