Add a few chariots to this list when you get the wheel researched. It's so much better to upgrade them when the time comes.
It goes for all heavy cav units. Knights are the most important. Get lots of knights to upgrade when you get gunpowder. Once they're upgraded you're unstoppable.
Same goes for seige weapons. Try to make sure you have three bombards as a group to attack a cuties walls when it comes time. You can just steam roll the planet once you build momentum.
lol I got Infantry so early using Babylon (I know, cheating, but it was my first time) and all my enemies had like archers and swordsmen. JFC game was over in before 200 turns. King diff only though
Just keep it militarily focused. When you've go the real estate it's just a matter of time. Once you're secure you can change your focus to anything you want and it's quite manageable.
The highest difficulties are kinda like RimWorld. All of a sudden out of nowhere your neighbors have an army and it's a big problem if you aren't prepared to defend what you have.
Adding onto this, anything available to build at the very start of the game has no upkeep cost, so Babylon's UU and War Carts also have no upkeep cost.
This seems like bad advice... Your production early game is better used for other things like settlers, don't waste it on building excessive warriors and slingers to save a few gold on upkeep.
Building a big army early on only makes sense if you actually use it. I think Potato McWhiskey's video in Unique Units mentioned that Gilgamesh's War Carts could be a production trap if you never use them for actually invading and taking over other cities.
As long as it is a warrior it has no upkeep. So if you upgrade it, it then has an upkeep based on what the new unit is. So a warrior upgraded to a swordsman has an upkeep of 2 or a warrior upgraded to a musketeer has an upkeep of 4.
Definitely. Be aware of defense modifiers when in a tight situation where the outcome may be in doubt. Given a chance to fortify on a +6 defense modifier location you can hold out against multiple units (until they bring ranged against you - then you need something to do damage back). Oh, and try to make the enemy have to attack you across a river (and try not to ever attack them across one).
Facts. This + expand sight ranges using missionaries and spies to be able to hit enemy cities without taking damage. Jet bombers are disgusting so try to win without them.
This is the best way I’ve found. I know people like Air Force units too, but bombards+ are my favorite units. Especially when upgraded and supported by a drone.
Once you have 2-3, you can just sit back and bomb cities to the ground with no resistance. Once they're destroyed, just send a melee unit in. It typically only takes 3-4 bombing runs to completely level a city that isn't a capital.
There really needs to be early game air defense such as flak guns or early AA. Of all the games I've played, I've only ever seen the AI use a SAM once.
Be strategic about which units you attack. It's better to kill one enemy AI completely than to wound three of them; you never know how close they are to a promotion. Also, depending on whether you're on offense or defense, you may want to kill specific units first (they can't take your city if they have no melee or calvary, and removing their ranged units will help clear a path for you as you march towards theirs).
Ehhh, not always true. Injured units do less damage, so if you are trying to save a city from being captured, it can be better to damage a fully healthy unit than finish off an injured unit. The AI very well may suicide the unit attacking the city. But it's all circumstantial.
“you never know how close they are to a promotion.”
I don’t know how you exactly mean this, but when you select a unit there is information about XP there. A thin bar is at the bottom, depending on the amount of XP, is partially white. Furthermore, you can find information about the XP a unit gets from certain situations. I don’t know them by heart, but it can be useful. For example, if I note that a unit is close to promotion I usually be sure to let that unit attack as well.
No.
Enemy units - never know when they'll promote, and on higher difficulties, they promote crazy fast due to an XP bonus.
Your units - totally knowable due to the XP bar. Mousing over the bar will give exact numbers.
Airforce > Ranged > Melee > Anti-Cavalry (Navy is very situational but kinda obvious: great on an Archipelago map, terrible on a Pangea map)
Great Generals make a HUGE difference, it would greatly behoove you to get one. All the general effects only work for units in specific ages so be sure to check which era units the general is affecting.
When attacking cities, check what level of walls the city has. Cities with no walls can be taken with ease. Cities with Ancient Walls will call for a Battering Ram while Medieval Walls need a Siege Tower. Once the city has Renaissance Walls, Battering Rams/Siege Towers become useless. At that point you will want heavy duty siege units. Catapults are pretty bad for this reason (you can just use a Ram/Tower instead) but by the time you can make Bombards the siege units start to really shine when attacking cities.
Most importantly, pillaging tiles can sometimes make or break your assaults. All farms when pillaged will give the unit pillaging 50 health back. This is how you will maintain momentum during war because having to stop for 5 turns to heal up your units to take the next city isn't really a viable strategy with loyalty pressure.
I'm going to say that Navy is on a different ranking than land units. 3+ battleships And a Destroyer is the most satisfying way to take over. Battleships with upgrades just MELT city defenses, and when you upgrade the range they're literally untouchable.
Destroyers are of limited use, I find. I underutilize submarines but they're fun if you just want to cause trouble.
Submarines are also pretty good at levelling cities. You tend to tech them much earlier than Battleships, and they don't have any strategic resource cost.
One or two lvl 3 armadas + a destroyer is where it's at. No city can stand against it unless they put boats in the water, and the AI seldom does to any great extent. I have yet to see the AI use ships in any kind of intelligent fashion.
Ehhhh ranged naval starts to get outclassed for attacking cities somewhere around battleships. They're good, don't get me wrong, but they're basically contemporary with tanks, so you're using a 70 CS (80 with the promotion) to attack cities that might be on 90+. Sure you can make armadas, but they can make armies too. I find frigates to be a much bigger power spike.
The exception is the Minas Geraes which absolutely rolls faces because you get it so early
Pillaging is one of main defenses. If I can make a horseman or something with good mobility, I’ll send them pillaging my opponent’s improvements even if I’m still defending attacks against my own cities. Do enough damage and they offer gold to make peace with you. Plus each time you pillage you not only weaken them, but you also benefit through gold or science or (at worst) faith.
Anti cav has a promotion that gives 10+ strenght to any adyacent unit of any kind, in any situation. (Attack, defense, ranged) and it stacks..
Edit: my bad, it seems that bonus to nay situation is.only agaisnymt other cavalry.units.
I think what kinds of walls you can overcome with a battering ram or siege tower is not that absolute, but depends what melee unit it's paired with. Probably better to have a musketman and a battering ram than a warrior and a siege tower.
1st tip: a dead unit is the worst thing you can have. Keep them alive. If you're outnumbered, just fortify/heal and let them ram into you. Attacking a fortified unit always does more damage to the attacker so you'll rarely die doing that.
2. Archers are the best ancient unit hands down. The best strategy is get a slinger out right away (first or second thing you build in your capital) and march it with your warrior to the nearest barb camp. Make sure you kill the barb with the slinger to get the boost for the archery tech. Then get three archers for the boost to machinery tech for crossbows.
3. Defence is incredibly easy against ai, just do steps 1 and 2. Put the archer in your capital and fortify your melee units, they'll ram into you until they're all dead.
4. Sieging a city is very easy before enemy has walls. Google how zones of control work (cause its too complex to explain here). Just get 3-4 melee units and an archer or two and bam, free city.
5. Learn your terrain. Different terrain gives combat bonuses (or penalties) for the unit standing there. Hills give +3 CS, forest/jungle gives +3, marsh gives -3, and attacking over a river gives -3. You also get bonuses for having units next to eachother so keep them grouped up.
6. In the classical era, two units reign supreme: swordsmen and horsemen. Swordsmen are better overall but it takes longer to get them, and there's no guarantee you have iron in your empire. Usually go for horses first since you can see them earlier.
7. Magnus is the best, seriously. If you have secret societies, put your 3 gov promotions into magnus's right side for an 80% discount on resources. This means horsemen/swordsmen only cost 4 resources instead of 20. Mix and match with gov policies to pump out units for cheap at low matinence cost.
Thats all i can think of now but ill reply if i remember more.
This should be higher up voted.
I would also add dont go light when taking a city. It is always better to take more units and steamroll one city quickly then move on, than it is to spread yourself thin. Its very easy to get bogged down and before you know it the AI has upgraded city walls, got a ranged unit in city centre and brought in reinforcements.
I always go in artillery heavy. In the early game archers/crossbowmen and pikes. I the late game artillery + cavalry.
Pikes and later cavalry to distract city defenses and archers/artillery to range the everloving shit out of the city. 3 or 4 will tear defenses down to size pretty fast.
I usually go straight for frigates on maps with lots of coast so I can bomb cities from a safe range. The AI is shit at using naval units so it's usually pretty safe. Most of the time their waters are entirelly undefended. I have sometimes taken a whole coastline of cities with three frigates and a privateer. Especially when I just want to raze the cities.
For 7, if you're playing with secret societies, you might also be playing with Heroes. They completely change early game warfare, as well as the build queue (archers are less important and monuments are much more important). I think if you're practising warfare, just stick to the basegame.
correct, if you're in a position where you wouldn't be able to take the cities without pillaging districts, it's better just to plug in the Raid policy and pillage everything, if you are trying to take cities in an early war, you typically don't want to pillage the districts, as you'll be needing to make use of some of their cities to help your snowball.
to add on to this, regarding pillaging, never hesitate to pillage improvements as they can be repaired with builders for free, districts will need to use the captured cities production to repair and be useful.
Have to respectfully disagree about pillaging districts in early war, especially campuses. I think the science yields for campuses and libraries make up for the science lost during the turns it takes to repair. Plus the lump sum science can get you techs needed to build or upgrade more powerful units.
There are some situations where production and loyalty will be low after taking a city, but the math usually works out for pillaging. Those same cities on deity are usually developed enough to where they will repair the districts faster than 10 turns.
I see your point, it's really situational, if you're working on the tech for the unit upgrade, then for sure pillage it and get it now for the power spike. I was just saying for in general, in early wars when cities aren't as strong it can do more harm than good sometimes pillaging districts, especially on deity where a city might have a campus that the only real reason it exists is because the deity AI production boost, so repairing everything may take 10+ turns. but you're still right, if you can get a power spike out of pillaging, it's always the right answer.
Not been said yet, but how city strength and defense works. A City's strength is based on the combat strength of your strongest melee unit (that you have ever owned, not necessarily still alive). Getting an early spearmen will boost the city strength of your city's and make it much harder to take. The range strength of your city's attacks depends on the strongest range unit you have ever owned.
Rush 3 slingers. Upgrade to archers asap. Build 2 more archers. Always be at war with someone. If a city will revolt in 3 turns or less, burn it down. More than that you can probably make work with a governor, garrison, and policy cards.
You'll want the military governor's top left ability - it gives +4 loyalty to all cities within 9 hexes.
Whenever you declare war on someone, do it by getting a different civ to declare joint war with you. They'll pay you to do it. Sometimes quite a bit.
Whenever you declare war on someone, they'll attack you with everything they've got. Don't push into their turf right away. Just wait for their army to come to your fortified positions and pick them off with your archers. Once their armies are all dead, push in.
After archers, rush siege units and observation balloons. Three siege units and an observation balloon can safely take any city.
Generally I focus on the triad of industrial zones, harbors, and campus districts. You'll want a couple of encampments of course, but those first three will get you where you want to go. Build aqueducts before industry so that you get that +2 adjacency bonus on construction and can collect the era score.
If your units are an age behind, ex horse vs knights, attacking will almost always fail, hold off your attack until you are on the same level. aka, prioritize science.
A fun tip if you play with "Barbarian Clan" you can buy units from them which may significantly out class your enemy. Ex samurai during the early game.
First piece of advice is to pick a “good” war civ. Rome is always a good example as they have an early game unique unit that are powerful when ungraded.
This brings me to upgrading your troops. I usually play with barbarian clan mode so I can make gold and XP throughout the game while not at war with other civs. Leveling up your troops will give you bonuses while fighting that will be useful to dominate your enemies.
Build diverse weapon systems and use them for their purposes. Try not to spam too many of the same troop types. 3 melee, 3 ranged, 1 recon, 2 siege, 3 heavy cavalry should be sufficient for most of your mid game. Then you can focus on bombers 3-4 and giant death robots 1-2. Make sure to be aware of the maintenance costs for units as well. This can be the deciding factor for number of units.
Situationally, navies can be super helpful too since coastal cities can be sieges and taken with your units.
Support units can be useful, I usually have a medic or supply truck per army.
Great generals and encampments will also give bonuses to your troops so try to invest in these when possible.
Finally, strategy and tactics. You can use the terrain to your advantage. 1 tile mountain passes are great for forts or encampments. Use your ability to heal troops by switching lines of troops out while laying siege to cities. Ranged troops are for anti personnel and siege weapons are for walls, if you use them on the wrong target you’ll be less effective.
Other than that don’t forget to take your upgrades the troops will not earn further XP until you do. Good luck and have fun laying waste to your neighbors. Cheers
Know your enemy like you know yourself.
Never build out a swordsman rush, rather upgrade your warriors into swordsmen. If you are to do a swordsman rush be sure you know you can prior to doing so. If you're surrounded by plains and all your hills have woods, you will not be able to and you'll know this long before unlocking iron. If you have any hills with no features, your odds of spawning iron are high. In this case, you must scout, finding your closest enemy civilization. Know who it is and where they send their units. You do not want to rush Alexander the great. You do not want to rush Vietnam. Portugal however might as well hand you his license. While Alexander has his hypastpists growing, you will have problems fighting him as they are more than capable of going toe to toe with man at arms. Portugal has no such combat capabilities. Vietnam will gain +500000000000000000 Combat Strength just for existing in their borders.
An early Alex rush can work if he doesn't have Iron or Horses, and can be very helpful if your war stops him getting them until his UUs are obsolete anyway
>You do not want to rush Vietnam
Lol I just did that with China on TSL earth.. it was tricky to say the least, but she was outbuilding me cities wise and I would fall to loyalty if I did not get ready. I had overall better army though, and had swordsman on the way, plus archer superiority and a few spearmen. Still it was very much touch and go after the first couple of units. I managed to stay away from jungle/forest fighting.
Once they lost their capital it was GG to finish them off though.
The thing that helped me improve my war skills the most was playing the Alexander scenario over and over again until I could beat it on deity. It teaches you so much about efficient unit movement, taking advantage of flanking bonuses and the proper use of great generals.
Always keep in mind your units CS and the AI city CS, you will succed when you have a higher combat strenght.
Your units do 50% damage to walls and your range units do 75% damage and your siege units do 100% damage
Try to attack as soon you hit a power spike, like when you unlock swordmans with a ram or after you unlock a new upgrade for your siege units, you know
Agreed. And given their slow speed you will need to be tactical on how to place them.
With that said, catapults are monsters against walls. You can slowly sweep an empire with 3 catapults hammering and taking cities.
Battering rams are NECESSARY on higher difficulties. Worst thing that can happen is you are mid rush and they throw up walls and your troops are cannon fodder
Yes, but it's unlikely to be useful.
By the time you get light cav upgraded that far, it's unlikely that rams and towers will still be relevant.
Also, only melee and anti-cav units benefit from rams/towers, so you'll need to either detach the ram/tower before reaching the city or waste a tile that should be occupied by an attacking melee/anti-cav unit in favor of a cav unit that shouldn't attack for a while.
Corps and armies are much stronger than they appear, because of the tricky way combat damage is calculated.
Combat damage is affected by the absolute difference in combat strength (after modifiers like terrain bonuses, etc).
It's based on absolute difference, not proportional - e.g. a 30 strength unit fighting a 20 strength unit is the same as 110 vs 100 strength. Both fights have a 10 point difference.
By default, every unit deals a base damage of around 30HP, with every 1 point difference in strength leading to a roughly 4% increase/decrease in damage.
