Effective Usage of Dropping Citadels

Hi guys,

I was wondering on some effective strategy for expending Great Generals into citadels.

In past I was a bit "citadel-happy," dropping them pretty willy-nilly - for example if I was getting pretty close to bordering a rival civ I'd tend to drop them one tile outside my border to steal tiles from their borders (obviously if I wasn't too worried about provoking them and had war in mind already). Another example would be if I was doing a conquest of a rival civ and had taken one of their cities with another close by - I'd drop the citadel to provide a little defensive waypoint towards the next city I'm attacking.

I think one obvious use for a citadel would be if you're playing a tall empire, and focusing on defense as you go for a science victory - - if you have any chokes (tiles between two mountain ranges, tiles on isthmuses near coastal cities, etc) to your city, a citadel with a range unit would obviously make life difficult for any aggressors to get in.

Anyway, to those of you playing above King - - what are some of your strategies and approaches to using this feature?

 

I sometimes use them to grab tiles from the AI, but they will do it right back to you, so it works better vs a CS. If you open the Honor tree, a GG (hence a citadel) is never farther away than your next SP. I mostly use them on high levels to limit the approach to cities that I want to keep. It’s a great force multiplier so you wont pay as much in unit upkeep. Place it so that the enemy has to cross the fields of fire in order to attack your city, cover as many tiles as you can. Of course, you can always settle a city in ring one of your opponent, buy tiles then drop a citadel right on his cap. That’s pretty cheap, but effective as long as you have troops on hand to take the city.

 

I put them at two tiles from a city. Its max firing range. Have a unit on fortify in the citadel and don't use them to attack unless absolutely necessary. Any unit that is next to a citadel suffers 30hp damage. This is another reason to put them at max city range so they can get sandwiched between citadel and city and suffer damage. And with them being in our zone of control they are really gonna suffer.

 

I like using them offensively. If you plop one down next to an enemy city it will damage the garrisoned unit as well. Current era infantry with the cover promotion can fortify in a citadel and the AI will move units into the city over and over to just get killed by your citadel. It works great early in the war when the AI usually have your army outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1 and will allow you to get your other units positioned for sacking the city.

I'll also use them when rough terrain is making the city hard to approach since it makes it so you can use their roads or even build your own.

I find that most of the time the toughest cities to take are the first ones and once you knock out that first city the rest seem to topple like dominoes so I don't feel bad at all about spending a GG to make my first conquest quicker and easier.

 

I just thought of something I forgot. If you do drop a citadel next to an enemy city you need to be 110% sure you will be able to keep the city and they don't have the units to take it back because if they do take it back the citadel will flip back with them and you'll be stuck dealing with your own citadel. Using that tactic can be a bit of a double edged sword in that case.

 

I always thought when you performed a citadel culture bomb, you had to be within one tile of your borders, and the stollen land went to your city's borders. If you conquer the AI city and the AI conquers back, wouldn't the citadel land still belong to your original city?

 

That's what I thought too, but it doesn't. I don't know why. Maybe whenever they take a city that city's cultural borders always includes the adjacent tiles whether they technically belonged to another city or not. I mean you can settle a city 4 tiles away from another city but a city's tiles can actually reach 5 tiles away, I'm thinking if you settle a city within another city's cultural borders then the adjacent tiles all switch to the new city rather than belonging to the old city and this little rule must apply to culture bombs too.

I was having a really rough time taking a city from Germany on deity a couple games ago because it was behind a couple hills and had two mountain passes two tiles away that I had to get through to hit the city. So I used the citadel to help finally capture the city since his road still existed between that one and the one I just took. I had an opportunity to take the city but he still had units behind it and captured it back a couple turns later taking my citadel with it. I ended up loading an earlier autosave because my citadel made it nearly impossible to retake the city (it's not really cheating if you're reloading because of a rule you didn't know about, right?)

Anyway that's how I discovered that little bit of interesting information and thought I ought to add that to my earlier post. It wouldn't be useful to some one who uses citadels defensively but some one who uses them offensively like me could be affected by it.

Adding home turf healing, defensive bonuses and the damage per turn to a city siege is huge for breaking into a hard to crack city. With how powerful a weapon those citadels can be, China has moved up a tier again in my opinion. Mongolia, Sweden and Persia are good at using them offensively too since they get extra movement for their generals it makes it easier to set up those citadels inside enemy territory.

 

Why does China move up for you? Their generals are more powerful, do they also give an extra benefit to the citadel?

EDIT: I see why now: Art of War increases great general spawn rate. You can make more citadels with China.

 

Just more generals to use as citadels while still keeping one or two to enhance your troops. Before this change to GGs I could care less when my third general would come if I ever cared at all so I used to think it was a pretty weak UA. Once I had 2 generals I usually had enough to keep me happy the rest of the game. The constantly shorter and shorter golden ages seemed pointless to me but now being able to use them as an offensive weapon I find myself anxious for my next general almost the whole game. Since China get's them faster they're now even more of a powerhouse than before.

 

AI's are bad dealing with citadels. You can move in and pillage citadels easily, while they seem completely oblivious to citadels when you control them. Citadels are good for players, not AI's.

 

I know, it was just a warning that if the city flips you don't get to keep your citadel, that's all I was saying.