Tank Beeline: The new dominant beeline in BtS?

[MisterBarca]

@Frob: They pushed cav back, but the AI techs waaay slower now! So if you beeline cav the AI can still be way behind you giving you a strong advantage.

My reasoning on tanks is that this tech disparity is even greater. If you think cav vs. longbows is powerful, you should see tanks vs longbows

I even think that knights (esp. cataphracts) vs. longbows is a great deal if you can hit before the AI gets engineering (quite possible now) because of the 2-move.

2-move means you wipe through an enemy empire 2x as fast! If it would take you only 10 turns to go through an empire with 2-move units it would take 20 for 1-move units. That's 10 extra turns for the AI to be whipping/drafting/building units--which it does much better now frankly. So due to losses and the enemy cranking units it is much more likely that your advance will stall 2/3 of the way into your conquest if you don't bring along huge numbers of units (maintenance). Furthermore this means 10 extra turns of combatting war weariness, which later in the game has the potential to be quite crippling (before fascism).

Christ, if you are consistently facing medieval units with Tanks, then you should move up a level!

 

[Bjorn190]

The new beeline: Byzantian Trojan Horse

1. Secure horse resource by any means neccessary
2. Beeline to guilds, while building stables
3. Produce level 3 Cataphracts, with combat 1 and shock so they have no counter.
4. Plant spies in the towns you wish to take
5. Incite revolt with spy, then charge with cataphracts, they will pwn.
6. Win the game

 

[Warspite2]

I always thought Tanks should not be allowed to conquer a city. Like in RoN you need infantry to take cities, I really like that. Tanks should be able to destroy city defenses and damage units only, like bombers. At least maybe Tanks should get a penalty when attacking into a city.

 

[Tzu Iop]

Cuirassier makes the cavrush a bit easier imho, since you have nice prebuild for cavs which cost only 80 gold for upgrading. cavrush maybe moved a little futher but its still devastating if its done correctly.

In general taking the horsepath whit beelining guilds and military tradtion seems much more viable to me, since you will face much less defenders then in the slow way with siegeweapons. Also its possible to have wide spread front with small stacks attaking many cities simultanously and shifting forces arround being more easy.

 

[Dan Quale]

After tanks beelining laser is a good way to go now too. While mobile artilery cant actually finish the job, vs a les advanced civ they have NO counter whatsoever, and those 14 str anti tanks cant even hurt them, overall a spectacular unit 26 str mass collateral, bombard and 2 moves. With the mobile sam your antiair problems are also over.

 

[AThousandYoung]

I disagree. Tanks can sit on an intersection, covering terrain, without wasting fuel or being at a disadvantage like a grounded helicopter would be. They can come under fire and respond and win the battle, unlike Artillery.

I suppose it really depends what "conquering" a city means. I know that mech infantry is supposed to be used for holding ground that the tank wins, but in a pinch an all tank force can control the streets of a city.

I always thought Tanks should not be allowed to conquer a city. Like in RoN you need infantry to take cities, I really like that. Tanks should be able to destroy city defenses and damage units only, like bombers. At least maybe Tanks should get a penalty when attacking into a city.

 

[NaZdReG]

hermit,

go to the BTS mods page and there is a FIXED version of the next war epic game mod. or take this linky

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=232146&page=7

fixed corporations interest rate, all of the new stuff from nextwar directly integrated into the vanilla BTS setup. after playing nextwar once I am totally hooked on the additional late game techs and units.

but in order for it to play well you have to remove cultural and space victory conditions or you will see no use out of mechs and clones.

think teching towards tanks is nice.. try teching towards mechs and see how devestating they are.

listed as a national unit of 4, but I jacked that up to 12 because there's no real life limit to manufacturing. easy to find in the xml files.

as far as a tank beeline, welcome to how I end 99% of my games. I always go for the DOM win and in several years have only had 1 space race win and a few dem wins when I got bored. nothing better than having masses of airports and instantaneous reinforcement wherever your front it.

btw, if you put in either solver's unofficial patch or use this cleaned up mod, corporate maintanance is no longer attached to inflation. if your corp headquarters is in a wall street city you are pretty much break even. I had mining inc producing 30 hammers and -50 gold, but the multipliers in the capitol under beurocracy with mark,groc,mall,bank,wallstreet made it break even even under the old inflation model.

NaZ

 

[ReyLuis]

If you are fighting tanks vs an enemy without tanks or artillery then you are really a tech era ahead - and any battle in which you are a tech era ahead is devastating. But if you have tanks that early, you must also have had infantry well before the AI - and at that point infantry would have no counter either.

A rifle beeline is pretty devastating too - grenadiers are now off the beaten path and rifles vs longbows is probably the biggest jump in the game.

I think the nice thing now is that liberalism isn't necessary the main focus for a mid game rush. You have to gain your tech lead the hard way. And once you gain it, expect to be able to capitalize on it.