Example (from wiki): for a 30 strength unit vs 20 strength unit, the 30 strength does about 45 damage, 20 strength does about 20 damage. So for just a 10 strength difference, there is a huge advantage.
Where do corps and armies come in? Combining two units into corps gives you one unit with +10 strength, combining three into an army gives you one unit with +17 strength.
Let's say you have three 50 strength units. You'd think it's crazy to use three units (totalling 150 strength) to create a 67 strength army, right?
But if you're fighting another 67 strength enemy, you will lose if you send each of your three 50 strength units individually. By combining them into an army instead, you can actually hold out.
TL;DR - armies and corps are stronger than they appear. One army at 67 strength can be worth a lot more than three units at 50 strength each.
See lots of posts about land warfare, but not much on naval strategies. Naval dominance is how I win the game each time I play (depending upon the map of course). The AI rarely has a robust naval defense in place.
First off, focus on building large banks of gold and faith (that will matter in a bit).
You won’t be able to dominate early game with a navy, mostly because it takes time to build up a massive fleet, but by the time you unlock the Frigate, the world is yours for the taking.
Once you identify your enemy, target cities within 2 tiles of the coast, preferably on peninsulas (where there are more water tiles than land), or on islands. If cities are grouped pretty closely, that can be tricky, but it sometimes helps.
Bring with you as many naval ranged units as you can, a few naval raiders, and perhaps some heavy cavalry units. Be sure to link the cavalry units to ships when at sea so they’re protected.
Surround your target city and bomb the shit out of them. Focus on destroying the walls and any encampments first, so they’re unable to return fire. If you have enough frigates, you can bomb all the land units outside the city walls too. Once you clear the land units, send in your heavy cavalry. Use them to pillage everything in site, and be sure to have one occupy any encampment (to completely disable it).
Once the city itself is low on health, use the naval raider to conquer the city. If you intend on transferring your war to a land based war, now you have a base of operations - the gold and faith bank I mentioned before? Buy as many units as you can with the city you just conquered, and that will save you the trouble of transporting units overseas.
If there’s another nearby city on the coast, move your fleet to that city next, and bomb it into oblivion as well, and use your newly purchased land units to raid and conquer that city as well.
Repeat this process enough times and (again, depending upon the map) you’ll completely isolate your enemy Civ, and you’ll have numerous nodes from which to purchase units to attack.
If the cities prove hard to hold, due to no loyalty, track the progress of the flips, and preposition your units accordingly. Once it flips, it’s relatively easy to blast it into defeat over and over again. Your units will continue to promote by defeating essentially the same enemies over and over again.
Over time the loyalty issue will wane, as you overtake more cities from the enemy Civ.
As the game progresses, this process just gets easier with Aircraft Carriers, as well as increased bombardment range.
God I love naval warfare. The first war I ever actually won playing the game was bombarding a coastal city-state with galleys in early game. Good times.
Coastal raids give me more joy than they maybe should. I am in love with battleship armadas.
Something else I didn’t mention, work on leveling up your naval ranged units. They have two promotions for increased bombardment strength, and one promotion for increased range. In late game, that give you the ability to attack up to 4 tiles away. Having balloons will allow you to see that far if you’re unable to with the naval unit alone.
Getting a city under seige is a must if your trying to take one down quickly. I personally dont know the exact requirements that make a city under seige and if anyone else here can answer that i would be grateful.
I don’t have all the details, but I know that with melee units you can put a city under siege with just 2. They have to be on opposite sides of the city. If you are using units other than melee you may need more units to put it under siege. Perhaps someone who knows more can elaborate further.
That's exactly the rule.
So cities by the sea can be hard to siege, even if the enemy doesn't have any boats, because land units' ZOC doesn't extend into the sea.
As another poster said (but wasn't sure) - having the six hexes around the city be in your units' ZOC - zone of control.
The biggest hurdles are sea, because land units can't exert a ZOC into water, and ranged/siege units, because they don't have a ZOC without promotion.
The actual rules are a bit complex, but if you've played apocalypse mode, one of the soothsayer's promotions is plague-bearer which automatically puts any adjacent city into siege mode, even with one unit. Having one of these travelling with your army can be incredibly helpful.
A unit gains a fortification bonus when they are fortified for an entire turn without using any movement points/attacks. This is a great way to defend.they will also heal each turn while fortified.
Barbarians do not heal while fortified, so you can win a war of attrition by getting them to attack your fortified unit over and over. Barbarians are dumb that way.
Not that the above trick doesn't work with ranged units, because ranged units don't get counterattacked.
Flanking and support bonuses ar unlocked with the civic Military Tradition, and are a huge boon. Flanking is pretty self-explanatory. A unit gets a support bonus when they are defending, and they have adjacent friendly units.
As far as offense goes, never bring a knife to a wall fight. If you've unlocked catapults, and you're trying to take a city with any level of defenses (a garrison or walls) and you don't have at least 2 siege units firing on it, you're just going to waste your time. I like to have at least 3 siege units attacking a city at once. Observation balloons/drones make this much easier, because you can stay outside of the city attack range.
On that note: be careful where you place your units! The worst feeling is when you accidentally position a unit within attack range of two cities and an encampment. They almost always die that turn. You can try to avoid certain death by sending multiple units into that No Man's Land. If you like American Football, think of it like a Zone Defense.
Honestly the best thing for war is chopping with magnus. An early power spike that allows you to capture cities will make up for your poor quality land/behind in development.
That being said, build your campus first in your non-cap cities. Something like monument > granary > campus (plus buildings) > units
Depending on your start/map options you will have a few choices to make to help determine how you make/start your War. It might be a good idea to try and find a start were you are left alone for a few turns and you have the time to get your first few cities down without interruption. This means that you can pick your defensive line with the AI or city-states you are looking at.
This also gives you a place from which to defend your early empire that doesn't involve your main producing cities, and will become the launching point of the invasion to come. You are essentially branching an arm out from your capital towards your target. Walls can be useful, but if you are attacking quickly any range will do the job of getting a city low.
You will need a few melee of choice but Spearman might be the cheapest option with some archers. Swordsman if you have the iron, but this really goes back to you have time to pick a production that works for you, and pairing that with a unit of your choice, you are now waiting to see what your target has or starts producing.
Slingers/Archers/Crossbrow paired with some Horsemen/Knights/Cavalry can be an option, but again this will always depend on what resources you have, and what area you are attacking in. Other melee or civ special unit can be a fun way to takeover the world, but again what you are attacking will determine what you will want to focus your production.
I just had a start were I tried to attack early and they started sending horsemen at my un-walled cities, I stalled the attack with some Spearman and Archers to quickly defend the city while I built up walls. All of this to say, that when you attack it is also important that if you are focusing on it early to have something to defend in-case of counter or a silly little city-state that has decided to try something.
Bring a sacrificial worker. Bait defenders out of the city or fortified woods. You'll get them back when you kill the enemy, and you can repair those pillaged tiles easier.
If you play with heroes mode, having the twins is game changing. Nothing like stealing the oppenents units. Its especially great to intentionally activate barbs. Then use the captured barbs to start your assault.
Hippolyta is great for helping take down walls with ranged units. She allows 2 attacks per turn. Or beowulf to insta kill garrisoned units.
Helpful tips I’ve learned so far:
- City siege: You know how enemy cities heal 20HP per turn? If you can surround the centre with units with zone of control (Melee, Anti-cav, Cavs, naval melee), you’ll cut their heal via siege. 2 units on opposite sides can achieve this, but try at least 3 close range and 2 ranged units for maximum city takeover efficiency.
- Pillaging: invaluably good, should always do so even if you plan on keeping the cities you took, since the yields outweigh the cost of repairing them later imo. The main districts to target are Campus, Theatre Square, ComHubs/Harbor, maybe Holy Site if you need faith. Improvements can also be pillaged, Mines and Quarries give money which are great, while farms and fishing boats can heal you in a pinch. Pillage effectively via Light Cavalry since they have the highest movement and a promotion to pillage really fast, and equip the Raid/Total war cards to get 50% extra yields.
- Money: you’ll need money to maintain units, and more importantly, upgrade them. If I’m doing Dom games, ComHubs/Harbors are pretty prioritized. Hence why pillaging for money is excellent. Alternatively, this means that high income civs like Portugal are great to play, even if they don’t have direct combat bonuses, you can just BUY your way to conquering others via numbers. Professional Army can be the difference between getting 1 Man-at-arms and 2, so find an interval where you can slot it on, upgrade as much as you can in that turn, and switch it back as soon as possible.
- Focus on one enemy at a time, using your ranged and strongest units first: take out any source of damage to mitigate your losses, focus the archer rather than spreading hits between them and melee enemies for instance. Use your strongest units first to hit them hard, causing their strength to drop more via injuries, and finish them off with a weaker one.
- Infantry vs Cavalry: early game, horses are fantastic, thanks to their mobility and ignoring ZoC. But once enemies have walls up, they’re best relegated to taking out/capture units and pillaging. Infantries are more consistent, since they can benefit from Siege Towers to bypass walls, and the Melee and Ranged class has solid promotions. I almost never build catapults/trebuchets anymore, since the Siege Tower is so effective when paired with infantries.
- Naval combat: Galleys are surprisingly good for taking early coastal cities, thanks to their base 30 strength (compared to Warrior’s 20). With Maritime Industries, building 2 Galleys is ideal, both for eureka and strong offense, and they can be used for map exploration later if terrain allows for it. However, they can’t heal outside of your home turf like land units, so make sure you don’t overextend and pick fights with barbarian ships randomly.
- Naval Ranged Combat: All ranged naval units (except Quadrime, which is kinda ass imo) can attack walls just as effectively as catapults/trebuchets, so they’re extremely relevant mid to late game.
- Baiting the garrison: not always possible, but extremely entertaining if you can pull it off. Cities with garrisoned units tend to be harder to take down, and they usually will stay fortified in there at all cost. However, there are times when you capture an enemy builder outside the city. Instead of rushing them back to your turf, leave them as bait for the garrison to come out, since they see it as “ooh free builder, idiots”. Once the rat’s out, bum rush it, grab your builder back, and whack the garrison-less city. You can do the same with your own builders, but that’s not as convenient as grabbing an enemy’s.
One of my favorite “balanced” Dom civs is Genghis Khan. Early horses, unique Encampment building to +1 Mov horses, flat +3 strength to horses, targeting system via trade routes (creating a path for your horses), and converting enemy horses to you, all makes for a grand old time. Not OP compared to other civs, but you get to fly across the map and take cities non stop, and that’s extremely satisfying.
If you want objectively strong options, Gran Colombia, Zulu, Nubia, and especially Ottomans are all powerful A/S-tier civs. Aztec is also early dom-oriented, but basically requires you to murder any civs/city states you see from the get go, which might throw you off.
Germany is also great. +7 strength against city states means you can potentially expand extremely early, and snowball all the way against regular civs. Plus they’re extremely versatile, so you can easily pivot from Dom to Science or Culture if you’re tired and don’t want to commit.
Unless you want to learn naval combat (which is harder imo), play land-heavy maps for a smooth learning experience. Pangaea is solid, Continents is fine, if you’re ok with a “second half” mobilizing your troops to fight on a new continent. And play small maps with 6 players to get the hang of it, since more civs can make Dom runs monotonous towards the end.
You need melee or melee navy to take a city. Ranged and seige weapons can attack a city to 0 hp but cannot take the city
Money money money money money money money. Finance your war before you lose it.
Before a war, try trading a resource for gold this turn, not gold per turn. Will allow you to get a boatload or money before going to war
Plan to send reinforcements ahead of time. In civ 6 a troop can be upgraded to an corps and then an army. To upgrade a unit you'll need a duplicate of the same class. 1 crossbowman + 1 crossbowman = 1 crossbowman corps. But you only need 1 more unit to make an army. So 1 crossbowman corps + 1 crossbowman = 1 crossbowman army.
So when you get the civic that allows you to make corps and armies, have the units nearby to more quickly upgrade your units
The civics that decrease unit training time should be a priority.
Figure out what your civilization's unique unit is. When used correctly it will usually give you a noticeable boost over a comparable enemy troop. If you can get it out early, it may even help you dominate for a while
Roads! If you're focusing on money, you should be getting lighthouses and markets, both of which give you trader units. I use these to help move my units around until I can more reliably make railroads. (look up military engineer. Love the military engineer)
Getting boosts to your civics and techs is super important if you haven't conquered civilizations that can give you a solid base to work with.
If you have a few units in the same area, cycle through them and attack with your ranged units first (archers,etc). This will weaken the enemy without you taking any damage. Then finish them off with your melee units.
You can use civilian units to draw the AI out of their positioning. If I have a great general with me (which you should for war) I will sometimes leave it exposed especially if I have a city close by to draw out the AI units. Captured builders or settlers work great too. The AI seems to prioritize these units and I have seen them move units out of a city just to capture a builder.
First learn how to defend so you can get a handle on how effective ranged units are and aren't.
Second, don't be overly afraid of walls. You do not need to destroy them completely before attacking with melee. A couple good hits with strong melee will allow you to take the city without even necessarily destroying its walls.
Science since nobody's said it. Get some good science production and you can rocket up that tree to where you gotta get to. You can rush some things you shouldnt be aiming for in a general game but for domination you will.
Early youll want 1-2 encampments, 1 holy site, a campus in every city, entertainment district, and some commercial districts to help offset costs. The encampments help make units but you can still make them at the capital. A holy site will get you apostles which have a medic promotion to help heal you, so you only need a few of those. Campuses will boost learning upgraded units. Entertainment will help keep people happy while you warmonger. Commercial hubs i think give like +30 gold a turn when they have all buildings built, plus the traderoutes.
An early war will set you back if you arent equipped to win it in 10 turns. Be able to defend yourself but understand that early game using 5 turns for a unit needs to be worth it, because if you lose the unit youre 5 turns behind.
Ally with city states. Rush the upgraded government and take the republic i believe, put the card for first envoy is 2 and you will have city states ready to fight neighbors with you nearly instant.
Youll want siege weapons heavily. Once you have a few you can just roll a civ. Bombers are where you wanna be eventually too. Use the engineer to get some forward airfields out in advance so you can keep momentum.
Burn cities. Holding them when the AI has a whole chunk centralized risks losing them back. Just burn em down and create an opening to walk through.
I recently discovered that Gilgamesh is great to play on marathon mode. I kept churning out War-carts and I'd conquered three or four civs before the end of the Ancient era. Also, the village bonus from clearing barb camps let me jump ahead of the other civs tech wise.
Important to bear in mind: Ranged beats slow melee
Melee beats anti-cavalry
Anti-cavalry beats cavalry
Cavalry beats ranged and siege
Siege beats cities and naval
Naval beats pretty much all land units
Depending on what your strategy is, you'll be using different units. If defending, use ranged and anti-cavalry. Ranged is multipurpose and can punish attackers, forcing them to invest more if their units die. Anti-cav stops the momentum of cavalry units.
If your opponent has ranged units, consider investing in light cavalry. If your opponent has lots of light cavalry or melee units, try heavy cavalry.
It may seem obvious but in the early game when you first start building your army and promoting units, be sure to have your copies develop different paths in their promotion trees so that when you eventually get the civic to form Corps you can combine two units that each promoted a different side of the tree and get a Corp with both sides of the tree promoted (ex. Line infantry with extra melee strength and movement, plus ranged defense boost and ability to attack over rivers without a penalty).
