Fighting efficiently vs. fighting en masse

[futurehermit]

(I qualify the following comments by saying that they apply to emperor and below. Above emperor I appreciate that the game is very different and you have to do specific things to win.)


This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

Are you better off fighting efficiently, and by that I mean (almost) never fighting a unit with < 50&#37; odds unless you're using a catapult to soften defenders, or with loads of troops?

The thing with fighting with loads of troops, say axemen, is that you generally take cities, but you lose a lot of troops in the process. Although you claim cities (good) you end up wasting a lot of hammers on dead troops (bad, imo).

I've also been really struggling with domination attempts on emperor. So, I'm looking for another approach.

What about instead of going for an axerush, you build 3 cities + capital, maybe 4, and you just build up your infrastructure while beelining for construction after literature and trading for ironworking.

It would look like this (taking Gandhi as an example):

1) Found religion to help with border popping and for shrine later.

2) Get 2nd city out, secure military resource, and build defenders.

3) Get 3rd city out. 4th and maybe 5th as you are able.

4) Chop oracle for metal casting, start forges in all cities.

5) Beeline literature, trade alpha for iron and math/masonry hopefully.

6) Chop GL in gpfarm city.

7) Use GP from oracle on theology, hopefully founding christianity for another shrine.

8) Using organized religion be sure to spread your religion to all of your cities if it doesn't spread itself.

9) Once construction comes on board, switch to theocracy and pump out loads of 2-promotion units. This is really key for fighting efficiently. It means you have catapults with--I forget it's name at the moment--the promotion that aids tearing down defenses. It means you have swords with city raider two, shock axes, combat two spears ready for formation, maybe even combat two elephants, not to mention a medic unit and city garrison 2 archers to put in your newly captured cities.

10) Aim to take out the nearest opponent in two wars, with one signing of peace treaty to extort some tech out of them after crippling them. Possibly do the same to another nearby civ if you don't need them as a trading buddy.

11) Hyperspecialize your cities. Don't try to force them to be something they're not. This is something I'm doing more and more. Lots of mines with cows and horses? Production city. Lots of grasslands with a river? Cottage that baby. Clams, wheat, bananas, and 2 floodplains? Specialists. etc. I think the best approach is to just take what you're given. Make the city the best it can be given what is available.

12) Hopefully trade MC for currency and col if possible. This will help your econ out.

13) Try and get a GS from your GL city for philosophy, hopefully founding taoism, giving you a total of three religions and shrines.

14) Initially farm prophets. Use one on theology then the next three for your shrines. Then hopefully start farming GSs for the liberalism path.

15) Hopefully this efficient style of play will allow for a smoother path toward domination victory for although you will start off a bit slower, you will have a much more supportive initial infrastructure from which to expand, not to mention you should have stronger and more numerous veteran troops from your early warfare (including a medic 3 unit from first GG) since you didn't kill a pile of them off.

What do you think?

 

[Snaaty]

If you want to try out something different (and very efficient), try out this:

Don´t go to an early war, go only to war when you have a superiour warfare tech. Like you said, every unit you loose in a fight is a wast.

To do so, you need to have at least 6 cities. Build your first 3-4 cities towards the other AI´s and don´t open borders. When you have researched/traded currency and CoL, then build 2 more cities (you also can build more if you have enough space) in your back lands.

I don´t think city specialisation or running cottage, food or specialist economy is a key to victory (I personally favor food economy), because they all can lead to a domination/space race victory if played right...

When not going to an early war, what is a key to victory is having at least 6 cities (what also enables you to build Globe Theatre and draft units). With 6 cities, research combined with lightbulbing and specializing on some key (warfare) techs will bring you an advantage of 30-40 turns before the AI´s catch up.

You can do for exaple a cavalry invasion:

build 10 knights/elphants you upgrade to cavalry (ca. 2000 gold), whip 6 more (one per city), draft 10 more muskets in the city you have build the Globe Theatre and build/whip 6 catas to take down town defences. If done right, your whole army can be produced within 10 turns.

