Warmongering for Builders (at higher levels)

[Jenarie]

I finally got to see the domination movie (Noble/Tokugawa/Marathon).

1. One of your first four cities should be an enemy capital.

I think that helped me the most - it helped me have a goal/reason to declare war early enough instead of waiting for one more of whatever. It was HARD to not build the Great Library though (tip 3)!


I have a question about the end. I had my population way before I got enough land. I had four vassals at the end but I'm not sure what percent of their land counts for me. The last few turns I just went 100% culture and hoped it would border pop me into the last half percent. It took a lot longer then I'd have liked though and I'm thinking I should have not taken the last vassal and kept taking over his cities. The problem was that the cities were on the edge of France's culture and I really didn't want to fight with him the time. I was afraid if I took them I'd have 0 culture and by the time borders popped I'd be left with almost no extra land for the extra cities because France would have eaten it all with culture.

How do you know when to keep and when to raze? I've seen a LOT of discussion about this in relation to economy but at this point I didn't care at all about what it was going to do to economy - I just wanted the fastest thing to get the last couple percent to trigger the win even if I had to bleed money to get it.

 

[uberfish]

In the early going, keep cities with good special resources or developed cottages, raze those which do not and backfill the space when your economy develops more. Once you get into the Renaissance, your economy should be strong enough to keep everything if you want to.

 

[Jenarie]

Keeping or razing I've got mostly figured out for most of the game. I'd like to hear how people get the last 3-5% for domination. I just reread it and I worded my question very poorly the first time. I was thinking more vassals and asked about razing.

-Razing won't work unless you follow your troops around with settlers.
-Taking the city leaves you with 0 culture and you have to wait for border pops and have to deal with any remaining culture in the area as well as the possibility of AI settling the holes.
-Taking a vassal gives you part of their total but I don't know how much - in many cases I would think this would be the best option but it took a lot longer then I expected so I'm wondering what other people do here.

 

[uberfish]

Yeah, it is annoying if a 3rd party civ has too much culture in the area of cities you are conquering. If the city I'm taking is in the furthest ring of the 3rd party city, I will generally keep and make the city build cultural buildings or hire artists. If it is deeper, it's best to raze the city and resettle outside their borders. Keeping a settler or two following your army around for this purpose is something I would recommend in later game.

If you accept a vassal you get credit for half their land. I generally don't take vassals on the grounds that by the point they're willing to capitulate, their army is broken and it's easy to wipe them out, getting credit for all their land and eliminating "we want to join our motherland" penalties.

 

[cabert]

Yeah, it is annoying if a 3rd party civ has too much culture in the area of cities you are conquering. If the city I'm taking is in the furthest ring of the 3rd party city, I will generally keep and make the city build cultural buildings or hire artists. If it is deeper, it's best to raze the city and resettle outside their borders. Keeping a settler or two following your army around for this purpose is something I would recommend in later game.

If you accept a vassal you get credit for half their land. I generally don't take vassals on the grounds that by the point they're willing to capitulate, their army is broken and it's easy to wipe them out, getting credit for all their land and eliminating "we want to join our motherland" penalties.

I'm at the exact opposite side of the vassalization process
I found that having a couple of vassals
- makes the next guy easier to capitulate;
- the happiness from many vassals overrides unhappiness from "motherland"
- the diplo penalty isn't a big deal when I plan to kill everyone
When I play "warmonger" I go for conquest through vassalizing all the enemies. Sometimes I hit domination limit that way, but in "just for fun" games, it's not a problem.
Of course, I'm playing at monarch level only (or emperor with Rome ) so it's not totally relevent here.

 

[Perugia]

Anyone who wants to wean themselves off builder strategy and warmonger reliance on catpult strategy should set up an Incan game on Deity. Leave those pesky barbarians off, at least for the first 100 tries!

HC gives you the Agressive trait, Quecha and cheap barracks plus the financial trait to leverage off coast, riverside cottages and other 2 commerce tiles.

The AI free archers now play to your advantage as your Quecha are already a strength 4 unit with Combat 1 from the aggressive trait and you can build cheap barracks.

