No Time for Military

[Drake44444]

Hi, I am playing on a huge map and have build my citization to be the top.

However, as I am expanding on new islands with settlers, building all the wonders because I am first in technology, and building civ improvements (aqueduct, temples, etc), etc, I have no time to build a military. By the time I build up a decent army, it has no chance to take a city, and pretty soon its technology is outdated.

Is there something I can do to build up a military because it just takes too long for what it provides for me.

And even with an army of cavalry, I lose most of them taking a few longbowmen.

[kolpo]

The key are siege weapons(catapult, cannon and artillery). Use them to lower the enemy city it's defenses to 0%, before you use any other unit against the city. Even after that is it often a good idea to sacrifice one siege unit to do collateral damage to the city defenders, this shall increase the change your other attackers shall survive.

[LzPrst]

there are several things you can do. build one specialized city that has only one purpose. the production of military equipment. dont build culture or science stuff, dont improve cottages within its range. just mines, workshops and farms to keep the population alive. have it crank out units. one good city with heroic epic will be able to train a unit every other turn. if thats enough, build two such cities. hills and a bonus food resource or river is recommended.

[player1]

Try playing epic instead of normal game speed?

[Bhruic]

It's a matter of sacrifice. You can't expect to build all the wonders, constantly build all the new buildings, etc, and still have time to build a military. You need to balance your non-military with your military building, so that you can get a decent army out. That might mean missing out on a wonder or two, or putting off getting that library built, but that's the cost of going to war.

Bh

[Slartibartfast]

Re: No Time for Military

Originally posted by Drake44444
And even with an army of cavalry, I lose most of them taking a few longbowmen.

And, as has been noted elsewhere, if you press ALT and hover the mouse over the longbowmen, you'll see the strength ratio. Sometimes the defenders will get large bonuses.

[LzPrst]

as someone mentioned, you must prioritize. if you specialize one or two cities to just produce military units you'll have more of them...

[Dinner]

Switch to epoch play and during industrialization or other periods with lots to build reduce science to 10% and use the money to rush build. In 5-10 turns you'll be finished building and can put science back to 90%.

[Datajack Franit]

I really like epic so far

[Dis]

yeah use seige units.

I pretty much found out cavalry against longbowmen can be real tough.

But I have found tremendous success waging war after bombers came around. A squad of about 10 tanks and 6 bombers just laid waste to the second highest civilization in points. I took every city of theirs.

But combat can be tough until bombers come around. Your only choice is to sacrifice seige units to try to damage the defending archers/lonbowmen. My tanks couldn't even think about attacking a city until my bombers reduced their HP to 10 (out of 20)

note: this was admittedly at warlord level. You'll have to work 3 times as hard to do this at noble. As they build 3 times as many units.

[Cordelayne]

Epic is better, but I still find it very frustrating--it usually takes far too long to create military units, and it's still a bit too fast to my taste for science advances.

I solved this by modding the "Epic" speed setting, which is ridiculously easy.

Find the file CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml in the Assets/XML/GameInfo directory. Open with notepad (or any editor). Make a backup copy. Make a written list of what you change. Change some numbers. Save. And play using the new version of the Epic speed.

I did the following:

--changed Construct from 150 to 75;
--changed Create from 150 to 100;
--changed Research from 150 to 250;
--changed Build from 150 to 75;
--changed Growth from 150 to 100;
--changed Inflation% from 18 to 5; and
--changed the final group of "1 year turns" from 200 to 500, extending the game for 300 years.

That's all from editing one text file! One can twiddle in many ways, of course, but I like the above. Production of units and buildings is much faster. Production of wonders is a little faster. Science research is slowed way down. And there are plenty of turns, so you can go all the way to the end of the tech tree.

I'm extremely pleased with the balance with these settings. And I can go back to the original in 15 seconds whenever I want by just changing the extension on the backup file and removing the modded file.

[SSBLoveU]

So far, Huge map and epic is taking me between 17 to 18 hours per game for the two games I played. These short time periods are due to the AI rushing the game by having more techs than the humans have and not enough game space. I could switch the AI to warlike or change some other settings. With only two games finished, I am not in a position to make up my mind.