How do I speed up my science?

One key skill for mastering the early republic is having as little military as reasonably possible.

 

I don't think I have the b-lls for that I'd rather shoot myself in the face than lose a city, and what concerns me the most is galleys.

I recently read someone saying that if a city can be reached in one turn, it needs protection. Great advice, because you have time to rush or switch to a second military unit.

I think I'm going to play Zulu next time, with one Impi able to reach all my towns in 1.66 moves

Can you control where your enemy will land? I think I've seen them favour an unprotected capital over anything else, and that once they've sent out the galley they don't change their target?

What about when I'm fighting a war to the west and my neighbour to the east keeps violating my borders to send troops across it; is a right of passage better than challenging them to declare war?

 

Arguably so. This would however favour having every city, that can be reached in one turn, be defended. Counting in the RoP this might practically be every city. Or you take the low risk that the RoP will be misused.

 

That's usually my feeling, as well. However, in my last game (won early this morning), I concentrated most of my forces to take one enemy city to get the Uranium I needed for the last part of the Spaceship, and left a couple other towns only lightly defended because at that point it didn't matter if I lost a couple. I ended up not losing them (much to my surprise), but I was willing to in order to finish the Ship.

That is, admittedly, a rare circumstance that I'm not sure I've come across before, but it seemed to make sense at the time.

 

I've always kept one unit in my coastal cities, because I have been surprised by a galley+escorts a time or two. Lately I have been more vigilant, which leads to my second observation.

In my experience, the AI loves an unprotected city. It will look for one that is "close" to the coast, if not right on the coast. I've not seen it go for my capital if another coastal city is unprotected. I remember one game where I moved defenders around, sliding them from city to city, and convinced myself that the AI changed its target to go for the unprotected one. I might have been fooling myself, though.

Another trend, I've seen in my last couple games. The AI loves to attack my island towns, especially on 3, 4, or 5 tile islands. It must figure that it will be hard for me to reinforce.

tl;dr - AI tries to find your least defended city and attack it, in my experience.

 

My last game, I had two towns near each other - one lightly defended, the other more heavily. (I don't remember why.) The lightly defended one had culture-flipped to me many turns earlier, but the Aztecs attacked the heavily-defended town instead, and got creamed. Though they took the town, I took it back one turn later because they'd wasted all their units on it. And all distracting from my attack on their former capital (I'd previously taken & lost it) as I took it again for its Uranium (which ran out almost immediately, but not before I got the Stasis Chamber started).

Anyway, just wanted to share that experience that was different. In any case, I try to never leave a town wholly undefended ... they should at least have to work for it a little bit.

 

Others have witnessed similar behavior.

One can exploit this to create a loop where AI makes its units move to Target A in one turn and to target B in the next turn and back to target A in the turn after that. If such a loop can be created it is quite powerful as AI will achieve nothing while you get the opportunity to change the balance in your favour.

 

No, this is real, and it works against overland AI-invasions as well as seaborne invasions. It works especially well when you have rails, so can instantly shuffle a small stack of defenders from one end of a landmass to the other.

I recently saw a link to a video featuring Soren Johnson(?) discussing game-AI design in general, and the (Civ III) AI's decision-making process in particular, and he specifically mentions that the 'bait city' exploit was something he/they deliberately aimed to fix in Civ IV.

Of course, I now can't remember where I saw that link. Possibly @choxorn's "Conquests" thread, in response to his conclusion that "the AI is a cheating b*****d". Or he might even have linked to the TVTropes page with that title...

 

I did link to the TVTropes page with that title, and Soren's video is linked in that page, which is probably where you found it.

Yeah, what happens is that when doing naval invasions, the AI looks for whatever coastal or near-coastal city is least well defended. And it rechecks which city this is every turn, so if you keep reshuffling which of your coastal cities is least defended, it will keep moving its invasion around and never land. You can do that by moving stacks from one end of a continent to the other with railroads, or, because they check only units in the city itself and not units near the city, move all your units in a city outside it to bait the AI there, then when they come, move them back into the city and move all your units in a city far away a few tiles outside that city, repeat while the AI goes back and forth forever.

That said, the AI is so totally inept and naval invasions even aside from this exploit that you really don't even need to use it most of the time.

 

Or you allow the AI to land and then murder them until they are dead.