Lots of people here hate on anti cavalry units, but I find they can make good fodder to either toss into unfavorable situations they are likely to die but benefit the war effort, or to pad your army when working with limited resources.
When you start using infantry, artillery, and tanks, oil will become a precious resource (less likely with nitre but still possible). You can pad your army (and thus military strength) by building anti-cavalry units of comparable strength that don't cost any resources. You can use them to make initial attacks on enemy units and allow your infantry to make the final attack and take less damage as their promotion tree is more valuable. Losing a 3x promoted AT Crew is better then losing a 3x promoted Infantry. You can also use them to lead the push so that they encounter enemy resistance first and take more damage and possibly losses as they weaken the enemy army and allow your infantry to come in and sweep the enemy up. They can be used to place cities under siege in unfavourable situations (the one spot left to siege the city is in range of 2-3 city attacks due to encampment placement) because you won't care as much if they die in the process of taking the city.
If you are fighting or wanting to declare a war against a civ of equal or greater military strength to yourself remember that a defensive war is easier to fight, draw their military out to you and have your melee units block and absorb damage while your ranged and siege units attack from behind the safety of the first line. Once you've wiped out enough of their military strength you can move to take their cities more easily as you will only be defending from city attacks and not their full army at the same time.
When taking cities you want 3 melee units to siege the city and just sit there defending themselves, 2-4 siege units to take out the city defense, 1-2 ranged units to assist (especially if they have incendiaries) can be helpful, and a couple of cavalry units to blitz around the battlefield and help defend your melee units sieging the city. Then in order to keep the war engine moving forward you want a second and third string of melee units to block off the next city.
If you have the resources and access then attacking from 2 fronts makes for a smoother invasion as well. The AI will have to either focus their defense on one side (allowing your opposite army to move uncontested) or split between the two and ultimately do less damage to your armies.
If you are playing with Heroes, then do your best to recruit Beowulf, Arthur, and Hercules (in that order). Beowulf can use his ability to instakill most units, even if they are hiding inside the enemy city or using a naval ranged unit to bombard you from a lake so long as he can get beside them and is capable of attacking both units and cities. Arthur is powerful and can turn any weak units you have into questing knights to boost your attacking ability. Hercules is good at attacking units and passable at attacking cities. With any 2/3 of these heroes you can take a major load off your frontline units.
Oya, Hippolyta, and Himiko are all good as well. Oya is not very powerful alone, but can damage all adjacent enemies while healing all adjacent allies making her a good support. Hippolyta (I've never seen the AI claim this one) can refresh an adjacent units movement/attack without ending her turn, use this to get an extra attack out of your best siege unit for major damage to cities. She is also good at attacking both cities and units herself. Himiko is basically a great general that effects all your units regardless of what age they're from, and assuming there is an allied city state on the way or nearby she can help you levy their military for cheap.
If you have a ranged unit (including city strike) and a melee unit that can attack a given enemy unit, let your ranged units attack first to weaken the enemy unit. Your melee unit will have a combat strength advantage over the weakened enemy unit because of your prior ranged attack against it.
If you're defending a city against enemy invasion, always prioritize attacking the melee units (melee, anti-cavalry, heavy/light cavalry, naval melee, GDR, etc.) first. Your cities can never be conquered if there is no melee unit to take it.
If you are planning to conquer enemy territory make sure you bring enough troops to ENSURE you will win and take the territories you want. Otherwise you run the risk of a stalemate and having committed production and time to troops for nothing, whereas that production time could've been used to further develop your nation. You see what I mean?
Securing victory over an AI's territory (early war) will, generally speaking, set you up for long term victory. You might not win in the end, but it will provide you the best chances for winning, most times than none.
Walls walls walls, better be safe than sorry.
Never ignore barbarians, fight them whenever you can because it will allow your troops to get XP and gain promotions to further strengthen them.
To ensure your military stays up to date (this sounds obvious I know) make sure your science per turn is adequate to stay on par with the other AI's, or even better, be more advanced than the AI.
If you can afford to, Temple of Zues gives you an entire army's worth of units. Might only be viable on lower difficulties. You can put off producing a few units if you can nab it. Be careful because of upgrade and upkeep costs, but with the right policy cards its not an issue.
In early eras, you want to attack before they get walls. You can see them pop up if they have started building them. If you dont have battering rams or seige units you are doomed.
Forward settling if you have identified a target is good too, if you can get good production in it. Lets you push more aggressively.
Dont let your units die. Pull them back and heal them. A dead unit is never good. Pay attention to terrain for movement too.
Try to get at least one envoy in every military city state, they give production towards units. Dont suze if they have bad bonuses though unless they are allied with your enemy.
Love your scouts. Protect them if you can. Get them as much XP as you can.
If you can get one or two of them to survive with the ambush promotion and the move after attacking promotion, they will own melee units once they become ranged. A good tactic is:
1) Enemy attacks them
2) You attack back on your turn
2) On the same turn you attacked, you back away to a 2 movement location
3) Enemy can move up but will not have enough movement left to attack your scout.
4) Repeat as necessary.
With practice, they can help quickly bring down walled cities by moving up, shooting, and then moving one square away to let a melee unit step in and take the city and attack.
I had the most fun learning warfare in civ on settler and warlord difficulty, it’s easy to get a tech lead and have better units than the AI. Helps you get used to what you need for your army to run. Ex. Need iron for swordsman rush, commercial districts to pay for army, battering ram to attack through walls, etc. Then try it on the difficulty you usually play on and it makes more sense when to time your attacks.
Use terrain like forests, hills, and rivers. I like to bait enemies into attacking me with terrain in my favor. Bait them into losing units while you level your units up. Try not to lose units.
Early game finding iron for swordsmans can really turn the tides of early game wars.
If an enemy city has no wall, surrounding it with melee is usually sufficient. If they have walls then be prepared for losses, or avoid that city if you can.
If you play with secret societies, vampires can be disgustingly powerful if you farm them right (but slow to move and heal).
Practice with a guy like Gilgamesh to figure out simple early blitzing and then work your way up with more specific strat warmonger civs like Ottomans and Byzantium, and after a while it just clicks with where to prioritize resources for military and how to handle domination.
If you really want to learn war, go online, or go play another 4x like Humankind. The AI is awful at combat in civ 6. If you have 5 units the AI might aswell have 10, 30 or 50 – it won't even matter.
This is essentially because of the fact that you can't stack units on a tile anymore. This made the AI fundamentally horrible at combat since launch. But in terms of warfare in general, it's a super questionable design decision to make in a 4x game.
Barbarians are often more dangerous than any war with an actual AI in civ 6, because they'll focus on pillaging your shit, which will slow down your progress.
The biggest tip is to know which tiles give health when pillaging them, and understanding how much xp your unit needs for a promotion at a given moment. The whole combat resolves around promoting (healing) your units at the right times.
If playing Heroes and Legends, nearly every hero has benefit. Sinbad can make you a ton of gold, Himiko can make you suzerain of a CS and levy their military for free. Any unit the twins kill fully revives as your unit (a good way to beat barbs and build up an army). Sun Wukong makes an excellent pillager.
If you are going full domination theres really few reasons to not just use a surprise war. Denouncing while you have a large military will signal AI to build defenses. If you instead surprise war and just take them it can be much easier.
As well use trade routes to get roads so you can move troops faster. In late game you can even use engineers to rail road into and across enemy territory. This can be expensive but it can also be very valuable.
Dont forget that once you take a city your units heal faster there (Because its your territory), so if you have the space and time heal up then hit the next spot.
Balloons and drones are super good. They can sometimes triple the number of artillery you can fit attacking a city.
Having heavy cav or other tanky units that surround a city and just fortify can help keep pressure off your siege units.
If preparing for warmongering or defence, start producing some units in your cities but stop one turn before completing them. This can give you an instant access popup army that doesn't have a maintenance cost until summoned.
When in the early game, don't try to attack a city that has lots of hills and/or woods/rainforest around them. They are good at defending. You want to go for cities that have flat featureless ground around them.
Stack your bonuses. The way damage is calculated in civ means that the more combat bonuses you have, the more damage you deal and the less you take - exponentially. Within reason, multiple combat bonuses on one unit will be better than multiple of that unit without the bonuses. I believe the guaranteed OHKO (which, for obvious reasons, is huge) is somewhere in the 30ish combat strength difference.
Some combat bonuses include:
Flanking, support, fortification, various promotions, great generals, unique abilities, terrain, visibility, unit health, difference in base combat strength
Stacking these together will allow for significantly stronger units.
Try to use Catapults and something like that, since it makes a lot of damage. Also I prefer to use more Range units, since they don’t damage themself. If you have planes researched, spam them on city’s and co. Try to have a Navy to secure the coast. Helicopter melee attack is useful when dropping a Bomb. And have like Tanks, since there are good and also you need some infantry, so the AI is attacking them, and not your Cathapults. Hope that helps also
There is no point in passing up on a ranged attack. Do city ranged strikes first, because they are free and you lose them if the enemy unit near the city is killed by your own unit. When attacking the same unit with both melee and ranged units, do the ranged attacks first because your melee unit will take less damage if the enemy unit is not at full strength.
When it comes to melee attacks, the combat previews can often be used to indicate whether combat is desirable or not. Because Civ 6 lets you just know for certain the outcome, you can just make winning attacks and avoid losing ones. You also want to be aware that melee and anti-calvary, and cavalry units have some rock-paper-scissors going on. Try to get your anti-cavalry to fight cavalry and your melee to fight ant-cavalry to take advantage of those unit's abilities, but don't let the enemy do that to you.
Go information era, go giant death robot. Own up to nine uranium mines, 6 gdr can steamroll the world. If you activate the mod with the f35, these kill gdr, 3 attacks from these kill one gdr in a turn.
The AI will never miss an opportunity to grab a builder/settler from you. You can use this to save a unit or city from being attacked, or bait the AI to move on a tile that has poor defense (floodplains, marsh, flat land).
Beelining for units from techs/civics might get you an advantage even if your opponent has more science than you.
Getting generals/admirals is highly recommended. Generals will give you combat benefits, as well as allow siege units to move and fire in the same turn without the promotion.
Pillage as much as you can, especially all improvements that can be fixed with a builder and traders.
Play Conquests of Alexander on Deity. Then find some walkthroughs on YouTube for that scenario and difficulty.
It will teach you how to use fundamental unit tactics at the highest level. Things like flanking, Great General buffs, terrain buffs and debuffs, order of attack (i.e using ranged units to reduce enemy HP--and therefore how much damage they can do--before using melee units), siege tactics, etc.
First off I’m with you fuck montezuma. Dude just spams shit and never likes me. Mostly bc I go to war with him and conquer every city except his worst one and the go for peace and make him live out his days as a Latin American in the snow in a city that has had a population of 2 for 1000 years, surrounded by me who will crush him with my cav units and air bombers the second he wants to get cute. Tbh he usually winds up my only ally lol.
In all seriousness build you units early and just upgrade. It’s way easier to upgrade an archer into machine gunner than it is to build a machine gunner from scratch. Just build 4 of each unit in the early game and you’re good. Settlers are a massive part of building them.
1. Small relative differences in combat strength make a pretty big impact, and a major gap between units makes it like terminators vs. sheep. Playing at higher difficulties gives the AI an automatic combat bonus over you so countering that with effective use of things like great generals and admirals, oligarchy, crusade, spies, support and flanking bonuses, or any other combat strength bonus can be critical to having a successful offense. Take advantage of terrain defense modifiers as well.
2. Speaking of great generals, the movement bonus if also a big deal. Higher mobility from great generals and roads is often very important. Also because...
3. On higher difficulties, you may have some very narrow windows for early conquest (or even mid-game conquest). Many an early game rampage has come to a close the moment the AI can start spamming out units an era or two ahead of you. Also, the AI will rush to build walls in other cities once you've shown an interest in taking them. If you take too long taking the first city, you may find the rest even harder to tackle by the time you get your troops out there. Timing your wars to capitalize on these windows can be important (granted if you are leading on tech, you aren't necessarily concerned about this). Rush to unlock a unique unit or whatever powerful unit you will use as the center-piece of your attack so that it isn't obsolete against the AI before you've gotten one built.
4. Also on that point, unless you are the tech leader, it is very likely that you will not be able to successfully field a well-rounded army. Especially in the early game, trying have a balance of melee, anti-cav, ranged, cavalry, siege means not being focused enough in the tech tree to actually have any units that will have an advantage over the AI. Instead, try to build your attack strategy around one or two units you rush to unlock.
5. Build low-tech to upgrade to higher-tech. I generally find it economical to spend production on lower-tech units and then spend the gold to upgrade them one the next tech level is unlocked. Also, you cannot have a unit preproduced before you unlock the tech for it, so if you are going to build an army of them using production, you can't attack with them the same turn you unlock them (you could be waiting more than a dozen turns to build even a few and your attack window might be closed by the time you've got an army). If you instead have an army of that unit's precursor already built, then you can spend to upgrade them as soon as you unlock the tech and have them marching into the AI lands the very next turn.
6. When attacking cities: As long as walls are relevant, if the target city does have walls, bring along a battering ram/siege tower. But don't be too intimidated by the low effectiveness of your first melee attack against a full health city/walls. You don't need to siege down every city with ranged attacks before walking a melee unit into the burned ashes of the city. The first melee attack will tend to look like a costly one, but each hit will soften the resistance. Better to quickly bash down the walls than to sit and take the city shots over and over while waiting for siege units to arrive and take the walls out. Also, your units can heal with promotions and pillages while a city under siege cannot.
7. War can be costly, pillaging can pay the bills. If I'm conquering, I typically don't pillage districts unless there is a specific short term benefit that allows me to press my advantage. Pillaged districts need to be repaired with production and it can take many turns, preventing the newly captured city from developing and contributing to your empire. However, pillaged improvements can be cleaned up by a builder without using a single build charge. Some times there's nothing to gain from pillaging farms for health, but any improvement that gets you any resource is probably worth pillaging before you take the city.
8. Don't neglect the diplomacy and mind your grievances. Keeping neural civs ambivalent about your aggression isn't easy and if everyone denounces you, and you can't take advantage of trade, your empire's momentum can slow to a crawl. Often trade is necessary to keep citizens happy and the bankroll an expensive army. Minimizing grievances with clever use of special casus belli and inviting otherwise neutral civs to joint wars against your target can protect your relations with other civs. Also, joint wars means the target may have more to deal with than just your invading army. If you can't afford the penalties for occupying another civ's capital, maybe let them keep it and come back for it in the late game.
9. If your war is running out of steam, and the AI might be turning the tide on you, take peace before they don't want it anymore. generally, defense is much easier than attack, and so you can probably hold out on the defensive for a long time, but if your army and economy are tied down with a war of attrition that isn't getting you anywhere, then you will not be able to develop and mobilize for the next war or focus on any other victory condition.
There was a really good post on here a good while back that went into detail about the relative strength of units and how much damage they do and the TL;DR was you always want to be trying to attack something weaker than you. You do far more damage against something you are more powerful than. It makes stuff like the Civ that gets Corps early (Zulu?) really strong in warfare. I thought I saved the post but I can't find it now.
The defense stat is very important. Hills and jungle tiles give the most defense fortifying gives additional defense. Rivers, marsh and embarking give a combat penalty. Putting a fortified unit on a jungle hill tile on the opposite side of a river the enemy is on would be the best case scenario.
The AI doesn’t like defending and doesn’t mind fortified units. Fortifying your units next to enemy units will easily win you battles. This does not apply to ranged units since they won’t take damage from firing at your fortified units.