You will end up fighting longbowmen/macmen/knights (and muskets on immortal/deity) with your cavalry and all your fights will be at >70% success rate. On average, you shouldn´t loose more then 5 cavalry and 5 muskets during your invasion (so you can stop building troops after you go to war, you only have to replace losses)

With this tactics it´s fairly easy to take down 2 AI´s within 30-40 turns (what means before they catch up in warfare tech).

After that, you will have enought cities/land to pick the victory conditon you prefere (space-race or domination)


For your civ choice:

On the higher levels, religion isn´t important. Money is the main problem. So best is to pick a financial or a organized civ for your first tries (or one that has both)

 

[jesusin]

Interesting reading.

Efficiency, hmmm. What do you consider more efficient, not losing a single unit in the whole game or not building a single settler in the whole game?

I mean, imagine you are going to lose 2 Axes per city taken in a very early war. In that situation, it would be more cost effective to build 2 more Axes than building a settler. Your dead Axes wouldn’t be a waste, but a valuable investment that has more than paid off.

On a side note, I don’t think money is a problem in Deity. In Deity, around 1AD, the AI is so filthy rich that it is usual to get 8gpt per resource traded or 500g per tech traded.

 

[nullspace]

I think that is the harder way to go for domination. You really only need a few things to take over the world:

1) Lots of soldiers. Quality is nice, but quantity is at least as important. Many soldiers don't need quality at all. Some units will be fortified in cities for happiness under hereditary rule. Some will be cannon fodder to absorb collateral damage. Some will be "I'll put three units in this city, so if it is attacked by by two enemies I know I won't lose the city."

2) A large production base to build more units. For this, you want to have a lot of cities, and specialize some for production. Also, you want the heroic epic (which is the best wonder in the game for domination victory, not the oracle or great library). You want to build the heroic epic as soon as your research literature, so you have to fight before then.

3) This list is in order of importance, and now we get to: An economy decent enough that you don't fall more than an era behind your next target. Crossbows, elephants, and catapults can beat anything until grenadiers. Grenadiers and trebuchets can beat anything until infantry, and so on. You don't need a tech advantage to fight a winning war. Numbers, resources, tactics, and promotions can give you the advantage. And if an enemy does get a big tech advantage over you, then don't fight him. Attack an easier target because you don't have to kill everyone to get a domination victory.

4) Enough diplomacy so you're not surrounded by people that are trying to kill you. Protect yourself with oceans and a few friends/tech partners.

Well, now that I look at the top or your post again, I see that you mention >50% odds as the definition of efficiency. I rarely do fight at less than 50% odds, but I'm willing to make sacrifices to get those odds. Use a lot of suicide catapults. Let their unit pillage your hills and kill it when it steps onto flat land and you have a the right counter unit nearby.

One specific thing that I don't like about the strategy you posted is that it's not really a construction beeline if you get theology, metal casting and literature first. That gives your enemy the chance to hook up their resources and tech to longbows before you attack. I'd rather do something like bronzeworking, animal husbandry, pottery, then straight to construction (maybe alphabet first if I'm going to use it right away). And I might pillage them while I do this so they can't have anything better than archers when my catapults show up. Then I'd start on currency and code of laws to support the new cities.

Futurehermit, your strategy could work, but I think it has too many wonders and techs, and not enough units, production, and warfare, which are the important parts of domination.

 

[johnny_rico]

futurehermit,

Your initial post is how I played for quite a while until I got bored. I basically rolled through that pattern with any leader I chose with lots of success. It does require nice turf though and bad geography will alter some of those plans. Still, I've found that to be a solid template. Try that with wang kon, once you get the hwacas online, you'll be grinding the enemy, as those cheap units will become the bulk of your force.

One of the things I would add to that are to take a few axes if you have a close neighbor and pick a fight. It's nice is some of those axes have already acquired the CR2 promotion via barbs and I wouldn't fight a city with a cultural bonus for defense. It's nice to find a city with zero culture and 1 to 3 archers defending. With any luck you swipe a worker, steal or raze the city, and then head towards the capital not to attack, but to keep workers from improving turf. This should be a low casualty war, basically priming your first victim. They should be eliminated before they have a chance to capitulate to someone.

