So, lessons learned:
I think the main takeaway is how industrial era wars play out, since I've never fought one against a human before and the AI is abysmal at warfare. The actual game I think shows little of interest - I won when I got to 4 cities before anyone else had more than 2, then repeatedly compounded that with waves of settlers from every city so I grew exponentially from 25 -> 50 (4->8 cities) then from 50->75 (8->17 cities) and from 75->100 (17->27 cities). With monumentality and pillaged faith I was still founding cities on the final turns (one strategic outpost to control the pass to Hungary, mostly as a cheeky use of faith). Not a lot to learn there - I had fantastic land to develop and I love packing in as many cities as I can. My empires are always wide and rarely "tall" - the only city I had hit 15 population was conquered Poutine, while Germany and Hungary both hit that mark before I ever even got there.
The war was fun, though. It goes to show how much proper planning and preparation pay off - Hungary declared war on Japan on turn 3 (per his report), and only conquered Japan on turn 96, a shocking 93-turn war to conquer, in the end, 3 underdeveloped cities. Hungary didn't gain a sufficient advantage before declaring war, maybe underestimating how easy it is to kick out ancient and classical units in a short time.
By contrast, I spent about 20 turns preparing for my conquest, training a large force mostly of cavalry (due to resource constraints, mostly - I could use horses/iron to train knights/coursers, but needed iron/niter to train the equivalent infantry). I also kept the pump on until the very end of the game, still always having at least 10 cities on military builds on the final turn (easy when you have 32 cities at the end!). The result was it took me 19 turns to go from the frontier to capturing India's capital. I played against the AI a bit last night and it took only 10 turns after that to mop up every remaining Indian city apart from Mysore. You want to go in with an overwhelming strength advantage - I had about twice India's military strength, but even worse for him, it was mostly in the form of higher-quality units. As a result, I did more damage and took less damage in every battle, so his strength degraded more rapidly than mine.
So, lesson one: Be prepared.
Lesson two: Force mix matters. Infantry, I found, was largely unneeded past the late medieval era. The reason for that is city defenses - the best way to take an ancient or medieval city is via a ram/siege tower and infantry assault. Ranged and cavalry units are too heavily nerfed against cities to make them viable against walls. But once Renaissance Walls are up, you really need bombards (and artillery) to bust later defenses - and if you have those, then you can take cities with cavalry fairly easily. Infantry help, and are useful to have along, but cavalry's greater speed, greater hitting power (in every era), the pillaging ability of light cavalry, all made those my real war-winners. The cavalry won every battle, you'll notice, while the infantry just cleaned up the cities as the horse were racing ahead to the next front.
Lesson three: Plan your resources in advance. Niter and especially oil are in short supply. Niter is mostly important for muskets (to take late medieval cities) and then bombards (for everything after that), but once you've got your core force of city crackers out the pinch lessons. Oil, though, is consumed per turn, not once per build, meaning you will only ever be able to support a limited force of modern units. Since I was fighting on three fronts, I had to really carefully judge where to upgrade and where to rely on less-cutting edge units. Which brings me to point 4...
Lesson four: The two most crucial techs for warfare in the modern age are Flight and Refining. Flight enables observation balloons, which makes all city defenses obsolete. You HAVE to have a superior army once your enemy gets flight, or you lose every city, one by one. I was able to race across Canada so quickly because my bombards were taking no damage at all in every siege. If I'd had to come into range, India could have damaged them - I don't think killed them, I kept them well-protected - and would have forced more periods of rest and recuperation. As it was, I conquered basically as quickly as the siege units could traverse the map.
Refining is even more important. Every single modern unit - infantry, artillery, tanks, helicopters, early planes - takes oil to maintain. You only get oil at refining. Infantry is easy to beeline - I think India even managed it, there at the end - but you can't build them without refining first (or an ally feeding you oil, meaning HE has refining). By contrast, cuirassiers and cavalry are relatively easy to beeline and take no hard to find resources - so if you war in this era, your opponent will be able to match your quality relatively soon.
Lesson five: Ranged units are overrated, cavalry are underrated. Maybe this is the wrong conclusion to draw, but India put maybe 20 crossbows and later field cannons into the field against about 15 combined knights/cuirassiers/cavalry from me. I built 4 field cannons (mostly thinking I could use them to defend cities?) but I think they were all wasted - I hardly used them ebcause they just couldn't keep up, and were no good against cities. The problem gets bad as you get into the modern era - machine guns cost as much as fighters with less strength and less range and flexibility, just requiring no resources! Anyway, a crossbow-heavy army will fall to a knight-heavy army. If your opponent gets cuirassiers - which is at the same tech as field cannon - he'll be able to decimate you.
The reason is ranged units need to be protected, meaning they can't hold territory themselves, they just get swamped. They can garrison cities well enough, but again, observation balloons - you have to come out and fight, and when you do, your ranged units will inflict a small amount of damage and then get wiped out. It's possible India just didn't build enough frontline combat units, though, and that with proper protection his field cannons would have done more.
