WW in the medieval age?

[Kc7mxo]

The best thing to do in any war situation is to get them ON YOUR SIDE FIRST.

It rarely takes more than 500 bucks in the middle ages to bribe another empire into allying with you. Remember they only last 20 turns, but they often stay at war for long periods even after the alliance ends.

Whenever I go to war I immiaditly grab all the allies i can, excluding those I don't feel are either any threat to me, and no threat to my enemy. The only thing you have to watch out for are large mutual defense pact setups.

[TrainWreck20]

I am still learning the game, so I don't have the answers, but I prefer the new AI as opposed to the old Civ AIs. Much more challenging.

I am trying to form alliances 'pro-actively', which appears to be helping. Don't really have enough time under the belt to tell, really. The learning curve is quite steep here. I am playing at Regeant level and being quite entertained (much to my surprise). If the world is warlike, though, you may be forced into a warlike posture to maintain your empire.

Think about it....if a group of civs get together to beat up a small one, they all gain. The trick is to be a member of the group, not the small guy!

[tomcat ha]

i also had an world war against the aztecs.
I won.
with help of 4 other nations.
The egyptian emipre was first slaugterd (they had mostly old war chariots)
Then they came with hordes of cavalary units.
i just bombarded the aztec cities.

[Der PH]

Originally posted by Kc7mxo
It rarely takes more than 500 bucks in the middle ages to bribe another empire into allying with you.

I think, exactly this has been the problem!
One turn before the war started, the Babylonians had more than 2000 gold in their piggy bank and I had only about 250 (which were gratefully taken by the Persians).
So it was the Babylonians, who bribed all the others to join their party.

Of course I tried to convince the others, too, but they all refused to oppose the Babylonians (which I can understand very good, The Bab's were the most powerful civ in the game).
The fact, that it was the Persians, who joined me, was rather surprising, because in the ancient age I had a big war against them and took 3 of their cities.

Well, altogether I like this game and I'm going to continue, although I don't think, I have any chance of winning it.
A challenging AI was exactly what I wanted from Civ3 and I'm very happy (and a little bit surprised) that I got one.

[Fromage]

Alliances are pretty nice in these situations. I was playing with emperor level, 12 civs and two large continents. I played with babylonians had a really great culture, but hardly any armies. Perhaps one spearman in every third city. It worked really well untill 1500.

I was just started building my first riflemans when I saw 10 chines riders coming near my empty border city. I had to think something, so:
- I bought one rifleman to defend the border city.
- Made mutual protection pact with three civs that were near me.

I worked pretty well. Other civs actually paid me 30-40gold /turn for the mutual protection pact When those riders attacked my worker, civs A, B and C declared war to China. I thought that would be enough to keep Chine out of my territory.

Next turn I noticed that those A, B and C civs had pacts with civs D, E and F. So now there was 7 civs against China. A bit after that one of my rich allies made military alliances with all the other civs.

China vs. rest of the world (11 civs) was pretty fast. 15 years later there was no China anymore. I had only build 10 riflemans in that time

If some large civ is going to attack, pacts with 2-3 civs can take him down.

[SanPellegrino]

It depends very much on your military strenght. When you are weak the AI is going to push you around. When you are stronger they will often pay tribute for treaties. Quality of units is not important, you can have a lot of warriors and they fear you