You have all you need to take out your nearest neighbour right from 4000BC with your UU, no copper, no catapults required. This will teach your the advantages of early war like nothing else. Many cities will not even have reached 20% culture if you play a long game like epic to extend the life of your Quecha.

Use your starting Quecha to steal a worker. As your UU has 100% bonus vs archers there's a good chance it will survive. Send in 4 more Quecha to eliminate or badly maul your neighbour.

Research BW, chop or pop rush a settler to grab copper or if none is available chop or pop rush a barracks and take copper from the AI. Then start augmenting your quecha with axes as the AI gets metal based units. You are already turns ahead of the previous Axe or Praet based strats in this Thread.

Go for any required worker techs and once you have rivers, pottery for the cottages. You will be last in the tech race and should beeline for techs that the AI does not favour, you will be able to trade with the less advanced AI and should befriend them attacking the strongest ones you can. At Deity most AI will beat you to Alphabet so you don't even have to worry about getting there first. Then head on up to construction

Eventually you will crawl up the score ladder but civs like Gandhi, Asoka & Cathy will always be ahead. Learn away.

 

[obsolete]

If you accept a vassal you get credit for half their land. I generally don't take vassals on the grounds that by the point they're willing to capitulate, their army is broken and it's easy to wipe them out, getting credit for all their land and eliminating "we want to join our motherland" penalties.

The problem, is if u dont accept them as a vassal, they will capitulalte to someone else. Then you STILL have to fight them, but get a super strong AI to dogpile you in the backdoor. GG

Unless your lucky and the Master accepts the vassal without continuing the war. I wish someone would draft up some excell charts on how the AI's personality and traits fit into the continue war, or break war when accepting vassals.

 

[cabert]

The problem, is if u dont accept them as a vassal, they will capitulalte to someone else. Then you STILL have to fight them, but get a super strong AI to dogpile you in the backdoor. GG

Unless your lucky and the Master accepts the vassal without continuing the war. I wish someone would draft up some excell charts on how the AI's personality and traits fit into the continue war, or break war when accepting vassals.

nothing to do with traits or personnality
If the Ai surrenders (=war vassal) to another AI, it's peace for everyone.
If the AI vassalizes (peace vassal) to another AI, the new master is at war with you.

So basically, if the AI you're hitting has friendly relations to an "enemy" of yours, get ready to fight a 2 fronts war.

 

[obsolete]

And when the war is over, the Vassal can break it's agreement after the 10 or so turns? What bugs me is there is no seperate indicator for war vs peace vassal in the diplo menu, unless I'm missing it. They should have changed color for the marking-lines.

 

[InFlux5]

I haven't read all four pages, but what I would like to see is more discussion on nuts-and-bolts strategy for actually creating your stack and executing the war plan. My problem is deciding how much of my resources and Worker turns to devote to military over other things, and when to stop the military expansion and start building up my economy. After capturing 1 or 2 cities I get overwhelmed and don't want to continue the war effort. How long should it go on?

I wanted to make a quick comment too about Swordsmen. They are bashed endlessly on this forum, and I never really used them myself. But I have been having great success with them lately, particularly with non-aggressive civs.

In the early game, hammers are scarce, so each one is more valuable. If I'm not aggressive, I am very hesitant to spend the time and hammers on a Barracks in the very early game. I could have another unit instead, and when one unit can easily make the difference between taking a city and giving promotions to your enemy's Archers, I want the unit.

So hammer-for-hammer, in the early game I think Swords are more valuable. "Out of the box" they are a stronger city-taking unit than the Axeman. I agree that over time the Axeman is more valuable, but we're talking about a special case: the very early game. Time and hammers are what you don't have. So it seems to me that the "get a stack of Axes to City Raider 3" is a fine long-term strategy, but in the very early game a few Swordsmen will give you more bang for your buck.

