Need advice on current game (4P FFA Immortal/Domination)

[Manick]

This is the first Immortal difficulty game I have ever played, and I must say I am finding it many times harder than Emperor. It is a miracle that I have survived this long into the future era, because I have been vastly out-numbered, out-produced, out-teched, and at an economic disadvantage the entire game by everyone.

The contained text in spoiler is just a little informative about how my game went and up to you if you want to read it or not.

Spoiler :

There are three main reasons I have gotten this far.

The first, is that I killed my neighbor fairly early who started out next to me on the top right of the continent, gaining me access to almost half the entire land mass, and the ability to establish somewhat of a frontline. He declared war on me initially, I eventually gained the upper hand, and decided to take over all his cities instead of colonizing new ones since there wasn't much valuable land left anywhere.

The second, is that I managed to fend off the Babylon Empire (bottom left) at Neapolis long enough to weaken his forces to the point where the Songhai Empire (top left) noticed and intervened to declared war on him. This reduced the pressure off my struggling frontline forces and eventually lead to a peace treaty between me and the Babylon Empire. This defensive battle lasted long enough to allow me to quickly catch up on the technology curve and eventually allowed me to go on the offensive.

The third, is that the Songhai Empire has been friendly with me for the majority of the game, and that he had most of his attention focused on Babylon instead of me. He even agreed to declare war on him with me, which is the only reason I managed to survive at Neapolis, and got Babylon to negotiate a peace treaty with me with a very generous offer. He gave me two of his cities next to Neapolis, but unfortunately as soon as the peace treaty expired he nuked me along with half of my entire army, pushing me back to Neapolis. I have almost recovered from all of my losses as much as my budget will allow, but as I've been fearing the entire game, the Songhai Empire decided to declare war on me as well. And unfortunately, as you can see, I don't have a complete choke point at the very top to keep his forces from coming in, nor very many spare units to allocate across all fronts.

I basically forfeited the game last night, but I wanted to see if I could still make a come-back and loaded an auto-save game that is maybe a turn or two from when Songhai declared war on me and immediately opened a can of whoop ass on the very first turn.

Here is the current situation, along with a screenshot below. I just lost a modern tank that was consecutively bombarded 9 times in one turn by Babylon, which normally are bombarding either my city Neapolis or the surrounding fortified units establishing my frontline. Most of the time, Neapolis is bombed down to no health every turn and if I let even one enemy unit near he could take over my city instantly. I also am getting nukes or atomic bombs thrown at me, quite frequently, about every 10 turns or so I'd estimate. Most of my cities are also not very productive, and only three cities are capable of building units at an "average" pace (avg. 60 between the three) and the next 4 most productive cities average only half of that (the rest are practically not even worth trying to build anything with). Lastly, the only good things I have coming soon that may give me some kind of upper hand is a Giant Death Robot in 7 turns, and a nuclear missile in 3.

If anyone has any pointers on what I could do or could have done differently, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

Screenshot.

Spoiler :

 

[postion]

I'd take all my units and just make one final suicidal attack using workers as a meatshield while issuing a blood-curdling battle cry. If that doesn't work you'll never win and should just quit.

 

[Manick]

As hilarious and insane as that sounds, I actually have been using my workers before to lure units into capturing them and positioning themselves in a vulnerable location in order for me to kill them safely.

 

[elthrasher]

Looks to me like you've got plenty of uranium. What's the problem?

 

[Manick]

Using it. I can't produce the stuff that requires it very fast. Is that really a lot of Uranium though? Babylon just dropped an A bomb on me again before I could even clean up the fallout around it. Either he has a surplus of uranium and bombs or he just rebuilds them THAT fast.

 

[elthrasher]

What you want to do is fall back. Don't try to hold the line. Hit and run. Let the AI grab your city, then take it back. You should be able to kill a lot more AI units than you lose yourself.

Basically buy time to get more nukes. Then destroy everything.

 

[Manick]

I've never tried that before, but I'll give it a shot and see what happens. I can't remember though.. Do cities retain their full combat strength after being captured? Cause trying to re-take that city with its combat strength, at half health, will cause my units quite a bit of HP if I'm lucky to avoid casualties. I'm also worried about losing the territory bonuses, because that's another thing that has been keeping my guys alive as well. The bombers typically haven't been doing more than 1 damage per turn to fortified mechanized infantry held up in forts with the Oligarchy policy bonus.

 

[elthrasher]

A city loses a lot of its strength when it is captured. Before the horse nerf, I used this tactic a lot. Take a city with a "can move after attacking" unit. The AI will take it. Then I take it back again.

The thing is the AI is pretty dumb with its unit movements, so if you are patient and cycle fresh troops to the front while healing up your wounded ones in back, you can really cause a lot of casualties. Don't worry too much about your frontline cities. You will have them back once you exhaust your enemy's reserves. Of course that might be hard considering how far you are into the game, but it's worth a try.

 

[Manick]

Ok. So, yeah, it turns out Songhai had twenty (yes, twenty) aircraft stationed at his closest base to my boarder. Oh, and he could A-bomb me every single turn.

Also, not that I would likely have had a choice on giving up my cities or not, but they still retained most if not all of their combat strength after being captured, which made it complicated to just approach them without caution. Maybe I'm not fully patched though, because I haven't played in awhile. My version is 1.0.1.167.