VII. Infrastructure and production
Fighting a war on another continent is a
LONG process. In my latest game, I gained maps of the entire target continent (the Enemy/Stooge pic above in ch. III) in
1140AD, decided on who to invade first (based on their techs, resources, size and helpfulness to me in trade), and decided that the invasion starts
now. It was
1250AD - 12 turns later - before my first ship unloaded troops in-theatre.
After some time the Enemy (the Celts, in dark green) was reduced to one island city off the south-east coast of the continent. The Ally (Maya in light blue) had suffered serious city-losses: cities taken over by the Enemy (who took advantage of the war to bash a weak neighbour, avoiding attacking my Musketmen/Riflemen) but then taken over by the Stooge (Mongols, in yellow):
The date?
1490AD - 48 turn after the first landing! What took so long?
Well, I'm sure my warmongering abilities are far from perfect; and I may be prone to fighting a bit conservatively, avoiding risking losing captured cities rather than blitzkrieging. But the main reason, IMHO is: invading at that distance
just takes that long. Why is this?
a) Injured units take ages to heal, unless you're lucky enough to find an intact Barracks in your bridgehead city.
b) A unit that pops out of one of your core cities will be spending up to 8-9 turns sitting around in a port/ship, enjoying dreaming up lurid fantasies or gambling its pay away at the poker-table, before it sees action. 2 turns to move to port and load, 5 turns at sea, 1 turn to unload.
c) A bad spell with the RNG can leave you stuck waiting for several turns for reinforcements to arrive.
There's a lot of
waiting.
Waiting for units to heal before the next attack,
waiting for a ship to arrive with reinforcements,
waiting for units to arrive at the home loading-point,
waiting for ships to arrive back there to pick up a stack of units.
This section is about ways to make this waiting around something you have to put up with at the start of the campaign, rather than something that goes on hampering you all the way through.
Your supply infrastructure is going to be used day-in day-out for hundreds of years, so it's worth putting some effort into making it run smoothly. A quick start to a campaign that works well for me is loading up an initial expeditionary force onto 2-3 ships, and simultaneously starting work on the infrastructure so that it gets built while the ships are en-route. When I've taken the opposite approach - "wait and see" how the initial force does, and put off thinking about the supply back home - it's worked out badly.
VII.1 Loading-points and harbors
Minimise the sea-journey by choosing one loading-point on each side of your continent (assuming you're going for a Head and Tail of the Tiger two-pronged attack, as described by RaMesh in his War Academy
article). The closest point to the enemy continent may not be a city - it may be an awkward Hill or Jungle square that doesn't yet have a road. 1-2 tiles' less sea distance could mean a 5-turn rather than 6-turn journey - if so, get your Workers roading to the loading-point.
It's crucial to have a Harbor either at or close to the loading-point. You're going to need your ships to be constantly on-stream in spite of naval attacks and 1-3 generations of technological progress (Galley->Caravel->Galleon->Transport) - a lengthy diversion away from the supply-route to a Harbor to heal or upgrade will be nothing but a pain.
VII.2 Transport to the loading-point
The loading-point and the tiles leading to it are going to be the busiest part of your empire. Every unit produced at home will be crossing these tiles. So I make them the highest priority for roads, and then for Rail when it comes - a higher priority even than the high-shield tiles around my core production cities.
To build railways I generally use a "worker-saturation" method. Start with an enormous stack of workers in one area and rail with a high density of workers on one square. The rail network will spread outwards very quickly, helped by the fact that "resting" workers on a tile can quickly use the rails built by other workers to move to the next tiles to be railed - in the same turn.
When Steam Power is 1-2 turns away, I start moving stacks of workers to my loading-points. Here's the result a few turns later:
Note that I'm ignoring railing the "best" tiles (like one of the desert mines), in favour of just getting a straight-line, easy-terrain railway set up. Once that's set up, it makes it far easier to get stacks of Workers onto the tiles you want to rail for production rather than transport. Sometimes it's worth deviating from this a bit, and railing "hard", time-consuming terrain as part of the network:
In this picture I took the hard hill route, because Sparta is my best city after the capital - it's worth delaying the progress of the rails for the sake of the extra shields from the Mines. You can "twist" the initial rail network to cover high-value tiles, like the Wheat north of Ephesus. And there's no need to get every city connected up right from the start. Pharsalos has been ignored by the railers for the moment. As long as every city is within 2 tiles of a railway, even slow units (i.e. defence/arty units) produced can still move to the loading-point and load in one turn.
Remember that "exit tiles" from each city will only be used every 7+ turns, when the city produces a unit - "entrance tiles" to the loading-point will be used many times each turn!
