Criticizing the Istanbul Doctrine - help me!

[raigainousa]

First word:

Here are my set of doctrines which I used to play BTS. The only problem now, is that they seem to start failing.

Here it is:

Spoiler :

Istanbul Doctrine
1. Military units must be constantily built, in order to repulse any attacks from any invaders.
2. The official war plan is blitzkrieg. Cities must be captured as fast as possible, in order to easily secure victory, and prevent increasing maintenance and war weariness.
3. Cottages must be built, in order to easily maintain the empire. All improvements that add gold were prioritized. In the event of crisis, cities were sometimes required to focus on wealth.
4. The investment to research is set at 70%, in order to keep pace to improving technology.
5. Unless the economy allows, cultural focus is limited to buildings.
6. Spies are not prioritized, as they are hard to maintain.
7. Civics chosen must add to wealth, otherwise the economy would collapse.
8. Religion is not focused.
9. The expansion is needed to keep the enemies weak.
10. The production is prioritized to build military units easily.

Note: I always shoot on conquest victory.

For all users, I request that you criticize this.

 

[kossin]

Play the map, you never know what hand you're dealt.

 

[raigainousa]

Here my version is 3.13 so you may find problems if you have more recent ones

 

[Gooblah]

Istanbul Doctrine
1. Military units must be constantily built, in order to repulse any attacks from any invaders.

You'll sink your economy doing this.

2. The official war plan is blitzkrieg. Cities must be captured as fast as possible, in order to easily secure victory, and prevent increasing maintenance and war weariness.

Attack in waves; defeat and empire, rebuild improvements, build infrastructure, improve the economy, repeat.

3. Cottages must be built, in order to easily maintain the empire. All improvements that add gold were prioritized. In the event of crisis, cities were sometimes required to focus on wealth.

Sounds good, but building wealth shouldn't be relied upon.

4. The investment to research is set at 70%, in order to keep pace to improving technology.

Research slider set should be situational. Always keeping it at 70& is suicidal. Remember that a civ with 10 cities at 50% research can usually keep pace with a civ with 1 city at 100%.

5. Unless the economy allows, cultural focus is limited to buildings.

as to what this means.

6. Spies are not prioritized, as they are hard to maintain.

You just ignored an integral part of the game. Spies allow you to maintain a tech lead, and make your conquests faster by allowing City Revolt (thus saving Siege for collateral only)

7. Civics chosen must add to wealth, otherwise the economy would collapse.

Bad advice. High-cost civics like Vassalage or Police State have many usages. Bureaucracy is high-cost, but is amazing.

8. Religion is not focused.

You'll lose out on AP, UoS, and SM bonuses this way, as well as a source of culture and happiness.

9. The expansion is needed to keep the enemies weak.

You can keep enemies weak w/o constant expansion.

10. The production is prioritized to build military units easily.

Without proper infrastructure, the units are worthless.

 

[raigainousa]

Gooblah, thanks for your critic, but I need a deeper proof(well, I just want to study it) for better.

 

[Dhaulagiri]

There's a point when you have libraries built and CoL is either researched or close where it would be smart to expand and take the hit to your 70% research goal. Expand peacefully if you have land or war. Those 2 scientists you run in most cities, plus the courthouses can keep you researching at a decent rate until you get currency.

 

[BakingTheArt]

I routinely expand down to 20%, sometimes running a deficit at 0. If you can run a good Specialist-based economy in the early games, the world is your oyster. And even with a more Cottage based one, remember that making 70 beakers at 30% is better than 50 at 70%. I wouldn't rule out religion, too: a religous economy, based on the Spiral Minaret and University of Sankore is one of my favorite games, and you lose valueable allies by staying agnostic.

 

[Yamps]

Heh, this looks like a lot of fun. I'll bet you'll get a lot of contradicting advice here. Well, here goes my 2 :

Doctrine 0

Following doctrines blindly will get you killed. Always question the principles and figure out your strategic situation and goals before you apply anything. And yes, feel free to question this doctrine as well.

