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True, but you are diverting their troops away from your own border at the same time.

This does not seem like a good thing. Letting AI do the walking to front helps. You can thereby reduce the total strenght of the enemy military in a convenient way, your troops can gain experience and heal easily. Once you have build up a decisive advantage however you will likely want to end the war soon, so just capture all enemy cities so there is no flips risk left.
 
Let me guess: you are playing the Mayas, right...? :mischief:

Regarding this strategy: I don't think it'll be useful. On higher levels (Demigod or up), it won't work, as Spoonwood already pointed out, and on lower levels you can win with much easier strategies. I'm pretty sure there are better ways to spend so much gold than to rush Elephants in a far away isolated town, and that these "better ways" would speed up your victory much more than those far away Elephants would do.

There is, however, one variant which would make sense and which I used recently in the Gandhi story: at the end of a domination game, when all front lines have moved far away from your production centers, I use cash to rush attackers in captured towns directly at the front line. With Knights/Cavalry, that captured town needs to have iron/saltpeter connected, but with Elephants, you have the advantage that you can always rush them.
 
I'm not clear on how specialist policemen work. I can see the way civil engineers and all the other specialists seem to work, but policemen are an enigma. Do they work better in conjuction with a courthouse and/or police station? I've had them in not particularly corrupt cities and they seem to increase both shields and gpt, and highly corrupt cities in which they do nothing.
 
I have already noticed that behavior as well. Not exactly sure, but I have a theory on what could be causing it: as we know, the corruption "base value" (meaning the number produced by the corruption calculating algorithm) could be bigger than 100% for a given city, and then gets "capped" at 90% by the game. So my theory is that policemen work on the base value, before the capping takes place. For example: a town has base corruption 120%, the policeman reduces that to let's 110% and then the end result is capped at 90%. Consequently you don't see a difference between with and without policeman...

If this theory is correct, that would imply that in such a case a policeman doesn't work better in conjunction with Courthouse/Police Station, because these buildings work on the capped value. (And that capped value is the same with or without policeman.)
Only if the town's base corruption is in the 90% range, the effect of policemen and Courthouses/Police Stations should be cumulative.

justanik is our expert on corruption, perhaps he knows a few more details?
 
First corruption is calculated, second the corruption reduction of absolutely one per policemen on shields and commerce is applied and after that the maximum corruption applies.

Courthouses and police stations reduce maximum corruption by 10 percentage points each. They reduce the corruption before that more strongly, thus much more towns can reach a corruption level that can sensibily be further reduced by policemen.

If you go to communism all cities can use properly use policemen. That is except the 3 capitals, there the maximum corruption of 20%, 10% or even 0% applies.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/everything-about-corruption-c3c-edition.76619/
 
I have recently fallen in love with airfields, especially when playing a continents map. Here's my tactic ...

After bunch of wars to secure my continent, I have a bunch of slave workers running around. Building roads, building railroads.
Once I have discovered flight, I sacrifice one of them to build an airfield on a tile on the rail network, near my core.

When I go to invade the other continent, I put another slave worker in one of the slots in my galleons / transports. After my troops have landed and weathered the AI's initial counterattack, the slave goes out and builds an airfield next to my beachhead city. Now I can fly in one unit (usually infantry, sometimes cavalry) each turn, every turn, while my navy returns for refills.

Does not require cash rushing on either land mass, or require me to switch governments to one which allows whipping / pop rushing.
The beachhead city will build a barracks for unit healing and a harbor for connection to my trade network.
 
When I go to invade the other continent, I put another slave worker in one of the slots in my galleons / transports. After my troops have landed and weathered the AI's initial counterattack, the slave goes out and builds an airfield next to my beachhead city. Now I can fly in one unit (usually infantry, sometimes cavalry) each turn, every turn, while my navy returns for refills.
Why stick to flying in just one unit? And why bother with shipping mil-units, once you can fly them? (And also, why suffer the expense/ pollution/ game-slowdown caused by building more Airports than you need?) If you have multiple mostly-idle Slaves on your home Continent, don't just build one Airfield in your core, build one per core-city!

Once a fully mined-and-railed core-city has a Factory and a power-plant of some kind, even at Pop12, it should be putting out >40-60 shields per turn after waste — which means that by the late Industrial/Early Modern, you'll likely have 20-30[?] core cities which can build an Airlift-able mil-unit in 1-2 turns. But only those few (1-2?) core-cities where you want to build/upgrade Air-units 'need' Airports. For all the others, plant an Airfield adjacent to each city (on an irrigated tile for preference — irrigation is quicker to stack-restore than mines), and set the Airfield-tile as the 'Rally point' for that specific city.

Each turn the city finishes building a unit, it moves automatically to the adjacent Airfield, where it waits nicely for you to fly it to your beachhead (I find it easier to use the 'zoomed-out' view for this). So now, you get 15-25 units arriving by air on foreign soil per turn, instead of just one. (Rush) Building a Harbour + Barracks in your beachhead means you won't need to ship anything home for repairs, either.

