Help With War (I Am Clueless)

[Rosicrucian]

I need help fighting wars. My warmongering is pathetic. What I do is, I am usually declared war on, then they take a few cities, and by the time my guys get down there about 20 turns later I'm more or less stagnating, and then I take the cities back, and....

So what's the big picture in terms of balancing:

- bombard units
- defense units
- offense units
- workers (used to make roads to where you're making war?)

I just can't figure out good methods.

 

[Ohwell]

You should have at least 3 defensive units in all border cities, plus all your offensive units so you can attack quicker. Bombard units are effective for defense and offense.

 

[WOPR]

On the issue of warmongering, we could use more information here. For example, in which era do your enemies declare war on you?

In early eras, ALWAYS build roads to connect your cities.
In late eras, ALWAYS build railroads to connect your cities. (If you don't have coal, try trading for it. If you can't trade for it and there's a coal resource in an unclaimed region...claim it. If there's a coal source in someone else's territory...consider making war for it.)

In the early stages of the game, expand as fast and as much as possible. Get horses and iron ASAP. Luxury resources help as well (happy citizens = less time/money you have to spend on happiness improvements).

I usually don't have 3 units per city, unless the area is a war zone/heavily infested by barbarians, or I need them to increase happiness (depotism/monarchy).

In the late game, railroads + tanks are your friend! A few bombers near the front lines are great for softening up enemy units.

I often use bombers to DEFEND front-line cities. They can re-base quickly and easily, and can seriously damage offensive ground units so that my ground forces can finish them off.

Hope this helps.

 

[Rock]

I Total agreed!
My defending city usually have 2 defending unit + 1 fast attack units + 1 Art + bomber or ships in the later stage. You will need more if your friend next door have tanks.

I can crush a nation(x20 citys), with rails builded, in 5 turns with 30 ++ tanks (6 tanks per city)(panzer).. 6 tanks attack and take citys, next 6 tanks uses captured rails to get to next city and take it follow by next 6 tanks .. .. .. .. until all citys taken.

For attack in early stage, use fast units like Knights and Cavalry (x6 per city), defended by (Riflemen x2 per stack). Supported by Art(x2++).

 

[War4War]

My first advice would be never go to war if you're not ready. And by ready I mean that you have enough units to accomplish your objectives. Wars should be planned as much as possible. You need specific objectives that are realistic and not too big. For example a given resource or a few critical cities. This way your wars will be short and to the point. Then you declare peace and develop some more. This is especially important if you want to make war under democracy since you want to minimize war weariness.
In terms of units I usually build a majority of attack units and a few defense units to hold the conquerred cities (3 per city). I'm not a big fan of bombarding units except bombers that are very useful when you use them to destroy enemy improvements. Bombarding units are good to reduce city population so they don't convert back once conquerred but you can do the same by pop-rushing after the conquest or by starving the city.

 

[RAL2000]

Some great advice up there. Here are a few thoughts to help you out on for land units.

Resources are absolutely critical. You should exploit any resource advantage you have; a major part of your military strategy is gaining a resource advantage.

Early units --> build warriors for exploration and because they are fast builds to protect new cities, but switch to spearmen as soon as you have explored and founded your base cities. Warriors only upgrade to swordsmen, but spearmen can give you pikemen and infantry, much better units in the mid to late game. You never really have too many spearmen because of the upgrade potential.

Horses --> Horsemen, Knights/Riders, Cavalry; until tanks come along these are the best units because they can retreat. Especially potent when you get railroads, because you can jump up and attack, and move your wounded units back into a city with a barracks on the same turn for rapid rejuvenation.

Horsemen alone, however, will lose to swordsmen.

Metal --> swordsmen that beat horsemen and most early units. Unfortunately they do not upgrade, and are slow as molasses so you don't want to build too many unless that's all you've got -- in which case you should be using them to get horses.