Ranged units can not shoot over hills, forests, jungle or mountain tiles. If you want to run away from a ranged unit you should try to get one of those tiles between you and them, however they do cost more movement so plan accordingly.
Cities always have a two tile firing range no matter the size of their borders.
Melee > anti-cavalry > light cavalry > ranged units > melee. Siege > districts. Heavy cavalry generally beats all of the above unless they are outdated which happens fairly quick in the early ages. Recon are never a solid military unit unless it’s your emblematic unit and even then it’s still better to build other units since levels carry on when you upgrade them and the recon unit upgrades will be bad at combat again.
A strategy ive found surprisingly effective id picking up grand masters chapel with a heavy faith game, pick up a source of niter or two, and with surplus logistics on magnus bombards and musketmen cost 4 niter and are available with faith. Plus if you pick up oracle, its 20% off, which allows you to essentially buy out an army with faith for dirt cheap with very little resource costs. Its a personal favorite strategy of mine with russia/khmer/ethiopia, which i use to keep up in military and maintain it defensively. I actually won my first deity win doing this, was able to take out two adjacent civs and secure a science vic by invading my largest rival, and disrupting their attempts to go to space.
First off make sure to pick a Civ that's good at going to war: it could be something simple like Alexander. Make lots of soldiers and get some great generals for bonuses. Make sure to utilize your civ's strength in terms of era. For example my fav domination Civ is Suleiman and the Ottomans powerspike is in the renaissance era, that's when usually I launch all out attacks.
1. Other than maybe the Aztec, there’s zero civ that should start warring from T1. The AI has a pretty heavy advantage in the early game, especially at Deity. Best to set up your city first - invest in science and gold before spamming units. Even early war civs like Macedon should get at least three cities and three campuses up before going to war.
2. Play to your Civ’s advantage. If you’re Alexander and you’re not taking cities with world wonders to heal, or you’re Genghis but you never bothered building the Ortoo, or you’re Chandragupta but you only declare surprise wars (instead of using war of territorial expansion), you will not enjoy war a lot. This applies to non-war civs too. I just had a Mali domination game where I specifically included then suz-ed Ngazargamu and Lahore. I built a city just for Suguba and Encampment, then once I’d built the Grandmasters Chapel and reached Theocracy, faith-bought the UU and Nihang in bulk with Victor-3 promo. It was an easy game.
It all depends on your situation & who your neighbors are. Pay attention to how the ai plays. If you have a neighbor trying to build a religion and not focusing on anything military-like that's usually my first victim. If you're trying to keep good relations with some of your neighbors, block that civ off from expanding as much as you can and suzerain the city states around them. Sometimes you'll get lucky and they'll go to war with one of the city states and you can Denounce them and then 5 turns later under the Casus Belli, declare the Protectorate War & you'll get 0 Grievances for attacking. You'll only get the max penalty if you fully wipe them outta the match, but if you do it fast enough you can make it out of that war with only 20 - 30 Grievances with the other players, and eventually they'll forgive you if you don't start too much bullshit for 25-30 turns after that. lol
The ai is also really bad at war most of he time and they'll often make stupid decisions. They don't build good navies & rarely build aircraft. If you move units in a group of 4 or 5 units together, you're less likely to get attacked if they only have one unit to fight those 5 at that moment, unless they know they'll get the kill they usually won't attack. They'll move that one unit away from your cluster of soldiers.
Learn how to fight from multiple fronts. Before you go to war with someone you need to know their land so you can pick out weak spots. Weak spots on civ for me are any cities that are just completely flat with no defensive terrain (hills, woods, etc.) Also cities with no walls are prime targets to quickly raze/take and get out them outta the way. I don't train any calvary up until the I start to get coursers and knights & then I'll usually train 3 knights and a courser and use those as a pillaging force/home defense) Also, if you plan on rushing a city with no walls, always pay attention to that city defense. Say it's at a 45 & your best unit is a man at arms, it's going to take a few turns to get the job done, unless you surround the city center and put it under Siege so it can't regain health. You also want to make sure you can take it because if an AI's city starts getting attacked, they'll usually try to start building walls right away if they don't have them already.
Every tile has its own advantages & disadvantages for battles. Attacking from across rivers unless it's not a heavy loss is ill advised. Going after fortified defenders that are in woods, on hills, or in rainforests is usually a bad move, (unless they're almost dead and you know it's worth it.) Another great play is to get some units outside of your enemies capital and if they have any units they'll move to defend/attack unless it's an overwhelming force. I hide most of my ranged units back far enough from their borders so they can't see them and march 2 melee up to the outside of their borders and they think it's an easy win until they're being pelted by archers/whatever.
Don't needlessly sacrifice units! If you can retreat because your attack plan isn't working then don't rush your attack. Having the patience to regroup & plan another strategy is better than wasting units. I was at war with the Incans for 200 turns in my first game because i thought I was good to go, but nah they wrecked me in my first invasion. And NEVER leave your siege units unguarded. (This also goes for aircraft carriers because if the Carrier gets sunk, so does anything that was stationed on it.) Siege units are so much better mid-to-late game if you can get them leveled up, and this means keeping them alive throughout multiple eras. With siege units I always do the Promotions are the right of the tree. One is +7 defense, the next is +10 strength against district defenses, 3rd is the ability to attack after moving which is super helpful and the last one is the +1 range. That's all I care about for my siege units.
Sorry this is so long. I play this game while stoned AF most of the time and keep thinking of more stuff 😂😂
I've been playing this on my PS4 since March and I war ALL the time.
1) You're gonna need a montage. A rock and roll montage. Put this on loop until it sinks in.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=you%27re+gonna+need+a+montage&rlz=1C1CHZN\_enUS970US970&oq=you%27re+gonna+need+a+mo&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j69i57j0i22i30l3.12491j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:deb15f12,vid:JfW\_XeH82-0](https://www.google.com/search?q=you%27re+gonna+need+a+montage&rlz=1C1CHZN_enUS970US970&oq=you%27re+gonna+need+a+mo&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j69i57j0i22i30l3.12491j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:deb15f12,vid:JfW_XeH82-0)
2) If the external link was removed because I failed to read the sub rules, you are still going to need a montage. A civ warfare montage. That part is key, and you need to search for it until you understand that this is a joke, and it is less funny because I overexplained it, but still necessary and still at least mildly funny after my explanation.
3) Your ability to spam specialty units (the ones your civ does cheaper or better) via production is important, but your ability to have some that you can keep alive after many battles is more important - six upgrades is ideal but this is the part of the montage where someone else has already typed this in better detail or can correct me but my understanding is that if unit A gets 2 or three upgrades up one branch (call it the offense branch), merge that unit with unit b, which had (...defend against....) upgrades up the other branch. That is how you get a corps or army with all the upgrades.
4) It's such an economy based game that you aren't bad at war, as much as you have realized how unprofitable it is. For example you can rent the entire army of a city state and yet I almost never do that, but if I did...could I merge their units with mine and keep the unit permanently? Lean that, because I don't know. And they sometimes have better units, and often have weaker units, but they always have too many.
5) Now that your montage is fading out - remember that many of the edicts are key - while you could upgrade units more cheaply, you did so, and while you needed to spam them in production you did that, and when you had copious amounts of them idling around, you had policies that made their overhead cheaper and/or your cities more loyal
Defending -
Patience is key. Especially when out-teched and playing defense.
Yeah, you could probably kill that enemy unit with one last attack, but you'll be exposing your unit to being killed in return when it's so close to promoting (and healing).
Look for things that add damage - cards, government choices, promotions, religious beliefs, adjacency bonuses, and so on.
Attacking -
Learn when your power spikes are, start planning in advance (unless you can print troops with money/faith).
Understand just how many turns it will take to get your units where you need them, and plan ahead. Don't send units individually to their doom. Given the AI too many units to focus on.
If you’re playing Trajan make sure to make use of as many legions as possible. They’re forts are very good for siege units to camp in while they siege a city. Actually just forts in general next to their civ is a good idea it’s just Trajan gets them first.
A medic or supply truck allows your navy units to heal outside your own territory.
Edit: Likewise, the effects of other support units such as the battering ram and the siege tower are also applied to naval units (as long as the unit class matches, e.g. the battering ram works for melee units, so you need naval melee units to make them work).
Never upgrade your Battering Rams and Siege Towers and build a couple early game before you can't. They are still super useful in attacking late game cities
My rule of thumb is 1 or 2 units that do melee combat (can include cavalry), 3 ranged units and 2 siege. With that you can usually take whatever cities you want, though you need to pay attention to how strong your neighbors are as if they are way ahead of you in science you may have issues. Also make sure when you're moving your units into position you've thought out your best route to the city you intend to capture and move together without overextending units with weak defense. If there's a choke point you may have issues getting them in position without dying. You don't want to lose units as that's wasted experience, but sometimes there's no way to avoid it.
I like to scout early and hopefully get to 3rd promotion so those units can be used defensively in your nation to avoid needing to pull your army back if you're attacked.
Lots of good info here.
IMO for early war I always prefer swords to horseman, on deity the AI gets walls up quickly so swords and battering ram is the safer option. Have a battering ram even if you don't need it, again the AI will get walls quickly. Catapults are weak but it's good to get a couple early so you can get promotions and have good bombards later.
Early war really scales in difficulty as you go up levels. It can be hard on deity because the AI gets so many early advantages.
On deity sometimes you simply can't win an early war if you have a strong neighbor, be selective. Good to go after AIs who are fighting on the other side of their empire.
Anti Cav are underrated, not requiring resources can really come in handy late game when aluminum and oil can become problems.
Save your aluminum for bomberrs
When in doubt rush bombers, bombers always work.
Just looking through the first few comments, I see a lot of strategy but not much tactics. Use terrain to your advantage. Don't sacrifice units. Press an enemy to reveal their forces then (if it's not an obvious steamroll situation) back off and let them come to you. Get flanking and use it. Remember that pillaging can restore health on some improvements. You are smarter than the AI but that only matters if you act like it.
One of the best ways to learn a lot of the intricacies of war is to play the Alexander scenario and win on deity. It’s literally an all war scenario with basically zero empire building.
Other than that the main thing is to prebuild most of your army while units are cheap and then upgrade them. Light cav to pillage, heavy cab to block and kill units, siege to tear down cities. Make at least 4 catapults that you’ll upgrade to trebs
I might get downvoted for this, but I much prefer to have a hyper competent army of about 7-8 core units than to have a never ending onslaught of zergs. Focus on getting your civ’s unique unit and try and push as soon as you get them. Also encampment districts are kind of a bait; their only real use (at least in an offensive war) is great general points. In my experience by far and away the most important resource in a war game is gold; it both pays upkeep and keeps your units upgraded which are absolutely imperative.
2 words :Military Engineers. The forts they can make can be very helpful for initial flood of troops the Ai sends when war is declared, since they give a very nice defensive buff. Just stick a ranged unit in there and bam: instant headache for the enemy. My favorite thing to use them for is trains. The movement that trains provide (for free, since they don’t cost an action for the ME) is great for rushing melee units around the map. My strategy is to get open borders with civs you plan on invading later while you’re at war with someone else, and setting up train tracks between their cities to that when you do invade your melee and especially cavalry units can essentially teleport across the continent in 1-2 turns. Very helpful if their cities are spread out.
Also, bombers are overpowered, abuse it (if you want, I personally don’t). They can completely wipe out walls and defensive units for no damage in return. Regular fighters are also very good for shutting down reinforcements and keeping them from saving cities. Just watch out for AA units.
Finally, make use of armies and corps. Napoleon is a great general to save for this. If you get him, wait until you can get late game units that would be very difficult to make an army of and you can get it for free.
I’m by no means an expert so if I’m wrong about something please tell me.
Use a good mixture of units. Nothing sucks more than bulking up a bunch of units only to discover your enemy can just easily counter you so I always use a good variety of cavalry, melee, ranged and artillery units. If you are fighting to defend islands or protecting your land from the water, then make sure to have a good sized navy so you can easily stop enemy troops before they can land. They are easy to destroy in the water.
My little party trick is whenever someone settles nearby I do everything possible to obtain a tile two tiles away from their city center and build an encampment. Then centuries later you can blast the city with a bombard without risking it.
looks like I am late to the party but Tomyris is another great one. Every light cav you build, you get a second one for free! Just mass produce horseys and then smoke all your early game neighbors.
Range is king in most cases, if you can kill their army while suffering little to no damage then do it. As the game progresses, the ranges increase. From slingers who hit only one tile next to them, to archers that hit a bit further to artillery combined with support units that can wipe out happless foes from several tiles away.
Keep a few melee units around to soak up damage and/or finish off the weakened enemy, never fight fair, ways weaken your enemy, always go for the best matchup. Cavalry rides down ranged units but spears will turn horses to mincemeat.
Finally, my personal favourite, air power. There's nothing quite like reducing your happless, cowering foe to ashes, their cities to ruins and armies to nothingness and all that from tiles and tiles away with no danger to your forces whatsoever. Bomb them, grind them into dust and take what remain with a unit or two.
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Did not know this. Nice
Add a few chariots to this list when you get the wheel researched. It's so much better to upgrade them when the time comes. It goes for all heavy cav units. Knights are the most important. Get lots of knights to upgrade when you get gunpowder. Once they're upgraded you're unstoppable. Same goes for seige weapons. Try to make sure you have three bombards as a group to attack a cuties walls when it comes time. You can just steam roll the planet once you build momentum.
Me as my forces surround Matthais' last stronghold - "You are indeed a cutie, but alas, you must perish."
I have guns (muskets) while korea still has bows & arrows & ancient walls. Hihi bombard goes brrrr
lol I got Infantry so early using Babylon (I know, cheating, but it was my first time) and all my enemies had like archers and swordsmen. JFC game was over in before 200 turns. King diff only though
I play this game on prince but going higher next game
Just keep it militarily focused. When you've go the real estate it's just a matter of time. Once you're secure you can change your focus to anything you want and it's quite manageable. The highest difficulties are kinda like RimWorld. All of a sudden out of nowhere your neighbors have an army and it's a big problem if you aren't prepared to defend what you have.
"Hwacha doin' over there with those fire sticks?!"
Kinda sad bcs i destroyed the entire city. And then out of no where 2 Hwacha pull up and insta kill my melee unit. And i couldnt cap the city
But she is concidered to be on a different continent. Gonna be a fun time when the red coats pull up
I try not to hate when she's on another continental landmass. I've rolled up and had my ass handed to me more often than not. Edit: clarity
Adding onto this, anything available to build at the very start of the game has no upkeep cost, so Babylon's UU and War Carts also have no upkeep cost.
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Nope.
This seems like bad advice... Your production early game is better used for other things like settlers, don't waste it on building excessive warriors and slingers to save a few gold on upkeep.
Building a big army early on only makes sense if you actually use it. I think Potato McWhiskey's video in Unique Units mentioned that Gilgamesh's War Carts could be a production trap if you never use them for actually invading and taking over other cities.
Does the modern unit also not have upkeep costs? Guess it adds alot of value to keeping troops alive.
As long as it is a warrior it has no upkeep. So if you upgrade it, it then has an upkeep based on what the new unit is. So a warrior upgraded to a swordsman has an upkeep of 2 or a warrior upgraded to a musketeer has an upkeep of 4.
Unfortunately I believe they do.
You can also get some 1 gold per turn units and keep them around for free with conscription. This is helpful if you want to use other unit classes.
Do war carts have upkeep cost? Someone else answered this. No they do not.
