Inadequately supported city bribes or attacks

[tobyr]

A comment by Xin Yu gave me the idea for this thread.

I have found that one of the worst things you can do in the middle game of Civ2 is to make a sneak attack with a small force, or a lone diplomat, to conquer or bribe a city that is near heavy enemy fortifications (or other cities, or just a lot of enemy units). The likely result is that the enemy conquers the city back, and when they do, you give them one of your prized advances, plus losing the units involved in the attack.

It is particularly tempting to make this mistake in a multi-map game (ToT fantasy or sci fi), because the it is often so important to establish a beachhead on another map, and the presence of a large enemy force of map X does not stop you from assembling a small nearby force on map Y that can penetrate to X's city.

What do you skilled people do to assure yourself that a sneak attack is worth the risk, when you are ahead in technology?

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[Ming]

A lone diplo or small attack force used to take an attack point near a well armed nation is not the smartest thing to do. If you aren't in Democracy, the diplos/spies will be all over you in a turn or two.

Now, if you are in Democracy, and you can move even one or two strong defensive units in when you take the city, that can work... especially if you have the Great Wall.

Sometimes, the better strategy is to find a strong defensive position, and just create your own city on it. Bring a settler and strong defensive unit along, and just build your foot hold. Who cares if it really grows or not... the trick is to have an attack point.

In MP games with double production, Rah is well known for doing just this on Gold/Mountain squares being used by one of your cities... it really pisses you off

[DaveV]

Another trick in a non-walled city is to make sure the number of defenders is equal to the city size. Then the attacker will destroy the city rather than capture it. This doesn't help if the bad guys can use sea or air units to strip off defenders without city population loss. And it doesn't help against bribery, either. See Ming's response. See also the thread about moving your capital .

Sometimes it's worth losing your entire expeditionary force to cost the enemy one of his cities (like a city containing a key wonder).

[jpk]

I would go with Ming's strategy. Build a nearby city. Then start tranporting units from your main city to the holding city. If you prefer, have each ship that brings a military unit to your city bring a caravan to the AI civilization. This is one time it might be good to save your money. If they try to bribe the city back at least make lit expensive. If you build a holding city, patrol the surrounding land so that it can't be bribed away from you. Consider building a courthouse so it is twice as expensive to bribe.

When you finally start your attack ruin the road system so that the only roads into or out of the city you want to attack are through fortresses, each of which contains two of your guys.

If you are going to start to attack the heart of an AI civilization wait until you can smash them hard, really hard. Once you get a solid foothold you can be more agressive, but make sure you can get that solid foothold.

Sometimes the AI will have isolated cities on nearby islands. Consider bribiing such a city.

I have rambled for long ehough, perhaps too long. Yes, I'm sure of it, I've rambled for too long.

[Civ-wrecked]

When I'm not quite ready for a full scale invasion I usually send a boat load of troops and engineers to build a fort instead. It's better than a city since the fort cannot be bribed (i.e. no need for any elaborate defence against spies) and I can move the fort/troop all over the place and kill off the AI's defenders/attackers (without taking any cities even after I kill off all the defenders in there). In that way, I can still be at peace building up infrastructure in my core cities while destroying the AI's defence and ruining its research. When my main troop finally arrive, they only need to pick off the remaining defenders.

[geofelt]

One of my first beach-head goals is to make it two cities. If the AI takes one, you can still get it back. If I must have only one, I try to keep a spy and a defender in a nearby fortification to bribe it back