Share your Modern-Era warfare strategies

[kommie]

Hey All,

I was involved in my 1st serious Modern-Era offensive war in the last GOTM, and found it quite a bit more difficult than warfare in earlier eras.

The main thing that hampers an invasion is railroads. A good rail network means that your opponent can bring in reinforcements instantaneously from half way across the map, and harrass your troops easily with artillery and bombardment while you're slowly 1 tile at a time advance on their closest city.
It seems that to win this sort of war you'd need a great advantage in troop numbers, something that's very hard to achieve against the AI at Monarch and higher difficulties.

I thought of a strategy recently (while daydreaming about civ ) which i havent tried yet, but it might be effective:

With your attacking stacks, bring a special set of several Gunships that will be on pillage duty only. Every time your stack takes a step forward, the gunships should fly tile ahead, pillage the rail (will need several pillage attempts if other improvements are on the tile too) and fly back to the stack. You'll need A LOT of gunships to do this, as you probably need to pillage 3-5 tiles every step, each tile needing up to 5 pillage attempts if there's towns on them. Pity about the towns though

Since you're only pillaging one square away you'd still be attackable by gunships and tanks, but the SAMs and Gunships in your stacks should be able to take care of them (although tanks cause collateral dmg too, grr!! )
Plus you will still be bombed a fair bit, your SAMs cant intercept everything.

This strategy MIGHT be able to get your stack to the city in more or less 1 piece though.

What do you guys think of this strategy? Any other Modern-Era strategies?

 

[Mutineer]

Overwelm with numbers, if you force to land warware. In modern era it is probably the only way and is posible on monarch. Use a few smaller stacks to advance, so no collateral damage from arty/tanks. and kill offending units if they did not retreate.
Use naval warware more, move your stack by boats and drop near city in forms of few stacs.

At the end of the day you have to overproduce AI. Posible with buying units (Garanty unit/ city every 2 turns).

 

[kommie]

Yeah, i usually do well with naval warfare and manage to blockade enemy coastal cities, but the majority of cities are usually inland. ALso, even when you land your stack, in that 1 turn it gets hammered by artillery. Cant really use small stacks, coz every stack would need at least 1 tank, gunship, sam, artillery and marine, in order to counter any attackers that you might be up against.
Its hard to outproduce the AI, as it gets a 20% or so bonus to unit production at that diff level, plus ridiculously cheap upgrade costs.
Probably a combination of naval superiority, air attack and pillaging stacks would be the only way to fight the AI in the modern era.

 

[Holbek]

It worked for me on prince, always, and have worked a couple of times on monarch too..

Stealthbombers! Best unit in the game.
Build 20+ minimum. (I've had games with 50+, standard size maps)
First turn of war - bomb all resources.
Second - Remove cultural defense in the 2 first cities you are going to take, with surplus bombers you start removing hitpoints from stacks in an out of cities.

Keep this going.

With the right promotions on your tanks and a medic a few places, you can go on pretty strong.

 

[Mutineer]

It is still posible to overwhelm then with numbers, but you need to forget older era of war stile.
Total war, everything for victory!

Meaning research to 0, only military production and buy and buy. I did that on monarch when I decided to attack my rival I had been friend all game, but he become my biggest opponent. Huge common border.

So, I pop up my second golden age and went full military build up.

First few turns of war were brutal, but afriction work my way.

 

[Crighton]

Stealthbombers! Best unit in the game.
Build 20+ minimum. (I've had games with 50+, standard size maps)
First turn of war - bomb all resources.
Second - Remove cultural defense in the 2 first cities you are going to take, with surplus bombers you start removing hitpoints from stacks in an out of cities.

It is still posible to overwhelm then with numbers . . . research to 0, only military production and buy and buy

Thats combined is probably some of the best advice, outproduce and overwhelm the enemy.

I'd argue against any pillaging, why pillage when you have to rebuild it? unless its a war of extermination and your just anhilating the enemy then pillage and raze.

My advice is (if possible) use transports to land your forces as close as possible to the enemies major cities. If not, start the steam roller, bring up the stack of doom conquer and move to next target. Bombers (especially the Stealth bomber) are wonderful for conquest, especially in LARGE numbers (20+ is advised) you reduce the enemy strenght to half and eliminate the city cultural defense bonus.

And the Anti Air in this game is a bit of a joke, of course when you have 20+ bombers swinging in you'd need a crapload of AA just to have a reasonable shot at an intercept (which only damages and rarely destroys the bombers).

