Pillage grassland or mines?

[Ringo Kid]

When pillaging to weaken an enemy you do not wish to invade, will it weaken them more to pillage the irrigated land that provides food, or the mined land that brings in shields.

It seems to me that if you pillage the food the AI will have to pull workers off the mines and put them on unimproved grasslands to avoid starvation. Does that sound right ?

 

[vmxa]

It is a function of the level and the settings. If you have a Regent civ, you can hurt them to some degree with either. If it is much higher level game, you probably do not want to bother with either.

Just pillage resources, especially oil. I tend to not spend time on pillaging as the growth boost at Sid means you cannot stave them down very effectively. At least I have not seen it in my attempts. The cost factor applies to AI growth rates.

I may want to pillage roads to slow down their units movement. I prefer to have my armies kill troops either on attack or defending a beach head town.

Exception is very early in the game, killing workers and pillage of tiles can really hurt them, but you probably will have a hard time doing that.

 

[Ringo Kid]

Yes, monarch/ regent level.

I do as you say pillage the resources first. Actually I go for pillaging all the squares around the capital first, then the individual resources. Because sometimes that will break a trade for other resources or lux's from the other AI civs and have faster overall impact. Or if the enemy only has one road going to their only seaport. Thats a weak point too.

 

[vmxa]

Yes you can cut trade routes, but it is useful or not depends on many things. At Regent and Monarch, just raze the capitol and be done with it. Another reason I tend to not pillage, is those are my tiles that they are just holding for now.

 

[D0NIMATRIX]

Yes you can cut trade routes, but it is useful or not depends on many things. At Regent and Monarch, just raze the capitol and be done with it. Another reason I tend to not pillage, is those are my tiles that they are just holding for now.

Yes, I hardly ever pillage either, unless it's a war where I can't make any headway, and in that case I will pillage strategic locations and trade routes before random mines and irrigation.

 

[Ringo Kid]

Problem with razing the capitol is that they get another one instantly. If you pillage all the tiles they lose all that production & population until they build all the roads and irrigation again. And even if you want to take the cities, maybe its good to soften them up first with pillaging. Like if it causes the pop to drop from 7 to 5 for on example, - doesnt that weaken their defense?

 

[Nergal]

AFAIK citys get defense bonuses at sizes 6 and 12, so I will pillage to starve them down. Or cut them off from luxuries. In theory that should make them unhappy so they wont work the land. Especially if they are in Republic WW will kill them.

 

[Headbanger]

Bombers are great fun unless you want to keep the city.

 

[vmxa]

Pillaging is not a very effective way to take down a city. Attacking it is effective. It does not matter that they get another capitol as it will still break any trades and hurt their rep.

The new capitol is probably not going to be around long either, if you managed to raze the original one.

Again those are going to be you tiles, so why rip them up? The idea is to either capture the town or replace it so you have faster access to the next town.

 

[Mao Zendog]

Razing can help, but if you can blockade the entire city, then the AI will be trapped no matter what the difficulty level. By that I mean that you have 8 units completely surrounding the city. If the citizens cant get of the city, then they cant work any of the tiles no matter how improved they are! It may seem pointless at first because you could be using thouse units to actualy get the city, but it is very helpfull if the city is very large and the defence bonus of the defenders is overwelming. Remember that each citizen gives a small defencive bounus to all the defenders in the city, so if the citizens die then the defenders get less of a bounus. If you can manage to drop a city to a town, or a metro to a city then you can even further decrease the settlements defence bounus.

Pilliaging individual tiles can be less efficiant than blockading if there are alot of tiles that the workers could move to. Just pillaging a single tile means nothing if the citizens can just move to a different one.

If you just want to raze the tiles, then I would go for the hills. They take more effort to improve, and can do alot of damage to a nations transportation.

 

[D0NIMATRIX]

If you're going to go to the trouble of razing and rebuilding, why not just occupy all the tiles in a city's radius with units so that you get the improvements immediatly after?

 

[vmxa]

Mao what you say is correct, but again as I see it, you either have better units and thus should attack or they have better units and will attack your pillagers/occupiers.

I mostly play AW or Sid, so you just cannot sit on some ones tiles as they will attack you. If you are are superior with say cavs and they have earlier middle age units, they are going to kill some of those cavs.

Now if you have armies, you surely want to do more than pin pricks with those armies. High level civs will make units at a pretty good clip and it is best to take away towns to hurt them.

 

[Ringo Kid]

The question is what is the best way to pillage, when that is what you want to do.

Whether or not to pillage in the first place is another question, and much more difficult to answer because it depends on the goal of the particular players game.

 

[PaperBeetle]

I tend to pillage only with spare movement points, e.g. every tile that a C3C army occupies, fast units joining seige stacks, spare artillery shots, that kind of thing. But to address the original question, I would be pillaging mines and not irrigation. As vmxa points out, these tiles will be in my empire soon enough. But the towns will probably be corrupt, so it is the irrigation which I want to keep, the mines I don't really care about.

 

[Ringo Kid]

Thanks everyone for your input.

 

[Nergal]

It depends how annoyed I get with the AI. I just had a game where the Celts went to war with me and bombed a few of my towns to pieces. So I loaded 18 modern armour and a couple of battleships and went visiting. Pillaged the first city I got to, took it and razed it then loaded up what was left and went home. I've played a couple of nuke games where it was easier to nuke every AI city a couple of times and take the whole continent with 20 or so modern armour than it was to wage a long drawn out conventional battle.
I normally pillage lux and resources whatever the age.