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Situation: Mid-industrial era, huge map, continents, Mayans, republic. The Aztecs, on the other continent, declare war on me for no apparent reason. It's pre-Marines, and I generally abhor dropping a stack on a mountain, for various reasons, one big one being absorbing all the WW points as the stack gets attacked, even if the attacks fail. Because of this, I limit my warmongering to my landmass for the most part until I get Marines or Berserks.
So I decide to do what I always do in this situation, enlist Sumeria and the Iroquois in a proxy war. It's going well enough, with the Aztecs taking a few cities early, then my allies recovering them and a bit of a stalemate ensuing. Then it hits me that I can do a little bit more, since I don't plan on taking any territory in this war. Enter the explorer. Essentially, it has four moves if it pillages, since it treats all terrain as roads and has two movement points.
We're all aware of how well an explorer can pillage and move in enemy territory, but what about, say, a dozen of them? Two dozen? I think you see what my somewhat unorthodox plan was: flood Aztec lands with explorers and completely wreck their economy, fighting the war completely non-militarily.
To sum it up in short, I loved it, and have put the gambit into my permanent playbook. Let me try to share a few of the benefits:
The toughest part is the insertion, unless you land them on friendly shores, since for a turn the road network is still intact, there are a limited number of tiles you can offload onto, and they're sitting ducks for AI troops. That's the reason the strategy is to simply flood the AI with more explorers than he can capture in a turn, and keep wave after wave of them coming. I may have to find a way to use helicopters to expand the insertion limits.
As with any strategy, it's not one size fits all, but I highly recommend trying it the next time you're in an appropriate situation.
So I decide to do what I always do in this situation, enlist Sumeria and the Iroquois in a proxy war. It's going well enough, with the Aztecs taking a few cities early, then my allies recovering them and a bit of a stalemate ensuing. Then it hits me that I can do a little bit more, since I don't plan on taking any territory in this war. Enter the explorer. Essentially, it has four moves if it pillages, since it treats all terrain as roads and has two movement points.
We're all aware of how well an explorer can pillage and move in enemy territory, but what about, say, a dozen of them? Two dozen? I think you see what my somewhat unorthodox plan was: flood Aztec lands with explorers and completely wreck their economy, fighting the war completely non-militarily.
To sum it up in short, I loved it, and have put the gambit into my permanent playbook. Let me try to share a few of the benefits:
- Cost: Each explorer costs 20 shields. I'm already well into industrialization, and therefore have plenty of cities churning out 20+ spt. This means minimal interruption of my peaceful infrastructure building, as all I have to do is slip an explorer into six different build queues each turn, delaying those cities' development by a mere turn, and I have a full transport load for reinforcement. You should already have the transport capacity to get them there, and if you're like me, it's really a small portion of your transport navy, so I really don't consider that as part of the cost.
- Effectiveness: The Aztec economy ground to a complete halt, as I was able to virtually eliminate all roads in their core within a handful of turns. No cash, no research and, perhaps most importantly, no reinforcements, not to mention the lack of resources and luxuries. While the Iroquois sued for peace early, as soon as Sumeria got a few cavs thrown together, they began rolling over Aztec cities at an almost human rate. I literally have never seen one AI swallow another that fast. Aside from the fact that the Aztecs couldn't produce reinforcements fast enough, and couldn't produce top-flight units, since my explorers had disconnected their iron, what reinforcements they were able to produce couldn't get to the front because they had to travel over unroaded territory. At the same time, your explorers only draw a small portion of the AI's attackers if your ally is actually invading their territory, and thus presenting higher priority targets.
- War Weariness Management: You suffer 1 war weariness point (wwp) for each turn your units end in enemy territory, and 1 wwp each time a unit with no defense value is lost, as opposed to 2 wwp when a combat unit is attacked. This means that, instead of being at the mercy of the AI's counterattacks. you can put as many explorers into their territory as you're willing to lose. Since the AI declared war on me and I was in republic, I had 60 wwp to give before seeing any WW effects. I would just hit that, for example, if I had two dozen explorers in enemy territory for 36 turns, and they all were captured on the 36th turn. Try to imagine the havoc those explorers could wreak in 36 turns. On a more practical level, you're simply not going to see any WW effects, and if you do, you'll have obliterated the enemy's economy anyway and can cease operations, keeping WW at the 25% unhappy level (50% in Democracy). You can also do things like pull all your explorers into your ally's territory at the end of each turn (sometimes), to even further suppress the accumulation of wwp.
- Easy Exit Strategy: Ready to pull out and let your ally bear the full weight of the war? Just disband your explorers. Sure, it'd be nice to ship them back home and disband them in cities, but each one will only give you five shields, so if you don't have your transports right there on the spot, it's not really a big deal. And poof! Just like that, you're out.
- Random Number Elimination: Think about it. Pillaging is 100% guaranteed a success. If an AI unit catches your explorer, it's a 100% guaranteed capture. The RNG, bane of warring players everywhere at one time or another, is a non-factor to the outcome. Also, the enemy isn't going to get any promotions or leaders out of your defeats, which is nice.
- Fun: It's a freaking hoot watching the AI try to get at your explorers, while they sit back in the middle of a bare patch of ground, or even better, a mountain range, and thumb their noses at that knight or cavalry unit that just can't quite reach them. I also got a kick out of unloading explorers all up and down the AI coast to replenish those just captured, and laughing at the thought of the AI scrambling to decide which ones to capture, since capturing them all was out of the question.
The toughest part is the insertion, unless you land them on friendly shores, since for a turn the road network is still intact, there are a limited number of tiles you can offload onto, and they're sitting ducks for AI troops. That's the reason the strategy is to simply flood the AI with more explorers than he can capture in a turn, and keep wave after wave of them coming. I may have to find a way to use helicopters to expand the insertion limits.
As with any strategy, it's not one size fits all, but I highly recommend trying it the next time you're in an appropriate situation.
) to war production, then be done with it. Just keep your reserves stacked up and send them wave after wave.
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