Originally posted by Justus II
I have a couple of questions on another aspect of your game, the "slow warfare". I tend to fight short, quick wars targeted on a specific objective, then take my 20 turns to build up for the next one. From your description, yours was a much more gradual approach, although "slow" in relation to your research timeline might be misleading. My questions are: How do you handle War Weariness, being in Republic the whole time? I can usually count on luxuries and the slider for 10-15 turns, but then it gets too expensive. Second, do you try to go after cities first, or draw his forces out against your defenders and then go on the offensive? I have often thought that would be a better strategy, particularily for MA and IA warfare, but because I am trying to fight quick wars, I go after his cities pretty quickly.
War weariness never became a big problem for me. It helped a lot that there were six luxuries on the home continent. I targeted new luxuries early in my attack on each rival. It also helped that I had Marketplaces in my larger cities. The main thing though was not losing many units, and losing no cities. Those seem to be the biggest contributors to war weariness. Because I didn't lose a lot of units, I don't think I ever passed the first stage of war weariness, and that required just a slight luxury boost to keep it under control. In a few cities I did use specialists after war weariness began. Even in that there's a way to minimize the cost. I find that ofen I'll have a combination like 2 happy citizens and 3 unhappy. In that case I make one citizen a tax collector to get a bit of cash out of it instead of making the citizen an entertainer. It is important when running this close to the line to review all cities every turn to avoid disorder as they grow
About drawing the enemy out: I think that strategy depends on how defensible the border is. In this game my border with each of Baekje, Goguryeo, and Han Dynasty was rather long and exposed when I started my war on each. I didn't have a strong and mobile enough defense to wait for them to come at me. So instead I sent small groups of Bushi into their territory. Bushi were ideal for this geography. There's a lot of terrain with defensive bonuses, including many mountains. A Bushi on a mountain is likely to survive an attack by any contemporary unit. So I'd send a group (four or five) of Bushi toward a target city, taking maximum advantage of the terrain. And sometimes taking an extra step so that the attack on the city wouldn't be across a river. The AI, logically enough, prioritizes attacking incoming stacks which threaten its cities. So with this approach the AI tends to send its forces where mine are, vs. sending them into my weakly defended territory elsewhere along the border. (It is nonetheless importatant to keep a minimal defense on the home front to deal with occasional units which sneak past.) My troops get slowed down by enemy attacks - weakened Bushi must fall back to home territory to heal. Eventually, when I have a strong enough group (3 or 4 at least) of unwounded units right beside an enemy town, I attack it. If my group is smaller than that then it just sits, waiting for reinforcements and destroying exposed units in the meantime. My top priority in this kind of slow war is to minimize losses. I don't have a lot of units and I'm not producing new ones rapidly, so I need a very high kill ratio from what units I have, and that contributes to them going slowly. (As well as these being slow units, and my not having enough of them to simultaneously send strong stacks to separate targets.) Another small trick to mention here: If I have a small stack of say 2 or 3 units in enemy territory on hills, and the enemy exposes 2 units by leaving them on grassland beside the hills, I'll kill just one of those two units. That leaves my Bushi group strong on their hills, vs. also killing the second unit which would leave one of my Bushi exposed on the grassland, perhaps in wounded condition. I'll only attack a single exposed unit when I'm fairly sure more enemy units won't reach that location next turn.
In some other games I have used the approach of drawing enemy troops toward my defenders. But even then I rarely use actual "defenders" - I just hold back my offensive units. Fast offensive units can easily dispatch enemy units arriving within your territory and then withdraw to safety on the same turn. It makes for a very nice way to deal with a larger enemy, drawing them onto your home turf and hitting them in the open. I have found (the hard way
) with that technique that it is important to have a "killing zone" just inside your borders where you leave no available path to your cities which has a defensive bonus at each step.
Originally posted by cracker
Do you have a reading of your domination percentage?
I was still a long way from domination. I had 1303 tiles at 830AD - 61% of the 2141 domination limit for the map. Going for an early Diplomatic win at all costs slowed me down. If I'd taken all the gpt I could from the leading Japanese clans, and if I'd also built a few less universities and libraries, I probably would have finished 10 to 14 turns later (2 or 3 techs more to learn plus a couple of turns slower to research the most expensive techs) but would have had a lot more land by 830AD - lots more cash, significant additional shields, and weaker rivals would have made for more rapid expansion. I think this victory condition combined with this map is a case where the tradeoff between no-holds-barred speed of Diplomatic victory, vs. more tiles and a higher score, is as big as that trade-off gets
Originally posted by Txurce
What is impressive about how SirPleb used it is that he was simultaneously gifting the AI with tech, so he could have been beaten out for the ToE. This is why I didn't go for it.
It caused me a bit of nail-biting, and I didn't even want to spend gold to check how the AIs were making out on their ToE builds. When I first traded away Scientific Method the AIs would have from 18 to 22 turns to beat me to ToE (depending on whether and when I got Combustion from them.) I'd eliminated all possible cascades. From what I could see it was very unlikely that any of them would build it from scratch that quickly. They hadn't had Industrialization long enough to build any factories, and they didn't have Sanitation. Just one exception: if two of them had gone to war and triggered GAs, my odds would go way down. I just now checked my 820AD save to see how they were doing. At that date my three helpers had ToE builds which were 21, 25, and 15 turns from completion. So it seems it was a pretty safe gamble
PTW1.21f
and I deserved what I got. With the pre-builds I had going and the leader in reserve there was a fair chance that I could have got a reasonable date for an SS win, but I have run out of time. So yet again I will not be able to submit this month.
Yes I answered my own question. I should have just waited for you to post the perfect answer.
