The lazy man's method of military dominance

[Shaka II]

+1 "We enjoyed your impressive domination win last game!"
+1 "You were such a wimp last game, you must offer us tribute or face our numberless minions!"

[Shaka II]

Building a military unit every other turn may be a little too much, but that's the general idea, to interleave building military units with buildings, not to get trapped into just making buildings. So, it's good to do an F1 and check the build queues occasionally to see that there is a good mix. Even in a state of war, I may be building a few universities or banks in the key cities, maybe even a wonder, but most of production has to switch to war time production.

[Rook]

Just trying to grasp the concept here.

What difference is there if in the span of 100 turns you build say

Barracks
Warrior
Archer
Horse Archer
Obelisk
Library

or

Barracks
Warrior
Obelisk
Archer
Library
Horse Archer

In the end you would have the same 3 units and buildings either way or am I missing the point? I guess you would have some extra culture and research if you intermingle, but if you build the buildings first, you'd have even more. Just hope you don't get attacked too much.

This seems more like a way to dicispline yourself rather than a strategy.

[Urban Ranger]

Willem - how do you deal with obsolete units? Do you upgrade them in due time or just throw them into battles? If you keep upgrading your units you don't need an army as big.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Rook
In the end you would have the same 3 units and buildings either way or am I missing the point?

Yes you are missing the point. I'm using an Alt-click selection for my unit so I don't have to keep adding a unit to my building queue. All I do is add a building after the Alt-click and when the unit is complete, the city automatically switches to the building. Then I just add another building to the list after the Alt-click unit. Hence the term "lazy man". I don't have to bother with any unit selections, the city will just keep creating the same kind while alternating with a building selection.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Willem - how do you deal with obsolete units? Do you upgrade them in due time or just throw them into battles? If you keep upgrading your units you don't need an army as big.

I upgrade some, those with higher promotion levels. I was just deleting alot of them, but in the end I was throwing them into battle as cannon fodder. Just when all hell broke loose, everyone was shifting into Grenadiers/Riflemen and I had all these Medieval units hanging around so I figured I may as well do something with them.

[SandMonkey]

I also play on Noble, and I've used this strategy effectively a few times, but can anyone verify this as being valid on higher levels?

I find that you need a lot more units a lot earlier in Civ4 than in prior Civs, so i use this in the beginning to try and break my old habits of not building units in the early game.

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by Rook
Just trying to grasp the concept here.

What difference is there if in the span of 100 turns you build say

Barracks
Warrior
Archer
Horse Archer
Obelisk
Library

or

Barracks
Warrior
Obelisk
Archer
Library
Horse Archer

In the end you would have the same 3 units and buildings either way or am I missing the point? I guess you would have some extra culture and research if you intermingle, but if you build the buildings first, you'd have even more. Just hope you don't get attacked too much.

This seems more like a way to dicispline yourself rather than a strategy.

Yes, it seems that way to me too, but it's tough to discipline yourself if your a civilization builder.

If you didn't have to worry about being attacked, you'd be much better off doing the buildings first, but that leaves the door open for Alexander to take your civ away. On the other hand, if you build all military units first, your science and culture suffer a serious set back. So a balance is required. It depends on your objective, but usually, you shouldn't let your army fall below 40% to 50% of the top civ in the ancient era, and more like 50% to 70% in the mid game. If you're nice and diplomatic, you can get away with a weaker army. If you make everyone annoyed, you'd better have a good army to back yourself up, when the AI comes for you. If you want to insure victory, you'd better have an equal strength army, unless you've annoyed a number of civs, in which case you'd better have a really strong army. So the point is, you have to be careful diplomatically. If you have such a huge army, that costs you so much you can't advance in science fast enough, you lose, unless of course, you've managed to eliminate everyone else.

So, this alternation scheme seems like a good technique in the building phase. I usually check out the power graph to see where everyone is in relation to me, and if it looks like I need to boost my military, I focus on that. But usually, I already have a pretty key focus on the military, so I've only queued manually as needed to fine tune my army. Some cities can't be slowed down by building units, because they're more specialized science/commerce centers, except in war time or preparation for war, while others can be building mostly units, occasionally focusing on growth and production, but not science. Usually I end up having barracks in most cities, so they can all build units if the need arises, and it does.

I use the F5 key a lot to see the mix of units, and where they're distributed, F1 to see the overall picture of what's in the queue, F2 will tell you how much that army is costing you, F8 will tell you how many units you have compared to the leader, and the norm, and F9 yields the overall power graph for the big picture. That's the best graph of all, along with the total points graph. One without the other is not recommended.

[swat-spas2]

This works very well in the early-mid game. The advantage of doing this ASAP (preferrably as soon as you get copper) is that you don't really need to continuously alternate build new units in the middle-late game and can build up the more expensive infrastructure. You can become a quasi-builder because you will have a ton of units already. The old units used properly by effectively using cannon fodder (old low xp units and siege) will have ridiculously high experience (20+ easily) and thus should crush other units. You do have to upgrade eventually, but the $ from conquests is best spent on making the conquests still easier I think, thru tech or upgrades.

I particularily like putting the city attack bonus on units which eventually become infantry (prats/swords).. you barely need tanks with dozens of infantry running around with 3 city attacks... It costs some money to maintain the whole army/navy but really.. you shouldn't need a ton of garrison units outside of the front itself and maybe a few key coastal cities. So its probably not as expensive as it would seem. But then.. I often play as england and financial means never having to say you're sorry. Offensives are cheaper than having to rebuild improvements all the time and the AI kinna turtles once it loses handily somewhere. Aggressive AI doesn't so much... but then.. you need an army anyway to win that one.

Against the AI, I have been at war with 6 of 8 at once (that was only on emperor). Nobody even set foot on my main continent. I did actually lose a barrier island with 3 cities when Genghis sneak-attacked it and my navy was caught smacking around Izzy. I managed to weasel out of two of the six wars rather quickly (one AI was already about dead and one was about to be) but that left 4 supposedly strong AIs.

MP with a buddy we were at war with all 6 there too (that one is on immortal, still going, but winning so far, slow going at first). The basic idea would be to try to avoid pissing everybody off at once. Try to keep some neutrals, not even allies are needed, while you annihilate the nearest or weaker foes. Against people it should fare well too, but the aggression factor needed probably ramps up. People manage wars and counter-attacks alot better.