Post by Elledge on Jul 16, 2006 11:54:26 GMT -5
Well, I'm coming up around 300 games played on the ladder now, which is either a lot or not much, depending on how you look at it. Probably three quarters of those games have been inland sea Renaissance teamers.
When you play 40 or 50 Ren teamers you either start enjoying it or you stop playing it. A lot of people stop playing it:
This seems like a pretty popular viewpoint from a lot of solid players on ladder. I don't feel it's true at all; in fact, I think Renaissance is almost the only era in which you have a good chance at doing reasonable damage to someone when you have fairly close numbers and equal tech. The key to this damage is Musketeers, Conquistadors, and Cavalry, and I think there's a dearth of people who know how to use them well.
There are two steps to winning a Renaissance game by military might.
Step 1: Outnumber your enemy[/u]
This is a really simple step. You gotta outnumber the other guy, or the only way you will win is by a surprise rush into a weak city, and no half-decent player will fall for that. Ever.
You need to either outproduce them, or outmatch them on one front. In the cavalry era especially it's popular to (assuming 5v5) move units from 3 or 4 players down to one front to try to rush an advantage and a kill there. This is dangerous, obviously, but it works often. My personal preferred method is to just have about five times as much production as the other guy.
To be honest, if you aren't near the top in production (assuming you aren't in the back teching) in every game, that's what you should be working on. Building a strong empire is literally 95% of the game, and it's a skill that will serve you equally in Renaissance and Ancient and FFAs and island matches and CTONs and teamers. Getting better at that will improve your game much more than learning some military strategy. This post is aimed mostly at people who are good players but wondering how to attack well in Renaissance.
Step 2: Kick your enemy's ass[/u]
OK, so we have as many units or more as the other guy. To attack!
Attacking in any post-ancient era in Civ 4 is nothing more and nothing less than the art of catapult manipulation. If there were no catapults, you could just walk in with a big mixed stack and run over the other guy, right? Catapults are what makes it difficult.
There are three fundamental ways to combat your opponent's catapults, and they come up again and again.
A) Force your opponent to waste all his catapults.
This is the most satisfying option, and it's my favorite. Remember, catapults aren't free. 23 hammers is a third of a cavalry and half a musketeer. If your opponent is throwing away catapults turn after turn without getting a return in the form of killing your units, he's going to be outnumbered very badly soon. Here are some strategies for getting your opponent to blow those catapults.
Really fast reinforcement
Say you have half a dozen musketeers on a hill, just itching to get catapulted and die. Your opponent rubs his hands in glee and throws four catapults at your stack. Boom! But in the blink of an eye, you move in three full-health musketeers from a nearby forest! BLAST! Plan foiled! You got a free upgrade or two, your opponent wasted some catapults, and after a few turns with a medic you're all healed up.
If you're watching the front and waiting for it, you can almost always reinforce a stack in between before your opponent can attack following a catapult hit. Of course, this is predicated on you being watching the front and waiting for it, and sometimes you have to do other things on your turn. Still, turns are long and you should be able to pull this off the majority of the time if you are prepared and your opponent isn't perfect. Just keep a close eye on how many catapults your opponent has available; if he hits you with four and you reinforce, it does you no good if he has another four waiting in his city.
Overwhelming force
If you can double- or triple-threat (non-culture-bombed) cities, you can basically force an opponent to lay his hand and attack your stack with whatever he has available (assuming numbers are even or in your favor.) Since you know he has to catapult you or lose a city, you can be absolutely prepared to quick reinforce immediately when he does as above. My favorite situations are when my opponent can't do anything but throw catapults turn after turn at my stack in a forest, because if he lets up for a minute I'll be healthy enough to kill his city.
Tricky feint attacks
I like to call this one the AlboRasta maneuver, because I once pulled this off five times in one game against him a couple months ago. If it's late game and you are in the huge-cav-stack phase when each front might have 50+ cavalry available, you can exploit the fact that there's no good way to check how many units are in a stack.
