Civ 5

[Chad32]

I started trying to get some tiny island maps with England, but I'm not sure it won't be too frustrating when trying to get land troops to other islands.

Has anyone been able to successfully get an antagonistic civ to stop attacking a weaker one? I like that you seem to have the option, but I don't know how well it works in practice.

[Jackalope]

Yeah, that didn't work out so well - I quit the game at 1610AD having just achieved Navigation. Got stuck on an spit of useless fucking land (mostly desert, had start bias turned off), couldn't get my cities population really going due to lack of food and my science output was absolute shit.

Managed to stay friendly with everybody, until neighboring Egypt decided to declare war - I had *zero* military at the time, but managed to produce a few archers and repel them. If Egypt had attacked in force, I would have been screwed.

I'm going to try it again, but manage the research order myself so I don't get boned on being able to build some improvements that I really could have used.

[Jackalope]

I started trying to get some tiny island maps with England, but I'm not sure it won't be too frustrating when trying to get land troops to other islands.

Once you get ships of the line and privateers, you don't need to use land troops pretty much at all. I don't worry about taking cities at all until this point of the game, and rarely initiate combat until then.

Once you have ships of the line, you can pretty much dominate the seas. On an island map, at this point all you have to do is prevent yourself from being invaded. Use your spies to learn who's planning what, and position your navy accordingly.

Get Refrigeration and submarines, and you can absolutely control the seas. Park a submarine outside of each port, and any naval unit that is foolish enough the leave port is toast. They will continue to build/buy naval units and embark units, and every one that you sink drains both their production capacity and economy.

Shell enemy cities with ranged naval units (ships of the line and battleships), and take them when it's safe to do so with naval melee units (privateers and destroyers). One thing that can seriously confound this strategy is aircraft and enemy artillery. Artillery is dealt with easily enough, but if an enemy has enough aircraft to bring to bear on an attacking force, I sometimes have to wait until I get nukes to deal with them. If you have enough battleships, it won't matter.

[Chad32]

Melee ships. Of course. Honestly I haven't really used a navy to assault coastal cities much, so I forgot some ships were melee. I could just use a ship to take a port, and build land units from there.

When I do my maps, I try to remember to bring Askia and Seuliman since they have water based bonuses too. Just like if I wanted to play greece, I'd have lots of city states and make sure Attila was on the map.

[Napoléon]

Wtf? You can take cities with ships? I didn't even know that :S

[Jackalope]

Wtf? You can take cities with ships? I didn't even know that :S

Yep, and it's much easier. I always take the coastal raider promotion on naval melee units for that very purpose. I don't use melee ships for naval combat much so the boarding party promotion isn't nearly as useful for my play style.

I'll take a city down low enough on health with ranged units so that I can take the city with one attack - if you don't, you're going to almost certainly lose the unit to the city's ranged attack on the next turn. So the tactic is to shell with ranged units til the health bar is at or near zero and the attack preview shows that the you'll do enough damage to take the city without taking enough damage to destroy your melee unit. By the time your ranged units have taken the next target down, you'll have healed enough to use the same unit in that role again.

You don't usually need more than one melee unit per naval combat group to pull this off. You may occasionally need two if the tactical situation is such that your melee unit can be targeted before it can make it's attack. I tend to keep them back behind my ranged units just close enough to reach the city and attack in one turn - so unless an unseen unit pops out of the fog of war it's safe.

[Napoléon]

So what sea units are also melee units? I think I only ever used ranged units :/

[FatAndFaithless]

Venice + commerce master race.

[Jackalope]

So what sea units are also melee units? I think I only ever used ranged units :/

Trireme, caravel, privateer, ironclad, destroyer. There's also some unique to particular civs. http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Categ...%28Civ5%29

[Napoléon]

Wait a sec, this says for Gods and Kings? I'm only using the vanilla game, don't you need the expansion for this?