Fighting your friends

[OscarWildebeest]

I'm playing Ragnar, who's Agg and Fin (I'm using CivGold). Pangaea, Normal speed and map size, on Noble. It's my first Noble game, and I'm going for Conquest.

I'm occupying most of the North-West of the continent. I'm currently fighting Korea, which is occupying the South-East corner (and is down to about four cities, but they're proving tough to crack).

The problem is that most of the other civs have a small tech lead (although only I have Chemistry and Rifling). I have the Russians in the North-East, the Khmer immediately South of me and the Ukrainians wedged between the Khmer and the Koreans.

The issue is this: everyone is Hindu except for the Koreans whom I'm fighting. Because we're all Hindu, we're all getting along really well. At some point I'm going to have to turn on my friends and start devastating their territory. I don't want to try and take them all on at once, because the borders are too long and I don't have the manpower. Plus they'd all team up against me.

What's the best way of picking them off, one by one?

(I can post some screenshots if it'll help, but not before tomorrow, sorry.)

 

[svv]

How far are they from liberalism? Usually when liberalism starts getting known, some of the AIs will go to free religion. That might get them off "pleased" with the other hindus, and as soon as they get off pleased you can attack without getting the others mad at you.

If you have liberalism, maybe you can trade it to someone, or even give it to them, hoping they'll go to free religion.

I don't have warlords, so I don't know about the UUs for most of those civs. It seems like it might be a bad era to get the Russians mad at you (though I understand the Cossacks might be downgraded in warlords).

 

[oyzar]

he is past liberalism, though the point still hold. If your able just spread as many relagions as you can around their land to get them to convert. Seeing as your playing noble you can just use the bruteforce aproach too. The AI's cant war. just bring enough units and you should have no problem. Remember sige weapons/planes.

 

[OscarWildebeest]

Peter the Great has just discovered Liberalism, so I'm waiting for him to switch.

(svv - it's Vanilla CivGold, not Warlords. Peter will be able to make cossacks quite soon, and they're deadly. The Khmer UU is already outdated. I can't remember what the Ukrainian UU is.)

What about sending missionaries to Peter and getting him to convert to, say, Confucianism (which I founded)? Then the two of us go and smash up the other two. Then I knife him in the back once I've got tanks and bombers, rendering his cossacks inadequate (although he's likely to get to tanks & bombers just before me, so it could be an interesting endgame).

 

[ChicagoCubs]

What about sending missionaries to Peter and getting him to convert to, say, Confucianism (which I founded)? Then the two of us go and smash up the other two. Then I knife him in the back once I've got tanks and bombers, rendering his cossacks inadequate (although he's likely to get to tanks & bombers just before me, so it could be an interesting endgame).

I use this tactic frequently when there are multiple civs that are one religion.

 

[InvisibleStalke]

Or just go to war with them one by one. The penalty for attacking a friend will lower your relations - but probably not enough to matter. Certainly not enough for a friendly civ that shares your religion to dogpile you. By the time you have attacked enough friends to really anger them, there will only be one or two left standing.

You will suffer extra happy penalties by fighting with co-religionists, so make sure you have a plan to deal with that. I would attack the ones that have low religion bonuses (if you share the same religion with Isabella for example it won't matter what else you do to her friends) and the warlike opponents first. The peaceful AIs will most likely just sit on the sidelines.

 

[Dnomal]

If you want to break up friendships i recommend finding a tech junky, and paying him/her a tech to stop trading with another one of his friends, when this happens the two civs wont speak to one another. This wont work forever of course, but if you have your timing right you might just be able to isolate a few civs from there friends with enough time for you to swoop in an conquer.

But if you are going fo COnquest it will be EXTREMLY difficult, my only occasion ofa conquest victory was when i teched like crazy fo centuries, untill eventually it was my maceman vs. archers, without a huge tech lead a conquest (or extermination voctory as they really are) are amazing difficult, even with an agreeive leader and all the militart civics.

 

[lukep]

But if you are going fo COnquest it will be EXTREMLY difficult, my only occasion ofa conquest victory was when i teched like crazy fo centuries, untill eventually it was my maceman vs. archers, without a huge tech lead a conquest (or extermination voctory as they really are) are amazing difficult, even with an agreeive leader and all the militart civics.

hmm. not really.
it's more a matter of production. If you have a bigger production, you can afford to be a bit behind on techs.

In my current game on monarch, the mighty samurais chopped down incas riflemens (took more than 10 cities in 25 turns). Inca was bigger and had more soldiers than me at the start. He is now with a 1 pop city on ice
I so proved wrong the tip about "not getting a sword in a gunfight" but you need to be japaneese
3 stacks of 20 or so in the attack

Now preparing to do the same with Asoka, but it will be harder (other continent).

3 reasons for that :
- samurais are good for taking cities, yes, and the heavily promoted ones (CIII or more, CRIII) are dangerous up to infantery.
- my 3 main production cities were making 1 samurai or cat/turn and i had 5 doing 1 unit every 2 or 3 turns, so i could afford to loose some.
- AI suck totally at defending, the worse than can happen is a counter-attack where you have little defense.

Now some units have a definitive limit, cavalery is perfect against riflemen but infantery will mince it, tanks cant fight mech inf or gun ships without air support, so you need to be not much behind. just be aware of that and beeline accordingly

 

[cabert]

Now some units have a definitive limit, cavalery is perfect against riflemen but infantery will mince it, tanks cant fight mech inf or gun ships without air support, so you need to be not much behind. just be aware of that and beeline accordingly

you're joking right? riflemen butcher cavalries!
what you need is either
- large numbers of grenadiers (some rifles for stack defense, a few cav/knights for pillaging)
- canons!!

If you're hindu and have a better power than the AI you attack, the other AIs will dogpile on the weakest, don't be scared.
It's best to know the personalities of the other leaders, but I don't, so I can only guess.
If you want to come back in techs, you may need to give Korea a break for a few techs, then turn to the weakest (power!) of your friends before going back to Korea.

 

[thecivdude]

in my experience, it's your advantage for all neighbors to have the same religion. they will typically like you as much as you can hope for in this case. i've learned that you need cities that act as deterants. stack, i dunno, 8 - 10 or 12 units on border cities with countries you don't want to attack. use a seperate army to attack. a strong military, even when your attacking a friend of theirs, will keep them at bay.

 

[OscarWildebeest]

Thanks for all the advice. It didn't work out quite as I'd hoped. I managed to wipe out the Koreans without too much trouble. By this time Peter had gone to Free Religion, so I felt pretty safe declaring on the Ukrainians. I also bribed the Khmer to attack Russia, which tied both of them up for a while.

Unfortunately, although Ukraine capitulated moderately quickly, the Khmer-Russian war didn't last all that long and Peter headed for the Space Race. Both the Khmer and Russian empires were far too large and militarily advanced (and got on too well with each other) for me to risk another assault, so I tried to pump up the techs and production. Needless to say, I'd left it too late and Peter won the space race.

(I did get elected UN Sec Gen but nobody wanted to give me a diplomatic victory. Rotters.)

Still, I've learnt some things for next time, one of which is never fall too far behind in the tech race. With hindsight, I should have been knocking down each opponent as soon as he got to the top of the pile, but then I'd have had an entire continent of countries which hated me.