Suppose you have 65 cavs and he has 40 (you can check numbers with the military advisor, do it regularly!) He also has a lot of defensive units in his front city with 80%, though, he has a crapload of catapults, and it's all flat land so if you try to get by he'll catapult and kill you. How can you use your very strong numbers to your advantage here?
One way is to separate your cavalry out into a small stack of 21 (just enough so it shows up as a scary "..." stack to your enemy) and a large stack of however-many-you-have-left. At the end of the turn, make a fake doublemove along the north or south of his territory, moving into a position where he needs to catapult you.
Now, with seven seconds on the clock, nobody has time for the military advisor. 99% of the time, a competent player will assume it's your full force, and hit it with all his catapults as soon as he can click on them.
Quick reinforce! (If you didn't manage to reinforce it in time - lag spike? - you can just move in with the rest of your cavalry anyway and kill whatever he hit your stack with, although it might be riskier depending on the positioning.) Now his concentration on defensive units will bite him in the ass, as he doesn't have the firepower to take down your stack without catapults. Next turn, just walk your cavs back out, giggling mightily. Hopefully he just wasted all his catapults on giving you free promotions; with his lack of catapults and your budding formation cavalry you're that much closer to a win.
B) Go where the catapults aren't.
Catapults share a huge weakness with a lot of other units; namely, they only have one movement point. If you can cut roads between the enemy catapults and a destination, they become laughably helpless really quick. Usually this takes the form of trapping a front city which has a catapult stack in it and killing the roads to the back of his civ with musketeers; then you walk back with the majority of your force and just pillage and rape away.
This also means that catapults aren't really very good at defending wide fronts, unless the opponent has loads of them. If you see that an opponent's catapults are more than one turn away from an area (my favorite disposable scouts are fast workers ), you can often move into there and harass him before his catapults can arrive.
It can be effective to combine this with the tricky feint attack; send a 21-stack to one area, get his catapults on super red alert, and then go f**k the nuts out of the other side of his front.
C) Don't make big f**king stacks.
No matter how tricky and awesome you are, this is usually the best option, if the terrain permits.
If you're a vaguely serious chess player (I am) you're probably aware that one of the general basic precepts up there with "protect your back rank" and "don't double pawns" is that if you're ahead in material, it's usually a good idea to trade off pieces. The idea behind this is that although a two-pawn advantage is nice when there are 30 pieces on the board, if you trade down until all that's left is your two pawns and your king, suddenly you win. The same applies to civ4. If you have a numbers advantage, it's to your general benefit if you can force 1:1 unit trades with your opponent.
So in the cavalry era, this usually manifests itself in the form of a "scorched earth" strategy. Since there is no unit which is a strict counter to cavalry on flat ground until rifles, the only thing you really have to fear per se is catapults. (The enemy has a small advantage if he hits you with cavalry, since the attacker has a chance to withdraw, but it shouldn't amount to much.) That leads to the ability for the stronger side to advance with relative impunity, keeping stacks of 1 or 2 cavalry in front of his larger forces pillaging improvements and roads.
This also often leads to the quick death of a player who figures "well, i'll just build lots of muskets or pikes and try to gangbang his cavalry, since they're cheaper units than cavs." They're also 1-move units. If you quickly pillage away key roads near his pikemen and move on, he is going to be dipped in crap.
This strategy generally involves a lot of quick reinforcement and quick retreat of damaged units as described above, as the other guy hits your single cavalry with units like pikes and catapults, hoping to weaken them enough to get a free kill. This doesn't usually work out very well, because even if you don't reinforce in time, the unit he uses to kill your cavalry will (if you are careful not to pile up cavs on vulnerable spaces) be sitting right there and you can kill it back; going back to the 1:1 trade. But be careful doing this if you don't consider yourself a fast and experienced military player, because if you aren't on the ball your opponent does have the opportunity to outmaneuver and outplay you.
Subsection: Small stack musketeer/conquistador rape
This sums up what happens in a lot of games I play.
