War Strategies

[Shaka II]

I haven't had so much of a problem with fighting obsolete units, though I know what you mean when you say that the AI can have hordes of obsolete units that they throw at you.

What surprised me about Civ4 was how effectively the AI uses combined arms, particulalry siege weapons and artillery to weaken the stack and utterly destroy it. Every unit has a vulnerability, so the AI knows how to build gun ships to take out tanks, artillery to take down city defenses and cause collateral damage, grenadiers to counter your rifleman, etc.

I try to keep several stacks of 5 or 6 combined units each, so to make them less vulnerable to having the whole stack weakened by collateral damage. Mix in some medics, for example Sam infantry, to quickly heal the stack, before they get picked off in enemy territory.

Conduct some surveillance missions to find out the make up of the AI's military and make units that have bonuses against them. When the AI was producing gun ships to counter my tanks, I built Sam infantry. Marines are great against machine guns and artillery, build them and put one in each stack ...

For example, in a stack of six, it might have 2 tanks, 1 artillery, 1 Sam infantry, 1 marine, 1 gun ship.

Medieval/Renaissance era, it might look like 3 knights/cavalry, 1 crossbow/grenadier, 1 catapult/cannon, 1 musketman/rifleman.

Surround a city with several smaller stacks, rather than one large stack to reduce the effect of collateral damage from artillery. A medic in each stack will heal them up, so by the time city defenses are stripped, they're ready to go full strength or nearly so.

[Blake]

I think sometimes it makes sense to make a Mega Stack of DOOOM.

Say the enemy, holed up in his capital, has two artillery, but you have a good 20 units incoming. If you split them into 2 stacks of 10, the two artillery could damage all units in one of the stacks (since the collatoral is capped to 5-7 or something) and counter-attackers could concievably kill some of the weakened units, but against a single stack of DOOOM the artillery would only damage about half the units, leaving some full strength defenders to protect the weakened units.

I'm pretty fond of giant stacks of DOOOM. I like to have atleast 6 pults and just knock out the walls in one turn then roll the city, possibly sacrificing a pult or two (so enough pults to take out the walls, and a couple leftover!). The enemy can't do enough collatoral damage to harm all the attacking units and medic heals them up just fine (seperate stacks means you need more medics!)

Ofcourse sometimes I have to war on the cheap, and in that case I use the old fallback of having a couple of good defenders and a pult camp on a hill/forest outside a city and the pult wears it down while my city raiders heal and march over.

I also like sending Guerillas in ahead and camping outside a city in the hope of the AI throwing some units away, for some reason it often attacks lonely guerillas with artillery. If the guerillas don't get killed then they get to have a nice fortify bonus to protect the city-killing stack.