warmongering advice

[Arrian]

Tribute yes, but help? If there is a negative effect it's "under the hood" not a -1 visible in diplo.

-Arrian

[ZEE]

possibly 'under the hood' but i get a -1 from something whenever i ask for help. maybie offsets any help you have given them in the past? but im straying OT...

[Swiss Pauli]

Re: warmongering advice

Originally posted by shimmin
This is my typical wartime experience:
Having a tech lead over a neighbor whose territory I covet, I decide to wage war against him. I build up a force to overwhelm the defenses of a city, declare war, and easily take a city.
[...]
Or maybe I need more siege units in my stacks. At this stage of the game, I might have a stack of 6-8 maces / swords / axes, escorting two catapults, as a city-taking force.

I'd describe your style as 'opportunistic warmonger', rather than a dyed-in-the-wool fighter, so I'd say the key is more about timing and tech than the mechanical aspects of war, which I think you understand already.

When you decide you want a neighbour's cities, that's when you need to devote your energies to this goal, in research as well as in build priorities. A tech lead is no use per se, but early possession of keystone military techs (e.g. construction, military tradition, chemistry) and an awareness of what the enemy has (tech and units) will enable you to cut a swathe through your target.

[Arrian]

I'm pretty sure you're talking about demanding tribute as opposed to asking for help.

-Arrian

[ZEE]

maybie arrian. it is true that i do a LOT of demanding...

Like Ming the Merciless has said, demand, THEN go to war. i usualy dont ask for help, but the few times i did i could've sworn i got a -1. either way the point here is AI exploitation, another great warmongering strategy...

[rah]

I think you only get the -1 if it's an "unreasonable" demand.

[AshenPlanet]

Conventional Wisdom
Anyone knows it's good to have more units, and garrison your cities, and bring defenders, etc...
But, that's not really a very effective style of waging war.

Best Defense
The best offense is a good offense, not a good defense...
Your cities don't need heavy fortification when you are always scouting your perimeter - one simple defender to quell unrest is enough, except at close borders where there's only a square or 3 between your city and an enemy city.
Most everywhere else, you should be scouting, so you can get other troops there if you see an enemy or a 'friendly' stack coming to your borders.

Milk Money
In the time you are waiting for extra troops, extra defenders, extra siege, etc., your enemies are also building more/better troops.
Unless you're playing on the easier difficulties, when you get a new combat tech, that's when you want to go on the offensive, not later when they get that tech or it's counter.
When you get a new combat tech, you should look around for peaceful types wearing glasses like archers when others have longbows or longbows when others have cavalry/riflemen/grenadiers.
Don't feel bad about taking advantage of the weak; you are doing evolution a service by weeding out the stupid, especially the financial ones...
It doesn't have to be a neighbor that you wage war on, if you have open borders between you and a nerd who's behind on military strength, then pass through your neighbor to attack the easy target.
You can always come back for your neighbor's milk money later, and he'll be cut off from help if you control both sides of him.

War and Peace
When you declare war, go to war, don't send troops to die, when your cities are building wonders and other peacetime activities.
Change at least a third of your cities over to making military units to replace the lower class schmucks who got sent to the front lines.
When the enemy is on his last legs, and the war is nearing its conclusion, then convert back to your builder economic model.
Unlike Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri where world wonders were big deals with major influences on the outcome of a game, Civ 4 world wonders are nothing special.
Kremlin is good for everybody, Sistine Chapel for non-creatives, and Pyramid for philosophicals, but the others generally aren't even as good as national wonders which you can build at your leisure.
When at war, you're better served making more troops and courthouses than most other wonders.

Necessary Evils
The culture slider and police state are not good things to use, but use them if you have to.
If you're in a war for over 100 years, don't be surprised when your war unhappiness levels reach -20 or beyond.
That's what police state and the culture slider is for.
In a perfect world, you want to finish the war quickly enough to not have to resort to either.

