warmongering advice

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by zeace
In Civ IV the most overpowered wonders are probably:

Pyramids: If you get it you can run a specialist economy, otherwise you pretty much can't
Great Wall: It's a crutch for some people who can't deal with Barbs on their own.
Stonehenge: Some people can't play non-creative civs without it.
Oracle: Used to be overpowered with the slingshots, now a slingshot is a lot of work. You could almost do as well focusing that energy on research instead
3GD: This wonder is way better than building 50 coal plants. On a pangea/large continent map it is very powerful.

I don't agree any of those are overpowered given current implementation.

Pyramids is expensive and puts a huge crimp in your expansion. Stonehenge is nice but hardly crucial and those first few turns are sooooo important for expansion - it's a fair choice. GW is a crutch as you say - hardly overpowered then. 3GD isn't really either, although it obviously is powerful in a very large empire. Most of the time the delay in getting power up (if you build naturally) offsets the shields you save.

Oracle is the only one that's close, because at current cost it is almost always worth building if you think you can get it.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by AAHZ
heres the REAL reason i dont build wonders: when i played hotseat or LAN with my friends in civ3, they all were in a race to get all the wonders so they would have that "CRUTCH" like most wonders gave. so i tested myself to win WITHOUT those wonders. and as i stated in another thread, i was the BEST in my circle. im certainly not bragging, but simply stating that i TRAINED myself to win without wonders. i know wonders are less SUPER in civ4 and warlords, but there will still be a certain RUSH to build them in MP. I dont build wonders, but i build my army... to TAKE them from you...

Might I suggest that part of the benefit you have here is that you KNOW what your opponents are doing. This is of less benefit against an AI with bonuses because they can spend a long time building a wonder and defend themselves (given their starting bonuses). The human player has no such crutch so builds wonders at the expense of spending hammers building the insurance that it needs to survive and expand in the early game.

[Blake]

My rule of thumb for building wonders is to build those which you have the resource for and which aren't out of the way tech-wise.

The Oracle and The Great Library are possibly the only wonders you might want to go out of your way to get, if it appears feasible to do so. For example if you build the Pyramids you probably want to get The Great Library even if you don't have marble, and if you do have Marble you probably want to get The Great Library regardless - it's a good wonder.


Generally when warmongering I pick up a few wonders, like with Stone the Hanging Gardens are always a nice choice the population you gain (whip whip) more than pays for the wonder and you get the health and engineer points.
The Colossus is a good choice often if you are getting forges anyway and have some sea. It's cheap.

On the whole I find it easier to win without any wonders than trying to win with building too many wonders. Most wonders are pretty close to being balanced and if you build them without thought for strategy you'll probably just be hampering your expansion.

[Dis]

I don't play a high level, but I learned a lot about preperation last game. Yes I did have to do a reload to learn this . I would have won either way, but it was less frustrating this way, and I like to try different tactics. As I hate losing cities, and I like to see what works in defending against trebuchets.

Overwhelming force is the #1 rule. It's all you need to know. I don't even use catapults (though after reading this thread, I will). You hit them hard and fast, and they won't know what hit them.

Second is the Aztecs are *******s and will always attack you. After my war with them, I switched all cities off building military units to building improvements. Mistake. They built their units up and threatened a city (I reloaded before I lost it). Some civs you just have to pound until they are dead or vassalized. Keep building military units, don't let the ai get ahead. This will eliminate the SOD's and pillagers.

As I said, I learned alot. But I still get burned by the ai dropping off units with a transport to a lightly defended city, and me not noticing the combat message. . I get so many combat messages and troop warnings I lose track of them all.

[Dis]

just gotten to reading Ashen's posts. I guess I go with the mobility approach. The first few posts indicated I should go with cat. But I like mobility. Always have since my civ2 days, and rover rushes of smac.

Hitting the ai before he has a chance to respond is gold. You just have to make sure you bring enough. The times I have gotten burned is when I only had like 12 units when I should have had 30.

[sjm]

Originally posted by couerdelion
I took a look at Three Gorges Dam and at the moment, I have to say I am unconvinced. Basically, this just gives +50% production to a city which

a) is on the same continent
b) has a factory
c) does not already have power

In the last case, there could be a benefit from replacing coal plants and reducing unhealthiness but at best this will generate +2 food for those cities. By the time you can build 3GD, you should already have power in your most developed cities so the power benefit will go to the more marginal cities. Add to this, the cost of the 3GD is the same as 7 hydro plants so one can basically assume that it is not paying off until it has provided power for 7 cities. If this takes some time the cost is barely justified.

As Quillian says, the idea is to build the 3GD before you build power plants in your cities - but feel free to build on in your top few production cities though.

If you're building power plants in all your cities anyway, you're obviously not benefiting from it properly.

