How to win a war

[Surprise!]

Another hint is to select cities to make military units and only military units. Make sure you surround it with food and hammer improvements. Farms and mines. This city will be even more productive if it is near horses, copper/iron, or stone/marble. Just keep building them, even in peace. Before long you will have a huge army and will be able to swarm more then one enemy. (With my assumptions of the difficulty level you are playing taken into account)

[Frozen3003]

This is a little off-topic. When I go into ''Multiplayer -> Intenet Games'' I need to update to Patc_319. It is 173.284.713 bytes large. That is rather much? What's up with that? Am I experiencing an error or is this normal? Because I don't want to download it if it is extremely large and unnecessary. Then I would rather play Singleplayer and Lan with my friends.

[rah]

Do not update through the game. It usually doesn't work. Download the patch from a site and run it. Almost all MP games you'll find around here requires you to be updated.

[·Imhotep·]

Those of you new to Civ IV MP - or Civ IV at all - might want to read my blog article about attacking in Civ IV MP...

[rah]

A good blog that contains some good stuff, but I find myself disagreeing with one point.
Everyone always says the defender has the advantage. It's really "who gets to strike with his collateral damage units first" that has the advantage. I don't care what your defensive bonuses are once a stack of cannons hit it.

[·Imhotep·]

True, rah, but that's where another aspect mentioned in the article comes into play - mobility. If you have siege with your stack, you necessarily move only 1 tile per turn (the exception is Mobile Artillery of course). The defender can use roads in his territory - and so he will in almost all cases be the one who has the chance to hit first as his "reach" is longer. The attacker has to move up to the city first - that means the defender has the chance to hit at least one time, possibly two times, or even three times before the stack reaches the city.

[rah]

Agreed, and you addressed some tricks to minimize that exposure. I go back to my original "smoking kills" example where I slipped out for a quick smoke in a game and a player took the opportunity to declare war and move next to the city and then trash the city the next turn before my cannons could fire. (the ole double move) I came back and noticed I was missing a city. Much hilarity ensued.

If you can achieve surprise and limit there opportunity to react to a turn or two, they may not be able to respond with a enough units to take out the stack. But my point is still valid, it's who gets to use their collateral units first that has the advantage and it's not always the defender.

[Stephany297]

I'm getting a little confused. When their city defenses are down I kill the Longbow people with some kind of Siege weapon like Catapult or better or Knights?

[·Imhotep·]

@Stephany:

You cannot kill a unit with a siege unit - that was only possible in Vanilla Civ IV before patch 1.61. But siege units lower the strength of a unit a) due to directly attacking it and b) due to collateral damage. So what you do is: Bomb down the defense to 0%. Attack with some of your siege units (preferably Trebuchets as they get +100% on attacking cities) and then finish the now wounded units with your non-siege units. This way you will only lose your siege units, as the other units will have high odds. Make sure to constantly replace the siege units and conquer on!

Edit: I may just have answered to a signature spammer. Ah, never mind...

[Martin Gühmann]

Edit: I may just have answered to a signature spammer. Ah, never mind...

Well, Stephany297 or whatever never had a signature, it was part of the post. Well, removed the links from the sight of the google bots and sent Stephany297 to Banana Land.

-Martin

[Sirotnikov]

Stephanie was a smart bot!
It partially quotes an existing post, so it appears relevant to the discussion.
Look:

I'm not the smartest person ever so I'm getting a little confused. When their city defenses are down I kill the Longbow people with somekind of Siege weapon like Catapult or better or Knights?
How big effects does Espionage and Spy have against the enemy?
I would also like any other major tips if you got some.