Domination victory with only 3 advanced units

[smallstepforman]

Due to the 1 unit per tile limitations, it's suprisingly easy to capture an enemy capital if you have 3 decent offensive units which are better by one level (eg. Longsword vs swordsman, rifleman vs longswords, knights vs horseman etc). The One Unit Per Tile restrictions mean that that from any direction you can only be attacked once, since even if the attack fails and the enemy withdraws, another unit cannot attack from the same direction. Essentially, the weakened unit acts as a barrier between your forces and fresh enemy forces. Your 3 units should be sufficient to capture the capital, even without ranged weapons.

Create a puppet, negotiate for peace, heal the 3 units, and send them towards the next capital. For a small world, even on emperor difficulty, you only need to attack/capture 5 cities for domination win. Continents across the ocean can also be captured since you dont require a navy - land on the enemy coast just on the same turn you declare war.

My previous game (Emperor, small world) was over before it even began. All due to the 1UPT limitation. In Civ4 and stacks, invasions were truly epic. In Civ5, it only takes 3 units for domination victory.

 

[coe]

Add great general to gain another 25% boost and then honor tree policies of even more boost for next tile unit boost and you will have the same effect even with similar era units. It turns fights from so-so into deceive victories.

 

[Timber0]

It's more because of the AI's failure to think when attacking. I can also easily hold off 50+ units with 2-3 ranged units, given that they all come in a small area, which usually is true as they go for a city.

AI still seems to be thinking as units could stack, sending out ranged first, or sending units 1 and 1, and not using ranged to clear a path first. They're not even thinking about using melee units to work as a shield towards a bunch of ranged.

 

[dannythefool]

AI still seems to be thinking as units could stack, sending out ranged first, or sending units 1 and 1, and not using ranged to clear a path first. They're not even thinking about using melee units to work as a shield towards a bunch of ranged.

This. It doesn't understand using melee as shield for ranged, and it doesn't understand that tiles can be blocked by other military. (In fact, if you want to sabotage a war and you have open borders with the nation whose cities you want to protect, you can put some cheap warriors in a circle around them and the enemy AI will mostly just parade its close range military units around, with the occasional ranged hit from ranged units that the city should have no trouble at all dispatching and/or scaring away.)

 

[MeowTau]

I used this cheap blocking strategy to keep the AI from dropping a city state, after which it likely would go after me. The biggest downside is that each turn got progressively slower, and the game finely choked and died at about turn 100 of this, forcing me to remove the blockade.

I think this will be hard to fix, but perhaps AI can detect a block and either give up or threaten war if you don't move.

The AI also appears to be too dumb to have units directly attack from the water, even if the city has no hp whatsoever.

 

[alpaca]

Reminds me of the India Bollywood game I played today where I was able to hold off a Roman Empire that had 5-10 times more resources than I did and just sent suicide units every turn into my citadel and artillery barrages (note: artillery with range and logistics is a frightful weapon).

Augustus made even slightly dangerous attacks only twice: The first time when he declared war, and the second time after a short armistice that I signed because I wanted to repar my pillaged tiles. Which was a mistake. Just for ridiculousness I built a few GDRs after my culture victory and razed the whole Roman disgrace. See you in Utopia, suckers! Seriously, waging any wars feels almost like exploit mode in Civ5 - it's a lot worse than Civ4, almost on par with Total War games.

I also dislike how the domination victory works in this game. It's totally silly to just take the capitals: Who are you dominating just because you can capture 5 or 8 or whatever cities?