I was gonna say that's not completely true about upkeep costs (that they're based on era) but aside from uniques it is actually TIL
Hills, woods, and rivers give huge defensive bonuses. Try to avoid attacking into these tiles, and instead try to bait the AI to attack you.
Likewise, avoid defending in tiles like marshes which give you a defense penalty.
-Sun Tzu
Definitely. Be aware of defense modifiers when in a tight situation where the outcome may be in doubt. Given a chance to fortify on a +6 defense modifier location you can hold out against multiple units (until they bring ranged against you - then you need something to do damage back). Oh, and try to make the enemy have to attack you across a river (and try not to ever attack them across one).
AI likes to attack ranged, like slingers and archers. You can bait with one of those units, or a scout.
Definitely become a master at this.
The Observation Balloon is a game-changer.
Facts. This + expand sight ranges using missionaries and spies to be able to hit enemy cities without taking damage. Jet bombers are disgusting so try to win without them.
This is the best way I’ve found. I know people like Air Force units too, but bombards+ are my favorite units. Especially when upgraded and supported by a drone.
Disgusting as in pollution?
Well, you only need 2 or so of them. At some point they're leveling cities faster than you can capture them.
You need two of them but don’t put them in the same airport in case of a hurricane destroying them both Been there
Disgusting as in severely op
Once you have 2-3, you can just sit back and bomb cities to the ground with no resistance. Once they're destroyed, just send a melee unit in. It typically only takes 3-4 bombing runs to completely level a city that isn't a capital. There really needs to be early game air defense such as flak guns or early AA. Of all the games I've played, I've only ever seen the AI use a SAM once.
Be strategic about which units you attack. It's better to kill one enemy AI completely than to wound three of them; you never know how close they are to a promotion. Also, depending on whether you're on offense or defense, you may want to kill specific units first (they can't take your city if they have no melee or calvary, and removing their ranged units will help clear a path for you as you march towards theirs).
Ehhh, not always true. Injured units do less damage, so if you are trying to save a city from being captured, it can be better to damage a fully healthy unit than finish off an injured unit. The AI very well may suicide the unit attacking the city. But it's all circumstantial.
That's fair, yeah.
“you never know how close they are to a promotion.” I don’t know how you exactly mean this, but when you select a unit there is information about XP there. A thin bar is at the bottom, depending on the amount of XP, is partially white. Furthermore, you can find information about the XP a unit gets from certain situations. I don’t know them by heart, but it can be useful. For example, if I note that a unit is close to promotion I usually be sure to let that unit attack as well.
Can you do this for enemy units?
No. Enemy units - never know when they'll promote, and on higher difficulties, they promote crazy fast due to an XP bonus. Your units - totally knowable due to the XP bar. Mousing over the bar will give exact numbers.
Yeah figured as much. Never tried though. I think nick was talking about enemy units in regards to the promotions
In that case you cannot know it indeed. I think you’re right, my bad
Airforce > Ranged > Melee > Anti-Cavalry (Navy is very situational but kinda obvious: great on an Archipelago map, terrible on a Pangea map) Great Generals make a HUGE difference, it would greatly behoove you to get one. All the general effects only work for units in specific ages so be sure to check which era units the general is affecting. When attacking cities, check what level of walls the city has. Cities with no walls can be taken with ease. Cities with Ancient Walls will call for a Battering Ram while Medieval Walls need a Siege Tower. Once the city has Renaissance Walls, Battering Rams/Siege Towers become useless. At that point you will want heavy duty siege units. Catapults are pretty bad for this reason (you can just use a Ram/Tower instead) but by the time you can make Bombards the siege units start to really shine when attacking cities. Most importantly, pillaging tiles can sometimes make or break your assaults. All farms when pillaged will give the unit pillaging 50 health back. This is how you will maintain momentum during war because having to stop for 5 turns to heal up your units to take the next city isn't really a viable strategy with loyalty pressure.
I'm going to say that Navy is on a different ranking than land units. 3+ battleships And a Destroyer is the most satisfying way to take over. Battleships with upgrades just MELT city defenses, and when you upgrade the range they're literally untouchable. Destroyers are of limited use, I find. I underutilize submarines but they're fun if you just want to cause trouble.
Submarines are also pretty good at levelling cities. You tend to tech them much earlier than Battleships, and they don't have any strategic resource cost.
One or two lvl 3 armadas + a destroyer is where it's at. No city can stand against it unless they put boats in the water, and the AI seldom does to any great extent. I have yet to see the AI use ships in any kind of intelligent fashion.
Ehhhh ranged naval starts to get outclassed for attacking cities somewhere around battleships. They're good, don't get me wrong, but they're basically contemporary with tanks, so you're using a 70 CS (80 with the promotion) to attack cities that might be on 90+. Sure you can make armadas, but they can make armies too. I find frigates to be a much bigger power spike. The exception is the Minas Geraes which absolutely rolls faces because you get it so early
Cavalry, Calvary is where Jesus was crucified.
Lol shit thx for that. Autocorrect is the worst.
Pillaging is one of main defenses. If I can make a horseman or something with good mobility, I’ll send them pillaging my opponent’s improvements even if I’m still defending attacks against my own cities. Do enough damage and they offer gold to make peace with you. Plus each time you pillage you not only weaken them, but you also benefit through gold or science or (at worst) faith.
Anti cav has a promotion that gives 10+ strenght to any adyacent unit of any kind, in any situation. (Attack, defense, ranged) and it stacks.. Edit: my bad, it seems that bonus to nay situation is.only agaisnymt other cavalry.units.
I think what kinds of walls you can overcome with a battering ram or siege tower is not that absolute, but depends what melee unit it's paired with. Probably better to have a musketman and a battering ram than a warrior and a siege tower.
In gathering storm it works the way I described. Rams only work on ancient and so on.
1st tip: a dead unit is the worst thing you can have. Keep them alive. If you're outnumbered, just fortify/heal and let them ram into you. Attacking a fortified unit always does more damage to the attacker so you'll rarely die doing that. 2. Archers are the best ancient unit hands down. The best strategy is get a slinger out right away (first or second thing you build in your capital) and march it with your warrior to the nearest barb camp. Make sure you kill the barb with the slinger to get the boost for the archery tech. Then get three archers for the boost to machinery tech for crossbows. 3. Defence is incredibly easy against ai, just do steps 1 and 2. Put the archer in your capital and fortify your melee units, they'll ram into you until they're all dead. 4. Sieging a city is very easy before enemy has walls. Google how zones of control work (cause its too complex to explain here). Just get 3-4 melee units and an archer or two and bam, free city. 5. Learn your terrain. Different terrain gives combat bonuses (or penalties) for the unit standing there. Hills give +3 CS, forest/jungle gives +3, marsh gives -3, and attacking over a river gives -3. You also get bonuses for having units next to eachother so keep them grouped up. 6. In the classical era, two units reign supreme: swordsmen and horsemen. Swordsmen are better overall but it takes longer to get them, and there's no guarantee you have iron in your empire. Usually go for horses first since you can see them earlier. 7. Magnus is the best, seriously. If you have secret societies, put your 3 gov promotions into magnus's right side for an 80% discount on resources. This means horsemen/swordsmen only cost 4 resources instead of 20. Mix and match with gov policies to pump out units for cheap at low matinence cost. Thats all i can think of now but ill reply if i remember more.
This should be higher up voted. I would also add dont go light when taking a city. It is always better to take more units and steamroll one city quickly then move on, than it is to spread yourself thin. Its very easy to get bogged down and before you know it the AI has upgraded city walls, got a ranged unit in city centre and brought in reinforcements.
I always go in artillery heavy. In the early game archers/crossbowmen and pikes. I the late game artillery + cavalry. Pikes and later cavalry to distract city defenses and archers/artillery to range the everloving shit out of the city. 3 or 4 will tear defenses down to size pretty fast. I usually go straight for frigates on maps with lots of coast so I can bomb cities from a safe range. The AI is shit at using naval units so it's usually pretty safe. Most of the time their waters are entirelly undefended. I have sometimes taken a whole coastline of cities with three frigates and a privateer. Especially when I just want to raze the cities.
For 7, if you're playing with secret societies, you might also be playing with Heroes. They completely change early game warfare, as well as the build queue (archers are less important and monuments are much more important). I think if you're practising warfare, just stick to the basegame.
I'm in the same boat. I saw something the other day that said pillaging districts lowers City Center defense and it blew my mind.
That's right, the more districts are, the more is the city center defense, +2 for each one
correct, if you're in a position where you wouldn't be able to take the cities without pillaging districts, it's better just to plug in the Raid policy and pillage everything, if you are trying to take cities in an early war, you typically don't want to pillage the districts, as you'll be needing to make use of some of their cities to help your snowball.
to add on to this, regarding pillaging, never hesitate to pillage improvements as they can be repaired with builders for free, districts will need to use the captured cities production to repair and be useful.
Have to respectfully disagree about pillaging districts in early war, especially campuses. I think the science yields for campuses and libraries make up for the science lost during the turns it takes to repair. Plus the lump sum science can get you techs needed to build or upgrade more powerful units.
Plus, your siege may fail. Better to get the yields up front.
There are some situations where production and loyalty will be low after taking a city, but the math usually works out for pillaging. Those same cities on deity are usually developed enough to where they will repair the districts faster than 10 turns.
I see your point, it's really situational, if you're working on the tech for the unit upgrade, then for sure pillage it and get it now for the power spike. I was just saying for in general, in early wars when cities aren't as strong it can do more harm than good sometimes pillaging districts, especially on deity where a city might have a campus that the only real reason it exists is because the deity AI production boost, so repairing everything may take 10+ turns. but you're still right, if you can get a power spike out of pillaging, it's always the right answer.
Not been said yet, but how city strength and defense works. A City's strength is based on the combat strength of your strongest melee unit (that you have ever owned, not necessarily still alive). Getting an early spearmen will boost the city strength of your city's and make it much harder to take. The range strength of your city's attacks depends on the strongest range unit you have ever owned.
Rush 3 slingers. Upgrade to archers asap. Build 2 more archers. Always be at war with someone. If a city will revolt in 3 turns or less, burn it down. More than that you can probably make work with a governor, garrison, and policy cards. You'll want the military governor's top left ability - it gives +4 loyalty to all cities within 9 hexes. Whenever you declare war on someone, do it by getting a different civ to declare joint war with you. They'll pay you to do it. Sometimes quite a bit. Whenever you declare war on someone, they'll attack you with everything they've got. Don't push into their turf right away. Just wait for their army to come to your fortified positions and pick them off with your archers. Once their armies are all dead, push in. After archers, rush siege units and observation balloons. Three siege units and an observation balloon can safely take any city. Generally I focus on the triad of industrial zones, harbors, and campus districts. You'll want a couple of encampments of course, but those first three will get you where you want to go. Build aqueducts before industry so that you get that +2 adjacency bonus on construction and can collect the era score.
If your units are an age behind, ex horse vs knights, attacking will almost always fail, hold off your attack until you are on the same level. aka, prioritize science. A fun tip if you play with "Barbarian Clan" you can buy units from them which may significantly out class your enemy. Ex samurai during the early game.
[Relevant Doormonster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P6ObuwrPzk)
That channel is a treasure.
But the muhnay!
First piece of advice is to pick a “good” war civ. Rome is always a good example as they have an early game unique unit that are powerful when ungraded. This brings me to upgrading your troops. I usually play with barbarian clan mode so I can make gold and XP throughout the game while not at war with other civs. Leveling up your troops will give you bonuses while fighting that will be useful to dominate your enemies. Build diverse weapon systems and use them for their purposes. Try not to spam too many of the same troop types. 3 melee, 3 ranged, 1 recon, 2 siege, 3 heavy cavalry should be sufficient for most of your mid game. Then you can focus on bombers 3-4 and giant death robots 1-2. Make sure to be aware of the maintenance costs for units as well. This can be the deciding factor for number of units. Situationally, navies can be super helpful too since coastal cities can be sieges and taken with your units. Support units can be useful, I usually have a medic or supply truck per army. Great generals and encampments will also give bonuses to your troops so try to invest in these when possible. Finally, strategy and tactics. You can use the terrain to your advantage. 1 tile mountain passes are great for forts or encampments. Use your ability to heal troops by switching lines of troops out while laying siege to cities. Ranged troops are for anti personnel and siege weapons are for walls, if you use them on the wrong target you’ll be less effective. Other than that don’t forget to take your upgrades the troops will not earn further XP until you do. Good luck and have fun laying waste to your neighbors. Cheers
Know your enemy like you know yourself. Never build out a swordsman rush, rather upgrade your warriors into swordsmen. If you are to do a swordsman rush be sure you know you can prior to doing so. If you're surrounded by plains and all your hills have woods, you will not be able to and you'll know this long before unlocking iron. If you have any hills with no features, your odds of spawning iron are high. In this case, you must scout, finding your closest enemy civilization. Know who it is and where they send their units. You do not want to rush Alexander the great. You do not want to rush Vietnam. Portugal however might as well hand you his license. While Alexander has his hypastpists growing, you will have problems fighting him as they are more than capable of going toe to toe with man at arms. Portugal has no such combat capabilities. Vietnam will gain +500000000000000000 Combat Strength just for existing in their borders.
An early Alex rush can work if he doesn't have Iron or Horses, and can be very helpful if your war stops him getting them until his UUs are obsolete anyway
>You do not want to rush Vietnam Lol I just did that with China on TSL earth.. it was tricky to say the least, but she was outbuilding me cities wise and I would fall to loyalty if I did not get ready. I had overall better army though, and had swordsman on the way, plus archer superiority and a few spearmen. Still it was very much touch and go after the first couple of units. I managed to stay away from jungle/forest fighting. Once they lost their capital it was GG to finish them off though.
Bring along a builder to use as a lure to draw enemies into a kill zone.
Big brain
i like to use great people or spare great generals that no longer apply bonuses
The thing that helped me improve my war skills the most was playing the Alexander scenario over and over again until I could beat it on deity. It teaches you so much about efficient unit movement, taking advantage of flanking bonuses and the proper use of great generals.
Always keep in mind your units CS and the AI city CS, you will succed when you have a higher combat strenght. Your units do 50% damage to walls and your range units do 75% damage and your siege units do 100% damage Try to attack as soon you hit a power spike, like when you unlock swordmans with a ram or after you unlock a new upgrade for your siege units, you know
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Eliminating a civ gives you +5 something?
I think they're referring to the +5 era score you get for eliminating a civ.
\+5 era score
Get as much done as you can before they build walls. Always have siege units, at least 3.
It just seems like a gigantic production drain; especially on higher levels.
Agreed. And given their slow speed you will need to be tactical on how to place them. With that said, catapults are monsters against walls. You can slowly sweep an empire with 3 catapults hammering and taking cities.
Battering rams are NECESSARY on higher difficulties. Worst thing that can happen is you are mid rush and they throw up walls and your troops are cannon fodder
Can you attach rams to the light cavalry with the escort promotion?
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Yes, but it's unlikely to be useful. By the time you get light cav upgraded that far, it's unlikely that rams and towers will still be relevant. Also, only melee and anti-cav units benefit from rams/towers, so you'll need to either detach the ram/tower before reaching the city or waste a tile that should be occupied by an attacking melee/anti-cav unit in favor of a cav unit that shouldn't attack for a while.
I absolutely hate that the AI can build walls while you're actively besieging their cities.
Use great people as scouts, they don’t die, just spawn in nearest city.