 

[obsolete]

I find that having my military ciy Automate a Axe-Sword mixture dominantes any AI anywhere. In fact it's just too overpowering. I also find it odd that Swords get poo-pooed so much. They DO have their intrinsic advantages, otherwise there would be no point in having them.

The AI loves to use bowmen in cities. Swordsmen >> Axes here for 2 reasons, Strength & city advantage. And later on when the AI gets Longbowmen, I can STILL take over the city with my swords. Now try to do that with axemen, you'll lose the whole army that way.

 

[ozzmatt83]

I play at Emperor. Julius is a quick way to a domination victory, just advance until you start hitting longbowmen, then tech up and go again. Also, i like take out 2 or three neighbors no matter what civ i am playing and as soon as possible. don't build workers if you can steal them. Barracks are nice, but combat promotions are better. i always like to make a super medic with a warlord and another warlord with leadership and morale, to defend your stack of city raiding expendables, and to take out the last unit and leave the city undefended so you can draw more of their units into your city raider promoted killing ground.

If declaring against a stronger opponent, declare war with your stack in your borders, and let him take one of your border cities. (defend it so he has to commit his siege weapons and infantry, not just the cavalry vanguard) immediately counterattack his weakened army with your city raiders. it is a lot easier to fight a large army in your lands when you have the movement bonus. after that you can move in and take what is yours.

border cities should have minimal improvements, they are basically only bait, to be used for tactical advantage.

 

[ozzmatt83]

also, have lots of workers. with about 1/3 on trade automate. let the enemy pillage, no big deal go after their armies and the cities will fall anyway.

 

[nfw]

At higher levels, consider using AI to do research for you:

declare war, after 10 turns, ask all of AI technologies and you will have them all. Do this repeatedly. This has never failed me.

I've never been successful with this, even when the AI is ready to capitulate, they won't give me techs.

 

[obsolete]

Hmm, if one is that strong to do this repeatedly, why not finish off the whole world at the same time while at it?

 

[yanner39]

It's great that threads that are 3 years old are bumped. You always learn something.

I have trouble getting the war started faster, although I have gotten better. One thing that caught my attention in the OP's thread is war wariness and not stopping the war because of it.

What are good reasons to stop the war for 10 turns? I mean, some have given me good advice about taking 3 cities then go for peace, then resume the war later.

I assume it isn't because of the war wariness because in recent games, I negotiated peace after taking 3 cities and at the first site of WW. However, after 10 turns when I DOW again, the WW reappears. So why the heck did I stop the war to begin with? In 10 turns, I could have taken 2 more cities. Also, in a recent game, I was taking out Kublai Khan, and I sued for peace after taking out 3 or 4 cities. KK re-settled like 2 cities in that time.

Do people sue for peace because they've sustained losses and they want to get reinforcements to the front?

I like the OP's idea of remaining at was until there really isn't any production or commerce because of WW.

 

[vranasm]

@yanner39

stopping the war can take AI to not build more units, in ancient era with chariot/axe rush I sometimes do it to catch breath.
In cavs era it seems to me that dropping them to capitulation is better and at that point I am usually much better prepared for decisive strike (well I remember now 1 NC game where I had to peace with Charlemagne to catch breath , so it's useful sometimes)

 

[Mantic0re]

Prince player here, very far from the original post but quite a few at my level has posted:

I'm becoming a warmonger. It seems like war is the weakness that allows me to tip the game in my favor most times. If anything it is more about the mentality of the warmonger. I'm the bully on the playground looking for a victim now.


Like most builders I had the same problem pulling the trigger. Pangea maps have helped with that quite a bit. More reasons to war early there, capital cities are simply too good. I've also learned the hard way in early wars to take cities or make peace. If I don't think I can take another city in a few turns of movement and assault it is time to regroup. Dragging things out too long does nothing but help the other AI's.


One problem I've not seen mentioned yet is the builder fixation on protecting territory. I was so focused on 100% protection that every minor inconvenience became a major assault that needed to be repelled. I've learned to ignore that lone horse archer deep in the rear razing pastures and taking my workers. I figure a few turns of tile improvement and a worker or two is more than fair trade for a city.