Gunpowder --> gives you good defensive units in the rifleman, and upgrades to infantry and mech infantry, the best defensive unit in the game. Use gunpowder units to hold cities and key choke points. They also make great marauders, believe it or not. Although they are slow, once they get there they are hard to stop and a group of them can devastate the enemy rail/road network given some time -- but don't use them to attack other units except in rare circumstances.

Coal --> railroads. Not a military unit, but a HUGE impact on being able to move things around instantaneously. Once you have a good rail network you can garrison more lightly, especially the safer cities.

Oil/Rubber --> Tanks/Panzer. Next dominant phase.

Aluminum --> Modern armor whips tanks and can beat mech infantry.

I usually think of military as a series of phases, and plan wars around any phase I can get an advantage in --

i.e.
early units
then horsemen/swordsmen or archers (not that impressive IMO)
then knights/riders vs. pikemen
then cavalry/infantry
then tanks/infantry
then modern armor/mech infantry

hope this helps your land wars

 

[Furry Spatula]

Furry's Guide to waging war

Always try to make sure you only have one front. Keep your back to the ocean, b/c where else would you go? not into someone elses teritory.


Try to only have to worry about one baddy. And then you just stack all your units up on the boarder that is closest to his big cities. If you have a long or seperated boarder then you need to decide on where it is best to attack him, stack your units in the place that is closest to the industrial centers. If you have a civ on the other side aswell then you may be in a little bit of trouble and you need to make sure that if one guy gets in a war with you, you immediatley get teh second civ to sign an alliance with you, give them whatever they want, you dont want to be cought with your pants down and surrounded. It will mostlikely be the bigger of the two civs surrounding you that will attack you. and if there is a thrid civ, you just need to make sure that you have both of them, the two non agressiv civs, signed in an alliance with you. Also ... sorry .... if one of the civs are the germans or someone miliraristic and agressive they will mostlikely be the one that you need to have your troops boardering. And one more tip, if you need the help of the other civs give them a right of passage or do what ever you can to make sure you get one with them, otherwise they may not want to travel in your boarders to attack. But some may not see a problem trotting right through.


You never need offensive units in the center of your empire, so what you do is this. WHen ever you build something like a temple, market place, bank, library, etc. is build the best offensive unit possible at the time, or one that you plan to attack with, prefebly an upgradeable. Then leave them in a town or ...

Get a settler to put some forteresses on your boarder, load up all your offensive units into them or the one depending on how long your boarder is, usualy one is good b/c all you need to do is take one city and they'll focus their energy on stopping your massive army. So put some defensive units in the fortress as well just incase they attack that. Now you are set if they declare war. The key part in waging war is to know what you are after and to stay on the offensive.

If you are putting they pressure on them then it is unlikely that they will even have a chance to attack on of your cities, i'v never lost a city to another city so far. So get that army built up and on the boarder, if you dont have an army and they are asking you for stuff, you are advised to give it to them for now. If it is a resource you can just pilage the roads that are connecting you to them and you get the resource back, when you reconnect the road they wont get it again, even if its 2 turns after you destroyed the road. or sell your harbours and rebuild them, unless it effects other trades.

So i hope that helped . But also remeber this. You need an army, it doesn't need to be offensive though. aslong as you keep your military up the other civ will be scared of you, so getting your army 90% defensive, about 3-5 units in each city and a few offensives to attack anybody that may be demolishing your improvements. But on the large it doesnt hurt to have a good and large offensive army. If you are at the boarder with all your units you are mostlikely going to be able to wipe out a few cities as the AI doens't usualy stack up on the boarderif they declare war after asking for tribute b/c they expect you to give it to them. So you will have the upper hand as they wont expect you to hit them that hard early on.

