...do people win domination victories on Bts? On my game I'm currently on Warlord level and are up against 3 other opponents, one being the Greeks. It took ages to build up an army to attack the Greeks, which mainly consisted of Trebuchets, some pikemen and horse archers. I couldn't upgrade my units because that costs an absolute fortune! I had a stack of about 27 units which I managed to take over two cities with. However it then went pear shaped, with the Greeks attacking my stack with macemen and trebuchets. My stack has now completely gone and the Greeks have taken over one of my cities! I have no chance against them!!
I feel like tearing my hair out, because I've still got two more opponents to face. It honestly feels like the computer cheats regularly because it manages to get LOADS of units together to attack and its cities just start popping up all over the place!
What am I doing wrong? PS I don't know how to leave a link to my save game!
I detect 3 problems here:
1) Build times: You say it took a long time to build up your army. Obviously that's bad because, depending on the game speed (especially normal or faster), the army can be obsolete before it shows up at the battlefield. So you need to accelerate your military builds.
First off, make sure you have some good production cities--these should have a mix of good food tiles and good hammer tiles (you need the food because hammer-heavy tiles are food-poor). These become your military centres.
Second, take advantage of whipping and chopping. Run the Slavery civic and learn how to whip so you get an overflow of hammers into the next build. Prioritize Mathematics to enhance the output of chopped forests.
Third, get an early unit up to Level 4 (3 promotions) by fighting barbarians so you can build the Heroic Epic. Build the HE in one of your best production cities, preferably a coastal one, so it can give its 100% military unit production boost to both naval and land units. Devote this city to mainly producing units and very little else, except as needed to keep its citizens happy and healthy.
All of the above should help you produce your attacking army faster.
2) Stack composition: Okay, Trebuchets are good, but Horse Archers and Pikemen? Nuh-uh. Pikemen are purely for defense from mounted units; to my mind, they're not attacking units. And HAs aren't that useful overall. Remember that they get a
-10% penalty when attacking cities. And where are your Longbowmen to ensure you could hang on to your gains?
I like my medieval-era stacks to consist of the following:
- 6-10 Macemen with City Raider promotions
- A Combat/Shock promoted Maceman for general protection
- 3-4 Knights, mostly with Flanking promotions
- 1 or 2 Crossbowmen for protection from melee units
- 1 or 2 Pikemen for protection from mounted units
- 1 or 2 Longbowmen with City Garrison promotions for each city you intend to capture (if you can also include a Crossbow, Knight, and Pike for each city, so much the better; see below)
- Trebuchets, Trebuchets, Trebuchets. Try to field a dozen if you can, but more is always better.
That probably sounds like a lot, but if you follow my advice regarding production above, you should be able to produce this stack without too much trouble. Just devote every city to producing units for a while. By this point in the game your cities should be of a decent size and have the production required to churn out units for several turns.
If you find you just don't have enough cities to produce a good-sized medieval stack, you're probably not going to war early enough. 4 to 6 cities is fine to produce a classical-era stack, but not enough for the medieval era. So if you find yourself only able to expand to that many decent cities before the AI hems you in, you may need to go to war much earlier in order to acquire the land and cities you need to produce later units.
3) City Defense: I'm convinced that the AI is programmed to make recapturing one of its lost cities a very high priority. It will send stacks at a lost city repeatedly in an effort to get it back. So besides offensive units, you'll need defensive ones too. As I said above, the best medieval city defenders are Longbowmen, who have a +25% bonus for that task, and when you give them City Garrison promotions, they become nearly unbeatable--mainly because the AI is rather clueless regarding siege weapons.
The AI is also fond of mounted units, so bringing along some Pikemen and fortifying them in the city is also helpful.
Longbowmen, however, are for "passive" defense. To weigh the scales even further in your favour, bring along some units for "active" defense.
A couple of Catapults with Combat/Barrage promotions can weaken an enemy stack that pulls up next to your new acquisition. Even if you make no attacks with other units, the enemy stack will be weakened and will have less success against your city defeders.
Knights are particularly strong active defenders, able to foray out of the city and retreat back into it. They're the only unit that makes mincemeat out of Crossbowmen, they chew up Macemen admirably as well, and in BtS, they can now cause flanking damage to Catapults and Trebuchets. Flanking promotions mean they may survive battles where the odds are against them.
Crossbows are also useful defenders against melee units like Maces and Pikes. And Pikemen can do double-duty, fortifying inside the city, but also venturing out to attack the lone mounted units the AI likes to foolishly send in on recon/pillaging missions.
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Another thing you may want to consider is your game speed. As I said, on normal speed you may find your units becoming obsolete before you get to use them. If you haven't tried epic speed or even marathon, give one of them a shot. Things take longer to research and build, but unit movement is unchanged.
) when i attacked shaka i had 500 mech infantry and like 50 nukes.....he died so fast 
then washington fell and when i went to cyrus(who was blocking off my dad) half way through his territory....i got a dom victory 
. so it is possible without having any wars until the very end of your tech.