VII.3 Balancing unit production: defence, fast attack, arty, transport
Combined arms warfare is a great feature of CivIII. A stack of Musketmen/Riflemen/Infantry (defence), Cannon/Artillery (bombardment), and Fast Attack units (Knights/Cavalry/Tanks) is the way to go. But the result is often a frustrating wait because of imbalance in the units available.
You have a stack of Arty ready to do its work - but you can't move it out of a city into the target zone, because you have no defensive units to protect it. Or you have your arty-stack set up, defended by 2-3 defensive units - but bomb bomb bomb as much as you like, there's no Attack unit in the area to finish off the red-lined defenders.
This is doubly true in intercontinental warfare, and a unit imbalance on the other side of the world can stall a campaign. Run out of Cavalry? No problem, I think, I have more: but then I check my ships and the stacks waiting at the loading-points, and there's only 2 Cavs on the way! So I switch production back home to emphasise Cavalry. Fine - but those Cavs will take 8 turns to reach the war, even once they're produced.
The first rule, which I always have to repeat to myself, is:
SHIPS SHIPS SHIPS SHIPS. Build more ships than you think you'll need - twice as many. There's nothing worse than a campaign stalling or even falling back for lack of reinforcements, while stacks of units pile up at your loading-point waiting for the boat. It's much better to have 2 Galleons at 50 shields each waiting at the port for the units to turn up, than to have a 2Cav/2Infantry stack worth 340 shields waiting for the boats to turn up.
The second rule is: you can't tailor your production to what's going on at the front. Because of the transport delay, your production has to be balanced to cope with whatever
might have happened 8 turns in the future. This is very difficult; what I find helpful is to avoid the temptation to tweak production because of what's happening now.
So, in descending order of production-priority:
Transport ships
You'll need an enormous number of these. At this kind of distance, 2-3 boats cruising back and forth, loading and leaving on an occasional basis, won't cut it. The aim is a continuous stream of boats. Depending on the unit-productivity of your core, you'll want a boat to be ready to load and leave every 1-3 turns. With a 5-turn journey to the other continent (meaning a 10-turn round trip), this means 4-10 boats on each side of your continent. Count how many cities you can devote to unit production, and estimate the rate at which this core will pump out units (but don't forget the future effects of growth and Rail - this is going to be a LONG war). Divide by boat capacity (Galley 2, Caravel 3, Galleon 4), and add 1-2 to this number.
The need for regular departures makes it a good idea to pick one bridgehead on each side of the target continent (see VIII below) and stick to it. Sending ships off-route to land troops elsewhere can be a great tactic, but in the extreme the extra journey-time can break the flow of boats back home.
If you're lucky and the enemy has little or no offensive naval force, you'll only have to devote many cities to ship-building at the start of the campaign. At a certain point you may find that you have spare naval capacity. You can leave one of your ships hugging the enemy coast - very useful as a shuttle to ferry units along the coast, and also as a storage-area for units you don't want to leave in a city that you think might flip to the enemy.
Military ships
These don't exist as a separate category until Magnetism and the Frigate/Privateer - before that, transport ships are also the best attack/defence ships. Once you have Magnetism, should you build Frigates?
I'm not sure. I've had varying results with losing transports to naval attack. Sometimes I get hyper-cautious, and build lots of Frigates, only to find that I never come under naval attack. In general I've found that the AI doesn't take enough advantage of the chance to cut your supply-lines at sea - far less than I would as a human player. Once the enemy gets Magnetism, I tend to rethink, and build a few Frigates. Ironclads, when they come (and you need an extra, dead-end tech for them), are horribly slow, taking decades to reach the place where they're needed, and only destroying Frigates if they come across one with a turn or two of their snail-like 3/turn still remaining. For a true successor to the Frigate - a fast hunter-killer ship - you have to wait for Combustion and Destroyers.
Fast Attack units (Knights/Cavalry)
You won't be putting this on the army recruitment posters, but these guys die like flies. First of all, they do the worst of the fighting - even when supported by Arty and attacking red-lined defenders, they often die anyway. Secondly, their defence strength is rubbish, and their mobility means they often end up outside a defended stack. Even in an asymmetric war, where you have the tech advantage, this invites the inevitable attack by the greatest PITA unit in the game: the Longbowman. Longbowmen are the IEDs of CivIII, costing 40 shields and capable of taking down even Elite Cavalry (and, on occasions, Vet/Elite Riflemen). In a Longbowmen vs Cavalry battle, whoever attacks wins. So if you see a Longbowman in the open, kill it!
This is the unit I tend to run out of most. Each player has their own war of making war, with its own defence/attack/arty balance - but IMHO, whatever your style, you always run out of Fast Attackers; so I always build more than I need.
