When saying that PEACEFUL OUTPOPULATING is mainly about growing your cities and maintaining peace via diplo etc., still another important element is warfare. Our war(s) should be
- Quick (back to peace ASAP),
- with as few units as possible (saves time to grow your cities) and
- effective (get many cities in only a few turns, then back to peace).
Therefore warfare in PEACEFUL OUTPOPULATING differs significantly from the warmongers approach of warfare (win with numbers, long wars). We will try to build up our army completely before we enter the war. After that, we only build additional units to replace losses. In this game, I decided not to go for 20 cavalry as initial strike force (what I normally try to do), because we just havent enough cities to produce them fast enough AFTER military tradition is in. Main problem in this game is that we cant pre-build knight or elephants for upgrade, because we have no iron or ivory, so we have to pre-build horse archers. These are much more expensive to upgrade to cavalry, so we wont be able to pre-build 10 - 12 units for about 2000 gold of upgrade costs but only 7 - 8.
Another imortant rule is:
NEVER go to war alone. This should be relatively easy, since we always try to please the other civs. So if there is no war already going on, simply bribe someone to help you and let him take out the big defenisve stacks BEFORE you enter the war...
When we entered this war in 880 AD, our army production wasnt finished completely, we only had about 10 cavalry, 6 muskets and 5 catas (of 15 cavalry, 10 muskets and 6 catas). But I decided to go to war earlier, because the two front war of Ash (Isa and Sal) was starting to show its influence. Ash stopped advancing on Sal and already lost one of his borderland cities to Isa (Karachi, see next screenshot). So I felt that we had to strike ASAP, because I wanted to take most of his cities (and not leave them to Isa). The second borderland city to Isa wasnt our target (Lahore, see next screenshot), because Isa would be faster and even if not, we would never be able to survive her huge cultural pressure.
Our advancing route was also not ideal, but we had to cut Isa´s advance. So we decided to go for Kolhapur, then Madras, Bombay and last Bangalore.
Last thing to ad before we finally look at the war, is that this time we didnt forget to deal with Isa and she in fact turned to pleased. Only setback was, that we missed the economics trade with Ash.
North India 900 AD:
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Already when our catas arrived at Madras, our army was complete and so far we had only lost one musket (defending Kolhapur) to a knight. Altogether ten turns later, the north Indian map was already looking much better, and our losses so war were still only one musket and one cavalry.
North India 1050 AD:
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Our contact mission (remember the caravel we sent out about 15 turns earlier) was ended successful and we had made contact with the remaining two civs (Alex, and Huy). As you can see, we are in war with Huy, but this is only a fake war. When we met Huy, he was already in war with Monty. Because we didnt want Monty to take him out alone (balance of power
) we bribed Alex also in this war. Only about 5 turns later, Alex asked us to join in, so we did. As things are going now, Huy will be down quite fast, because he lost about one city each turn since 3 or 4 turns. He had 8 or 9 cities in the beginning, so perhaps he has about 10 turns left
Another 10 turns later (Huy only survived 8 turns), Ash is also more or less dead. Still, he managed to get to rifles before his last big city fell, but thanks to 6 catas (we sacrificed 2) and our (meanwhile heavily promoted) cavalry, we are optimistic to take this city also without to big losses.
Pic. 19: South India 1150 AD
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Since we have to face heavy culture pressure from Sal (see Delhi in screenshot above), we decide to leave the last two tundra cities from Ash to Isa (she will race them like she has done before with one of Ash´s cities we had to rebuild
) to keep her busy for some turns more (and loose some of her 20 30 conquistadors to riflemen). We dont need those cities, because they are placed bad and we already have a plan to build one city instead
We move our troops to Dehi to heal.
Oh, and by the way, the same turn Ash reached riflemen, we bribed Sal to stop trading with Ash (we dont want Sal to have riflemen already in the beginning of the second half of our war). Our losses after we have taken Ash´s last big city were now 2 cavalry, 1 musket and 2 catas.
We received printing press from Ash for making peace and 5 turns after that we went for Sal. But before going after Sal, we made sure that we wont get a negative modifier from Isa, and bribed her to stop trade with Sal.
Another 5 turns later, two cities of Sal were already down.
Pic. 20: Arabia 1250 AD
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But that was the point when the real fun started. Sal managed somehow to get to military tradition and was now also coming with cavalry. So we struck for his horses. Still he came with cavalry
I was confused. Nobody traded with him and somehow he managed with his lonely two remaining cities to bring out 2 cavalry every 3 turns. How could this be possible?
When I looked then for their special unit and found that its a camel archer which replaced the knight and does therefore need no horses it was clear. He just built camel archers and upgraded them to cavalry (btw, I think this is a mistake in the game and should be looked after). Since we started to make losses, I decided once again to hire Isa for the dirty work and bribed her to attack Sal. With Isa´s help, the war was over 8 turns later.
So our war against Ash and Sal lasted exactly 32 turns (the 5 turns peace in-between already subtracted).
Sal still had one or two island cities, but Isa (and Alex, whom I also invited to join this war) will look after that Im sure. We stayed in this war as fake war, to beef up the mood of Isa an Alex (also, Sal had nothing interesting to offer for peace). Our losses for the whole war were 5 cavalry, 4 catas and 1 musket.
One last thing to ad:
After Alex was in war with Sal, it was no problem to bribe Monty to war with Alex, so the relations look quite funny now and the friendly mood between Alex and Monty sort of ended forever
See you
Snaaty
)...
.