1. Military units must be constantily built, in order to repulse any attacks from any invaders.

Learn your Diplo well, learn the leader traits and game mechanics and you'll often find yourself 100% safe practically defenseless. That is, build units if you need them/plan to use them. Btw, you should know that for all practical purposes power rating doesn't have anything to do with war deterrence, it's diplomacy that matters.

2. The official war plan is blitzkrieg. Cities must be captured as fast as possible, in order to easily secure victory, and prevent increasing maintenance and war weariness.

Sounds good to me. IMO, wars should be well planned and executed swiftly if possible. However, sometimes attack waves are better/necessary so you'll just have to make your decision in each and every situation.

3. Cottages must be built, in order to easily maintain the empire. All improvements that add gold were prioritized. In the event of crisis, cities were sometimes required to focus on wealth.

There are other ways than cottages, try them out to know your options. Don't build all science/gold improvements everywhere, specialize. Wealth building is one of the possible strategies in hammer+cottage space games; research building in the early game when you don't have many cottages/REP specialists is also an option, etc. It's situational, play the map. (You'll get this advice a lot. )

4. The investment to research is set at 70%, in order to keep pace to improving technology.

The actual slider percentage is irrelevant, always look at actual beaker/coin per turn values. More importantly, decide do you even need more techs in the first place. Perhaps you could go for bankrupt domination? You can always spend the cash later. Another thing, it's valuable to save up money and spend it all fast after Libs/Oxford.

5. Unless the economy allows, cultural focus is limited to buildings.

I don't play for Culture victories at all so I won't comment this much. Do you mean the culture slider to tackle unhappiness? This mostly depends on your economy choice and the amount of cottages. CE hurts a lot from culture slider, but perhaps you just don't care at the time. (drafting comes to mind) Perhaps a point worth noting, take a look how much your 10% of culture is costing you. Perhaps you'd be better off with a few angry pop than say -100 gpt.

6. Spies are not prioritized, as they are hard to maintain.

How are spies hard to maintain? Using spies for city revolts is one of the oftenly used strategies. If you mean EP points, imo using short bursts of 100% EP if really needed is definitely better than some arbitrary percentage all the time without planning. Focusing EP on specific opponents helps too. There is also EE, Deity level players seem to like it...

7. Civics chosen must add to wealth, otherwise the economy would collapse.

Wealth? Another . Civics chosen must accompany the chosen goal and situation, especially if Spiritual.

8. Religion is not focused.

...not focused right away in most of the games, unless perhaps going for Cultural victories. Religion is a political mean and economical as well so it is a very important part of the game. However, sometimes things like OR without state religion are best to keep neighbors happy.

9. The expansion is needed to keep the enemies weak.

Expansion is good to get big and mean, yeah. When to do it and how aggressively is very situational though...If you do it early, make sure you plan the economic recovery before you crash. You could also start small, save enough land for 6 Universities (Oxford) and explode then. The fun is all yours.

10. The production is prioritized to build military units easily.

I'd say that's a good general doctrine. One of my mistakes I often did before was beeling military techs without good production capabilities. (D'oh, Cavalry is really cool, but how on earth I'm going to build all that right now?! )

However, you should realize that you have 2 quite different options: troops from big hammer cites and troops from food via slavery or drafting. GT powered 3 per turn rifle drafting will get you far.


Btw, on what level do you usually play? Noble/Prince? Check out War Academy...

 

[Jamuka]

1. Military units must be constantily built, in order to repulse any attacks from any invaders.
3. Cottages must be built, in order to easily maintain the empire. All improvements that add gold were prioritized. In the event of crisis, cities were sometimes required to focus on wealth.

Well, there's your problem. Cottages are too slow for frontier cities, especially if you're constantly invading. Build cottages in your first few cities and after that forget about them. The rest can stick to hammers - or specialists if they must.

Oh, building wealth is fine, and can (should) be relied upon.

4. The investment to research is set at 70%, in order to keep pace to improving technology

Forget this nonsense.

6. Spies are not prioritized, as they are hard to maintain.

If you want to be lazy about espionage, just focus all your EP into whichever AI overexpands the most. They wont have the economy to reciprocate any EP back, and you can steal some extra techs for free. You dont even have to use your espionage slider.