Running a scorched earth strategy with musketeers is like doing it with cavalry, except that you don't have to think about it hardly at all, because he can't even trade you 1:1 reliably if you get on hills!
Using musketeers is basically a terrain game. A musketeer on a hill doesn't die to anything; the closest it gets is a gunpowder knight, which has a small disadvantage against a 2c+gunpowder musketeer, and a big disadvantage against a 2c+formation musketeer; or a gunpowder musketman, which has a small disadvantage against a 2c+formation musketeer and a big disadvantage against a 2c+gunpowder musketeer. Once you get on a hill, you're untouchable unless your opponent is ready to throw multiple units at your platform.
So the optimal outcome is just filling up every f**king hill and forest in sight. Get on there and don't get off. Use the hills you control to jump over and doublemove to hills you don't control yet. Keep units nearby to quick-reinforce if your opponent decides he wants to throw knights at your musketeers.
If your opponent plays aggressively and does throw units on your hills, trying to dislodge you, you're still doing great; remember 1:1 trades should be in your favor, and his attacks won't even be doing him 1:1 unless you get unlucky. Very often an opponent can lose two units attacking a fortified hill musketeer before he kills it. Keep pushing more and more units at him and your advantage should increase unless he gets large reinforcement (in which case your other front should start winning! If your opponents have to 2v1 or 3v2 on your side to stay alive, that is as close to a win as you can get sometimes.) The biggest risk here is that he'll sacrifice some units to take back his front hills, and fortify them strongly, stopping you from bringing more musketeers in. Try to keep enough units in the area so that he can't do that without massive losses.
If your opponent plays passively and hunkers down in his cities, don't try to attack the cities, or I will make fun of you in all chat. f**k the cities; even taking a city isn't worth it if you have to use all your musketeers to do it and he can take back his land. Pillage him for all he's worth. Bring more and more muskets in until it will take an act of god to remove you from his territory. Crush his mines; crush his windmills; destroy his roads. Consider threatening the player behind him if the terrain in that direction is suitable.
Keep the pressure on and maintain until you suspect that they will have cavalry fairly soon. At that point you need to basically decide between one of three strategies:
Honestly, it's hard to screw up with musketeers - as long as you are very aggressive, you don't expose yourself to losses via catapults, and you don't try for futile city attacks. Also, beware of leaving musketeers on flat land, as gunpowder knights have an odds advantage. But the biggest mistake a lot of people make is simply not pushing in. Musketeers are worse than useless if you just sit them around in your territory waiting, the way you might with cavalry. Never stop advancing, one and two at a time.
I don't play Spain nearly as much, so all I can say about Conquistadors is that they seem about the same. The difference is that speed is more of a crucial factor; if you're fast and lucky, you can get iron and horse from your teammates faster than you can get gunpowder. There is nothing more satisfying than turn 10 conquistadors in your opponents' land, killing their workers. The only reason I'm not as partial to them is because war elephants are a very strong counter, and that means that it's hard to be safe with Conquistadors on hills.
One thing that is becoming more common among savvy players is the tendency to do a good job guarding their hills preemptively with guerilla longbows (before you have Gunpowder) and to chop all their strategic forests in time. Don't you hate smartasses? It's difficult to effectively attack a player if they succeed in covering all their terrain which is reachable from the front. You can try to take control of squares you can use later with your initial longbows; you can also try sailing in galleys if you have enough sea power to defend them, for an additional threat; other than that, your best bet is to hope that their early hammers spent on longbows will give you a long-term expansion and production advantage.
Anyway, this isn't by any means a comprehensive guide, so don't feel that there is a book to be played by; you make up the book. But I hope that this goes toward encouraging more active, strong play in Renaissance and maybe convinces some people to give the era a second look. Try Napoleon today!
