Worst UU

[Doshin]

noto2: just build more units than the AI and keep them together in a single stack until their production cities are gone. Naval units receive a defensive bonus by hugging the coast, so you should win more battles than you lose. To attack the AI ships, simply bomb (Fighters/Jet Fighters) or fling a Guided Missile at the top few defenders, and let collateral (Battleships/Missile Cruisers) do the rest.

It is possible to take out 8 air units for each city that you capture, and the AI, for all their production bonuses, can only build one unit per city. They will also try to attack your units with their limited bombers, meaning that (more often than not) they get hurt or shot down. Your units get hurt too, OFC, but with enough numbers, your hurt units can heal while the healthy units continue to patrol. The same applies to sinking the AI's ships during the initial attack (sink 6 Transports, 3 Destroyers, and a Battleship, the AI needs to find at least 10 cities to simply replenish their numbers, whereas you are continually adding more and more units to your army).

Numbers crush all unless Nukes are involved. From an old forum game:

Spoiler :

Round 6
In 1850 AD, Freddy is 30 turns away from a culture victory:

Spoiler :

Should I choose to attack his capital immediately, I will have to deal with the following:

Spoiler :

My stack:

Spoiler :

 

[drewisfat]

yeah well I just got a little bored of the fact that every time the game ends with a late game war I end up leaning on nukes. They are a crutch. The AI doesn't know how to use them.

The AI doesn't know how to use any unit. Relatively speaking, the AI is actually decent at using nukes. It will target your large stack of units, and it will sneak nukes over to your continent with subs. If you fall asleep against nukes you can pay a very dear price.
They definitely are extremely useful to you though... they're the strongest unit in the game. A very large runaway AI could be nearly impossible to defeat conventionally, but can be wiped off the board in ~15 turns of nuclear war.

 

[bestsss]

Build air and more air, an air unit takes one turn to arrive to business - trivial to replenish loses. Carriers allows for 'unlimited' air, while cities are limited to 8.
Capture coastal city and pillage the rail/roads, so whoever comes will be at the gates for you to squash, no initiative. If you are so afraid of stealth bombers too, you can rush build protection.
Airlift CG3 defenders in the captured cities.


That's all basically. If you attack w/ enough air (and scout ahead) there is no way to lose provided you have enough units and enough patience to keep grinding.

 

[FunkyAmishman]

noto2: just build more units than the AI and keep them together in a single stack until their production cities are gone. Naval units receive a defensive bonus by hugging the coast, so you should win more battles than you lose. To attack the AI ships, simply bomb (Fighters/Jet Fighters) or fling a Guided Missile at the top few defenders, and let collateral (Battleships/Missile Cruisers) do the rest.

It is possible to take out 8 air units for each city that you capture, and the AI, for all their production bonuses, can only build one unit per city. They will also try to attack your units with their limited bombers, meaning that (more often than not) they get hurt or shot down. Your units get hurt too, OFC, but with enough numbers, your hurt units can heal while the healthy units continue to patrol. The same applies to sinking the AI's ships during the initial attack (sink 6 Transports, 3 Destroyers, and a Battleship, the AI needs to find at least 10 cities to simply replenish their numbers, whereas you are continually adding more and more units to your army).

Numbers crush all unless Nukes are involved. From an old forum game:

For the want of a nuke, his kingdom was lost.

 

[uat2d]

A very large runaway AI could be nearly impossible to defeat conventionally, but can be wiped off the board in ~15 turns of nuclear war.

15 turns? With enough nukes, subs, transports and paratroopers, 1 turn is all you need.

 

[noto2]

When facing bombardment from the skies, do you guys think the march promotion is helpful? Like let's say I have a huge stack of ground forces with some anti air and jet fighter coverage, they will still get hit by stealth bombers and/or artillery... but the march promotion could reverse some of that collateral dmg, what do you think? Also by that point in the game getting march on nearly every unit wuoldn't be difficult

 

[Izuul]

If you are far enough on the tech tree to build Jet Fighters, why not just put a bazillion mobile artillery in your stack that are immune to collateral to from their siege?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you are far enough on the tech tree to build Jet Fighters, why not just put a bazillion mobile artillery in your stack that are immune to collateral to from their siege?

Bombers still rough them up, and so can gunship flanking.

March is OK but so is simply having enough units in the stack (like 50+) that the collateral from bombers after fighter/SAM interception isn't enough to be a serious dent. Then, you simply don't move or attack with the damaged guys on the turn you take the city, and the supermedic heals them.

Realistically though, if you have jet fighters you have like 10+ tile coverage in every direction and should really not have any trouble intercepting and killing most of the bombers before you get too far inland. Unless you're backwards just win the air battle.

If you ARE too far backwards, bring a lot of SAMs. They still clean up decently after arty, but they also shield you from both bombing (70% intercept rate en masse') and gunships. If you go that route you need #'s of course.