The Quick and the Dead
There are two equally valid ways to field troops in the mid game.
The best early game troops is usually nothing but axemen built as soon as you get copper or chariots as soon as you get horses.
The best late game tactic is all about bombers and gunships.
In the mid game, you can go with siege and sword or mobility.
If you have the aggressive trait, then siege and sword is a no-brainer (with the exception of Genghis and Kublai who have those nice keshiks).
When you are bringing siege and sword, about 33% of your stack should be siege, and absolutely you should attack with the siege first even after you've bombarded the city to 0%, and the reinforcements you are making while fighting the war should be mostly siege replacements.
Swords can be swordsmen, macemen, elephants, grenadiers, infantry, etc.
Sword, in this context, means whatever your highest strength single move attacker is).
You'll also want 1 archer/crossbow and 1 spearmen/pikemen in each stack to help defend the stack; these also serve well as the medic units if you can manage that.
It's going to be cheaper and faster in the long run to burn a catapult or treb so that your other troops can mop up the city even if there are only 2-3 defenders.
The other good way to field troops is mobility.
If you make chariots, horse archers, knights, or cavalry, and nothing but those horse troops, you can actually wage war effectively, but with great loss of life.
Basically, with stacks of horses, you are going to sacrifice a unit or 3 for every city you take, but the overall cost of the war will still be less than melee/siege.
How? Well, people generally value human life higher than worldly possessions like money or buildings or higher tech.
The good leaders (and the sociopaths) just look at replacement costs of soldiers.
Losing 1 unit instead of none at a lightly defended city or losing 4 troops instead of 1 or 2 at a heavily defended capitol has a cost.
The length of the war has a cost also.
The longer the war, the more economy lost to unhappy faces and the more troops the enemy will build to defend remaining cities dragging out the war even longer, etc.
With a mobility approach, you can just sacrifice units to storm the walls instead of waiting for siege engines, and this can actually save you commerce in the long run by finishing wars much faster than the standard siege and sword method.
You'll need a few more troops, but not as much as you'd expect, since the enemy has less time to make defenders.
If siege and sword, then you'll want to leave at least 1 and sometimes 2 defenders behind at each city, since your main stacks can't switch direction very quickly if a previously unseen stack comes after one of your newly taken cities.
If mobility, then 1 defender per captured city is usually enough, and you can get away with no defenders, if it's at the edge of your victims territory, and you know he has no troops nearby.

Mandatory Retirement
It's almost always cheaper and more effective to make new troops than upgrade old troops.
The only exception to that is with gunships - cavalry can get march and gunships can't.
It's a huge deal to have gunships with march, and so I always make a lot of cavalry before getting the gunship tech, just so I can upgrade to get gunships with march.
In every other case I can think of, you are better served giving old troops their pension and letting them quell unrest in your cities than giving them the shiny new weapons that your new troops get.
You can bring them along to act as defenders for your newly captured cities, but it's not a good role for them since they won't even be able to defend very well.
Their best home is a vet center in one of your older established cities far from the front lines.

.

[Arrian]

Unit upgrades make sense in some cases, like highly promoted units, particularly units with promotions that the upgraded units cannot get normally (city raider III maceman -> rifleman or grenadier).

-Arrian

[AshenPlanet]

.

That is true.
City raider 3 is hard to give up...

.

[ZEE]

AshenPlanet,

truly an eye opening strategy. i like the part about not upgrading the best. that can get VERY expensive.

your point on horses is also very true. horses die quickly vs pikemen and have a lousy defense.

police state is a good tactic as well as unhappyness is a killer for any advance, even if you are smiting your opponent.

my earlier post on attacking neighbors was just an example. i also stated that going to war far away implied different tactics. but i agree with your methods.

i like your scouting strategy. that will save me a lot of time. thank you for your insight...

[AshenPlanet]

.

Thanx, I appreciate the comments.

Upgrading is prohibitively expensive, and there's no skunkworks to reduce the cost anymore.

Scouting instead of garrisoning is even more safe and effective once you get engineering, and totally reliable once you get railroad.
Both those techs are really nice for your economy, because they both allow you to do more with fewer troops since they increase mobility in your territory.