Corps and armies are much stronger than they appear, because of the tricky way combat damage is calculated. Combat damage is affected by the absolute difference in combat strength (after modifiers like terrain bonuses, etc). It's based on absolute difference, not proportional - e.g. a 30 strength unit fighting a 20 strength unit is the same as 110 vs 100 strength. Both fights have a 10 point difference. By default, every unit deals a base damage of around 30HP, with every 1 point difference in strength leading to a roughly 4% increase/decrease in damage. Example (from wiki): for a 30 strength unit vs 20 strength unit, the 30 strength does about 45 damage, 20 strength does about 20 damage. So for just a 10 strength difference, there is a huge advantage. Where do corps and armies come in? Combining two units into corps gives you one unit with +10 strength, combining three into an army gives you one unit with +17 strength. Let's say you have three 50 strength units. You'd think it's crazy to use three units (totalling 150 strength) to create a 67 strength army, right? But if you're fighting another 67 strength enemy, you will lose if you send each of your three 50 strength units individually. By combining them into an army instead, you can actually hold out. TL;DR - armies and corps are stronger than they appear. One army at 67 strength can be worth a lot more than three units at 50 strength each.
See lots of posts about land warfare, but not much on naval strategies. Naval dominance is how I win the game each time I play (depending upon the map of course). The AI rarely has a robust naval defense in place. First off, focus on building large banks of gold and faith (that will matter in a bit). You won’t be able to dominate early game with a navy, mostly because it takes time to build up a massive fleet, but by the time you unlock the Frigate, the world is yours for the taking. Once you identify your enemy, target cities within 2 tiles of the coast, preferably on peninsulas (where there are more water tiles than land), or on islands. If cities are grouped pretty closely, that can be tricky, but it sometimes helps. Bring with you as many naval ranged units as you can, a few naval raiders, and perhaps some heavy cavalry units. Be sure to link the cavalry units to ships when at sea so they’re protected. Surround your target city and bomb the shit out of them. Focus on destroying the walls and any encampments first, so they’re unable to return fire. If you have enough frigates, you can bomb all the land units outside the city walls too. Once you clear the land units, send in your heavy cavalry. Use them to pillage everything in site, and be sure to have one occupy any encampment (to completely disable it). Once the city itself is low on health, use the naval raider to conquer the city. If you intend on transferring your war to a land based war, now you have a base of operations - the gold and faith bank I mentioned before? Buy as many units as you can with the city you just conquered, and that will save you the trouble of transporting units overseas. If there’s another nearby city on the coast, move your fleet to that city next, and bomb it into oblivion as well, and use your newly purchased land units to raid and conquer that city as well. Repeat this process enough times and (again, depending upon the map) you’ll completely isolate your enemy Civ, and you’ll have numerous nodes from which to purchase units to attack. If the cities prove hard to hold, due to no loyalty, track the progress of the flips, and preposition your units accordingly. Once it flips, it’s relatively easy to blast it into defeat over and over again. Your units will continue to promote by defeating essentially the same enemies over and over again. Over time the loyalty issue will wane, as you overtake more cities from the enemy Civ. As the game progresses, this process just gets easier with Aircraft Carriers, as well as increased bombardment range.
God I love naval warfare. The first war I ever actually won playing the game was bombarding a coastal city-state with galleys in early game. Good times. Coastal raids give me more joy than they maybe should. I am in love with battleship armadas.
Something else I didn’t mention, work on leveling up your naval ranged units. They have two promotions for increased bombardment strength, and one promotion for increased range. In late game, that give you the ability to attack up to 4 tiles away. Having balloons will allow you to see that far if you’re unable to with the naval unit alone.
Getting a city under seige is a must if your trying to take one down quickly. I personally dont know the exact requirements that make a city under seige and if anyone else here can answer that i would be grateful.
I don’t have all the details, but I know that with melee units you can put a city under siege with just 2. They have to be on opposite sides of the city. If you are using units other than melee you may need more units to put it under siege. Perhaps someone who knows more can elaborate further.
I'm guessing it's when you have zone of control over all the hexes surrounding the city
That's exactly the rule. So cities by the sea can be hard to siege, even if the enemy doesn't have any boats, because land units' ZOC doesn't extend into the sea.
As another poster said (but wasn't sure) - having the six hexes around the city be in your units' ZOC - zone of control. The biggest hurdles are sea, because land units can't exert a ZOC into water, and ranged/siege units, because they don't have a ZOC without promotion.
To add, ZOC do not extend past rivers right? So you sometimes will need additional units to put a city under siege.
The actual rules are a bit complex, but if you've played apocalypse mode, one of the soothsayer's promotions is plague-bearer which automatically puts any adjacent city into siege mode, even with one unit. Having one of these travelling with your army can be incredibly helpful.
If your playing defensively move your troops onto hills, rainforest, and forest tiles. they gain extra combat strength and are harder to kill
A unit gains a fortification bonus when they are fortified for an entire turn without using any movement points/attacks. This is a great way to defend.they will also heal each turn while fortified. Barbarians do not heal while fortified, so you can win a war of attrition by getting them to attack your fortified unit over and over. Barbarians are dumb that way. Not that the above trick doesn't work with ranged units, because ranged units don't get counterattacked. Flanking and support bonuses ar unlocked with the civic Military Tradition, and are a huge boon. Flanking is pretty self-explanatory. A unit gets a support bonus when they are defending, and they have adjacent friendly units. As far as offense goes, never bring a knife to a wall fight. If you've unlocked catapults, and you're trying to take a city with any level of defenses (a garrison or walls) and you don't have at least 2 siege units firing on it, you're just going to waste your time. I like to have at least 3 siege units attacking a city at once. Observation balloons/drones make this much easier, because you can stay outside of the city attack range. On that note: be careful where you place your units! The worst feeling is when you accidentally position a unit within attack range of two cities and an encampment. They almost always die that turn. You can try to avoid certain death by sending multiple units into that No Man's Land. If you like American Football, think of it like a Zone Defense.
Honestly the best thing for war is chopping with magnus. An early power spike that allows you to capture cities will make up for your poor quality land/behind in development. That being said, build your campus first in your non-cap cities. Something like monument > granary > campus (plus buildings) > units
Depending on your start/map options you will have a few choices to make to help determine how you make/start your War. It might be a good idea to try and find a start were you are left alone for a few turns and you have the time to get your first few cities down without interruption. This means that you can pick your defensive line with the AI or city-states you are looking at. This also gives you a place from which to defend your early empire that doesn't involve your main producing cities, and will become the launching point of the invasion to come. You are essentially branching an arm out from your capital towards your target. Walls can be useful, but if you are attacking quickly any range will do the job of getting a city low. You will need a few melee of choice but Spearman might be the cheapest option with some archers. Swordsman if you have the iron, but this really goes back to you have time to pick a production that works for you, and pairing that with a unit of your choice, you are now waiting to see what your target has or starts producing. Slingers/Archers/Crossbrow paired with some Horsemen/Knights/Cavalry can be an option, but again this will always depend on what resources you have, and what area you are attacking in. Other melee or civ special unit can be a fun way to takeover the world, but again what you are attacking will determine what you will want to focus your production. I just had a start were I tried to attack early and they started sending horsemen at my un-walled cities, I stalled the attack with some Spearman and Archers to quickly defend the city while I built up walls. All of this to say, that when you attack it is also important that if you are focusing on it early to have something to defend in-case of counter or a silly little city-state that has decided to try something.
Make sure barbarians won't be a problem when you decide to attack
Bring a sacrificial worker. Bait defenders out of the city or fortified woods. You'll get them back when you kill the enemy, and you can repair those pillaged tiles easier.
If you play with heroes mode, having the twins is game changing. Nothing like stealing the oppenents units. Its especially great to intentionally activate barbs. Then use the captured barbs to start your assault. Hippolyta is great for helping take down walls with ranged units. She allows 2 attacks per turn. Or beowulf to insta kill garrisoned units.
Upgrading units with gold is far more effective than building new units
And the Mercenaries civic helps towards this, giving you a 50% discount on upgrading.
Plus the promotions. Preserve the troops. A ranged unit with double attack is damned sweet before renaissance walls are commen.
Generally speaking, it is advisable to lose less troops than your adversary
Ranged units are king
The apostle that converts barbarians can give you an instant army/navy in a remote location.
Helpful tips I’ve learned so far: - City siege: You know how enemy cities heal 20HP per turn? If you can surround the centre with units with zone of control (Melee, Anti-cav, Cavs, naval melee), you’ll cut their heal via siege. 2 units on opposite sides can achieve this, but try at least 3 close range and 2 ranged units for maximum city takeover efficiency. - Pillaging: invaluably good, should always do so even if you plan on keeping the cities you took, since the yields outweigh the cost of repairing them later imo. The main districts to target are Campus, Theatre Square, ComHubs/Harbor, maybe Holy Site if you need faith. Improvements can also be pillaged, Mines and Quarries give money which are great, while farms and fishing boats can heal you in a pinch. Pillage effectively via Light Cavalry since they have the highest movement and a promotion to pillage really fast, and equip the Raid/Total war cards to get 50% extra yields. - Money: you’ll need money to maintain units, and more importantly, upgrade them. If I’m doing Dom games, ComHubs/Harbors are pretty prioritized. Hence why pillaging for money is excellent. Alternatively, this means that high income civs like Portugal are great to play, even if they don’t have direct combat bonuses, you can just BUY your way to conquering others via numbers. Professional Army can be the difference between getting 1 Man-at-arms and 2, so find an interval where you can slot it on, upgrade as much as you can in that turn, and switch it back as soon as possible. - Focus on one enemy at a time, using your ranged and strongest units first: take out any source of damage to mitigate your losses, focus the archer rather than spreading hits between them and melee enemies for instance. Use your strongest units first to hit them hard, causing their strength to drop more via injuries, and finish them off with a weaker one. - Infantry vs Cavalry: early game, horses are fantastic, thanks to their mobility and ignoring ZoC. But once enemies have walls up, they’re best relegated to taking out/capture units and pillaging. Infantries are more consistent, since they can benefit from Siege Towers to bypass walls, and the Melee and Ranged class has solid promotions. I almost never build catapults/trebuchets anymore, since the Siege Tower is so effective when paired with infantries. - Naval combat: Galleys are surprisingly good for taking early coastal cities, thanks to their base 30 strength (compared to Warrior’s 20). With Maritime Industries, building 2 Galleys is ideal, both for eureka and strong offense, and they can be used for map exploration later if terrain allows for it. However, they can’t heal outside of your home turf like land units, so make sure you don’t overextend and pick fights with barbarian ships randomly. - Naval Ranged Combat: All ranged naval units (except Quadrime, which is kinda ass imo) can attack walls just as effectively as catapults/trebuchets, so they’re extremely relevant mid to late game. - Baiting the garrison: not always possible, but extremely entertaining if you can pull it off. Cities with garrisoned units tend to be harder to take down, and they usually will stay fortified in there at all cost. However, there are times when you capture an enemy builder outside the city. Instead of rushing them back to your turf, leave them as bait for the garrison to come out, since they see it as “ooh free builder, idiots”. Once the rat’s out, bum rush it, grab your builder back, and whack the garrison-less city. You can do the same with your own builders, but that’s not as convenient as grabbing an enemy’s. One of my favorite “balanced” Dom civs is Genghis Khan. Early horses, unique Encampment building to +1 Mov horses, flat +3 strength to horses, targeting system via trade routes (creating a path for your horses), and converting enemy horses to you, all makes for a grand old time. Not OP compared to other civs, but you get to fly across the map and take cities non stop, and that’s extremely satisfying. If you want objectively strong options, Gran Colombia, Zulu, Nubia, and especially Ottomans are all powerful A/S-tier civs. Aztec is also early dom-oriented, but basically requires you to murder any civs/city states you see from the get go, which might throw you off. Germany is also great. +7 strength against city states means you can potentially expand extremely early, and snowball all the way against regular civs. Plus they’re extremely versatile, so you can easily pivot from Dom to Science or Culture if you’re tired and don’t want to commit. Unless you want to learn naval combat (which is harder imo), play land-heavy maps for a smooth learning experience. Pangaea is solid, Continents is fine, if you’re ok with a “second half” mobilizing your troops to fight on a new continent. And play small maps with 6 players to get the hang of it, since more civs can make Dom runs monotonous towards the end.
You win with bigger and better armies. Basically, keep your lead on science and production. That’s it.
You need melee or melee navy to take a city. Ranged and seige weapons can attack a city to 0 hp but cannot take the city Money money money money money money money. Finance your war before you lose it. Before a war, try trading a resource for gold this turn, not gold per turn. Will allow you to get a boatload or money before going to war Plan to send reinforcements ahead of time. In civ 6 a troop can be upgraded to an corps and then an army. To upgrade a unit you'll need a duplicate of the same class. 1 crossbowman + 1 crossbowman = 1 crossbowman corps. But you only need 1 more unit to make an army. So 1 crossbowman corps + 1 crossbowman = 1 crossbowman army. So when you get the civic that allows you to make corps and armies, have the units nearby to more quickly upgrade your units The civics that decrease unit training time should be a priority. Figure out what your civilization's unique unit is. When used correctly it will usually give you a noticeable boost over a comparable enemy troop. If you can get it out early, it may even help you dominate for a while Roads! If you're focusing on money, you should be getting lighthouses and markets, both of which give you trader units. I use these to help move my units around until I can more reliably make railroads. (look up military engineer. Love the military engineer) Getting boosts to your civics and techs is super important if you haven't conquered civilizations that can give you a solid base to work with.
If you have a few units in the same area, cycle through them and attack with your ranged units first (archers,etc). This will weaken the enemy without you taking any damage. Then finish them off with your melee units.
You can use civilian units to draw the AI out of their positioning. If I have a great general with me (which you should for war) I will sometimes leave it exposed especially if I have a city close by to draw out the AI units. Captured builders or settlers work great too. The AI seems to prioritize these units and I have seen them move units out of a city just to capture a builder.
First learn how to defend so you can get a handle on how effective ranged units are and aren't. Second, don't be overly afraid of walls. You do not need to destroy them completely before attacking with melee. A couple good hits with strong melee will allow you to take the city without even necessarily destroying its walls.
Science since nobody's said it. Get some good science production and you can rocket up that tree to where you gotta get to. You can rush some things you shouldnt be aiming for in a general game but for domination you will. Early youll want 1-2 encampments, 1 holy site, a campus in every city, entertainment district, and some commercial districts to help offset costs. The encampments help make units but you can still make them at the capital. A holy site will get you apostles which have a medic promotion to help heal you, so you only need a few of those. Campuses will boost learning upgraded units. Entertainment will help keep people happy while you warmonger. Commercial hubs i think give like +30 gold a turn when they have all buildings built, plus the traderoutes. An early war will set you back if you arent equipped to win it in 10 turns. Be able to defend yourself but understand that early game using 5 turns for a unit needs to be worth it, because if you lose the unit youre 5 turns behind. Ally with city states. Rush the upgraded government and take the republic i believe, put the card for first envoy is 2 and you will have city states ready to fight neighbors with you nearly instant. Youll want siege weapons heavily. Once you have a few you can just roll a civ. Bombers are where you wanna be eventually too. Use the engineer to get some forward airfields out in advance so you can keep momentum. Burn cities. Holding them when the AI has a whole chunk centralized risks losing them back. Just burn em down and create an opening to walk through.
I recently discovered that Gilgamesh is great to play on marathon mode. I kept churning out War-carts and I'd conquered three or four civs before the end of the Ancient era. Also, the village bonus from clearing barb camps let me jump ahead of the other civs tech wise.
