Preventing the Chaos of War?

[Zaimejs]

Aren't there advantages to owning capitals? Used to be big in Civ IV. Maybe not.

 

[joncnunn]

In Civ IV, the main advantage was that the capital was often in a really good spot.

There doesn't seem to be much difference in Civ V, particularly because in many cases the AI founded in place when it should have moved a hex or two.

Domination Victory in Civ V requires you to own all the capitals; so owning them all even bigger than in Civ IV where you could sometimes own everybody's original capital and still not have enough land to win.

Aren't there advantages to owning capitals? Used to be big in Civ IV. Maybe not.

 

[DaveMcW]

Capitals make lousy puppets because they keep trying to build defense.

But they do tend to have nice resources.

 

[Curundir]

Domination Victory in Civ V requires you to own all the capitals;

Technically this is incorrect. Domination requires you to be the last one in possession of your own capital.

You could have a game where one warmonger takes all the capitals but yours. Then, if you capture this warmonger's capital, you'll win a domination victory.

 

[Zaimejs]

Ooooh.. that is good to know. Ripe for the plucking. But if someone was taking all the cities of all the other players, they'd have a pretty massive army by the time you faced off.

 

[fromar]

Ooooh.. that is good to know. Ripe for the plucking. But if someone was taking all the cities of all the other players, they'd have a pretty massive army by the time you faced off.

Or a pretty far-away army.

I play on Emperor. I've never seen the AI doesn't do the "Around-The-Clock" method of domination. Humans will usually start with one AI and work their way around to the next AI depending on their location. This means your conquering army is always on the move, and your conquering force keeps basically the same collection of units for most of the game. I haven't seen the AI do this. The AI tends to create a collection of units to make an attack. After the attack, those units move back to base or spread out into the conquered lands.

So you may see an AI conquer one or two other capitals, but never all of them and never in a concerted effort to keep the strong expeditionary force intact for the next war. So even though they have a strong army now, they won't keep it in the same state for the next war.