 

[michmbk]

4 and 6 are the big ones that stand out to me. I often crash my economy by getting tons of early cities and limping to COL and Currency, with a 0% slider and sometimes even losing money at that point. Once I hit those two techs and get courthouses down, look out - all those cities start to make me bigger and stronger and a better techer in the long run. I love to be at 70% later in the game if I've done things right, but then will often take it to 0% if under US to buy units/infrastructure.

Spies can be integral in teching too - it often takes fewer espionage points to steal a tech than beakers to research manually. To convince yourself, try a game where you build great wall first, settle the spy when he pops, and focus all your espionage on the nearest civ. I guarantee you'll steal minimum 5 techs during the game. In fact, I played a game on monarch on the forum a month or two ago where I set research at 0% beginning at alphabet, and kept up in tech with the rest of the world through espionage (won via AP cheese).

 

[dorkynorky]

1. It is better to avoid attacks than repulse them. See some of the threads that deal with diplomacy. Basically, as you increase in difficulty you can't keep up with other civs in military production for a whole game (although at times you can surpass them for short periods). Too many units mean lots of unit maintenance. You have to learn to use diplomacy to try and avert attacks and learn how to use other typical techniques (like monitoring WHEOOHRN and scouting for SoD's) to tell you when civs are preparing for war with you and where their going to send their troops.

2. Correct. One other thing that could be added. Troop buildup for wars should also be done in the most expedient fashion (whipping, drafting, queue swapping, mass upgrades) to keep maintenance costs low and provide the largest window for military conquest.

3. Where you get your commerce is very map and game dependent.

4. Having a hard setting for the slider limits your ability to adapt to game circumstances. If you have room to REX or are on a killing spree much lower slider values can be sustained. Expansion in any form is going to put a strain on one's economy but the key is to follow up expansion with appropriate economic developments and deficit research.

5. Not sure what this means, but at the appropriate times in the game, it can be useful to run artists to speed border pops in newly acquired cities.

6. As difficulty increases it is more difficult to keep up with ai in espionage without consciously prioritizing it. However, ignoring it (not directing EPs towards next targets, not using spies to keep track of enemy SoD's when no OB, etc.) is going to limit one's effectiveness as a player.

7. Using war civics like Nationhood, Vassalage or Theocracy are important. As stated in 1, war preparation should be a short term event and war civics only need to be used at this point. As others have noted, if you have the Spiritual trait, being able to adopt war civics at the appropriate times without anarchy is the major power of the trait.

8. Founding religions is not a must. However, adopting a religion or perhaps various religions through out the game is key to diplomacy and the appropriate use of OR, Theocracy and Pacifism can significantly affect your commerce improvement, war successes and great person generation. Monastaries in science cities can act like early universities and observatories in terms of beaker generation. Combined with religious wonders, religious buildings can boost science, gold an hammers significantly.

9. Expansion in and of itself will only make your victim weak. As has been stated, it will also make you weak economically, at least until you can recover your economy. Balancing expansion and recovery is one of the challenges of the game.

10. City specialization is important. Having an appropriately balanced amount of commerce and production cities is vital. As regards to what one does with their production cities, it is not always optimal to build units. Diplomacy is the key to averting war and in the case where one wants to initiate war, having production cities build wealth to more rapidly obtain a key military tech can often be a better plan than building outdated units.

 

[Lone Wolf]

What does all that have to do with Istanbul?

 

[Kornaki]

2. The official war plan is blitzkrieg. Cities must be captured as fast as possible, in order to easily secure victory, and prevent increasing maintenance and war weariness.

I had some thoughts on this that might be of interest here:

If you've built up enough troops to rip through your opponent's empire with enough units to bombard + attack on the same turn, and keep the main force moving while wounded units heal (or similar effect) then you won the war during the troop buildup. While the war is the end result of a decisive victory over your opponent, the decision came about before you even declared war. Unless you have some sort of audacious cavalry assault behind enemy lines that tears through a weakly defended core while your opponent's tied up in the front, the only way you can use warfare as a decision maker is to slog it out on an even footing. By requiring the ability win decisively at the start of the war, you're actually eliminating your ability to win decisively via war.