Has anybody found a practical use for war?

[Privateer]

Assuming, of course, that you and the enemy are more or less on the same tech level and we are not talking about easily slapping around a bunch of Pikemen with Tanks and Bombers.

I found that whenever I go to war in these conditions, even if I am a lot stronger than the enemy, it costs me a lot more than it gets me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I don't know. Basicly, I almost always get farther by keeping an army small enough to hold the line and deter attacks, but not big enough to take somebody's cities. After all, defending a city or a fort is a lot easier than attacking it.

I have developed something of a taste for what I call "limited war", however. The point of a limited war is not to take over the enemy completely, but to hurt them as much as possible. This is best done on the seas. Once his navy is defeated, my ships can rob them of tens of thousands of production points by ravaging seaside tile improvements. Relatively early, especially, this is devastating.

How do you fight wars?

[Grandpa Troll]

I try to take out key cities along a divide, basically, I like to shut down a resupply line

go for bigger cities that provide tech advancements/gold or unit production (like in mountainous regions)

War is expensive

plus you take a city deep within their territory then unhappiness becomes an issue

Ugly mess this war..

of course this aint SimCity now is it

[The Humble One]

Notes to a Privateer!

War can be profitable! Just be careful your targets!

If your enemy is close by, accessible via land, you need to blockade the capitol. That means shutting down all roads, and bombarding the city while defending your besieging troops. You well may take losses, but your enemy likely isn't prepared for your offensive thrust.

Once you take the capitol, it can become a lesson in patience to expand your rule in the countryside. Unless you built a second army, and launched it in another part of the newly-to-be-acquired kingdom.

(Diversions are wonderful. Plant a strong army at the far end of the enemy's realm, and there's a good chance troops will stream there to defend a city that has absolutely no use to you. Except to move troops away from the real targets.)

Use your navy. Destroy the enemy's navy, and you have easy and fast movement. Build extra ships. They need time to move troops back and forth.

Use stealth units. It's always nice to have somebody telling you how the enemy is reinforcing it's cities. I've never liked spies or such, but I use clerics, as they can see troop movement along roads.

[Privateer]

That's a good sum up of tactics, The Humble One, and is very much alike to how I fight. The question is not on how to fight, though, but on how to make war worth it. Using tactics similar to what you described I find that war simply doesn't give you enough spoils to justify spending all the resources you need to spend on it.

It's great if there are only two (major) players, you and the enemy. Then you might be spending a lot of production on building war units, but so is the enemy to fight them and it all balances out. But usually the AIs are more or less on equal footing in my games, so if I start fighting one, we'll just throw away resources at each other, while the enemies who don't take part in the war grow stronger and stronger.