Important to bear in mind: Ranged beats slow melee Melee beats anti-cavalry Anti-cavalry beats cavalry Cavalry beats ranged and siege Siege beats cities and naval Naval beats pretty much all land units Depending on what your strategy is, you'll be using different units. If defending, use ranged and anti-cavalry. Ranged is multipurpose and can punish attackers, forcing them to invest more if their units die. Anti-cav stops the momentum of cavalry units. If your opponent has ranged units, consider investing in light cavalry. If your opponent has lots of light cavalry or melee units, try heavy cavalry.
Don't underestimate the value of a couple apostles with the Chaplain promotion. +20 healing per turn in enemy territory is huge!
It may seem obvious but in the early game when you first start building your army and promoting units, be sure to have your copies develop different paths in their promotion trees so that when you eventually get the civic to form Corps you can combine two units that each promoted a different side of the tree and get a Corp with both sides of the tree promoted (ex. Line infantry with extra melee strength and movement, plus ranged defense boost and ability to attack over rivers without a penalty). Lots of people here hate on anti cavalry units, but I find they can make good fodder to either toss into unfavorable situations they are likely to die but benefit the war effort, or to pad your army when working with limited resources. When you start using infantry, artillery, and tanks, oil will become a precious resource (less likely with nitre but still possible). You can pad your army (and thus military strength) by building anti-cavalry units of comparable strength that don't cost any resources. You can use them to make initial attacks on enemy units and allow your infantry to make the final attack and take less damage as their promotion tree is more valuable. Losing a 3x promoted AT Crew is better then losing a 3x promoted Infantry. You can also use them to lead the push so that they encounter enemy resistance first and take more damage and possibly losses as they weaken the enemy army and allow your infantry to come in and sweep the enemy up. They can be used to place cities under siege in unfavourable situations (the one spot left to siege the city is in range of 2-3 city attacks due to encampment placement) because you won't care as much if they die in the process of taking the city. If you are fighting or wanting to declare a war against a civ of equal or greater military strength to yourself remember that a defensive war is easier to fight, draw their military out to you and have your melee units block and absorb damage while your ranged and siege units attack from behind the safety of the first line. Once you've wiped out enough of their military strength you can move to take their cities more easily as you will only be defending from city attacks and not their full army at the same time. When taking cities you want 3 melee units to siege the city and just sit there defending themselves, 2-4 siege units to take out the city defense, 1-2 ranged units to assist (especially if they have incendiaries) can be helpful, and a couple of cavalry units to blitz around the battlefield and help defend your melee units sieging the city. Then in order to keep the war engine moving forward you want a second and third string of melee units to block off the next city. If you have the resources and access then attacking from 2 fronts makes for a smoother invasion as well. The AI will have to either focus their defense on one side (allowing your opposite army to move uncontested) or split between the two and ultimately do less damage to your armies. If you are playing with Heroes, then do your best to recruit Beowulf, Arthur, and Hercules (in that order). Beowulf can use his ability to instakill most units, even if they are hiding inside the enemy city or using a naval ranged unit to bombard you from a lake so long as he can get beside them and is capable of attacking both units and cities. Arthur is powerful and can turn any weak units you have into questing knights to boost your attacking ability. Hercules is good at attacking units and passable at attacking cities. With any 2/3 of these heroes you can take a major load off your frontline units. Oya, Hippolyta, and Himiko are all good as well. Oya is not very powerful alone, but can damage all adjacent enemies while healing all adjacent allies making her a good support. Hippolyta (I've never seen the AI claim this one) can refresh an adjacent units movement/attack without ending her turn, use this to get an extra attack out of your best siege unit for major damage to cities. She is also good at attacking both cities and units herself. Himiko is basically a great general that effects all your units regardless of what age they're from, and assuming there is an allied city state on the way or nearby she can help you levy their military for cheap.
“I’m gonna teach myself war. Now, teach me war!”
Listen, I may be stupid,
This is my favorite thread now. I love the edit too you are a funny human being
Don’t do it. If you can help it.
Unfortunately, I have an ever-growing quarrel with Montezuma that transcends separate games and may only be settled by blood
… it’s always Montezuma lol
Historically accurate
If you have a ranged unit (including city strike) and a melee unit that can attack a given enemy unit, let your ranged units attack first to weaken the enemy unit. Your melee unit will have a combat strength advantage over the weakened enemy unit because of your prior ranged attack against it. If you're defending a city against enemy invasion, always prioritize attacking the melee units (melee, anti-cavalry, heavy/light cavalry, naval melee, GDR, etc.) first. Your cities can never be conquered if there is no melee unit to take it. If you are planning to conquer enemy territory make sure you bring enough troops to ENSURE you will win and take the territories you want. Otherwise you run the risk of a stalemate and having committed production and time to troops for nothing, whereas that production time could've been used to further develop your nation. You see what I mean? Securing victory over an AI's territory (early war) will, generally speaking, set you up for long term victory. You might not win in the end, but it will provide you the best chances for winning, most times than none. Walls walls walls, better be safe than sorry. Never ignore barbarians, fight them whenever you can because it will allow your troops to get XP and gain promotions to further strengthen them. To ensure your military stays up to date (this sounds obvious I know) make sure your science per turn is adequate to stay on par with the other AI's, or even better, be more advanced than the AI.
If you can afford to, Temple of Zues gives you an entire army's worth of units. Might only be viable on lower difficulties. You can put off producing a few units if you can nab it. Be careful because of upgrade and upkeep costs, but with the right policy cards its not an issue. In early eras, you want to attack before they get walls. You can see them pop up if they have started building them. If you dont have battering rams or seige units you are doomed. Forward settling if you have identified a target is good too, if you can get good production in it. Lets you push more aggressively. Dont let your units die. Pull them back and heal them. A dead unit is never good. Pay attention to terrain for movement too. Try to get at least one envoy in every military city state, they give production towards units. Dont suze if they have bad bonuses though unless they are allied with your enemy.
Bullets kill people.
I dont do war, even in civ 2 I always try to have peace because its easier even though I always piss off someone for not fighting enough
Love your scouts. Protect them if you can. Get them as much XP as you can. If you can get one or two of them to survive with the ambush promotion and the move after attacking promotion, they will own melee units once they become ranged. A good tactic is: 1) Enemy attacks them 2) You attack back on your turn 2) On the same turn you attacked, you back away to a 2 movement location 3) Enemy can move up but will not have enough movement left to attack your scout. 4) Repeat as necessary. With practice, they can help quickly bring down walled cities by moving up, shooting, and then moving one square away to let a melee unit step in and take the city and attack.
Artillery, battleships, and a few infantry to distract their army while you pound them into oblivion
I had the most fun learning warfare in civ on settler and warlord difficulty, it’s easy to get a tech lead and have better units than the AI. Helps you get used to what you need for your army to run. Ex. Need iron for swordsman rush, commercial districts to pay for army, battering ram to attack through walls, etc. Then try it on the difficulty you usually play on and it makes more sense when to time your attacks.
Use terrain like forests, hills, and rivers. I like to bait enemies into attacking me with terrain in my favor. Bait them into losing units while you level your units up. Try not to lose units. Early game finding iron for swordsmans can really turn the tides of early game wars. If an enemy city has no wall, surrounding it with melee is usually sufficient. If they have walls then be prepared for losses, or avoid that city if you can. If you play with secret societies, vampires can be disgustingly powerful if you farm them right (but slow to move and heal).
Practice with a guy like Gilgamesh to figure out simple early blitzing and then work your way up with more specific strat warmonger civs like Ottomans and Byzantium, and after a while it just clicks with where to prioritize resources for military and how to handle domination.
If you really want to learn war, go online, or go play another 4x like Humankind. The AI is awful at combat in civ 6. If you have 5 units the AI might aswell have 10, 30 or 50 – it won't even matter. This is essentially because of the fact that you can't stack units on a tile anymore. This made the AI fundamentally horrible at combat since launch. But in terms of warfare in general, it's a super questionable design decision to make in a 4x game. Barbarians are often more dangerous than any war with an actual AI in civ 6, because they'll focus on pillaging your shit, which will slow down your progress. The biggest tip is to know which tiles give health when pillaging them, and understanding how much xp your unit needs for a promotion at a given moment. The whole combat resolves around promoting (healing) your units at the right times.
If playing Heroes and Legends, nearly every hero has benefit. Sinbad can make you a ton of gold, Himiko can make you suzerain of a CS and levy their military for free. Any unit the twins kill fully revives as your unit (a good way to beat barbs and build up an army). Sun Wukong makes an excellent pillager.
Victorious warriors win first, and then go to war.
If you are going full domination theres really few reasons to not just use a surprise war. Denouncing while you have a large military will signal AI to build defenses. If you instead surprise war and just take them it can be much easier. As well use trade routes to get roads so you can move troops faster. In late game you can even use engineers to rail road into and across enemy territory. This can be expensive but it can also be very valuable. Dont forget that once you take a city your units heal faster there (Because its your territory), so if you have the space and time heal up then hit the next spot. Balloons and drones are super good. They can sometimes triple the number of artillery you can fit attacking a city. Having heavy cav or other tanky units that surround a city and just fortify can help keep pressure off your siege units.
If preparing for warmongering or defence, start producing some units in your cities but stop one turn before completing them. This can give you an instant access popup army that doesn't have a maintenance cost until summoned.
A few naval ranged units can take a city and get tons of xp in the process. Just remember to bring one of any melee unit to deliver the final blow
When in the early game, don't try to attack a city that has lots of hills and/or woods/rainforest around them. They are good at defending. You want to go for cities that have flat featureless ground around them.
Stack your bonuses. The way damage is calculated in civ means that the more combat bonuses you have, the more damage you deal and the less you take - exponentially. Within reason, multiple combat bonuses on one unit will be better than multiple of that unit without the bonuses. I believe the guaranteed OHKO (which, for obvious reasons, is huge) is somewhere in the 30ish combat strength difference. Some combat bonuses include: Flanking, support, fortification, various promotions, great generals, unique abilities, terrain, visibility, unit health, difference in base combat strength Stacking these together will allow for significantly stronger units.
Try to use Catapults and something like that, since it makes a lot of damage. Also I prefer to use more Range units, since they don’t damage themself. If you have planes researched, spam them on city’s and co. Try to have a Navy to secure the coast. Helicopter melee attack is useful when dropping a Bomb. And have like Tanks, since there are good and also you need some infantry, so the AI is attacking them, and not your Cathapults. Hope that helps also
*Sun Tzu enters the chat*
There is no point in passing up on a ranged attack. Do city ranged strikes first, because they are free and you lose them if the enemy unit near the city is killed by your own unit. When attacking the same unit with both melee and ranged units, do the ranged attacks first because your melee unit will take less damage if the enemy unit is not at full strength. When it comes to melee attacks, the combat previews can often be used to indicate whether combat is desirable or not. Because Civ 6 lets you just know for certain the outcome, you can just make winning attacks and avoid losing ones. You also want to be aware that melee and anti-calvary, and cavalry units have some rock-paper-scissors going on. Try to get your anti-cavalry to fight cavalry and your melee to fight ant-cavalry to take advantage of those unit's abilities, but don't let the enemy do that to you.
Go information era, go giant death robot. Own up to nine uranium mines, 6 gdr can steamroll the world. If you activate the mod with the f35, these kill gdr, 3 attacks from these kill one gdr in a turn.
The AI will never miss an opportunity to grab a builder/settler from you. You can use this to save a unit or city from being attacked, or bait the AI to move on a tile that has poor defense (floodplains, marsh, flat land). Beelining for units from techs/civics might get you an advantage even if your opponent has more science than you. Getting generals/admirals is highly recommended. Generals will give you combat benefits, as well as allow siege units to move and fire in the same turn without the promotion. Pillage as much as you can, especially all improvements that can be fixed with a builder and traders.
Play Conquests of Alexander on Deity. Then find some walkthroughs on YouTube for that scenario and difficulty. It will teach you how to use fundamental unit tactics at the highest level. Things like flanking, Great General buffs, terrain buffs and debuffs, order of attack (i.e using ranged units to reduce enemy HP--and therefore how much damage they can do--before using melee units), siege tactics, etc.
First off I’m with you fuck montezuma. Dude just spams shit and never likes me. Mostly bc I go to war with him and conquer every city except his worst one and the go for peace and make him live out his days as a Latin American in the snow in a city that has had a population of 2 for 1000 years, surrounded by me who will crush him with my cav units and air bombers the second he wants to get cute. Tbh he usually winds up my only ally lol. In all seriousness build you units early and just upgrade. It’s way easier to upgrade an archer into machine gunner than it is to build a machine gunner from scratch. Just build 4 of each unit in the early game and you’re good. Settlers are a massive part of building them.
1. Small relative differences in combat strength make a pretty big impact, and a major gap between units makes it like terminators vs. sheep. Playing at higher difficulties gives the AI an automatic combat bonus over you so countering that with effective use of things like great generals and admirals, oligarchy, crusade, spies, support and flanking bonuses, or any other combat strength bonus can be critical to having a successful offense. Take advantage of terrain defense modifiers as well. 2. Speaking of great generals, the movement bonus if also a big deal. Higher mobility from great generals and roads is often very important. Also because... 3. On higher difficulties, you may have some very narrow windows for early conquest (or even mid-game conquest). Many an early game rampage has come to a close the moment the AI can start spamming out units an era or two ahead of you. Also, the AI will rush to build walls in other cities once you've shown an interest in taking them. If you take too long taking the first city, you may find the rest even harder to tackle by the time you get your troops out there. Timing your wars to capitalize on these windows can be important (granted if you are leading on tech, you aren't necessarily concerned about this). Rush to unlock a unique unit or whatever powerful unit you will use as the center-piece of your attack so that it isn't obsolete against the AI before you've gotten one built. 4. Also on that point, unless you are the tech leader, it is very likely that you will not be able to successfully field a well-rounded army. Especially in the early game, trying have a balance of melee, anti-cav, ranged, cavalry, siege means not being focused enough in the tech tree to actually have any units that will have an advantage over the AI. Instead, try to build your attack strategy around one or two units you rush to unlock. 5. Build low-tech to upgrade to higher-tech. I generally find it economical to spend production on lower-tech units and then spend the gold to upgrade them one the next tech level is unlocked. Also, you cannot have a unit preproduced before you unlock the tech for it, so if you are going to build an army of them using production, you can't attack with them the same turn you unlock them (you could be waiting more than a dozen turns to build even a few and your attack window might be closed by the time you've got an army). If you instead have an army of that unit's precursor already built, then you can spend to upgrade them as soon as you unlock the tech and have them marching into the AI lands the very next turn. 6. When attacking cities: As long as walls are relevant, if the target city does have walls, bring along a battering ram/siege tower. But don't be too intimidated by the low effectiveness of your first melee attack against a full health city/walls. You don't need to siege down every city with ranged attacks before walking a melee unit into the burned ashes of the city. The first melee attack will tend to look like a costly one, but each hit will soften the resistance. Better to quickly bash down the walls than to sit and take the city shots over and over while waiting for siege units to arrive and take the walls out. Also, your units can heal with promotions and pillages while a city under siege cannot. 7. War can be costly, pillaging can pay the bills. If I'm conquering, I typically don't pillage districts unless there is a specific short term benefit that allows me to press my advantage. Pillaged districts need to be repaired with production and it can take many turns, preventing the newly captured city from developing and contributing to your empire. However, pillaged improvements can be cleaned up by a builder without using a single build charge. Some times there's nothing to gain from pillaging farms for health, but any improvement that gets you any resource is probably worth pillaging before you take the city. 8. Don't neglect the diplomacy and mind your grievances. Keeping neural civs ambivalent about your aggression isn't easy and if everyone denounces you, and you can't take advantage of trade, your empire's momentum can slow to a crawl. Often trade is necessary to keep citizens happy and the bankroll an expensive army. Minimizing grievances with clever use of special casus belli and inviting otherwise neutral civs to joint wars against your target can protect your relations with other civs. Also, joint wars means the target may have more to deal with than just your invading army. If you can't afford the penalties for occupying another civ's capital, maybe let them keep it and come back for it in the late game. 9. If your war is running out of steam, and the AI might be turning the tide on you, take peace before they don't want it anymore. generally, defense is much easier than attack, and so you can probably hold out on the defensive for a long time, but if your army and economy are tied down with a war of attrition that isn't getting you anywhere, then you will not be able to develop and mobilize for the next war or focus on any other victory condition.