Lesson six: Corps can exacerbate a tech advantage, but they can't really make up for a tech disadvantage. Which makes sense. A corps adds +10 to a unit at the cost of another unit, an upgrade often adds +20 strength. Don't rely on corps to save you
Lesson seven: Don't neglect gold. I was the only player with significant commercial hubs and markets (I got all but 1 Great Merchants earned in the game), and I was the only player who could support my large army. India maintained a positive income but burned out all his reserves, and found himself unable to upgrade crossbows - which were more or less useless agaisnt modern cavalry. Grabbing new tech is no good if you can't upgrade your units in the field - it took him far too long to field a single cuirassier and field cannons only appeared when I was marching on his capital itself. On the other front, Germany literally bankrupted himself, losing gold hand over fist, meaning there was an upper limit on the amount of units he could field. He had the best producing city in the world in Aachen with its +9 hansa and quarries everywhere, but I could still overwhelm him because I simply could support more and better units than he could.
Lesson eight: spies are useful! Maybe too expensive outside online speed, but I could build one in five turns and have him in place within 4 turns. Then I got perfect intelligence for my attacks. Never used the spy to sabotage or steal, it was far too useful letting me see India and Germany's defensive setups. Sun Tzu: He who knows his enemy and knows himself will be victorious in a hundred battles.
Lesson 9: Online speed actually feels really good. Yes, I raced from knights->Cuirassiers->Tanks in the course of about 15 turns, which is probably a bit fast, but I liked how quickly the game moved, and it was fun to decide things in the industrial/modern era. Against RB players we might even see death robots and nukes. I think it's worth considering for a PBEM here sometime.
Lesson ten: an artillery with an observation balloon can spot for itself. :O
On the whole, I think the war system works very well in the renaissance/industrial era, very much how the designers intended it. You have to balance lots of competing priorities, the unit mix feels good, and with Great Generals in play you have the ability to maneuver. Infantry are still too slow, especially in thick terrain, but apart from that I think everything played out well. Lots of interesting tactical puzzles to solve - the war was a series of interesting decisions every turn, which I think was Sid's design goal for every game he made.
It was also fun to play against people not as hyper-obsessed with this game as you lunatics and stomp them into the ground without breaking a sweat. :P
I think the main takeaway is how industrial era wars play out, since I've never fought one against a human before and the AI is abysmal at warfare. The actual game I think shows little of interest - I won when I got to 4 cities before anyone else had more than 2, then repeatedly compounded that with waves of settlers from every city so I grew exponentially from 25 -> 50 (4->8 cities) then from 50->75 (8->17 cities) and from 75->100 (17->27 cities). With monumentality and pillaged faith I was still founding cities on the final turns (one strategic outpost to control the pass to Hungary, mostly as a cheeky use of faith). Not a lot to learn there - I had fantastic land to develop and I love packing in as many cities as I can. My empires are always wide and rarely "tall" - the only city I had hit 15 population was conquered Poutine, while Germany and Hungary both hit that mark before I ever even got there.
The war was fun, though. It goes to show how much proper planning and preparation pay off - Hungary declared war on Japan on turn 3 (per his report), and only conquered Japan on turn 96, a shocking 93-turn war to conquer, in the end, 3 underdeveloped cities. Hungary didn't gain a sufficient advantage before declaring war, maybe underestimating how easy it is to kick out ancient and classical units in a short time.
By contrast, I spent about 20 turns preparing for my conquest, training a large force mostly of cavalry (due to resource constraints, mostly - I could use horses/iron to train knights/coursers, but needed iron/niter to train the equivalent infantry). I also kept the pump on until the very end of the game, still always having at least 10 cities on military builds on the final turn (easy when you have 32 cities at the end!). The result was it took me 19 turns to go from the frontier to capturing India's capital. I played against the AI a bit last night and it took only 10 turns after that to mop up every remaining Indian city apart from Mysore. You want to go in with an overwhelming strength advantage - I had about twice India's military strength, but even worse for him, it was mostly in the form of higher-quality units. As a result, I did more damage and took less damage in every battle, so his strength degraded more rapidly than mine.
So, lesson one: Be prepared.
Lesson two: Force mix matters. Infantry, I found, was largely unneeded past the late medieval era. The reason for that is city defenses - the best way to take an ancient or medieval city is via a ram/siege tower and infantry assault. Ranged and cavalry units are too heavily nerfed against cities to make them viable against walls. But once Renaissance Walls are up, you really need bombards (and artillery) to bust later defenses - and if you have those, then you can take cities with cavalry fairly easily. Infantry help, and are useful to have along, but cavalry's greater speed, greater hitting power (in every era), the pillaging ability of light cavalry, all made those my real war-winners. The cavalry won every battle, you'll notice, while the infantry just cleaned up the cities as the horse were racing ahead to the next front.