When they attack you though, you should just concentrate on taking out a few big cities and then sue for peace, if you dont want to hold onto the cities sell them to another civ, preferable a neighbourgh of your new found enemy so you can bring another civ into the fight if they decide to attack again. However if you initiate the war dont do it just because you feel like having a war. Know where you want to go to. You need a resource? attack till you hit the resource and then sue for peace if you dont think you can whipe them out. If you dont know your objective then you will mostlikely have some trouble. If you have fought a war with the civ before and you want some buffer room, pull an Stalin, just get some cities as a buffer zone and you can either pillage them, making it hard to get peace, or you can sell, or give them to another civ. Sometimes civs wont buy cities off of you. So you just have to give it away. What would be best is if there is a civ on the other side you give them the town. that way those cities are a buffer, meaning they have to piss off the other civ to get to you later on. So capture and give the cities away, and then get peace ASAP.

Well i hope it helped and sorry if it is a bit hard to read, Its around midnight where i am and i'm getting ready to go to sleep .

 

[Gruntboy]

By Furry Spatula

You never need offensive units in the center of your empire

Actually, I find the concept of a mobile defense quite useful.

How can I defend a large empire from attack? What if I can't have 4 defensive units per city? In order to defeat an attack anywhere along my line, I keep a mobile reserve. Knights, cavalry, tanks, artillery on railroads, whatever - I can destroy any attack with my counterattack.

This means cheaper defence (1 or 2 units instead of 4) and consequently more to spend on offence. If I'm attacking, I don't have much need to defend.

 

[Zachriel]

Overwhelming force.

 

[Salvor]

If you have steam power (and coal), accompany any assault force with a large number of workers. They'll be able to extend your railhead into newly captured territory, so you can pull back wounded units and bring in reserves and reinforcements much more quickly. It's also the only way for slower units like artillery and infantry to keep up with your mobile attack force of cavalry or tanks. If you can, build two separate railheads, just in case on of the cities in your rear decides to flip.

 

[Furry Spatula]

ok about that you dont need offensive units in the middle of you empire. I play continent games, not pangeas so i dont worry about having a huge mofo boarder to defend. So i'm sorry if this doesn't work on pangea. But when i initialy build cities i get them to a bottleneck asap. that way it is easy to defend and you know where you need your army. so what i said there worked with my experiences. but once you do get railroads it doesn't realy matter where the troops are if your whole empire is connected with them. but before that usualy you need to guess where the mostlikely attack will be.

and as gruntboy suggested with the mobile counter attack in his empire, I guess i'm just too vengeful. If you declare war on me, i'm going to not only cripple your army but i'm going to launch the first assault and take some of your industrial base with me.

MUA HA HA HA HA

But i guess i may need to learn how to start having defensive wars. Its just it pisses me off that they think that they can attack me and not loose anything of theirs, oops thats that vengeful side of me coming back.

 

[Angmar]

I think the key factor to winning a war is to fight the war on your terms. In order to do this you need to have a strong military. Now what works out to be a "strong" military is a little iffy as the Civ ( and hence the AI ) seems to rank military a little funny. During the ancient age, it is pretty much number of units vs number of units. Later on in the game you will need to have spies to correctly rate your army vs his army. This is due to the fact the AI loves to keep around antique units. At this stage the computer rates your and an AI army as the same power however his 30 spearmen arent going to hold a candle to your 20 cavalry and 10 riflemen.

The next is planning. Make sure you have the enemy maps before you go to war. Each time I discovery a new resource I go looking for it in my neighbours and enemies. If its something important like iron, horses, oil or rubber I build a special strike force to pillage that on the first round if at all possible. Beyond this I try to have a line of units all across my border. This makes the AI know that you have forces on your border and might make him go look for a fight elsewhere. The side effect of this is that you dont get settlers running around your borders. So now you have a line of troops on your border, a key strike squad to run across and take away his important resource, its time to start thinking cities.

