Dom gain will drag on past industrial, what's my best options for war in the modern?

[Stacked_Deck]

Alternatively, would it be better to hold on to what I've already conquered and wait until the atomic for nukes?

Edit: Typo in the title, should read "Dom game".

 

[consentient]

It's extremely rare that a map can't be cleared with Artillery spam. If you beeline Dynamite, you should be able to avoid Modern in most cases. But if you are faced with Modern warfare, my favourite thing is to upgrade the Cavalry to Landships and maybe even Tanks, and spam those.

The most important thing with all Domination is the economy. The higher your GPT, the better you are doing. If you use Honor, Commerce and Autocracy you will be swimming in a sea of gold and happiness that usually is enough to finish any game.

 

[Acken]

Great war bombers and especially bombers are a really efficient modern/atomic era unit.

After that it's tank+rockets

 

[Stacked_Deck]

It's extremely rare that a map can't be cleared with Artillery spam.

Great war bombers and especially bombers are a really efficient modern/atomic era unit.

Yeah you were right about that. By the final civ (the furthest from my start and unfortunately the runaway) I had creeped into flight but that just ended up supplementing the artillery, having the bombers take out units let the Artillery focus on the city. So the artillery losing some effectiveness ended up being very minor.

The biggest obstacle and what slowed me down was happiness though. I founded 3 cities and didn't conquer anything until I hit dynamite. When I was running out of happiness I had 6 capitals (including my own), 2 self-founded expands and 5 AI expands, which I wanted for strategic reasons. I think when I started the artillery push my cities were around 15 pop.

Policy wise I went Tradition->Commerce->Order.

So what went wrong there?
Did I own too many cities?
Should I have limited the happiness in my expands to get the more efficient pop:happiness ratio from tradition?
Ignore the happiness and just push on despite the hefty combat penalty?

 

[Stacked_Deck]

As an example: Should I have razed Dongducheon, Geoje and Anju (Anju I did end up razing)?

 

[consentient]

My own view on razing is that I will only keep a city if

- it has Wonders that really help the warmongering (Machu Pichu, Pyramids, Notre Dame, Chichen Itza, etc)

- it has a good population and science buildings, so I can annex it (and have the happiness to do it, which you don't)

- it's strategically necessary to puppet it in order to assault another city

- - -

But beyond those questions, I'd encourage you to look at certain things that your screenshot reveals:

1. Troops. You don't have very many. This will slow you down. The faster you can conquer, the easier it is, believe me.

2. Science. For T300+ your science is really small. I don't know what difficulty that is, but on higher difficulties you need to reach certain military techs in good enough time for them to be properly effective, and to stop the AI from winning. Look at some of the threads on this board to learn how to grow your science better.

3. Happiness. If you take Autocracy and Commerce (which you should for every Domination sweep), you should not be unhappy. Unhappiness actually applies a penalty to your units combat strength and they could lose the war as a result. Plus, barbs could spawn next to your undefended capital and pillage your stuff.

If I could recommend one video that includes late game conquest, I'd probably choose PeddroElm's video of the Songhai Deity Challenge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvN3hIa_hi8

 

[Stacked_Deck]

Thanks for all the input Consentient.

Yeah, this game was on emperor, I don't often do domination games so I thought I'd drop it while I learn it. As such a lot of choices came down to "Sod it, it's good enough". At the time of the screen shot I believe I was ranked 1st in all demographics, except approval. Definitely things I need to pay attention on when I move the difficulty back.

My military for example, steam-rolled through most of the emperor-tier civs so I did get lazy with producing more units. I think in the screen shot that was approximately 2/3s of my army, the rest I moved because it looked like the remnants of Rome were amassing units near my border. I toyed with the idea of building a second army so I could fight on multiple fronts, but I wasn't sure I could get enough happiness to raise/capture more than one city at a time.

Once I hit dynamite I started de-prioritizing science by a lot. I often see people mentioning that artillery should be enough to clear a pangea, so most of my focus turned to production and gold. A bit fool-hardy I suppose, you never know what could go wrong with the artillery push.

I took Order because of the more immediate happiness tenants, but you're right, with two civs lefts I should've thought about the bigger picture more. Some of the neat infrastructure tenants in Order were a waste in retrospect, given how the game didn't last much longer.