When you play 40 or 50 Ren teamers you either start enjoying it or you stop playing it. A lot of people stop playing it:
mrsaturn said:
I was wondering what the appeal was of ancient and ren games- they are by far the most common eras in both CTONs and teamers. Ren games seem to take a lot out of unit strategy... just spam tons of cavalry, since they are by far the best offensive unit...This seems like a pretty popular viewpoint from a lot of solid players on ladder. I don't feel it's true at all; in fact, I think Renaissance is almost the only era in which you have a good chance at doing reasonable damage to someone when you have fairly close numbers and equal tech. The key to this damage is Musketeers, Conquistadors, and Cavalry, and I think there's a dearth of people who know how to use them well.
There are two steps to winning a Renaissance game by military might.
Step 1: Outnumber your enemy[/u]
This is a really simple step. You gotta outnumber the other guy, or the only way you will win is by a surprise rush into a weak city, and no half-decent player will fall for that. Ever.
You need to either outproduce them, or outmatch them on one front. In the cavalry era especially it's popular to (assuming 5v5) move units from 3 or 4 players down to one front to try to rush an advantage and a kill there. This is dangerous, obviously, but it works often. My personal preferred method is to just have about five times as much production as the other guy.
To be honest, if you aren't near the top in production (assuming you aren't in the back teching) in every game, that's what you should be working on. Building a strong empire is literally 95% of the game, and it's a skill that will serve you equally in Renaissance and Ancient and FFAs and island matches and CTONs and teamers. Getting better at that will improve your game much more than learning some military strategy. This post is aimed mostly at people who are good players but wondering how to attack well in Renaissance.
Step 2: Kick your enemy's ass[/u]
OK, so we have as many units or more as the other guy. To attack!
Attacking in any post-ancient era in Civ 4 is nothing more and nothing less than the art of catapult manipulation. If there were no catapults, you could just walk in with a big mixed stack and run over the other guy, right? Catapults are what makes it difficult.
There are three fundamental ways to combat your opponent's catapults, and they come up again and again.
A) Force your opponent to waste all his catapults.
This is the most satisfying option, and it's my favorite. Remember, catapults aren't free. 23 hammers is a third of a cavalry and half a musketeer. If your opponent is throwing away catapults turn after turn without getting a return in the form of killing your units, he's going to be outnumbered very badly soon. Here are some strategies for getting your opponent to blow those catapults.
Really fast reinforcement
Say you have half a dozen musketeers on a hill, just itching to get catapulted and die. Your opponent rubs his hands in glee and throws four catapults at your stack. Boom! But in the blink of an eye, you move in three full-health musketeers from a nearby forest! BLAST! Plan foiled! You got a free upgrade or two, your opponent wasted some catapults, and after a few turns with a medic you're all healed up.
If you're watching the front and waiting for it, you can almost always reinforce a stack in between before your opponent can attack following a catapult hit. Of course, this is predicated on you being watching the front and waiting for it, and sometimes you have to do other things on your turn. Still, turns are long and you should be able to pull this off the majority of the time if you are prepared and your opponent isn't perfect. Just keep a close eye on how many catapults your opponent has available; if he hits you with four and you reinforce, it does you no good if he has another four waiting in his city.
Overwhelming force
If you can double- or triple-threat (non-culture-bombed) cities, you can basically force an opponent to lay his hand and attack your stack with whatever he has available (assuming numbers are even or in your favor.) Since you know he has to catapult you or lose a city, you can be absolutely prepared to quick reinforce immediately when he does as above. My favorite situations are when my opponent can't do anything but throw catapults turn after turn at my stack in a forest, because if he lets up for a minute I'll be healthy enough to kill his city.
Tricky feint attacks
I like to call this one the AlboRasta maneuver, because I once pulled this off five times in one game against him a couple months ago. If it's late game and you are in the huge-cav-stack phase when each front might have 50+ cavalry available, you can exploit the fact that there's no good way to check how many units are in a stack.
Suppose you have 65 cavs and he has 40 (you can check numbers with the military advisor, do it regularly!) He also has a lot of defensive units in his front city with 80%, though, he has a crapload of catapults, and it's all flat land so if you try to get by he'll catapult and kill you. How can you use your very strong numbers to your advantage here?