In my opinion, the 3GD trumps all others in the right situations:
You are situated on a LARGE continent
You are playing a production heavy game - State Property and domination (which is what this thread is theoretically about) being its best use IMO

To me, getting an almost empire-wide 50% base bonus to production is well worth it. But you do want to prepare the 3GD site beforehand:
Plan ahead when building an improving cities, and build a city on a river that has good production potential.
Improve the land around the city for a production centre.
Build a factory and power plant there ASAP.
Save an engineer.
Optional: Rush buy the last bits if you want (sometimes you just have TOOO much gold; aka owning most of the shrines on a huge map).

And suddenly, building the 3GD in a well-prepared production heavy city is already just as fast (in game turns) as building those power plants in many of your hybrid cities; i.e. those that are not totally and utterly geared to production. So you save yourself building, say 35 power plants, at the cost of one Great Engineer. The time taken to build the 3GD is roughly equal (in turns) to the time it takes to build up the industrial infrastructure in lesser cities, all of which can spend the intermediate time building military units instead. So you get the 50% boost to your production across the continent, and also get a massive army into the bargain.

During this time, the total production capacity of all the cities building military will far surpass that of the single city building 3GD on its own. But the time to build a power plant all those cities will be similar to the time needed to build the 3GD if you use an engineer. You simply save the need to build them, and build more useful units instead.

At least, that's the pattern in my games. You race through the techs from industrialism -> Plastics at approx. 6-10 turns on marathon, which gives you enough time to round off your infrastructure (e.g. factories, jails, barracks, happy faces) in all your cities and for them to grow nice and big with the bonuses from State Property and Biology. You then have loads of massive cities with most improvements they'll ever need, and just switch everything to produce military once a factory is in.

With your military, you begin the final phase of conquering the world. With State Property, your production should already have a significant boost at this time. Because civ wars are wars of attrition, higher production will win you wars, allowing you to build more reinforcements than your opponent can. You can't however do this, if you're building 50 power plants instead. And then, another 20ish turns after plastics (marathon), you get your 50% extra boost to production in all those large highly developed cities. And they now produce your army 1.5 times quicker.

In the meantime, your army has conquered several more civs.

So actually, the net benefit, if you do it right, is not +2 health in every city.

It's +new cities, + unstoppable army, +earlier domination victory.

[couerdelion]

I don't think I've played as far as Plastics before but have played near to it to a stage where I have controlled a large continent (4 civs) and had built coal plants in almost all of the larger cities that would have produced all the important late game builds.

At this stage I could have easily spammed machine guns, infantry, naval units but didn't feel like continuing the game because it involved too much logistics to get a large army over to the other continent and start taking one or two nations apart piecemeal for a domination win.

[sjm]

Originally posted by couerdelion
I don't think I've played as far as Plastics before but have played near to it to a stage where I have controlled a large continent (4 civs) and had built coal plants in almost all of the larger cities that would have produced all the important late game builds.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. If you're warmongering, the only important late game builds are units themselves, especially modern armours (and an airport of course). The quicker you churn them out, the quicker and more effective your conquests. So almost every single one of your cities will be building units once they have their basic infrastructure up. Lesser cities can focus on support units (bombers, transport etc.), the +50% benefit really makes a difference here; these are the cities that won't have time to build the power plants. In a big empire, the bonuses really add up.

(Note this is especially true for huge maps)

There's also no point in gearing your cities towards research or commerce at this point in the game; in fact, you don't need to research anything after composites. Which is why you want to gear almost all of your newer cities towards running State Property around the early mid-game. That means a large number of heavily productive cities that are financed via courthouses, religion and any gold from rivers (which you want for watermills anyway). Plus any cottage spam you acquire via earlier conquests

You can throw in the odd town if you really need to, but some of your earlier cities should already be totally geared to commerce by this point (e.g. Oxford). Just make sure you spam those courthouses, and by the time you switch to State Property, city maintenance is a non-issue, and even the smallest cities generate a small amount of income from trade routes.

I do firmly believe that you need to make a decision early-ish in the game as to how you're going to win and base your entire strategy around that target. Whilst it's nice to build up all your cities with every improvement, you actually don't need to. If you're warmongering, whenever a city has built everything it NEEDS, it builds units. Whenever you have a big army, you attack the best target. You do need a shrine though to fill your coffers, so if you don't found a religion, make sure you capture one ASAP.

That's why, if you're going for a cultural victory, say, 3GD is a lot less attractive! I would also agree that not building the 3GD won't hurt you much either way. But it really really speeds up that (sometimes tedious) end-game.

[One_more_turn]

I don't like fighting in the age of machine guns, infantries, and artilleries. The defense is too strong to make fast advances. I prefer lightening wars that are over within 10-15 turns. Late game war weariness is terrible.