Defence (Musketmen/Riflemen/Infantry)
Essential for the initial landing, especially if the enemy has Rails and will throw their entire army at you in 1-2 turns. Loads of defensive units at the start is a good rule of thumb. Once a bridgehead city is established, these guys are tricky to balance.
On the one hand, I tend to have a military tech advantage when I attack: even if the AI is equivalent to me in tech, it often doesn't have a resource, or hasn't managed to build/upgrade the latest units outside the capital and immediate core. So I'm dealing with Knights and Trebs vs my Musketmen/Riflemen, or Cavs and Cannon vs my Riflemen/Infantry. The AI tends to avoid attacking tiles defended by good defensive units, preferring to slip through gaps, or find undefended/lightly defended Workers or Artillery to grab. So losses of defensive units tend to be low.
On the other hand, good progress in a campaign can really stretch your defence out, so that further progress becomes impossible without more defensive units. You need so many defenders: for the cities you've taken, for MP in the cities you've taken, for the artillery stack at the spearhead, to protect that arty/Fast Attack stack that's on its way to the spearhead, to protect the Workers roading/railing from the bridgehead to the spearhead, or to occupy a Mountain the enemy loves putting units on.
Defenders aren't just needed at the start. Whenever I've checked my defence in the warzone, thought "OK, everything's covered" and stopped producing defenders, it's turned out to be a really bad idea.
Arty (Treb/Cannon/Artillery)
I don't produce very many of these during a continental invasion (your style may vary). For one thing, with Leonardo's, I usually have a reasonable stack of them left over from my local wars, easily upgradeable to the latest style of killing-machine. And I'm very conservative about defending them in a war-zone, so I don't tend to lose many Artillery units, if I lose any at all. I used to produce loads of Arty, for the good reason that Arty is great - but learned that artillery is useless without enough defensive units to protect it, and enough attacking units to finish the job after bombardment.
On a quick side-note - if the enemy does build up an annoying naval force, arty on the coast on both continents (ideally a stack of 3-4 on a rail network) is the way to deter the enemy navy, send it back home for repairs, or make it easier for your own navy to sink it.
And a last note on Armies:
Watch out for the Army-transport problem! A 3-unit Army counts as 4 units, and can't be transported by anything less than a Galleon (needs Magnetism). A 4-unit post-Pentagon Army is 5 units - nothing less than a Transport (Combustion) will do the job. A simple trick is to only load up Armies (either the initial 3-unit load, or the extra 1-unit 3->4 load after Pentagon) over on the war-continent.
VII.4 Balancing units on a boat
What combination of units should go on a boat? This question is IMHO only relevant when you're loading for an initial landing. Once the production-line is ticking over smoothly, I just load whatever turns up so that the boat can leave ASAP. It's impossible to predict what might be needed 5 turns in the future when the boat arrives in-theatre. But I do have an aversion to loading nothing but Arty, even when I have a bridgehead established, simply because it's useless (except as a city-defender) without some other unit to move with it. In the worst case, when other ships get sunk, a ship carrying only Arty may be reduced to waiting until more ships with defenders come along to allow it to land its units.
The unit-balance for initial landings depend on the whether the AI has rails. If I'm facing a railed enemy, I don't bother loading anything except Defence (and maybe one or two Arty for defensive bombardment, at a ratio of 3-4 Defence:1 Arty). A highly-militarised railed enemy won't give you a chance to break out of a LZ - all you can hope for is to hold the tile, or at least have many enemy units commit suicide against your stack before it dies.
In the absence of enemy rails, a Fast Attack unit or two can be useful, to pick off injured units that have tried to attack you and then pop back into the stack. Something like a 2 Defence:1 Arty:1 Fast Attack works well for me.
trouble
to it.
) is to cut them down to size. Divide and rule overseas, and at home (if you've discovered the Blairism government type) tell the simple folk that this civ has WMDs. It is the Middle Ages, and no-one will know what the heck you're talking about. Try "the [enemy civ] are souring the cows' milk by witchcraft". Let the other civs have a chance to expand a bit at the Enemy's expense - they can do so without threatening you, so why not?
. Corruption and waste in CivIII mean that being a "builder through war", as you could be in CivII, is not a possibility. (Though, as someone not very experienced with Communist government, I'd be interested in different perspectives on this). Invading another continent for the sake of taking over the wonderful, productive, shield and commerce-rich cities over there is simply pointless. Once you take them over, they're good for nothing but farming. True, this city is in a particularly unpleasant place - but the catastrophic effects of corruption and waste will be the same no matter how good the city is.