Taking cities is a trick in its own. Sometimes they can be consume a great deal of your troops knocking out the defends. You will then need your main strike force. I like to have this to be as mobile units as I have. The more the better. I place these strike forces along my border as close as I can to the enemy cities that I wish to take. Never go over the border until you have a complete game plan of what you want. If its a resource or a section of land that you want make sure you have more forces to take and hold that area. This will require atleast one of your best defensive units for each city you wish to hold and probably 2 or 3 of your best offensive units for each city you wish to capture. You may need to bump this up to 4 or 5 if you are going against a superior foe but in general I like grabbing land from my weak neighbours so I can build more and make everyone look small and weak.

Declaring war! Okay now you have your troops and your armies in place its time to pick a fight. There are two options, one you go across his border and break something right away. This allows you to get the 'sneak' attack and if you placed your troops correctly cause a great deal of damage. In one game I was able to take all my objectives ( 3 cities, one with a luxury that I didnt have ) in one round. Now if you cant obtain your objectives in one round you might want to let war start on his turn. This is one of the best choices if you have best defence around and he has railroads. Place your units in his land in the high ground ( mountains are choice ) and fortify. He'll ask you to move, bluff if you can or declar war. That round he will hopefully blunt the majority of his army with out having your weaker offensive forces being caught out open in the field.

I find this method of declaring war to be the best unless I think I can pull of wonders in the first round of war. Cause casualties in the hills with you defending with your infantry. The only time I have ever lost cities is when I stretch myself out thin and my 'last' cavalry takes a city and is taken back in a counter attack.

Once I have railroads I also like to give it to everyone. They love to pay lots of money for it. I give it to friends so they can quickly come and help, I give it to enemies so when their cities fall I can quickly use their railroads to get my cavalry and tanks into place to attack the next city in the same turn.

Now Im going to take a step back in the timeline and go back to the turn before you are going to step across the border. This is were you want to talk to your enemy and soften him up with diplomacy. You want to take as much as you can from him the turn before you attack him. Offer him luxuries ( be careful with other resources ) and non military tech and in exchange you want lump sums of gold and any tech you can get out of him. Now unless Im super buff I dont like going to war alone. If I can I want to get his neighbour on the other side to being my friend. Then I can get him into an alliance or a MPP this will make it so Ill have to fight about half as much which means Ill gain twice as much land

Now my key to winning the war. I have it all planned out, built up the troops, took all of his gold reserves in exchange for luxuries that are going to end the next turn, and have two MPP with his other neighbours the war starts and my troops move into a combat position and ready to attack this round.

I SAVE THE GAME.

I then fight the battle. If the battle goes well then I move the next group of troops into place and SAVE THE GAME. Fight the battle and repeat the process.

Now even the best laid plans sometime go wrong and random chance rears it ugly head and you take more casualties than you are willing to loose. Load your last save.

Now this is were one of the anomilies of civ kicks in. The best way I can tell is that at the beginning of your turn civ generates a massive amount of random numbers and then takes the top number off this list each time you attack. So if you save the game during your turn, go to battle, load the game and enter the same battle it will *always* turn out the same.

So now you have failed a critical strke and loaded your game. All the troops that did attack should wait out this round and wait one turn. Waiting one turn for an entirely new set of combat results is much better than spending 10 turns rebuilding your army You may want to try attacking a different location as that city might be smaller, the defenders slightly different and while the same 'random' numbers are used, the results might be different.

Now you may want to skip my save/load abuse However the AI has a crystal ball about my troop locations, Im going to use my crystal ball that tells me combat outcomes!

So now you have taken out a few cities that you wish to keep. First step is to station a decent amount of troops in each one. Then each turn I starve the SOBs. I keep turning everyone into entertainers, entertains dont seem to want to flip and well they arent bringing in food so Im purging the old unhappy populace. Once I knock the city down to 1 citizen I let it rebuild, and it will rebuild QUICKLY.

Now the war is over, you are happy with what you have gained. Sue for peace. Hopefully you are still in a strong enough position that you can take your enemy for everything you can during the peace process. Pay attention to what your advisor is saying and spend a couple minutes experimenting with his cities, technology, gold till you have taken him for all he is worth.

