Civ 5

[Nine]

What sort of overall strategies do you guys use?

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I have a fairly formulaic strategy for domination games.

Early on, I focus on getting 3-4 cities up and running and exploring my immediate area. I build no more military units than I have to, and only when I need them. If there's an ocean, build a naval unit early and set it to auto-explore.

In the early- to mid- stages of the game, I do nothing intentionally provocative, and use the time to build relationships and figure out who's strong and who's weak, and do whatever I can to encourage other civs to war with each other, but not with me.

Mid-game, while they're focused on beating each other up, I'll focus on science and culture, and building wonders that help that, as well as ones with military value. Get your economic engine rolling. Don't build a large military yet, but do keep enough units to make other civs think twice about attacking (and reserve capital to buy more). My plan is to never *need* to defend myself (it doesn't always work out that way). Explore the map. Choose culture perks carefully.

The idea is to be non-threatening and maintain a technological edge, and have an advantage in culture and buffs from city improvements and wonders.

I'll usually have an idea exactly when I'm going to switch gears to the offensive. It depends a lot on the map and which civ I'm playing. If it's a primarily land map, I'll get aggressive when I develop gunpowder (presumably, I'll be first by a fair margin). If it's an island map, I'll wait - sometimes as long as when I develop submarines (submarines vs. frigates and privateers is like shooting fish in a bucket).

Once I go aggressive, I don't rush straight to capital cities to take them. First, I'm going to destroy my opponent's ability to wage war, while retaining my own. Destroy his units wherever you see them. Force him to spend money and use production capacity to replace them. Drain his coffers. Don't overextend your forces. Use the fog of war to your advantage.

Sometimes, if an opponent offers peace, I'll take it, if only to get a 10 turn breather to consolidate my forces - but he's going to have to pay dearly for it (as in gold, strategic resources, and a city). If I'm playing this strategy, I'll be in a much, much better position when the treaty ends then he will. Be flexible - sometimes you'll have to offer peace to someone you're beating up if another more pressing threat pops up.

This strategy works really well on sea maps. I'm still playing around with it on land maps.

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I do more or less the same thing. I try to get down the 3-4 cities with a nice amount of space for them to expand. Get a lot of farms down to make them grow nice and fast, prioritize science first and culture second.

Hopefully I get it done fairly quick then just sit back and wait until I'm really far ahead on the tech's and getting lots of wonders. Then I take a couple of artillery and my a couple of my best infantry units and take cities one by one.

I also take the peace offerings to recover my forces, occasionally you get offered other cities too if they fear they might lose their capital. I pretty much raze everything that I can. It just keeps me from having the entire lot declare war and cause me issues. Not that it would be too bad, by that point I'm being gifted units by city states that can defend my cities with no maintenance cost.

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I've found a great early game defensive tactic is 2 sets of archers, if you have some natural barriers you use them to slow their forces while picking off their numbers. As soon as one gets damaged to move it back to heal and use the other. Even if you get all the way back to your city you can really do a lot of damage with the 2 archers plus a city.

You wouldn't believe the sizes of some of the armies I've brought down like that.