Making friends with aggressive civs.

[Dis]

Holy crap, how in the hell could you guys ever build that many units! Are we playing the same game? I know I play on a lower difficulty, but that just means I should be able to build more. How do your cities have enough production to produce those in a reasonable amount of time without crippling your research/economy? And you certainly can't whip that large of an army. Sometimes I whip hard, and end up with like size 1 or 2 cities but still only have like 25 units.

I'm only counting offensive units btw. My last game I won by domination victory and had about 40 cities or so, and I obviously had a lot of units there. At least 40 defenders (a couple cities had 10 to resist flipping). And then my tank force was around 25 or 30. And about 5 mobile artillery. 8 stealth bombers, and 1 jet fighter.

[wodan11]

If you make specialized cities, with HE in a production city, you'll be able to spit out 1 unit/turn. That city should make units all game. And if your empire is > 6-7 cities, you should probably have 2 production cities making nothing but units. Lastly, during times of war or gearing up for war, probably every city in the empire should be making units.

That's if you want a warmonger game, of course. Most people don't do this and focus more on infrastructure.

[rah]

If I'm playing aggressive AI, my rule of thumb is that at any time 1/2 my cities are producing a unit.
In MP you probably do more.
Yes, the biggest task in the game is learning how to build and pay for that large of an army.
In sp it's usually monarch or higher.
In MP it's other humans.

[One_more_turn]

Aggressive AI is not that bad. It also means the AIs are fighting more among each other. I've seen AI wars lasting half of the game.

[Ming]

In our last MP game, we only had a few players, so we added in some AI's for fun. (playing aggressive AI)
An AI on one side of me declared war on the AI on the other side of me, and for countless turns, I watched the AI march 100's of units through my borders. They were still going at it when we ended the game for the night.
I was just happy that the attacking AI and I were on good terms

[rah]

When the civ they were attacking was down to one island city. His rally point was a city squashed by my culture so I could easily view it. I counted about 150 unit in it. The city kept churning out galleys to transport them all to the last island.

[Blaupanzer]

"We'll make our last stand at Malta," sort of thing. All the Christian knights looking for ships for the island while the foot sloggers waited to be slaughtered.

[rah]

It was funny because they only had a couple of longbowmen on the island so the 5 galleys there were more than sufficient to handle it, but they waited for about 15 before they launched.

[Blaupanzer]

Sort of a "when we go, everybody goes" type of thing?

[Ming]

Yeah... the typical AI overkill strategy

But kind of back on topic... If you have one of the crazies next door, especially if you are playing aggressive AI, you need to EXPECT that they will be coming at you and you need to make sure you don't spend too much effort on infrastructure and not enough on military. Because with crazies like Monty or Togga, it's not a question of if, but a matter of when.

[rah]

Normally I'd agree 100% with that, but after reading all the posts that slnz makes, and his example in the Agressive AI game next to the romans, he seems to handle the diplo part of the game at a considerably higher level so that might not be the case for him.

[Ming]

True enough... However, neither Roman leader is as crazy as Monty, Shaka, or Togga

[slnz]

True enough... However, neither Roman leader is as crazy as Monty, Shaka, or Togga

Yep, but if they do declare it's much more dangerous due to Imbaetorians. What makes them easier to handle (in addition to being a bit less aggressive) is that they both lack the extra "default hate" of -1 that most of the lunatics (or traditional army nuts, like Nappy or DeGaulle) have, so they're up to Pleased a notch earlier (and AC doesn't even declare at Pleased). The lunatic squadron poses the biggest threat before ~1000BC, because there's almost no diplo room to maneuver very early. Getting any Civ to Pleased (up from Cautious) usually makes a DoW 3-6 times less likely, or eliminates the possibility completely.

In that game I was quite lucky to not get DoWed before JC was up to Pleased (from religion IIRC), but after that he was much much more likely to declare on others than me.

FYI, I don't usually dig this deep into the statistics in casual (non-forum) play, other than the stuff that has stuck on my cortex

EDIT: Like Ming said, it's not as much about avoiding wars, rather knowing the risks in each diplomatic situation and preparing according to those risks (enough troops, stationed in the right places).

[rah]

As I said, he handles it a bit more sophisticated than we do.


For him.

"GIVE"
"Let me see if it makes sense"

For us:

"GIVE"
"NO F**KING WAY" and then wonder why we are DOWed.

[Blaupanzer]

slnz,

Can you keep the three crazies from attacking throughout the whole game when they start out as your neighbors? (Doesn't have to be all three at once.)