I'm usually not willing to fight unless I have 70+&#37; chance of victory unless I expect to lose the unit. My luck with combat is insanely bad but that is neither here nor there. I usually send in lower promoted units first preferring to keep the ones that have survived earlier fights.

Nullspace makes some good points as well. I usually go for quantity over quality when I am warring with someone who has a tech lead on me. I try to assault with sheer numbers and take down a city or three in an attempt to acquire some technologies when signing a peace treaty.

Where I don't agree with nullspace is where he talks about giving your enemies time to hook up resources and get to longbows. On monarch and above, you should consider yourself lucky and/or well played if you've eliminated an opponent before longbows. The AI just favors feudalism too much.

 

[futurehermit]

^^^Yeah, I keep stumbling into AIs with longbows ca. 500BC, which is why I made that thread awhile back. It's pretty insane. That's part of why I want to include oracle into my plans, simply to deny AIs that potential slingshot. It especially hurts if it's wang or qin or some other protective civ

It's funny how the responses are both yay and nay. It's the tension I feel within myself. Part of me feels: "Let's just mass units, emphasize production, and go conquer as much land as possible". And then my research starts to seriously lag and I the other part of me starts to cry out: "Let's start over and build up first before going out and conquering land".

That's the eternal question for me. Should I follow Snaaty's advice and emphasize tech, get a tech lead, and then attack with superior units. Or, should I follow nullspace's advice and fight en masse with inferior units?

I guess I will have to play around more with both appraoches. You'll see from my new sig that I continue to favour the nullspace approach. And I will have to perhaps let go of my apprehension of falling behind in tech. I think my problem is that I always feel like I have to keep up in tech WHILE I'm also going insane in military. I end up having a mix of both, but strong in neither I guess I'm going to have to follow my advice from another thread and just play a game where I go for military and let my research go (within reason).

 

[Galileo44]

I say, follow your signature's advice in the early game. Go for big expansion and fast if imperialistic or take some cities with axes. Even if you end up with 20&#37; science rate, then just cottage spam or farm for specialists. The specialists will catch up faster but the cottages will allow you to get ahead in the long run. Using this, you are behind until maybe gunpowder and then you shoot ahead as the cottages mature and you get infrastructure like libraries, universities, Oxford up. You should be in a good setup for a war with rifle/infantry or tanks, or really any modern conflict.

 

[ratrangerm]

Just to add a point, one of the biggest aspects of fighting efficiently is to check the cultural defense of a city. Sometimes, when you pick an AI civ to target first, you'll find yourself able to take just about any city except for the capital or any holy city that exists, because those are guaranteed to have higher cultural defense because of something that generates a lot of culture.

So I've had to adjust my strategies on the early rushes sometimes. I use my initial axemen army to take every city I can except for those with the highest cultural defeneses, until I can build enough catapults to weaken the defenses of the capital or holy city.

Basically, in order to take down a capital or holy city with an early rush, you need to do it before its culture is built up too much. It can be done, but timing is of the essence.

And of course, my approach comes on vanilla CIV. With Warlords and the vassal state option coming into play, I'm sure that often means it can be more urgent to take out that AI civ quickly should you go for the early rush option.

 

[Idiodyssey]

I think suiciding excess units to capture a capitol is worth it in the long run, as capitols are usually situated in ideal positions, and having two capitol sites early in the game is a huge boost. That may mean two CR swordsman per archer, but I think the benefit is greater than the cost. As for peripheral cities with culture, unless they are shrine cities, I won't go for those until later. Even shrine cities can wait until catapults. But I tend to go straight for the capitol and then mop up culture-less cities after.

 

[futurehermit]

I think suiciding excess units to capture a capitol is worth it in the long run, as capitols are usually situated in ideal positions, and having two capitol sites early in the game is a huge boost. That may mean two CR swordsman per archer, but I think the benefit is greater than the cost. As for peripheral cities with culture, unless they are shrine cities, I won't go for those until later. Even shrine cities can wait until catapults. But I tend to go straight for the capitol and then mop up culture-less cities after.