One way is to separate your cavalry out into a small stack of 21 (just enough so it shows up as a scary "..." stack to your enemy) and a large stack of however-many-you-have-left. At the end of the turn, make a fake doublemove along the north or south of his territory, moving into a position where he needs to catapult you.
Now, with seven seconds on the clock, nobody has time for the military advisor. 99% of the time, a competent player will assume it's your full force, and hit it with all his catapults as soon as he can click on them.
Quick reinforce! (If you didn't manage to reinforce it in time - lag spike? - you can just move in with the rest of your cavalry anyway and kill whatever he hit your stack with, although it might be riskier depending on the positioning.) Now his concentration on defensive units will bite him in the ass, as he doesn't have the firepower to take down your stack without catapults. Next turn, just walk your cavs back out, giggling mightily. Hopefully he just wasted all his catapults on giving you free promotions; with his lack of catapults and your budding formation cavalry you're that much closer to a win.
B) Go where the catapults aren't.
Catapults share a huge weakness with a lot of other units; namely, they only have one movement point. If you can cut roads between the enemy catapults and a destination, they become laughably helpless really quick. Usually this takes the form of trapping a front city which has a catapult stack in it and killing the roads to the back of his civ with musketeers; then you walk back with the majority of your force and just pillage and rape away.
This also means that catapults aren't really very good at defending wide fronts, unless the opponent has loads of them. If you see that an opponent's catapults are more than one turn away from an area (my favorite disposable scouts are fast workers ), you can often move into there and harass him before his catapults can arrive.
It can be effective to combine this with the tricky feint attack; send a 21-stack to one area, get his catapults on super red alert, and then go f**k the nuts out of the other side of his front.
C) Don't make big f**king stacks.
No matter how tricky and awesome you are, this is usually the best option, if the terrain permits.
If you're a vaguely serious chess player (I am) you're probably aware that one of the general basic precepts up there with "protect your back rank" and "don't double pawns" is that if you're ahead in material, it's usually a good idea to trade off pieces. The idea behind this is that although a two-pawn advantage is nice when there are 30 pieces on the board, if you trade down until all that's left is your two pawns and your king, suddenly you win. The same applies to civ4. If you have a numbers advantage, it's to your general benefit if you can force 1:1 unit trades with your opponent.
So in the cavalry era, this usually manifests itself in the form of a "scorched earth" strategy. Since there is no unit which is a strict counter to cavalry on flat ground until rifles, the only thing you really have to fear per se is catapults. (The enemy has a small advantage if he hits you with cavalry, since the attacker has a chance to withdraw, but it shouldn't amount to much.) That leads to the ability for the stronger side to advance with relative impunity, keeping stacks of 1 or 2 cavalry in front of his larger forces pillaging improvements and roads.
This also often leads to the quick death of a player who figures "well, i'll just build lots of muskets or pikes and try to gangbang his cavalry, since they're cheaper units than cavs." They're also 1-move units. If you quickly pillage away key roads near his pikemen and move on, he is going to be dipped in crap.
This strategy generally involves a lot of quick reinforcement and quick retreat of damaged units as described above, as the other guy hits your single cavalry with units like pikes and catapults, hoping to weaken them enough to get a free kill. This doesn't usually work out very well, because even if you don't reinforce in time, the unit he uses to kill your cavalry will (if you are careful not to pile up cavs on vulnerable spaces) be sitting right there and you can kill it back; going back to the 1:1 trade. But be careful doing this if you don't consider yourself a fast and experienced military player, because if you aren't on the ball your opponent does have the opportunity to outmaneuver and outplay you.
Subsection: Small stack musketeer/conquistador rape
This sums up what happens in a lot of games I play.
Running a scorched earth strategy with musketeers is like doing it with cavalry, except that you don't have to think about it hardly at all, because he can't even trade you 1:1 reliably if you get on hills!