Caveat: IIRC, Artillery, Settlers and Workers are non-Airliftable in the epic game, so will still have to be shipped, if you're planning to (re)colonise your conquests. So, find your home-continental port-town nearest the enemy Continent, and set it as your Continental Rally Point (assumes a fully constructed thin rail-net), before setting the individual cities to ship to their respective Airfields. Then set up a ship-chain, with the bulk of your navy concentrated on the 1-2 tile(s) where your Transports will finish their moves after leaving port, and transfer their cargo(s) over to the next ship(s).

Once I need to start shipping large numbers of units, I also add numbers to my naval transport ships (e.g. Caravel 1, Galleon 2, Transport 3) so I always know which boat(s) I'm loading/transferring units onto/between.
 
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Agree, wholeheartedly. My point -- which you have reinforced -- is don't wait to build an airport, or even cash-rush an airport. Move quickly, and build airfields as soon as you research Flight.
 
Bombers are great for destroying resourses. Use them before sending in your artillery and attack units.

They also can destroy enemy units , so you can walk right in most cities. They have become my fav units after artillery.

Also if you are resoirce short, build marines if you have the complete version. 12 attack is a lot better than infrantry. I know its a optional tech, but its worth it if you cant build units.
 
Use artillery before bombers, if the artillery are in range, when attacking towns. The artillery will knock off a few hp so that the bombers can kill them. Since artillery don't have lethal bombardment, it doesn't work well the other way around.

Marines require rubber, so I don't see them as a unit for when I'm missing resources. On the other hand, rocketry is just a couple of techs away by the time you could learn amphibious warfare, and TOW infantry don't require any resources. They attack at 12 and defend at 14, they have defensive bombard and they cost the same as marines, so they are way better than marines unless you need an amphibious attack.
 
I like to use regular workers for Airfields since slaves don't cost upkeep. And they only take one turn to create an airfield even on a mountain.
 
As I enter the Modern Era in my latest game, pursuing yet another SS victory, it occurs to me that I haven't seen anyone list the best/recommended/optimal order for researching the required techs to build the SS. I'm thinking about writing a mini-guide that describes my thoughts, but I don't want to re-do work if someone has already done it. I didn't see a guide in the "Strategy Articles" forum, but I may not have looked far enough.

Or maybe all the good players just focus on domination wins? ;)
 
I guess, Computers and then Miniaturization are a no-brainer in order to keep the research rate high with SETI, Internet (and Research Labs). In most games, there is probably no way to keep up 4-turn research without these things. The rest then doesn't really matter. (I even once played a game, where I finished all 10 SS parts in the same interturn following the completion of the last required tech. It was a multi-player game and I didn't want to give away, how far I had already progressed [SS parts are shown to the other players in F8, even if they don't have a spy], therefore I set up 10 pre-builds to finish in exactly the same turn.)
What I sometimes do is: if I don't have enough research power to do the expensive ones in 4 turns, I first do a cheaper one, hoping that 4 turns later my science farms and other things (Police Stations, Commercial Docks, etc.) have grown enough, so that then the expensive ones are also possible in 4 turns.
 
As I enter the Modern Era in my latest game, pursuing yet another SS victory, it occurs to me that I haven't seen anyone list the best/recommended/optimal order for researching the required techs to build the SS. I'm thinking about writing a mini-guide that describes my thoughts, but I don't want to re-do work if someone has already done it. I didn't see a guide in the "Strategy Articles" forum, but I may not have looked far enough.
At one point -- shortly after ABLES SG, IIRC -- I did actually write such a text doc (mainly for my own purposes) about Space Race wins. I don't have it on my desktop box, so (assuming I still have it) it's most likely on my XP-laptop: if you're interested, I'd be happy to dig it out and upload it.

I haven't looked at it for a while though, and given that I was a relatively new graduate to Emp-level when I wrote it, it would probably need (a lot of) work to be useful as a Strat Article...
 
At one point -- shortly after ABLES SG, IIRC -- I did actually write such a text doc (mainly for my own purposes) about Space Race wins. I don't have it on my desktop box, so (assuming I still have it) it's most likely on my XP-laptop: if you're interested, I'd be happy to dig it out and upload it.

I haven't looked at it for a while though, and given that I was a relatively new graduate to Emp-level when I wrote it, it would probably need (a lot of) work to be useful as a Strat Article...

That would be helpful! I've got a Excel sheet that I've used to sort some data, and I'm doing some playtesting to check my recommendations. But I'm playing at a lower difficulty level, so some input from an Emperor-level player would be welcome.
 
That would be helpful! I've got a Excel sheet that I've used to sort some data, and I'm doing some playtesting to check my recommendations. But I'm playing at a lower difficulty level, so some input from an Emperor-level player would be welcome.
Found it. It's kind of didactic, and probably longer than it needs to be. It was also saved as an .rtf, not a .txt/.doc, so was not directly uploadable to CFC (not one of the permitted file extensions): for simplicity, I've re-saved it as a .txt, but the paragraph formatting may now be wonky (looks OK on my machine, but YMMV...).

Let the nit-picking commence... ;)
 

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It is interesting to me that you learn robotics last, as I usually learn it early so that I can build manufacturing plants. If there are plenty of wonders available to use a prebuilds, I suppose it doesn't matter, but I like having extra shield production. I don't really think it matters in which order you learn the SS techs, as 4 turns/tech gives plenty of building time.
 
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