Currently I have had more bomber losses due to destroyers stationed in the city than to fighters or sam infantry.

Nukes aren't that great but they have a loooong reach and knock the crap out of the other civ.

Use spies to sabotage enemy stategic resources (oil wells baby) prefferably while you're ramping up the war machine. Off shore platforms stink because it would generate open war fare to get rid of them to cripple the enemy.

Aftrer taking a city or to switch the slider to culture for a few turns to help crank it out for the newly conquered areas of your empire.

crap, I've got to get back to work

 

[5cats]

Tanks, big tanks, lots of them.
Bombers, big bombers, lots of them.
Occasionally a defensive unit, like SAM or Infantry, with medic or city defense.
Spys not only damage resources, they "light up" an area for your bombers to fly into Or you could just use a damaged bomber for recon...

 

[atreas]

If you want to make things a bit easier:

Rule #1
Spies to destroy Oil wells. You don't want anything that flies or moves fast (Tanks etc), except if it has the correct color (yours).

Rule #2
Don't wait to attack in that era - you made things difficult for yourself. I'm not talking only about REX, but also about a very simple truth: Axemen-Macemen upgraded to Infantry have also City Raider promotions, that the other Infantry can't get. When you want to take cities this is making things much easier. But this requires usually to have made an aggressive war earlier.

Rule #3
Tanks and Bombers, of course, are even better. But with a good army you can make it even before that.

and, finally
It's a complete Myth that on Monarch you can't outtech AI so as to make these wars the easy way. In ALL levels up to Immortal (that I have tested) if you grab some land early and use a consistent strategy, by the modern times you are the one with Tanks and the others have some Rifles or Infantry (at best) to try for survivor.

 

[pholkhero]

As others have already pointed out: it's called: "Blitzkreig" Bomb down their defenses with air, reduce their defenders HP; move in with tanks. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

[Crighton]

Rule #2
Don't wait to attack in that era . . .

Good point. Though sometimes unavoidable.

Better to crush your enemies as early as possible.

Particularly Monty (decor prohibits the full usage of my vocabulary to describe Monty properly).

 

[Elrohir]

As everyone has said already, the best strategy is a fast, "Blitzkreig" attack. Bomb their cities with until their Defense Bonus is gone and their units are hurt, slaughter with tanks, move in Infantry and Seal's to garrison, rinse and repeat. Artillery are mostly obsolete now with bombers here, only build them if you absolutely must or have no oil.

The key is to deny them important resources (IE, oil) and keep advancing. If you get bogged down then your advance may never get going again; just keep building more infantry to garrison those new cities and tanks and bombers to replace the losses you sustain in taking the cities. Hopefully though by this time you've achieved technological superiority and they only have Riflemen or Infantry. (It is much harder to win this way if they are as advanced as you) If they are as advanced or nearly so you need to massively out produce them, or have allies, or you are going to lose, or at the very least not win.

 

[Rast]

My games rarely last long enough to get Stealth Bombers (up to Prince here, will be going for Monarch after a bit more practice, but I digress...)

Anyway, here's what works for me:

1) Bombers and fighters - plenty of both, especially if your enemy has air units of his own. Load them all into one city and put some extra garrison units in it because he *will* come after it if it's lightly defended.

2) Put some fighters on intercept, but send most around to destroy improvements and draw AA fire. It's been my experiance so far that AA units seem to only be able to intercept once per turn (though I may be wrong). Plus fighters can counter-intercept. A good method is to put all your offensive fighters in one stack and just do repeated bombing missions - really saves time bombing down those fully-developed cottages.

3) You *may* want to go light on improvement destruction in your target city, though I don't suggest it. DESTROY EVERYTHING, start with resources, then food, then commerce, then production. This way, even if you get beaten back, their ecomony is shambles and you can just build another invasion force and try again with them at a severe disadvantage

4) Use bombers to destroy cultural defenses first, then attack the units till it won't let you anymore. After that the city should be easy pickings for tanks and infantry.

5) After you take the city, hurry cultural improvements (Theatre, Courthouse, Library, Temples, University, in that order) to push the borders out. Have some workers in your back line come forward and rebuild improvements.

Cities taken like this typically fall 10 population points or more and can't produce anything on their own for a while, hence the need to hurry things, but the carpet-bomb strategy hasn't failed me yet, through many games on Noble and a couple on Prince.

 

[kamigawan]

I like to beeline to artillery + infantry. I find that this combo can dominate because the requirements are pretty low (steam power, rifling, assembly line, physics). The only real downside is a slow advance, so it is best against close neighbors.

