How to gauge an enemy's military strength

[lummoxybez]

Playing as Japan, Large map, More Aggressive AI, Monarch, all other settings default.

When I look at the 'Power' rating on the graph page, the text states that Power is a mixture of units, wonders etc...
Using this, I saw that the Power rating of Rome was much higher than my own, and although I know that they have built several wonders, and have also taken most of the Greek cities (I took Athens and a couple of others myself), I expect that Caesar will have a lot of legions partying merrily in the fog.
Therefore, I was understandably reluctant to start a war with them but as they were moving around 20 units into my territory, I realized I had no choice but to get them to DoW.

Now they flood units into my land and they are mostly archers and spearmen, with a couple of legions now and then. None of these are a match for my samurai, and I'm pushing Rome back more and more each turn.

My question is, is the Power rating skewed to show a nation is far more powerful than it actually is when it has built a lot of wonders or has a lot of cities rather than it's pure military might?

Rome is still showing as slightly more powerful than me now, but unless Caesar has 50+ legions hidden away where I can't see them, I don't see how he can defend against my soon-to-arrive hordes of samurai.

(I'm the only one with Chivalry BTW - made a beeline for it.)

 

[justanick]

The powerrating does mainly come from cities.The more you got, the more power you have. Units do play a role, but it is numbers that count for power. For military strenght however quality matters a lot. The graph for power is a bad measure of military strenght.

F3 is a better measure for the current military strenght. The tricky part is anticipating changes in military strenght.

 

[tjs282]

If you're specifically interested in a potential adversary's military strength, then you should be looking at your Military Advisor's (F3) comparison, rather than the overall Power-rating (F8) screen. Assuming that you're building primarily/exclusively attack-units rather than defensive-units, and that these attack-units are stationed out on your borders rather than in your core, then once Colonel F3 begins rating you as '(poor to) average' against them, then you can probably take them on safely. 'Average' means you're pretty well matched in terms of total (mostly) attack-power + defence-power.

The AI always builds the 'best' (attack) units that it can, so also looking at what resources and techs they have to trade, via the Foreign Advisor (F4) (or CivAssist), may also help you judge what units they are currently likely to be building/ fielding, and thus what (relative) numbers are likely compared to your own:
— If they have Iron but no Horses, they will build exclusively Swords (or Legions, if Rome)
— If they have both Iron and Horses, they will build mostly Swords, with maybe a few Horsemen
— If they have Horses but no Iron, then the M=2 should make Horsemen-builds preferred over Archers, resulting in similar unit-numbers as for Sword-builds, but a lower total strength-rating — but with the caveats that Horseman could attack an unpopped border-town directly from beyond the border, and retreat if they failed to kill your defender(s)
— If they have no Iron or Horses, they will simply build Archers. Since Archers have only A=2 rather than A=3, but cost only 20s vs 30s, they can build ~50% more Archers than they would have built Swords/Horsemen, and still get roughly the same strength-rating

In this case, the Romans probably 'looked' powerful because they had a large stack of Archers (+ Spears), but the fact that they had very few Legions in the initial stack tells you (if you didn't know already) that they probably did not have Iron until quite recently — perhaps from finally hooking up an Iron-mountain, or from a former Greek town, or from a town that popped its borders across an Iron-colony — and they probably (still) have no Horses either. And since the AI also usually throws its entire offensive stack into the initial rush, if you've killed that initial stack, then all you will be faced with now are the units they produced on the previous turn(s).

So it is also unlikely that they have a big surprise-stack of Legions out there in the fog (especially if they've also been building Wonders!), and if you managed to take any Iron-tile(s) from them, then their Legion-supply may soon dry up again. By continuing to push forwards, picking your attack-route(s) and battlefield(s) with a little care, and concentrating on their towns rather than stray units in the field, you should be able to defeat them relatively easily.

EDIT: X-posted with Justanick, but never mind...

 

[lummoxybez]

Thanks for the responses.
I wasn't aware that the Military Advisor gave an estimate of relative strengths. That's an awesome tip.

By way of an update, the Romans stomped into my (formerly) Greek territories with several stacks of Legionaries. I rushed a wall in Athens and sat tight with my Samurai whilst they threw themselves recklessly at the walls. End result was 30+ destroyed Legionaries and only 1 Samurai lost. However, I got an army off the back of that battle. Payback time!

 

[tjs282]

I rushed a wall in Athens and sat tight with my Samurai whilst they threw themselves recklessly at the walls.

That was kind of a risky approach, though. It's almost always better to attack than to defend, especially if you have M>1 fast units (Samurai) available vs. their M=1 slow units (Legions). Not only are you twice as likely to spawn MGLs on attack as on defence, but every attack on your units — even if the attacker loses (or retreats) — also increases war-weariness (if you're running a WW-susceptible gov-type).

So it's better not to wait until their units reach your towns, if you can prevent it. If there are roads on some/most/all of the 8 tiles around the town-tile, then as soon as you see an incoming enemy stack(s) just beyond your borders, you could/should send out your fast-units to attack the topmost unit(s) of that stack(s) before they cross into your territory (if the NSEW tiles all have roads, your units can reach all the tiles in the town's 5x5 radius). So long as there is still >1 attacker left in the incoming stack, a victorious (or retreated) Samurai will not move across the border, and you can then use its second move to retreat it back into the town (and sentry if its HP are still green; or fortify if it's yellow/red). Injured enemy units will usually retreat to heal rather than advancing, and you can use your remaining healthy units to attack any border-crossing survivors on the second turn.

This way, you can whittle down the enemy stack(s) over the course of 2 turns of attacks, rather than 1 turn of defence, ensuring that the actual town (and its healing defenders) will suffer fewer attacks on the second interturn (also buying you more time to rush-build a Barracks and/or a Pikeman, to go with that Wall).

 

[justanick]

That was kind of a risky approach, though. It's almost always better to attack than to defend, especially if you have M>1 fast units (Samurai) available vs. their M=1 slow units (Legions).

In this concrete case the rationale changes by quite a margin. The higher defence of Legions makes attacking them less rational while the higher defence of Samurai makes them defending more rational. Combine this with being fortified in town with walls and the results will be much better than what can be expected at attack. The risk of war-weariness is a relevant concern, but after the initial meltdown of the enemy forces the fast Samurai can advance fast and take the war to an end which will end the war-weariness.

 

[lummoxybez]

Thanks all.
I wasn't aware that a city being attacked contributed to WW.
Yet another new lesson today.

 

[justanick]

Technically it is units being attacked. And of course losing a city contributes to WW.