Using musketeers is basically a terrain game. A musketeer on a hill doesn't die to anything; the closest it gets is a gunpowder knight, which has a small disadvantage against a 2c+gunpowder musketeer, and a big disadvantage against a 2c+formation musketeer; or a gunpowder musketman, which has a small disadvantage against a 2c+formation musketeer and a big disadvantage against a 2c+gunpowder musketeer. Once you get on a hill, you're untouchable unless your opponent is ready to throw multiple units at your platform.
So the optimal outcome is just filling up every f**king hill and forest in sight. Get on there and don't get off. Use the hills you control to jump over and doublemove to hills you don't control yet. Keep units nearby to quick-reinforce if your opponent decides he wants to throw knights at your musketeers.
If your opponent plays aggressively and does throw units on your hills, trying to dislodge you, you're still doing great; remember 1:1 trades should be in your favor, and his attacks won't even be doing him 1:1 unless you get unlucky. Very often an opponent can lose two units attacking a fortified hill musketeer before he kills it. Keep pushing more and more units at him and your advantage should increase unless he gets large reinforcement (in which case your other front should start winning! If your opponents have to 2v1 or 3v2 on your side to stay alive, that is as close to a win as you can get sometimes.) The biggest risk here is that he'll sacrifice some units to take back his front hills, and fortify them strongly, stopping you from bringing more musketeers in. Try to keep enough units in the area so that he can't do that without massive losses.
If your opponent plays passively and hunkers down in his cities, don't try to attack the cities, or I will make fun of you in all chat. f**k the cities; even taking a city isn't worth it if you have to use all your musketeers to do it and he can take back his land. Pillage him for all he's worth. Bring more and more muskets in until it will take an act of god to remove you from his territory. Crush his mines; crush his windmills; destroy his roads. Consider threatening the player behind him if the terrain in that direction is suitable.
Keep the pressure on and maintain until you suspect that they will have cavalry fairly soon. At that point you need to basically decide between one of three strategies:
- Roll in catapults - his roads are gone, right? - and assault his cities from musketeer-defended squares. This is pretty easy going if you have a hill (or, praise God, forest) position next to his city of question. Bombard and destroy with impunity.
- Mass your musketeers in positions where you can double- or triple-threat his cities with lower culture defense, and go for straight up attacks on whatever cities he leaves weakest.
- Just retreat. If you've destroyed his infrastructure and your team is looking strong, but his cities have loads of musketmen and longbows defending them, sometimes it's best to take your victory as it stands and get out before he whittles you down with cavalry. Because of pillaging, you should have an enormous production advantage and have no problem destroying him in the cavalry era.
Honestly, it's hard to screw up with musketeers - as long as you are very aggressive, you don't expose yourself to losses via catapults, and you don't try for futile city attacks. Also, beware of leaving musketeers on flat land, as gunpowder knights have an odds advantage. But the biggest mistake a lot of people make is simply not pushing in. Musketeers are worse than useless if you just sit them around in your territory waiting, the way you might with cavalry. Never stop advancing, one and two at a time.
I don't play Spain nearly as much, so all I can say about Conquistadors is that they seem about the same. The difference is that speed is more of a crucial factor; if you're fast and lucky, you can get iron and horse from your teammates faster than you can get gunpowder. There is nothing more satisfying than turn 10 conquistadors in your opponents' land, killing their workers. The only reason I'm not as partial to them is because war elephants are a very strong counter, and that means that it's hard to be safe with Conquistadors on hills.
One thing that is becoming more common among savvy players is the tendency to do a good job guarding their hills preemptively with guerilla longbows (before you have Gunpowder) and to chop all their strategic forests in time. Don't you hate smartasses? It's difficult to effectively attack a player if they succeed in covering all their terrain which is reachable from the front. You can try to take control of squares you can use later with your initial longbows; you can also try sailing in galleys if you have enough sea power to defend them, for an additional threat; other than that, your best bet is to hope that their early hammers spent on longbows will give you a long-term expansion and production advantage.
Anyway, this isn't by any means a comprehensive guide, so don't feel that there is a book to be played by; you make up the book. But I hope that this goes toward encouraging more active, strong play in Renaissance and maybe convinces some people to give the era a second look. Try Napoleon today!