Now that your civ is at peace its time to BUILD FOR WAR. Start looking at the territory around your borders find out what is tasty. Find the high ground on islands near key cities etc. Rinse, wash and repeat!

Cheers,

 

[Arrian]

There are some great ideas here, but I'm gonna give a simplistic piece of advice:

Mobile Units - lots of them. There are points in the game where you have nothing to build but units. Early on, build horsemen. These will eventually become Cavalry, which is one of the best units in the game. Oh, and build barracks before you pump out large numbers of troops. "Regular" units suck.

Also, keep in mind that the AI's idea of "power" is heavily dependant on the number of units you have vs. the numher of units they have. That's it - it's that simple. This is why you will occasionally get attacked by an AI civ that has Cavalry and Riflemen which die horribly against your Modern Armor, Mech. Inf. and Bombers.

Horsemen->Knights->Cavalry, later Tanks->Modern Armor. Mobile units are extremely powerful in Civ III for a number of reasons (it has been argued they are overpowered). Retreat is the #1 reason, but also the ability to get them where you need them quickly.

I usually keep most of my troops at or near the border. Two defenders, lots of attack troops. Any invading stack is gonna get hit really hard. Don't worry about bombard units until you have artillery, unless you plan on attacking a civ with a 3 defense unit before you have knights (hitting the Greeks with horsemen and swordsmen is gonna hurt, but catapults will help a bit).

Building loads of 1-move defenders will not help you much. They cannot prevent the AI from running around and ripping up your roads and irrigation. You need to be able to kill invasion forces, not just stop them from taking your cities.

Of course, you do need some footsloggers, but in the ancient era I normally go with a 2 to 1 ratio of horsemen to swordsmen. The swordsmen go along as escorts and extra hitting power when needed. Once I have Knights (and then Cav... and Tanks) the ratio gets even more skewed.

-Arrian

 

[Neo Guderian]

2 words for the late game warmonger.

Air Power

Your tanks can roll over anything if you have a massive bomber fleet and you can repel almost any assault. I heard somewhere that air power was broken for the player when it comes to intercepting enemy bombers. I haven't found this to be the case. I have successfully shot down many enemy bombers in my games. the key is to have a large fighter force nearby. The key to winning air superiority is by attacking the target multiple times with fighters to draw out any enemy interceptors before committing your (expensive) bomber fleet.

on air power offense.
1) destroy all enemy resource roads first.
2) destroy all enemy roads (this prevents the enemy from moving to meet your frontline forces.
3) create road bottlenecks. (bomb all roads but a main road to channel the enemies forces to where you can are easily destroy them.
4) leave a gap in your lines that is on difficult terrain( the ai will move its offensive forces toward these holes where they can be pounded and destroyed)
5) concentration of air power. Target 1 city, bomb it out of existence in 1 or 2 turns while the front advances towards the target.
6) once a city is taken move a force of warriors (cheap resistence suppressors) in and quell. leave a strong offensive unit beside the city to retake it in case it reverts back.
7)keep advancing the front. it really sucks loosing 40 aircraft when a city reverts back over via culture(i think this is a terrible thing firaxis should change,,, no reversions during wartime.(come on, did paris just simply kick the germans out in ww2? No! it took the whole allied army!) so a easy fix is to just bring up a settler and found an airbase city and build a temple.(firaxis took out the airbase improvement when i think wasnt a good move)
8) When fighting near water, build CARRIERS! I love carriers, can't build enough of them. IN my last game I managed to build a fleet of 12 carriers fully loaded. thats 48 air units! about 20% were fighters.