Anyone who is that far ahead in tech/military clearly needs to step up a level

Moderator Action: please don't bump threads if you have nothing to contribute to them, just dropping a non-discussion post like this does not count as contribution.
- ori
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Kid R]

I think that should now be "the OLD dominant beeline"

 

[2metraninja]

despite here nothing is mentioned how exactly get to tanks fast, what is changed since then?

 

[strijder20]

You now can bulb Industrialism with a great engineer if you don't research mysticism and have got mining, you can bulb combustion with a great scientist now provided you have Agriculture and Fishing, and every civilization now starts with two great people of choice.
So, basically, not much.

 

[AbsoluteZero]

despite here nothing is mentioned how exactly get to tanks fast, what is changed since then?

If you conquer around half the map then you can probably get tanks before the AI has infantry on immortal +. But you could have probably won with anything else before that. Beelining tanks is really not an efficient strategy.

 

[JammerUno]

^agreed, furthermore, bulbing returns start to diminish drastically after SciMeth, whereas getting to cavs in a timely manner requires a somewhat decent techrate and 5/6 GP, getting to tanks requires a sustained high techrate.

Another argument to consider:
the AI

• starts the game with an advantage
• squanders tons of resources through bad decisionmaking
• gets ages bonuses

You

• start at a disadvantage
• can play to the best of your ability and use your resources well
• don't get age bonuses

That will lead to the following situation, with the x axis being time and the y axis being effective economic power. Player is red, AI is either green or blue, depending on difficulty. I couldn't be bothered to produce/upload my own graph, so it's not perfect (it ignores early AI advantage), but it gets the point across.

You'll have thesame returns on your resources as the game progresses, while the AI will get better returns with time. You start of behind, catch up, get into the lead, the lead decreases as the age bonuses kick in, and finally the AI overtakes you.

The way to win the game is to shift up the linear red line (the player) by conquering new territory so you can stay ahead of the exponential line. You need to do this somewhere before the exponential line overtakes the linear one, since the gap will only increase from there. The better you are, the steeper the red line, the further along that intersect ends up. As far as my less than perfect play goes, that intersect is somewhere around infantry most games. I can't stretch it to tanks.

ps. this doesn't go for lower difficulties, as AI age bonuses don't play a big role there. It can clarify why a winning position turns into a clusterf**k in a couple of turns on the more challenging levels.

 

[MarigoldRan]

How do you beeline tanks in the first place? It requires several lines of research to get Industrialism. You need Physics -> Electricity, Corporation ->Replaceable Parts -> Assembly Line AND Railroad-> Combustion.

 

[Grashopa]

If you conquer around half the map then you can probably get tanks before the AI has infantry on immortal +. But you could have probably won with anything else before that. Beelining tanks is really not an efficient strategy.

If you peacefully settle half the map and get tanks at 1300 AD that may just be the most efficient path.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=440741&page=2

 

[r_rolo1]

How do you beeline tanks in the first place? It requires several lines of research to get Industrialism. You need Physics -> Electricity, Corporation ->Replaceable Parts -> Assembly Line AND Railroad-> Combustion.

Well , technically you don't need railroad->combustion .... you need oil. A vassal with combustion and a land oil source will do the trick

 

[hr_oskar]

Beelining tanks can be a fun and flavorful way to win the game.

In terms of efficiency, you can win a domination or conquest victory much faster by conquering the world with pre-industrial units. This is the case across difficulties, as early rushes (horse archers, elephants, xbows, trebs, knights) are perfectly viable on deity. I posted a thread recently of a 1190 AD deity win using only medieval units for example.

Lower difficulties only make early rushes stronger as the AI's start out even weaker. Below prince you should be able to conquer the world with axemen and perhaps some horse archers towards the end.

This does vary by maps of course. What I've just said applies to pangaea. With continents separated by ocean you'll obviously need astronomy so things slow down considerably on water maps. Even in those cases, tanks will suck since you might as well use siege (trebs or cannons) if your mobility is restricted by water.

 

[kazapp]

My reasoning on tanks is that this tech disparity is even greater. If you think cav vs. longbows is powerful, you should see tanks vs longbows

Of course, nobody would buy longbows when attacked by tanks when they have...

 

[Archon_Wing]

It's somewhat simple to be ahead of your enemies when you have cav and they don't have rifles. Or Infantry when they don't have infantry of their own. It's much harder for your opponent to not have infantry when you have tanks. Once they get infantry, they became much harder to just run over. Infantry + artillery can hold off for the longest time til modern armor.

It doesn't seem like tanks provide that massive of an advantage until you have air power.

 

[Heathcliff]

I think the best two beeling units are:

1. Horse Archers - good before AI gets longbows.

2. Cuirassiers - good before AI gets Rifles.

Tanks are good, but comes to late imho. You want to get an advantage before Tanks.