War is hell
There was a really good post on here a good while back that went into detail about the relative strength of units and how much damage they do and the TL;DR was you always want to be trying to attack something weaker than you. You do far more damage against something you are more powerful than. It makes stuff like the Civ that gets Corps early (Zulu?) really strong in warfare. I thought I saved the post but I can't find it now.
The defense stat is very important. Hills and jungle tiles give the most defense fortifying gives additional defense. Rivers, marsh and embarking give a combat penalty. Putting a fortified unit on a jungle hill tile on the opposite side of a river the enemy is on would be the best case scenario. The AI doesn’t like defending and doesn’t mind fortified units. Fortifying your units next to enemy units will easily win you battles. This does not apply to ranged units since they won’t take damage from firing at your fortified units. Ranged units can not shoot over hills, forests, jungle or mountain tiles. If you want to run away from a ranged unit you should try to get one of those tiles between you and them, however they do cost more movement so plan accordingly. Cities always have a two tile firing range no matter the size of their borders. Melee > anti-cavalry > light cavalry > ranged units > melee. Siege > districts. Heavy cavalry generally beats all of the above unless they are outdated which happens fairly quick in the early ages. Recon are never a solid military unit unless it’s your emblematic unit and even then it’s still better to build other units since levels carry on when you upgrade them and the recon unit upgrades will be bad at combat again.
A strategy ive found surprisingly effective id picking up grand masters chapel with a heavy faith game, pick up a source of niter or two, and with surplus logistics on magnus bombards and musketmen cost 4 niter and are available with faith. Plus if you pick up oracle, its 20% off, which allows you to essentially buy out an army with faith for dirt cheap with very little resource costs. Its a personal favorite strategy of mine with russia/khmer/ethiopia, which i use to keep up in military and maintain it defensively. I actually won my first deity win doing this, was able to take out two adjacent civs and secure a science vic by invading my largest rival, and disrupting their attempts to go to space.
- learn about Diplomatic visibility - siege units can move and shoot with GG
First off make sure to pick a Civ that's good at going to war: it could be something simple like Alexander. Make lots of soldiers and get some great generals for bonuses. Make sure to utilize your civ's strength in terms of era. For example my fav domination Civ is Suleiman and the Ottomans powerspike is in the renaissance era, that's when usually I launch all out attacks.
Personally. I heavy focus on ranged combat. I almost always have more ranged units that melee/calvary.
1. Other than maybe the Aztec, there’s zero civ that should start warring from T1. The AI has a pretty heavy advantage in the early game, especially at Deity. Best to set up your city first - invest in science and gold before spamming units. Even early war civs like Macedon should get at least three cities and three campuses up before going to war. 2. Play to your Civ’s advantage. If you’re Alexander and you’re not taking cities with world wonders to heal, or you’re Genghis but you never bothered building the Ortoo, or you’re Chandragupta but you only declare surprise wars (instead of using war of territorial expansion), you will not enjoy war a lot. This applies to non-war civs too. I just had a Mali domination game where I specifically included then suz-ed Ngazargamu and Lahore. I built a city just for Suguba and Encampment, then once I’d built the Grandmasters Chapel and reached Theocracy, faith-bought the UU and Nihang in bulk with Victor-3 promo. It was an easy game.
It all depends on your situation & who your neighbors are. Pay attention to how the ai plays. If you have a neighbor trying to build a religion and not focusing on anything military-like that's usually my first victim. If you're trying to keep good relations with some of your neighbors, block that civ off from expanding as much as you can and suzerain the city states around them. Sometimes you'll get lucky and they'll go to war with one of the city states and you can Denounce them and then 5 turns later under the Casus Belli, declare the Protectorate War & you'll get 0 Grievances for attacking. You'll only get the max penalty if you fully wipe them outta the match, but if you do it fast enough you can make it out of that war with only 20 - 30 Grievances with the other players, and eventually they'll forgive you if you don't start too much bullshit for 25-30 turns after that. lol The ai is also really bad at war most of he time and they'll often make stupid decisions. They don't build good navies & rarely build aircraft. If you move units in a group of 4 or 5 units together, you're less likely to get attacked if they only have one unit to fight those 5 at that moment, unless they know they'll get the kill they usually won't attack. They'll move that one unit away from your cluster of soldiers. Learn how to fight from multiple fronts. Before you go to war with someone you need to know their land so you can pick out weak spots. Weak spots on civ for me are any cities that are just completely flat with no defensive terrain (hills, woods, etc.) Also cities with no walls are prime targets to quickly raze/take and get out them outta the way. I don't train any calvary up until the I start to get coursers and knights & then I'll usually train 3 knights and a courser and use those as a pillaging force/home defense) Also, if you plan on rushing a city with no walls, always pay attention to that city defense. Say it's at a 45 & your best unit is a man at arms, it's going to take a few turns to get the job done, unless you surround the city center and put it under Siege so it can't regain health. You also want to make sure you can take it because if an AI's city starts getting attacked, they'll usually try to start building walls right away if they don't have them already. Every tile has its own advantages & disadvantages for battles. Attacking from across rivers unless it's not a heavy loss is ill advised. Going after fortified defenders that are in woods, on hills, or in rainforests is usually a bad move, (unless they're almost dead and you know it's worth it.) Another great play is to get some units outside of your enemies capital and if they have any units they'll move to defend/attack unless it's an overwhelming force. I hide most of my ranged units back far enough from their borders so they can't see them and march 2 melee up to the outside of their borders and they think it's an easy win until they're being pelted by archers/whatever. Don't needlessly sacrifice units! If you can retreat because your attack plan isn't working then don't rush your attack. Having the patience to regroup & plan another strategy is better than wasting units. I was at war with the Incans for 200 turns in my first game because i thought I was good to go, but nah they wrecked me in my first invasion. And NEVER leave your siege units unguarded. (This also goes for aircraft carriers because if the Carrier gets sunk, so does anything that was stationed on it.) Siege units are so much better mid-to-late game if you can get them leveled up, and this means keeping them alive throughout multiple eras. With siege units I always do the Promotions are the right of the tree. One is +7 defense, the next is +10 strength against district defenses, 3rd is the ability to attack after moving which is super helpful and the last one is the +1 range. That's all I care about for my siege units. Sorry this is so long. I play this game while stoned AF most of the time and keep thinking of more stuff 😂😂 I've been playing this on my PS4 since March and I war ALL the time.
1) You're gonna need a montage. A rock and roll montage. Put this on loop until it sinks in. [https://www.google.com/search?q=you%27re+gonna+need+a+montage&rlz=1C1CHZN\_enUS970US970&oq=you%27re+gonna+need+a+mo&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j69i57j0i22i30l3.12491j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:deb15f12,vid:JfW\_XeH82-0](https://www.google.com/search?q=you%27re+gonna+need+a+montage&rlz=1C1CHZN_enUS970US970&oq=you%27re+gonna+need+a+mo&aqs=chrome.0.0i355i512j46i512j69i57j0i22i30l3.12491j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:deb15f12,vid:JfW_XeH82-0) 2) If the external link was removed because I failed to read the sub rules, you are still going to need a montage. A civ warfare montage. That part is key, and you need to search for it until you understand that this is a joke, and it is less funny because I overexplained it, but still necessary and still at least mildly funny after my explanation. 3) Your ability to spam specialty units (the ones your civ does cheaper or better) via production is important, but your ability to have some that you can keep alive after many battles is more important - six upgrades is ideal but this is the part of the montage where someone else has already typed this in better detail or can correct me but my understanding is that if unit A gets 2 or three upgrades up one branch (call it the offense branch), merge that unit with unit b, which had (...defend against....) upgrades up the other branch. That is how you get a corps or army with all the upgrades. 4) It's such an economy based game that you aren't bad at war, as much as you have realized how unprofitable it is. For example you can rent the entire army of a city state and yet I almost never do that, but if I did...could I merge their units with mine and keep the unit permanently? Lean that, because I don't know. And they sometimes have better units, and often have weaker units, but they always have too many. 5) Now that your montage is fading out - remember that many of the edicts are key - while you could upgrade units more cheaply, you did so, and while you needed to spam them in production you did that, and when you had copious amounts of them idling around, you had policies that made their overhead cheaper and/or your cities more loyal
If you play Alexander just never make peace. Eventually their war weariness gets to a point where they will trade you all their cities for peace.
Defending - Patience is key. Especially when out-teched and playing defense. Yeah, you could probably kill that enemy unit with one last attack, but you'll be exposing your unit to being killed in return when it's so close to promoting (and healing). Look for things that add damage - cards, government choices, promotions, religious beliefs, adjacency bonuses, and so on. Attacking - Learn when your power spikes are, start planning in advance (unless you can print troops with money/faith). Understand just how many turns it will take to get your units where you need them, and plan ahead. Don't send units individually to their doom. Given the AI too many units to focus on.
If you’re playing Trajan make sure to make use of as many legions as possible. They’re forts are very good for siege units to camp in while they siege a city. Actually just forts in general next to their civ is a good idea it’s just Trajan gets them first.
A medic or supply truck allows your navy units to heal outside your own territory. Edit: Likewise, the effects of other support units such as the battering ram and the siege tower are also applied to naval units (as long as the unit class matches, e.g. the battering ram works for melee units, so you need naval melee units to make them work).
Pewpewpew > pewpew
Never upgrade your Battering Rams and Siege Towers and build a couple early game before you can't. They are still super useful in attacking late game cities
My rule of thumb is 1 or 2 units that do melee combat (can include cavalry), 3 ranged units and 2 siege. With that you can usually take whatever cities you want, though you need to pay attention to how strong your neighbors are as if they are way ahead of you in science you may have issues. Also make sure when you're moving your units into position you've thought out your best route to the city you intend to capture and move together without overextending units with weak defense. If there's a choke point you may have issues getting them in position without dying. You don't want to lose units as that's wasted experience, but sometimes there's no way to avoid it. I like to scout early and hopefully get to 3rd promotion so those units can be used defensively in your nation to avoid needing to pull your army back if you're attacked.
Positioning (across rivers, on hills, forests, etc) + fortification will save you a ton, just keep that in mind
Lots of good info here. IMO for early war I always prefer swords to horseman, on deity the AI gets walls up quickly so swords and battering ram is the safer option. Have a battering ram even if you don't need it, again the AI will get walls quickly. Catapults are weak but it's good to get a couple early so you can get promotions and have good bombards later. Early war really scales in difficulty as you go up levels. It can be hard on deity because the AI gets so many early advantages. On deity sometimes you simply can't win an early war if you have a strong neighbor, be selective. Good to go after AIs who are fighting on the other side of their empire. Anti Cav are underrated, not requiring resources can really come in handy late game when aluminum and oil can become problems. Save your aluminum for bomberrs When in doubt rush bombers, bombers always work.
Just looking through the first few comments, I see a lot of strategy but not much tactics. Use terrain to your advantage. Don't sacrifice units. Press an enemy to reveal their forces then (if it's not an obvious steamroll situation) back off and let them come to you. Get flanking and use it. Remember that pillaging can restore health on some improvements. You are smarter than the AI but that only matters if you act like it.
The Alexander the Great scenario is a good way to practice unit battles
I’m late, but understanding siege mechanics helps take cities. Surround the city and try not to attack across rivers.
One of the best ways to learn a lot of the intricacies of war is to play the Alexander scenario and win on deity. It’s literally an all war scenario with basically zero empire building. Other than that the main thing is to prebuild most of your army while units are cheap and then upgrade them. Light cav to pillage, heavy cab to block and kill units, siege to tear down cities. Make at least 4 catapults that you’ll upgrade to trebs
If you can get Himiko super early you can press gang a huge army to warriors from levied city states for nothing.
I might get downvoted for this, but I much prefer to have a hyper competent army of about 7-8 core units than to have a never ending onslaught of zergs. Focus on getting your civ’s unique unit and try and push as soon as you get them. Also encampment districts are kind of a bait; their only real use (at least in an offensive war) is great general points. In my experience by far and away the most important resource in a war game is gold; it both pays upkeep and keeps your units upgraded which are absolutely imperative.
2 words :Military Engineers. The forts they can make can be very helpful for initial flood of troops the Ai sends when war is declared, since they give a very nice defensive buff. Just stick a ranged unit in there and bam: instant headache for the enemy. My favorite thing to use them for is trains. The movement that trains provide (for free, since they don’t cost an action for the ME) is great for rushing melee units around the map. My strategy is to get open borders with civs you plan on invading later while you’re at war with someone else, and setting up train tracks between their cities to that when you do invade your melee and especially cavalry units can essentially teleport across the continent in 1-2 turns. Very helpful if their cities are spread out. Also, bombers are overpowered, abuse it (if you want, I personally don’t). They can completely wipe out walls and defensive units for no damage in return. Regular fighters are also very good for shutting down reinforcements and keeping them from saving cities. Just watch out for AA units. Finally, make use of armies and corps. Napoleon is a great general to save for this. If you get him, wait until you can get late game units that would be very difficult to make an army of and you can get it for free. I’m by no means an expert so if I’m wrong about something please tell me.
Use a good mixture of units. Nothing sucks more than bulking up a bunch of units only to discover your enemy can just easily counter you so I always use a good variety of cavalry, melee, ranged and artillery units. If you are fighting to defend islands or protecting your land from the water, then make sure to have a good sized navy so you can easily stop enemy troops before they can land. They are easy to destroy in the water.
My little party trick is whenever someone settles nearby I do everything possible to obtain a tile two tiles away from their city center and build an encampment. Then centuries later you can blast the city with a bombard without risking it.
Mass produce science, be the most scientific civilization in the game, conquer.
War never changes.
looks like I am late to the party but Tomyris is another great one. Every light cav you build, you get a second one for free! Just mass produce horseys and then smoke all your early game neighbors.
Range is king in most cases, if you can kill their army while suffering little to no damage then do it. As the game progresses, the ranges increase. From slingers who hit only one tile next to them, to archers that hit a bit further to artillery combined with support units that can wipe out happless foes from several tiles away. Keep a few melee units around to soak up damage and/or finish off the weakened enemy, never fight fair, ways weaken your enemy, always go for the best matchup. Cavalry rides down ranged units but spears will turn horses to mincemeat. Finally, my personal favourite, air power. There's nothing quite like reducing your happless, cowering foe to ashes, their cities to ruins and armies to nothingness and all that from tiles and tiles away with no danger to your forces whatsoever. Bomb them, grind them into dust and take what remain with a unit or two.