That works well in vanilla, but is much harder in 2.08 warlords. the ai just produces so many more units!

 

[Snaaty]

I guess I will have to play around more with both appraoches. You'll see from my new sig that I continue to favour the nullspace approach. And I will have to perhaps let go of my apprehension of falling behind in tech. I think my problem is that I always feel like I have to keep up in tech WHILE I'm also going insane in military. I end up having a mix of both, but strong in neither I guess I'm going to have to follow my advice from another thread and just play a game where I go for military and let my research go (within reason).

Si, you are right. Most important on higher levels is to specialize. If you don´t specialize, you will run into trouble. Btw, I don´t think that any strategy is superior (I just prefere peace over war, because game is simply played faster without that much units running around), but you have to stick to the basic strategy you choose(peaceful teching or agressive expansinon) very striktly to be competetive (at least from emperor up).

So basically, my advice is to follow your own advice

 

[futurehermit]

Ok, so I tried a game last night with Hatty where I just went aggressive and didn't worry about tech really. I had copper, no horses, so I built one city and started cranking axes. I didn't have an opponent too close by. Nearest was china (mao) about two full city spots away with one city and about three full city spots away with his other cities (capital about 4 full city spots away).

I took out all of his cities except his capital, even though he was protective I hit him early and hard with two stacks of axes.

My problem was that I kept all three cities when I should've only kept one and razed two.

Not worry as much about econ doesn't mean totally crippling yourself economically I discovered

I should've kept one, razed two, sued for peace (he gave 3 early techs, not bad) and then backfilled some of my own cities.

Another part of the problem was that I avoided cottages. More and more I'm becoming ambivalent about avoiding cottages. When I follow immortal/deity games I see how it works. Basically, you get your money from the ai, who has a ton of it and early. But in emperor the ai doesn't seem to have enough and the ai doesn't have col available for suing that early in the game, so i have to self-research it.

So, I don't know, I'm still searching for the proper balance in my game. How much expansion? How many cottages? And when to do these things?

I think I might try my math-currency-col opening again which involves lightbulbing alpha with first gs (otherwise can't sue for tech in first early attack). The extra trade route and ability to build courthouses should support early expansion much better and also allow me to run specialists instead of cottages.

I still am trying to get my game to the point where I run specialists until democracy while trying to wipe my continent out by that point and then switch to cottage spam and appropriate civics for my late game efforts.

I really believe that is the ultimate way to play the game playing to the strengths of each era. The early game civics really support a SE and the late game ones really support a CE. Plus in the early game growth and expansion is so important which also really favours SE whereas lategame you have things pretty much set in place and you just want tons of cash for rush buying and supporting your huge empire and stuff: advantage CE.

Tonight I think I'm going to try fighting efficiently with Gandhi and see how that compares. Then I'll try my Hatty currency-col opening again, playing a bit smarter, and see how that goes.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Lots of soldiers.... Some will be cannon fodder to absorb collateral damage.

That's a fairly important idea what's been obliquely hinted at here. Thanks!

 

[futurehermit]

Yeah, collateral dmg sucks, although a medic 3 unit takes care of that. Basically your troops heal up while your catapults wear down defenses.

 

[Mr. Civtastic]

What about instead of going for an axerush, you build 3 cities + capital, maybe 4, and you just build up your infrastructure while beelining for construction after literature and trading for ironworking.

I did this for awhile too. Now Ive modified it so that I still do an early axe/sword rush, grab a couple cities and take peace, then once I have construction and feudalism I'll finish the job and have a vassal.

The main problem I had with waiting for war till cats is time. There are, as Im sure everyone knows, some advantages to attacking right away. I rather attack cities that have archers and no culture (a city that I can knock out in a turn or two) as opposed to dealing with fairly big cultural defense, most like a high fortified defense AND longbowmen. Plus things like alliances havent had as much time to form, religions havent spread as much, etc.