 

[Izuul]

Bombers still rough them up, and so can gunship flanking.

Those can be countered to a decent extent. The flanking is always going to hurt a bit, but i don't recall seeing massive stacks of AI gunships. The other units in the stack will take the brunt of the siege collateral, but that won't matter b/c even at 25-50% strength, they can still take a city once the siege is finished flattening the defenders.

Obviously the best answer is just to take more units though.

 

[rah]

In vanilla gunships came a lot earlier so you'd see more of them. Not as much in BTS

 

[noto2]

yeah I liked gunships countering tanks better than the stupid bazooka unit :/

 

[s.bernbaum]

Gunships still counter tanks in BTS. They just come a lot later than in vanilla.

 

[VSarius]

With where they come on the tech line now? They are closer to Modern Armor, which they don't counter for because Modern Armor scales so ridiculously well with Combat Promos and has a 1st Strike. Gunships in tandem with Nukes however is the fastest way to dominate an opponent.

 

[noto2]

Gunships still counter tanks in BTS. They just come a lot later than in vanilla.

yeah...which has basically taken them out of the game. The bazooka unit is just a dumb thing they added to help the AI out in the industrial age. It would have been better if they could have just taught the AI how to use its own bombers and tanks...seriously

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I use anti-tanks a fair amount when fighting as a backwards empire because they scare AI tanks out of taking potshots at your infantry/arty stacks.

 

[noto2]

Idk, perhaps I'm just not much of a fan of rock/paper/scissor balancing in games. I never really need them as the AI seems to prefer to use every other unit more than tanks. I see the AI build tons of infantry, SAMs, bazookas, lots of fighters, it loves stealth bombers...but I just don't see big tank stacks.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah, you don't need a TON of anti-tank, just enough to keep the odd few tanks off you in the field. Most AI tanks will then die defending against artillery in cities.

Pretty much all of civ combat is rock/paper/scissor balancing until the late game, where they simply cast balance aside outright.

 

[noto2]

Yeah I know... I wonder who started the rock paper scissors thing, it's so annoying. I remember playing Dune2, which was probably the first RTS. It may have seemed like rock/paper/scissors but it wasn't really. Rifle infantry were good against infantry, and rocket launcher infantry were good against vehicles. Light vehicles with machine guns were good against infantry and strong against rifle rounds, and tanks were good against vehicles, and then you had artillery which was good against everything and had long range but was slow and vulnerable.
It made sense. It wasn't totally realistic in that in RL infantry can carry both anti-tank weaponry and their rifle and of course tanks have machine guns as well as their main cannon, but it still made sense in terms of gameplay and wasn't too much like rock/paper/scissors.
Starcraft had a bit of it too but again didn't get carried away with it. Certain units could cloak, certain ones coudl detect cloak, some units could fly, many units couldn't shoot air targets, etc. I'm quite tired of the whole spears are good vs cavalry thing. Spears were good against everything when in formation. In any case Civ isn't a tactical game and look what happened when they tried to make it more tactical (Civ 5) oh boy...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Civ V doesn't count because its utterly shoddy engine prevented them from using enough hexes to allow units to maneuver tactically on any consistent basis. At least use an example of a functional game when evaluating the viability of a heavy tactical element .

 

[noto2]

Even if it did have enough hexes I just don't see the appeal. I don't get why people would want to play a hybrid of stratego and Civilization.

Rome total war and Star wars empire at war both use a hybrid system where the main strategic map works on a turn based system and each battle is handled in real time. That's definitely an interesting system but note that in both cases the real "meat" of the game is the tactical battles. No one plays RTW to sit on the strategic map, and no one plays SWEAW for that either. RTW does have an interesting strategic map but by far the real action is in the tactical real time battles, ditto for Star Wars.

There was another game called Superpower, and Superpower 2. SP2 dealt with battles in a very interesting way - basically you commanded forces in a specific region and had a few options of commands to give your troops. You had infantry, IFV's, armour, helicopters, attack (bombing) aircraft, air to air fighters, and artillery. Your orders could be to retreat, to hold ground, to assault cautiously, or to all-out attack as fast as possible.

I like all of those systems and think they are superior to any of the combat in any Civ game, but RTW already takes a month to finish a game (we're talking like 100 hours to finish 1 game) and there's no way I would want a real time battle for every battle in a game of Civ - that would be awful. Probably something similar to SP2's battle system would work well for Civ.

A turn based tactical game with hexes and all that really would have to be its own game - where the tactical battles were the main forcus of the game. Trying to put that into a game of Civ was a very stupid idea.

It would be like taking a game like Grand Theft Auto, and trying to hybridize it with The Sims, where you're a character going around killing people, robbing, looting, car jacking, shooting up the cops, and then at the same time you have to answer your phone when your buddy calls and go play pool with him...oh wait...