Attacking a city without catapults

[khumak]

Attacking cities without cats can also work if you concentrate on getting a reasonable number of units to high experience early on and protect them so you don't lose them, then upgrade them to something decent for attacks. This work especially well for AGG or CHM civs with good early-mid game offensive UUs.

I had a game I was playing as Japan where I beelined for Samurai using the CS slingshot as a boost and easily conquered an entire continent full of longbow guarded cities without cats/trebs. I lost maybe 1 or 2 samura total after conquering 30 or so cities filled with a mix of longbows, archers, and axemen. Some of them even had city walls.

The core of my attacking force was 4-6 Samurai warlords with CR 3, Combat 5, and various levels of drill. I was playing raging barbs and I ruthlessly exploited the steady stream of barbarian cannon fodder to ramp up my unit xp and generate great generals to turn into warlords. I didn't attack my first city until I had at least 4 units with CR 3.

If only there was an AGG/CHM civ... *drool*

[couerdelion]

Now I would have thought it possible to take that city with the 13 swords. Not easy, but possible and it is expensive. To be safer, a couple more would do it but then you lose too much time and the city would just be acquiring more archers. Your biggest worries in the city are the axemen because they are going to hurt your swords.

Now I’m assuming that you have some Lvl 4 units which could mean Raider III swords. Swords are natural city raiders.

CRIII Sword gets 85% bonus while Archer defender on hill with Garrison II (fortified with 60% culture) gets 25%+60%+50%+50%+45% = 230%

So it is 6 vs 3* (1+230%-85%)= 6 vs 3 * 245% = 6 vs 7.35

Still not great odds but you’re looking for your heavy hitters to damage the strong defenders since you have at least 1 spare fighter for each defender.

Your problem is that your heavy hitter will not be attacking the strongest defenders but will be taking on the axemen who, with fortification, culture, hill and combat bonus, gets +160% (without promotions)

6 vs 5 * (1+160%-85%) = 6 vs 8.75

I’ve tended to find that it makes more sense to throw a second tier raider (your basic Sword with Raider I) at these cities first. They will die but they will hurt the axemen. Once you have the axemen wounded enough, your elite swords then start attacking the archers. Now my guess is that one of these combats will do almost no damage at all but as long as the others do sufficient damage, you will have another sword to finish the job and one spare to get the unit where the random number generator turned on you.

In a worst case, you might have 1 unit surviving but you will have 5!! Now that unit will then take all the promotions available next turn but your five will probably take some themselves and then finish the job.

Well that’s my prediction. It’s still expensive but if the site is good then take it. All those units are costing you a lot of money so get something for it. And next time strike either earlier (before culture expansion) or later( with catapult)

[binTravkin]

If only there was an AGG/CHM civ... *drool*

Ask someone to mod in Hitler - AGG/CHM describes him best

[khumak]

Originally posted by binTravkin

Ask someone to mod in Hitler - AGG/CHM describes him best

Actually there is a civ in the Chinese scenario (Unification I think?) that has AGG/CHM. Can't remember which one. It's pretty sick.