Pikemen will often kill a knight, but 2 knights will often kill a pikemen, as will 1 cavalry...
Since you'll rarely find more than 1 pikemen in a city, they shouldn't discourage mobility tactics.
Multiple longbows are still going to be your biggest concern, but the faster you can get from city to city, the fewer longbows you'll have to fight.

Going to war far away leads to another point:

Salting the Earth
It doesn't happen in most games, but sometimes you'll have war declared on you by someone far away.
You may not have the ability to make a forbidden city or versaille yet, and the upkeep costs might bury you if you try to capture his cities.
If the distance makes you wary of capturing any of his cities, then go on a raid and raze expedition instead.
All horses is pretty much a given for this tactic - you want to get to his empire, and do as much damage as possible and get him to give you stuff for peace as soon as possible.
Financial civs are especially juicy for this, since they'll often have a lot of cottages.
I'll often declare war on civs like Mansa myself, just so I can make tons of money from raiding all his little villages and hamlets.
If the empire is nearby and you're planning on keeping it, raid as few towns as you need to pay for your troops, but keep the rest.
If it's far away, send horses and raid every cottage you see.
You can let some of these units die, as long as you are raiding multiple towns each turn.
If you lose 1 knight in a turn that you raided 4 villages, you are way ahead.
Try to raze their capitol as early as you can, as it will greatly increase that chance that he'll talk to you and give you goodies to get peace.
Even if you don't raze any of his cities, you can still come out ahead and more than pay for all the horses you sent if you raid enough hamlets.
Burying him economically can also encourage him to sue for peace even if you didn't raze his capitol.
Check his name every turn to see if it still says 'refuses to talk'.
Once that message is gone, you can open a dialog with him, and he will most likely be willing to give you stuff to end the war.
He will also never be a threat to you again and easy pickings when you are ready to expand into his territory if you did massive damage to his economy.

.

[ZEE]

that is all very true. the point of a war, predominantly, is to cause as much damage to your opponent as possible. i usually DONT pillage improvements of civs close to me, however, as i will probably end up capturing the cities and using the land anyways. the exception to this of course is resources, but not always. pillaging and rampaging far away civs makes much more sense, especially if you dont have forbidden or versailles as you pointed out.

as far as my siege strategy goes, machine guns are tough to beat. they are powerful for their time, and will take out almost any obsolete unit. so i STILL say throw cheap siege units at them and clean up with others. it has worked for me on MANY occasions...

[sjm]

@courdelion:

Definitely agree that you don't really need cats vs. archers if you have access to copper or iron - except in the rare cases that there in a city on a hill with a decent city defense bonus (walls/culture). Otherwise the attackers (who should all have city raider) tend to win anyway.

In the very early game, you can just mass produce axemen for a quick rush (or quechas even earlier). With a barracks to give them sensible promotions, you'll do fine against warriors and archers in cities with a maximum of 20% bonus.

Once longbowmen come along though, it's a different story.

[sjm]

The culture slider has another big benefit to the warmonger, that I don't think has been alluded to, in addition to somewhat pacifying your citizens.

If you have a relatively high culture rate, your newly acquired cities pop their borders much quicker. This has several advantages:
Captured cities are quickly able to run at full capacity. There's nothing worse than watching your newly captured 20 pop city plummet to a population of 8, because there isn't enough food in the 8 squares around the city; and you do want these new cities to actually be able to produce stuff too - and ASAP. The quicker you expand your initial borders, the better. In the late game, this should only ever take one turn...

Enemies have movement penalties in your territory. As your borders expands, you hamper the AI's movement, meaning that they are less and less likely to be able to counterattack without you having ample time to react.

A domination victory is normally a question of capturing enough land; getting the population is never an issue for me. The quicker your borders expand, the quicker you'll get that victory.

Note that a high-ish (say 40%) culture rate is my norm in the late game; but it's at 0% for a long long time beforehand if I'm going for domination. And once you've got modern armour you can go 100% culture if you want.

On that note, I really like the Eiffel Tower as a warmonger (+50% culture in all cities immediately upon capture)!

[Arrian]

Drama is the warmonger's friend. Poprushing theatres will take care of border popping.

Free Religion tends to be nice too b/c then you get culture from the captured cities' religion(s).

-Arrian