Lesson three: Plan your resources in advance. Niter and especially oil are in short supply. Niter is mostly important for muskets (to take late medieval cities) and then bombards (for everything after that), but once you've got your core force of city crackers out the pinch lessons. Oil, though, is consumed per turn, not once per build, meaning you will only ever be able to support a limited force of modern units. Since I was fighting on three fronts, I had to really carefully judge where to upgrade and where to rely on less-cutting edge units. Which brings me to point 4...
Lesson four: The two most crucial techs for warfare in the modern age are Flight and Refining. Flight enables observation balloons, which makes all city defenses obsolete. You HAVE to have a superior army once your enemy gets flight, or you lose every city, one by one. I was able to race across Canada so quickly because my bombards were taking no damage at all in every siege. If I'd had to come into range, India could have damaged them - I don't think killed them, I kept them well-protected - and would have forced more periods of rest and recuperation. As it was, I conquered basically as quickly as the siege units could traverse the map.
Refining is even more important. Every single modern unit - infantry, artillery, tanks, helicopters, early planes - takes oil to maintain. You only get oil at refining. Infantry is easy to beeline - I think India even managed it, there at the end - but you can't build them without refining first (or an ally feeding you oil, meaning HE has refining). By contrast, cuirassiers and cavalry are relatively easy to beeline and take no hard to find resources - so if you war in this era, your opponent will be able to match your quality relatively soon.
Lesson five: Ranged units are overrated, cavalry are underrated. Maybe this is the wrong conclusion to draw, but India put maybe 20 crossbows and later field cannons into the field against about 15 combined knights/cuirassiers/cavalry from me. I built 4 field cannons (mostly thinking I could use them to defend cities?) but I think they were all wasted - I hardly used them ebcause they just couldn't keep up, and were no good against cities. The problem gets bad as you get into the modern era - machine guns cost as much as fighters with less strength and less range and flexibility, just requiring no resources! Anyway, a crossbow-heavy army will fall to a knight-heavy army. If your opponent gets cuirassiers - which is at the same tech as field cannon - he'll be able to decimate you.
The reason is ranged units need to be protected, meaning they can't hold territory themselves, they just get swamped. They can garrison cities well enough, but again, observation balloons - you have to come out and fight, and when you do, your ranged units will inflict a small amount of damage and then get wiped out. It's possible India just didn't build enough frontline combat units, though, and that with proper protection his field cannons would have done more.
Lesson six: Corps can exacerbate a tech advantage, but they can't really make up for a tech disadvantage. Which makes sense. A corps adds +10 to a unit at the cost of another unit, an upgrade often adds +20 strength. Don't rely on corps to save you
Lesson seven: Don't neglect gold. I was the only player with significant commercial hubs and markets (I got all but 1 Great Merchants earned in the game), and I was the only player who could support my large army. India maintained a positive income but burned out all his reserves, and found himself unable to upgrade crossbows - which were more or less useless agaisnt modern cavalry. Grabbing new tech is no good if you can't upgrade your units in the field - it took him far too long to field a single cuirassier and field cannons only appeared when I was marching on his capital itself. On the other front, Germany literally bankrupted himself, losing gold hand over fist, meaning there was an upper limit on the amount of units he could field. He had the best producing city in the world in Aachen with its +9 hansa and quarries everywhere, but I could still overwhelm him because I simply could support more and better units than he could.
Lesson eight: spies are useful! Maybe too expensive outside online speed, but I could build one in five turns and have him in place within 4 turns. Then I got perfect intelligence for my attacks. Never used the spy to sabotage or steal, it was far too useful letting me see India and Germany's defensive setups. Sun Tzu: He who knows his enemy and knows himself will be victorious in a hundred battles.
Lesson 9: Online speed actually feels really good. Yes, I raced from knights->Cuirassiers->Tanks in the course of about 15 turns, which is probably a bit fast, but I liked how quickly the game moved, and it was fun to decide things in the industrial/modern era. Against RB players we might even see death robots and nukes. I think it's worth considering for a PBEM here sometime.
Lesson ten: an artillery with an observation balloon can spot for itself. :O
On the whole, I think the war system works very well in the renaissance/industrial era, very much how the designers intended it. You have to balance lots of competing priorities, the unit mix feels good, and with Great Generals in play you have the ability to maneuver. Infantry are still too slow, especially in thick terrain, but apart from that I think everything played out well. Lots of interesting tactical puzzles to solve - the war was a series of interesting decisions every turn, which I think was Sid's design goal for every game he made.
It was also fun to play against people not as hyper-obsessed with this game as you lunatics and stomp them into the ground without breaking a sweat. :P
I Think I'm Gwangju Like It Here
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
A blog about my adventures in Korea, and whatever else I feel like writing about.
economy you were running?