Once you get to Bombers and Tanks, the balance of power shifts to the offense. Given enough Bombers, you can actually bomb an entire civ into submission in one turn. Then it's a matter of using tanks to mop up the survivors.

[Dis]

I seem to get my dom victories before 3 gorges anyways. So I have been forgoing building it my last few games.

I don't even get hollywood and UN up before my game ends.

once I get bombers and tanks it's all over. My conquests involve 3 phases. Swordsmen rush just before longbowmen start appearing. Cavalry rush as soon as they come about. And tank rush soon as I get 20 of those built.

sword rush has to be done before longbowmen. Cavalry has to be done before infantry. Tanks are hard to do during infantry as well. I usually need bomber support. But I usually put collateral damage on my tanks.

Pentagon is a very important wonder for me. If only to keep it out of a potential enemy's hands. It's so expensive, however. I build a factory and coal plant before I attempt to build it.

[Jaybe]

Eiffel Tower & Pentagon are for my Iron Works city. Perhaps with additional factory and power.

[Blake]

Originally posted by sjm
... Huge map experiences ...

3 gorges is one of those map size and map type things.

Basic fact is a Coal Plant costs um 150 hammers and yields an additional 50% hammers over base hammer yield.

Take a city with 20 base hpt / 30hpt after Forge+Factory

The coal plant requires 5 turns to build at 30hpt.

After that it generates an additional 10hpt, taking 15 turns to pay off the initial investment.

Nominally, the time to pay off is 400/hpt.

If you finish your factory and estimate it'll take you more than 20 turns to research and build 3GD, you should build the Coal Plant regardless.

Other factors include though:
1) The unhealthy, may or may not be a factor.
2) The diminishing value of future hammers vs present hammers. May or may not be a factor. For example if you are in a war NOW then hammers spent on units NOW are more valuable than hammers spent on units in the FUTURE. If however you are planning a war to start in 20 turns, the future hammers are MORE valuable because units trained in the future don't cost upkeep NOW. Likewise if you have useful things to build NOW vs useful things to build in the FUTURE, for instance you have nothing to build now, but will have Tanks to train in 5 turns, you should build the coal plant to accelerate the Tanks training (even though the coal plant will technically not have paid itself off yet, it will result in getting tanks faster). Diminishing value of future hammers is a tricky thing! Mainly because of how units tend to depreciate over time!
3) The possibility that you will FAIL to get the 3GD, in which case you'll have LOST time on having the coal plant pay for itself.

I find that usually the various 2 factors and the 3 factor offset each other sufficiently to make the "400/hpt" rule fairly good, once adjusted for unhealth.


Now to get to map size and topology. On a huge map you tend to research faster in the late game than you can on smaller maps (depending on quality of city specialization and GPP whoring this may not be true, but generally it is). Also the number of cities per landmass: a "X in every city for spending Z in one city" gives more benefit when you have more cities on a land mass, trivially it's not worth building 3GD if your largest landmass has 6 or fewer cities.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by One_more_turn
I don't like fighting in the age of machine guns, infantries, and artilleries. The defense is too strong to make fast advances. I prefer lightening wars that are over within 10-15 turns. Late game war weariness is terrible.

I like this age of fighting. Particularly if the best units I have to face are riflemen and cavalry.

[wodan11]

I usually build a Coal Plant only in the city I plan for 3GD.

Wodan

[Calvin Vu]

I think I play somewhat like Arian and couerdelion. Winning doesn't mean much if going to war is the only (rather monotonous) way to do it. Building wonders makes the game open to all play options, including an early unexpected war. Besides, it's rather satisfying to build up an advanced civ without having to kill people to do it.

I used to ignore Stonehenge in order to do the early expansion. Now, I build Stonehenge before my first Settler, given a reasonably good starting position.

And 3GD is too late for me too. By that time, I just conclude that the game is pretty much over and start another game if I have not won already. There's nothing wrong with the game, I just have more fun with a new game, that's all.

The only wonder over which I would consider defeat if I can't get it is the Great Library. Since I usually aim for Alphabet and Literature early, if I can't get GL something is seriously wrong with the game and I just give up.

BTW, since I want to try random leader, I drop down to Prince level. Getting Pyramid at this level seems to be much easier since the AIs don't even seem to try to build it. I got most of the early wonders Stonehenge, Temple of Artemis, Pyramid, Colosus, GL, Oracle, etc. in my latest game on Terra map. I probably can finish the game before any civs, including me, have a chance to send a ship to the New World. I did not declare any of the wars. The AI civs just asked to be exterminated and kept me busy with their petty wars.

Also, the AIs almost always declare war only after I get Education and start to build universities (if not earlier). Therefore, I don't have much choice but to fight in the age of macemen and riflemen. Usually, the game can be considered wrapped up around the time of Infantry and tanks.