Vel's Strategy Thread - Part Two

[Raging Mouse]

Re: Not entirely accurate....

Originally posted by inca911


Soren did state that as a good rule of thumb, one unit (with attack capability >0) prevents one citizen from thinking about defection. In my book, this is a very significant and simple concept to employ to aggressively prevent defections in captured cities (which is usually my goal

This must put a serious brake on your invasion, since if you want to capture a large city, say size 11, you need to station 11 or 12 military units in it to prevent defection. Those units might be better used elswhere. Nah; I'll stick to reducing it's size via bombardment until it's a manageable size!

[inca911]

Absolutely correct!

You are 100% correct. Bombard until the pop is nice and low and bring over your own workers to staff up cities if you want greater production output.

[mlepinski]

The Importance of Navel Power

I'd like to know what people's thoughts are on the importance of navel power, particularly in the early game. I find that someone always discovers mapmaking before the intitial landgrab phase is complete. Therefore, I find that I always have the choice of whether to get mapmaking quickly and devote resources to building galleys or to ignore navies until the caravel.

My take on the situation is that the only reason to build galleys is to attempt to discover other land (new islands for expansion or new continents for trade) before other civilations on my continent. Being successful at locating land at sea generally requires both:
A) There must be land nearby (this is mostly luck)
B) Building quite a few galleys (since some will undoubtably be lost in sea squares).

Now I've played games where I ignored early navel power and the computer was able to expand onto several nearby islands that I didn't know existed. I've also played games where I put resources into early galleys (thus hampering my ability to expand and build armies) only to find that there was no land anywhere near me.

Therefore, building early galleys seems to be a significant risk and I'm not sure if the potential payoff (finding an island with a luxery or resource or making contact with another civ) makes the risk worth taking.

- Matt Lepinski :->

[spongeucsb]

Regarding the use of the Forbidden Palace

I recently finished a game in which I began on a continent with 2 other civs, the Egyptians and the Romans. The Romans were located close enough to my prodcution center to attempt to 'secure' a few of their cities located near iron deposits. As I was the first to obtain iron working because I was playing the Greeks and my science was notably better, I played some strategic resource denial and began pumping out swordsman. Eventually the Romans were nothing but a bad memory and i had captured nearly all their cities intact including infrastructure. However corruption was a huge problem and a conflict with the Egyptians to the North was becoming inevitable and i needed these cities to run at full production so i began building the FP in the center of the subjugated roman empire and using my leader acquired during the war to rush the production, i had what amounted to a second empire, full with population centers and improvements. I have read many theories on the best use of the FP but the forceful subjugation of a weaker nation and strategic placement of the forbidden palace can double your center of production with little effort from you (you were going to destroy them anyways...)
I ended up destroying the egyptians easily and although my continent was smaller than the other civs, i was eventually able to secure a military victory due to the high rates of science advance and production from the combined Greek and Roman empires.

[Bambul]

There was some mention before of dropping back to Despotism from Democracy to pop-rush, then back to Democracy (with a religious civ I assume). Well, there's a better way of doing it that doesn't involve anarchy, which means non-religious civs can use it too!

All you need is Nationalism. By the time you're well into the industrial age you should have a number of cities size 7 and up as well as enough railroad to zap your units around your empire and to the front lines. All you need to do is draft a citizen from one of your size 7+ cities, then move the rifleman into the city you're building in, then diband for 20 shields. Not only does this work while the city is still resisting, but once you get infantry and mech inf, you get 22 and 27 shields respectively instead of 20.

It does have it's unique limitations: you can only draft one unit per city per turn and it must be from a size 7+ city, but the pop can come from any city within your empire.

Has anyone else used this strategy?

[E_T]

Bump to top

[Lawrence of Arabia]

burp

[Lawrence of Arabia]

In my present game I have all the resources I need. Has anyone else ever gotten that? The only problem is that my neighbors are 'Furious' because they want me to trade my 6 rubber to them so they can build Infantry. Yeah right...

[trickey]

Cool. Mybe someone figured this out along time ago (im a newbie) but the AI dosn't reconize units three spaces away as a threat to their city. Has this been patched???

ps. great work vel.