Then again, I had a successful game with Churchill where I didnt go to war till Trebs, then rolled three civs in fairly quick order. But that game highlighted another variable to everyone...who you are attacking. It was easy to take out Mansa Musa and Frederick. It would have gone differently of course if they had been aggresive civs.

As to the question efficiency vs en masse, I gotta vote en masse for a couple reasons.

1. You're going to lose soldiers in combat and defending captured cities.
2. Better safe then sorry. So many times Ive had a war stall because I underestimated the ai. Then war weariness becomes a problem and then things then to snowball
3. I hate it when I finish a war and right away someone different declares war on me. There is a good chance this will happen if you attack someone's friend or your power score is low from a depleted army.
4. You get better odds with more promotions of course, but thats all they are...odds. We've all had bad runs...once I lost three straight fights with over 90&#37;. Im sure people have had similar or worse. I think more soldiers gives you better odds of winning the war by offsetting the random defeats to underdog units
5. I think more soldiers works better with lots of suicide siege units. Then it wont matter nearly as much if you are fighting a unit at 90% or 95%.


Now the one exception I can think of is...a Raze War. Thats what I call a war where my only goal is to raze as many cities as possible to force capitulation. I build up an army that is almost a suicide army...they will fight to the death, they are coming home either when the enemy capitulates or they are in caskets. In this case you wont need soldiers to defend captured cities, you wont be concerned with pillaging resources because you want to end this war asap, and I think that the ai will retreat units to its "back" cities if it doesnt have cities to try to recapture.

My example...I once built up an army of around 30 redcoats and 10 or so trebs and sent them to attack Monty. I razed three of his cities, he capitulated. Granted I had an advantage with redcoats against riflemen, but the point was I wasnt depending on this army to survive...I would like them to of course.

Guess I rambled a bit there. Long story short, I think more>better.

 

[Naismith]

One specific thing that I don't like about the strategy you posted is that it's not really a construction beeline if you get theology, metal casting and literature first. That gives your enemy the chance to hook up their resources and tech to longbows before you attack. I'd rather do something like bronzeworking, animal husbandry, pottery, then straight to construction (maybe alphabet first if I'm going to use it right away). And I might pillage them while I do this so they can't have anything better than archers when my catapults show up. Then I'd start on currency and code of laws to support the new cities.

Futurehermit, your strategy could work, but I think it has too many wonders and techs, and not enough units, production, and warfare, which are the important parts of domination.

Sounds familiar - I almost always pick up Hunting, Farming and Mysticism before Alphabet. I almost always research Construction immediately after Alphabet. I will trade for, but almost never research the whole lower part of the tech tree until after I've researched Currency, COL and Calendar (if there are happiness resources around). I may not even attempt to get any wonders during this time, except maybe Stonehenge. I may try and work in GL, but that comes a bit later.

So, I basically get to Construction early and often don't start my first war until I get Construction.

I'm not saying this is some kind of ideal strategy - it just gets you to Construction (and cats) early enough that you could wait for cats before having your first war.

The thing I personally dislike about early wars (axe rush) is that I have the tendency to bog down my economy too much. I find it often forces me into a non-stop warring strategy, which I find exhausting and boring. I admit my Civ skills probably aren't all what they should be...

 

[Naismith]

Duplicate post.

 

[futurehermit]

Ok thks, I'm going to try another game where I go en masse and start out beelining currency and col. I'll report back on how it goes.

I just have to remember not to cripple myself and to raze cities that are too far from capital early on. Can always chop a settler to fill in the gaps once I can afford it.

 

[Ruler]

I still believe that good map is a mandatory for a domination victory. I have read about your post regarding domination victory and it's quite interesting and what I have wanted to ask couple times by now is that could you post your save file from your game when things has gone already bad and you are calling quits.

 

[futurehermit]

I still believe that good map is a mandatory for a domination victory. I have read about your post regarding domination victory and it's quite interesting and what I have wanted to ask couple times by now is that could you post your save file from your game when things has gone already bad and you are calling quits.

well, follow along with my current game that i'm posting. hopefully it won't come to that...but...we shall see!

i don't usually keep my losing saves around, but if i have another failed attempt, i'll try and remember to post it here.