Bombard, Trimming Your Neighbors, and Enemy Leads?

[maxcavsm]

Following questions:
1) I'm playing at Noble. Peter is a little over 500 points ahead of me right now score wise, but I'm "The Most Advanced Civilization" right now. I'm hoping I'm going to bury him in the science race, but I'm getting a tad nervous. How much does score affect things like Space Race, etc? Is 500 a lot on the scheme of things?

2) Bombarding of defenses. Okay, are cannon, catapults and artillery just expendibles used to take out a city's defenses? I'm used to the "bombard" button and being able to destroy a town without having to get my hands dirty from Civ III. Here, do you HAVE to attack with a cannon or catapult by itself in order to get it to bombard or do collateral? I think it's silly to have to sacrifice an indirect fire weapon every assault.
I'm sure there's a right answer here....

3) My neighbor, Alexander, was trimmed early and is now in last place. He's got six cities on my continent that look tasty. While I understand the idea of milking a crippled civilization for all it's worth, it's getting towards endgame, and his uses are somewhat limited. Would it be better to go in with a tank rush, take what's left and use the terraing and cities to my advantage? Or is it better to just let him keep working and every once and awhile trade him weak technology for all of his gold?

[paleman]

If you're not worried about Alexander, but you are worried about Peter, send your tanks after Peter.

[Shr3dZ]

1) 500 points can be a big or little lead, its a bit misleading. If you are most advanced youre prolly doing fine. The one thing I dont like about the score is territory plays such a big part - if you are number 1 in everything, tech, mfg, commerce, but an AI has more tiles under his controls, he can have a bigger score than you. Just use score as a guidline...


2) Catapult bombard nicely if you have enough, once the city defenses reach zero, check the odds of your best attacker vs. their best defender - if your odds are bad (which they usually are) I would recommend sending in your least useful catapult(s) as a sacrafice. After youve taken out a couple of their good defenders, check the odds of your good catapults vs. their now best defender, if its good use them again to weaken everything left plus raising their XP for the next battle or even start thinking about when you upgrade them to cannons.

3) I would prolly take Alex out - youll get a massive score increase for taking all his land and you wont even remember that you were 500 points behind. Unless of course your civ cant support more cities, which I doubt it cant.

[maxcavsm]

Okay...more ???

Cannons, catapults and artillery pieces MUST be sent into an attack in order to cause collateral damage. There is not a way to have them utilize their standoff capability and bombard without them going head to head with their main defender.

In other words, expect to lose a LOT of indirect fire weapons during a major town siege. Is this correct? There's no way to stack 6-7 cannon outside of a town and bombard them, without losing any?

Another question. I'm in Peter's territory, and I've taken a city. instead of razing it like I should, I took it over and defended for a few turns. But I don't want to tie up shooters defending a town that will probably be retaken eventually anyway. How do you raze a town AFTER you take it over? It's still in revolt and has been for some time...

[PaganPaulwhisky]

Generally it is well worth sacrificing seige weapons to mass damage the defense stack. When you get tanks, you can give them collateral damage upgrades and use them with a higher success rate then artillery or cannons. I usually combine city attack tanks with collateral damage tanks. If Peter is on another continent with that much territory he may give you trouble. I would prepare a massive army of marines and when he builds apollo hit him hard with amphibious attack. If he is on your continent just build a ton of tanks and slam him. I would definitely take out the Greeks now.

[maxcavsm]

Is it possible to raze a city after you've captured it?

[Shr3dZ]

Originally posted by maxcavsm
In other words, expect to lose a LOT of indirect fire weapons during a major town siege. Is this correct?

Thats fair to say. They can bombard without taking any dmg, but to do collateral dmg they gotta get their hands dirty.

Try not to waste too many, keep checking yer odds with your best attacker vs. their best defender after each catapult sacrafice.

If you know youre gonna be throwing away a lot of catapults (ie. lots of war) you can even get away with building them in a non-barracks city if its urgent, then go and sacrafice those ones.

[gdgrimm]

Originally posted by maxcavsm
Is it possible to raze a city after you've captured it?

No. If you don't immediately raze it when you capture it, you're stuck with it.

Or just leave it undefended, let the enemy take it back from you, then take it back a second time and raze it.

[Brizey]

Quick question:

Is the most advanced the civ with the most techs or most total beakers?

[Yosho]

Originally posted by paleman
If you're not worried about Alexander, but you are worried about Peter, send your tanks after Peter.

(shrug) Not always. Often, the best thing to do is to conquer a small, weak, nearby country, in order to expand your empire for fairly cheap, and go after the "big boys" later, or not at all. It all depends.

[Blake]

There's no question - destroy or assimilate Alexander. You can make better use of his cities. Small pocket civs are security risks, they can backstab you at the worst possible moment, they can be used as staging grounds by 3rd parties (with open borders).

[Arrian]

If you have an easy target whose cities you can assimilate easily into your empire, that's the clear choice. Beat on the weakling is often the best way. Absorb Alex and then re-evaluate.

Plus, if you've got a real tech advantage over him, you should take nearly zero casualties, whilst gaining XP for your units. You'll be all the stronger if/when you take on Petrov.

-Arrian

[paleman]

True, everything depends. But in this particular situation, since maxcavsm was talking about tanks, there's not a whole lot of later left in the game.

[Arrian]

I think he's gonna win the space race anyway. And diverting enough resources to really take on a powerful opponent might actually hurt his chances. He can easily take out a weakling neighbor, giving him a boost at little cost, without seriously disrupting his economy.

This is, of course, w/o seeing the exact in-game situation.

-Arrian

[MasterDave]

The AI has a tendency to put spaceship building on the back burner when at war. Therefore, if it is safe for the human player to remain at war with an AI while the human can still building his spaceship parts, that can often be a good way to win the space race. If the AI rival is too dangerous and strong to risk a war, or if war weariness becomes a serious problem, then the player should generally make peace and use spies to slow down their opponent's space race.