The main benefit of using air power is that fighters are relatively cheap and its alright loosing a couple a turn drawing out the enemy(if you keep up your air assault the enemies fighters will be destroyed, aka, the blitz) when attacking 1 city with 40+ bombers that city will be reduced to rubble and hence be useless to the enemy civ. Since the enemy gets mauled from the air, you need minimal ammounts of ground units to simply come in and mop up.
this is highly realistic i think and is a major improvement over civ2.

thanks firaxis.

 

[Neo Guderian]

If you are going to use war as a valid option, you need the resource and industrial base to do so, and the luxuries to keep those workers cranking out units. so here's how to do it.

1)Early on tool up for warfare in all your cities and build a massive army. Don't worry about building many cities early on, you'll conquer plenty.

2) choose your target well. Invade quickly and cleanly, take a city or 2 and halt for a bit, pick some well defensible terrain and let the enemy bring his army to bear against yours. When he does he attacks your meatgrinding defenses and you press home the assault. Concentrate on quantity early on rather than quality. Archers Archers Archers. Yes you will lose alot but the early battles they will win will put you on the road to victory. Get to horsemen asap because force protection is crucial, horses that retreat live to fight another day.

3) You can take down a civ or two and annex enough territory to really give you a better resource base. But what about that culture problem? Simple, stay despotism till you get to communism. every 20 turns rush build improvements in your main cities and in your imperial provinces do the same for military units. This is how you will raise your armies, forcing people into service =).

4)what about maintenance and gold? Pick about 5 good growth cities and crank out settlers, gobble up all the terrain thats along way from your capital with cities only 1 square apart and set them to wealth, dont even guard them.

5)Don't build wonders, waste of time when you can simply capture them from others.

6)Don't research, set your science to zero and buy techs from far off civs, save that money for upgrades and to purchase techs.

These are the steps to building a powerful empire by the time the really fun weapons come up like tanks, but you will probably win before then.

happy conquest

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Neo Guderian
2 words for the late game warmonger.

Air Power
build CARRIERS! I love carriers, can't build enough of them.

I know firsthand how good carriers can be. My enemy has carriers off my coast and bombers are making my people very miserable.

If my army can just take their capitol, this war will be over. . . .

 

[Grotius]

This thread is quite useful. One question: what government is optimal for war?

I've found that Republic can work, for a while, if I have all the happiness advances -- especially Universal Sufferage. But now that I'm playing on Regent level, I keep losing the Wonder race, so I don't have any happiness wonders. Meanwhile my Japanese Democracy has just been attacked by the Chinese. My Civ is religious, so I can insta-switch to communism or monarchy or even despotism. Is one of these preferable, if one doesn't have any happiness wonders?

 

[Furry Spatula]

Communism is good but your science goes down the crapper as you run low on cash b/c you get less money. Democracy is good if you have lots of cathedrals and luxeries. Also in the late game get the sufferage. The biggest problem with democracy i found is that war wearieness creaps in if you start having losses. So what is best is if you aren't going for a resource just attack and take a city, give it to another civ, burn the city, or take the city and stick enough defensive units to keep the city in it. then back your troops into someone esles territory after signing a ROP so they heal up. I lost one army once and then suddenly i got ppl Wanting peace. Before that tehre wasn't a hint of it. So if you dont loose any troops there wont be war wearieness. A difficult task to have no losses though, unless of course you have way better units.

PS Use artillery when you get it. You can blow a cities defence to nothing and take it with your units with no problem. If you use tanks or cavalry make sure you have 10 artilary pieces escorted by 10 infantry and you can take any city easily, aswell as being able to heavily damage many of the counter attacking pieces. THen use bombers when they come in to play.

 

[Grotius]

Thanks for the advice on governments. I'll try fighting a bit as a Democracy, and if the people get very unhappy very fast, I'll switch to Communism. Is monarchy an option?

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Grotius
Thanks for the advice on governments. I'll try fighting a bit as a Democracy, and if the people get very unhappy very fast, I'll switch to Communism. Is monarchy an option?

Better yet, keep your wars short and to the point. Fast and furious.