Scandinavian conquest *theoretical*

[Chrikke]

First of all, you might not want to take this too serious.
I've only been playing this game for a couple days, on Warlord difficulty. Usually prospering early on but then failing because of diplomatic mistakes or a too weak army. So I have still much to learn, but I'm taking most of what I read on these forums into very good account!

Now, during a game I played lastly, it was me(Babylon) versus the English, Greeks, and Persians. I shared the smallest of two continents with the Greeks and Persians. I never established contact with the fourth civilization so I figured it was isolated somewhere. And I was right, soon it was revealed that the English occupied an entire continent much bigger than ours. At that time however, I had already defeated the Persians. They were clearly the weakest and were always threatening me so I took their lands. After I discovered the English major leading position I knew I could only bring myself back into the game by taking out the Greeks. I tried twice invading their cities and twice I failed. I then took another look at their infrastructure. The capital laid in the center, with 3 COASTAL cities surrounding it and two cities by the border. They also had three minor cities on a relatively big island just east of our continent.

I soon began to abandon culture techs, rushing my gold into every tech that could help me at warfare. Amphibious Warfare was my savior. Basically I loaded 5 Transports full of Marines, taking the coastal cities and the island. Whatever Marines were then inland went on to the capital, as I had taken the border cities by bombing them and then going in with Infantry.

The Marine proved to be a very powerful unit, with its ability to attack directly from the ship that carries it! However, the Scandinavian Berserk comes as soon as in the early Middle Ages, with an attack value of 6, which is more than decent at that time.

Imagine playing the Vikings on an archipelago-styled map with this knowledge.
You should always have the upperhand in armies, taking out cities lightningfast where it will take the others alot longer to launch counterattacks back on you. Keeping up with techs shouldn't be too hard I imagine. You're the seafaring one, so you get to know every civilization. A mistake, I think, would be to sell the communications. Rather sell techs on your turn, and don't sell them on the AIs turn. If you can sell each tech 3 to 5 times it only doubles to the gold needed for upgrading/rushing units.

But again, this is just a theory of me, a noob who's only been playing for three days ^^" Though if some of you more experienced players would want to give this a test I'd be glad. I really want to know if this works and I fear I'm too inexperienced myself.

PS: I eventually still lost the game I described above I made the big mistake of using my ICBMs, thinking that cutting of resources would be sufficient but alas. The English soon took my capital, destroying my Spaceship which only needed two more parts. I know, I should've focused on that Those ICBMs just looked so tasty!

 

[Snarkhunter]

I've been trying that on my current emperor game. A couple of problems: you don't get beserks very quickly in the game, you can only stick 2 of them on a galley (& galleys are all you have for some time), they don't defend well, & you more or less have to write one off to take/raze a city. but you can slow up an AI fairly effectively this way.

kk

 

[Chrikke]

If you attack coastal cities, the defense shouldn't matter I think. As long as your berserks stay in the boat then the enemy won't be able to get to you. But you're right, you're practically restricted to razing because it would take way more galleys if you wanted to keep them, for transporting pikemen or whatever.

 

[Bowsling]

Even so, razing coastal cities would weaken them and have them send lots of troops to those locations, leaving the inland part to MI/Pikeman/Treb. stacks.

 

[Lanzelot]

Hello Chrikke,
the strategy you describe here, is indeed very effective. I used it recently in COTM61. See COTM61 - Final Spoiler. The first spoiler also has some interesting information.

This game was a Deity, but pretty well suited for this strategy, because we (the Scandinavians) were located on an isolated continent of sufficient size. So we were able to develop infrastructure peacefully, until the necessary tech for Berzerks was discovered. Then I started using a slightly refined version of your strategy:

• First ingredient: the AIs had done some fighting among themselves already, and there was one AI that had been reduced to size 1 by the others already (let's call it Arabia. Can't remember now, which AI I ended up using for this purpose... I originally planned to use Arabia, but it was not them, because a bit into the game I changed my mind and kept Arabia for getting their UN vote, so it certainly was not Arabia, because an AI that you use in that manner, will be quite pissed at you...). I made sure that this AI stayed alive. (E.g gift them a lonely island, if they become endangered of extinction.)
• I loaded about 10 galleys with Berzerks and started taking all the coastal cities of my first victim. (On lower difficulty levels 5 galleys should be enough, but on Deity the AI has tons of units by the time you get to Invention, and some of the AI cities already had muskets in them.)
• Once I had taken a city, I immediately gifted it to Arabia. (There would be no chance to hold the city against the counter-attack anyway...)
• After I had taken all the coastal cities, I made peace with my victim and then declared war against Arabia. "On the way back" my galleys took all the Arabian cities, which were defended by only a spear, so it was a piece of cake. As Arabia was far away on a different continent, there was no risk of loosing them in a counter-attack.
• Now the original victim is weakened a lot (some lost half their cities to me), without ever being able to fire even one single shot at me...
• The beachheads gained that way, can now be reinforced with Knights/Cavalry and the victim can then be finished off in a "normal" land war.

There are two risks involved in this strategy:

• On Deity the AI has quite a bit of culture. So once you have taken their cities back from the "proxy", you'll loose some due to flips. Just make sure to park your reinforcements outside of cities...
• There's a small risk, that the AI attacks you, before your reinforcements are ready. But usually an AI respects a 20-turn peace deal, if you have a clean reputation. So just make sure you never break any deals (especially no peace deals) in this game.

Lanzelot