 

[kommie]

Well, the above stuff sounds good but im hesitant to believe that it works all that well.
A couple of people above suggested Stealth Bombers. Yes they rock, i'd love to use them, but by the time you get to that tech your opponents are usually 2 pieces or so away from Space Race victory, so starting a war at that stage is a bit too late.

Also, you could probably blitzkreig and take the 1st city lets say, but then there's still nothing stopping the AI from launching 10 artillery at you the next turn and your stack of Doom is not going to be fit for any other conquest.

Basically it seems that the only way is to pillage everything in site, so the enemy doesnt have easy access to your troops via rail.

 

[Ian Kognitow]

Collateral Damage and multiple army groups.

Even with Stealth Bombers Galore, you'll still probably need about 8+ just to get through standard defense per city. Be prepared to sac some artillery and tanks. Even after just 2-4 of those, you can usually make kills with standard infantry and even leftover rifleman/cavalry that haven't been upgraded. Blitzing tanks with city attack upgrades are highly recommended. (they'll typically be fine against even mildly-damaged gunships). If possible, have your navies do the bombardment work, it makes life so much easier for bombers to directly pulverize with collateral damage and lets artillery roll in at the first opportunity rather than having to bombard first (and get weakened in the process by the enemies' own artillery).

I've generally found that even if you're only running two main groups (I usually try for 3), the AI will really only give more than nominal defense against one. Try to split your troops so that the stronger group is *not* the one going against the majority of the AI defense. Have the weaker group be able to at least stalemate the main defense while the stronger group rolls over the defenders at the other axis of your assault By then, you should have created a large group of reserves who have been able to make it to the front to support the weaker group, crushing the main defense group. Use your medic upgrades. You should now have 2 of the opponents' main cities (and maybe some weaker outlying ones you should have easily taken at the start) and within 2-3 turns you should have fended off any mobile resistance from within their own cities. Heal up and close the pincers.

 

[Heeringas]

In my last game I played as Japan on monarch level. I had about 30% of land, but nearly 60% of population of the world. So I had great lead already in the game when I decided to start total war. I switched to Uni.Suff, vasselage and Theocracy. Recearch down to 0%. Tons of gold every turn. Bought barracks to every city. 1 turn building a unit, another buying it, cheap and easy
took couple turns to have level 4 units, about 20 tanks 20 fighters little later bombers, 10 marines, 20-30 infantrys, couple of cannons ( I like it better to use air force to bombard than artillery.)
During the building process I bribed all other to attack each other...I made a world war, laughing...hee...
Then I changes back to "normal" civics and only my two production cities kept building extra units all the time...I had enough units to declare war on against two civ and it was suprising and strong attack I made...
AI was too behind with techs...not even 10 Infantries are enough to handle strong two turn air attack, first to bombard defence down to 0% then softening all units in a city to half strenght, then attacking with collaterar damage tanks, and with drill tanks...Marines are also great units, especially when used from transport to take some badly protected coastal cities far from the front line. Attacking same AI from the two fronts really kills it. AI really don´t know how to war...

 

[MENGW]

two methods I found to work quite well

1- Modern armor (gunship helps too) + a lot of stealth bombers, you know the drill, bombard, collateral, send in the tanks, repeat.

2- Nuclear weapons: 2 nuke per city, kills all unit inside, send in 1 warrior and its yours
*(under the condition you dont care about your empire turning into a big desert)

 

[Snackwell]

"Off shore platforms stink because it would generate open war fare to get rid of them to cripple the enemy."

You never put a spy on a sub? They can sabotage those offshore wells w/o starting the war. (And clams/fish/crabs/whales while they're at it.)

 

[Landstander]

Spy on a sub? Brilliant!
Personally, I've never waged a modern war above Noble, so I've always had the tech advantage and just obliterated my foes with my superior weaponry. But I really like the macro strategies described here - full civic switch, 0% tech, bribe civs to war - Somehow I doubt the AI has the capacity to wage that kind of total war.

 

[Nuka-sama]

I usualy do a modren war with the USA. First I choose a country and before war I destoy everything with spies. Then I take out all their coastel cities with seals and stealth bombers. Then I bomb the crap out of them, Invade with Modren Armors, Mechanized Infantry, gunships ect. I keep 4 or 5 SAMs in each city, so Planes aren't a big threat. Always works for me on Warlord and bellow, Noble and Prince sometimes works.