Epic Three: The Age of the Rifle


When I was thinking about this game prior to starting, I expected that I would be carrying out my conquest with tanks and marines, probably with air power for support. At the very least, I expected to be using destroyers and transports to carry my forces from city to city. The funny thing is that when I actually began playing the game and got a look at Egypt/America after trading for their world maps, I realized that I didn't need to wait that long. All of their cities were on the coast, which meant that I could knock out coastal defenses just by building large numbers of frigates. With enough galleons for transport, I wouldn't need to walk from city to city, but could simply sail from one location to the next, in similar fashion to what I did in the Epic Two game. Finally, and most importantly, with my huge amount of territory (25 cities), I had an inexhaustible supply of soldiers to throw at the AI civs. I could produce 25 rifles out of thin air every 15 turns, and with Hatty and FDR slow to grab Rifling themselves, there was a window of opportunity here where I could fight with rifles and cannon against medieval units. That window would be small, and the logistics nightmarish in carrying on a campaign on the other side of the world, but I was confident I could do it. Who needs airports and more advanced units? I can get this done right here in the Renaissance period!

With that in mind, here was the plan for my military conquest:

Unfortunately this is a little crude, so let me explain. I drafted a round of rifles out of all my cities, and sent them over to Cuzco where they joined together with my upgraded medieval forces and set sail to the east. After crossing the International Date line, they would hit Egypt and attack from there in two groups. Yes, although my soldiers would appear to be attacking Egypt in one massive blow, in actual fact I would be running two largely separate campaigns: one for the east coast, and one for the west coast. And I needed frigates and galleons enough to cover both sides of Egypt, without which the whole thing wouldn't work. With luck, both groups would fight their way up each side of the Egyptian continent and proceed onto America when they finished.

But it wouldn't be efficient to just send more reinforcements behind the initial wave of soldiers, as the supply lines would quickly get ridiculously long. Therefore, once I reached a certain critical point, I planned to launch a separate invasion wave off the northwest corner of my continent, from which point the second group of conscripts would leave on their journey. They would then open yet another front in America, and would require their own galleons for transport and their own frigates for protection/bombardment of enemy cities. The logistics for this whole thing are going to be a great deal of fun. A grasp of naval operations in Civ4 is not optional if you're heading down the Conquest route in this game!

Enough with the planning, now for the execution. I declare on Hatty in 1682AD and am greeted by this sight:

Umm... I may have over-estimated the AI here.

Honestly, my initial thought when I saw this was not relief that I was easily going to take Memphis, it was fear that other players might have attacked Egypt even earlier, given Hatty's weakness. Guess we'll find that out on report day. This certainly was an easy first conquest. Still, it wasn't about capturing the first city - I knew I could do that. The tough part was going to be sustaining this campaign so far away from home for a long period of time. Might as well buckle up, this could take a while. Memphis was indeed captured in 1685 with no losses.

As the frigates and galleons composing Group #2 rounded the southern coast of the Egyptian continent, I ran into Hatty's counter-attack force:

Only problem is, Hatty has placed them all on ships. And with my control of the seas, that was a mistake. I first attacked Hatty's naval stack with one of my frigates and killed her own defending frigate (and I got lucky there, winning at 30% odds), then my other frigates attacked and sank the three galleons you can see here. Six knights and a war elephant straight to the bottom, glug glug glug. This literally was Hatty's entire counter force, as once these units went to the bottom of the sea, I never saw her attack out of her cities at all. The AI did a good job of protecting the ships too - but I just had a bigger and badder navy on hand. These frigates can do more than just drop city defenses, ya know!

With Hatty's ships now lying 10,000 leagues under the sea, the path was cleared for Group #2 to attack Thebes. My five frigates on the eastern coast bombed the defenses from 105% to 0% in two turns, and then my rifles/grenadiers/cannon went to work. Against medieval defenders, the results were what you'd expect:

I kept Thebes, but I didn't plan on keeping all of the cities over here on this continent. Since I was going for Conquest and not Domination, cities that I didn't feel like garrisoning could simply be razed to the ground. For example, on the same 1694 turn that Group #2 took Thebes, Group #1 attacked and razed Alexandria on the western coast. You can see the cannon in position at the top of the screenshot above. Three cities already down, two separate advances proceeding up each coast - this is a lot of fun here.

The usual order of things in this campaign was to sail up to a city and bombard it with my frigates while the ground troops were unloaded. Then on the following turn the frigates would bombard the defenses to zero while the ground pounders attacked and razed the city. On the following turn, the ships would load up the soldiers and push on to the next city, where the process would repeat all over again. I would spend a turn or two resting where appropriate, but generally I was willing to sacrifice units from time to time in order to keep pushing forward more quickly. Where the defenses were weak, I wouldn't even bother unloading the troops and would simply take cities amphibiously:

99.7% odds? No need to unload the units, just blitz through from the sea and keep on moving. This was at Heliopolis, which I razed in 1700AD. Now you can go even faster later in the game with more advanced units (in particular, once you get carriers/fighters to airstrike defenders and marines/City Raider tanks for true amphibious assaults), but even here with more primitive units, this Renaissance variant of the Sirian Doctrine proved extremely effective. You certainly don't have time to WALK from city to city, for heaven's sake! Walking is for chumps and suckers. My soldiers travel in style, cruising from city to city on their transports. It's the only way to get this kind of conquest done in any kind of a reasonable timeframe.

Anyway, I started the war in 1682, and here's the progress I had made by 1700 (6 turns):

About half of mainland Egypt has been taken out so far, and the northern half remains to go. Hatty also has a number of cities on offshore islands (and one of the reasons I wanted to attack NOW instead of later was to stop the AIs from plopping more of these settlements down). I chatted frequently with Hatty (and later FDR) just to make sure that there weren't any new settlements not on my maps yet (you can see them all on the AI city list in the diplomacy screen), and I did in fact find one Egyptian city this way. As far as my own forces, Group #1 is outside Pi-Ramesses, the one city on the entire map not on the coast (it took one extra turn there because my cannon had to bomb the city defenses instead of my frigates). Group #2 is heading for Elephantine; it may LOOK like I've bypassed the city, but that's just due to the fact that it's on the eastern coast instead of the western coast. I really am running two campaigns here which are almost totally separate from one another. Unfortunately, there were no canal cities anywhere in Egypt to send ships from one coast to the other, so my planning and logistics had to be pretty good.

Here's a demonstration of my frigates in action over at Elephantine a couple turns later:

Each frigate reduces the defenses of a city by 10% with each shot, so you can drop the defenses of any city to zero in just two turns if you have five frigates on hand. That's quite a lot of ships, and this stuff is much easier to do with more advanced units, but if you need to conquer the world in a hurry, you make due the best you can. Due to its strategic location in the center of Egypt, I captured Elephantine. Pi-Ramesses was not so lucky, and it was razed to the ground on this same turn (1706). What a bad location the AI chose for that particular city!

Now I had planned to knock Hatty off the mainland before declaring war on FDR, but on this same turn I ran into a target of opportunity which was simply too good to pass up:

Roosevelt sailed a galleon with a settler on board into range of my frigates, evidently intending to poach some land in what used to be southern Egypt. There was no way that I could resist that particular temptation, so I declared war on him too and sent a few more units down to converse with those Egyptian knights at the bottom of the ocean. On the plus side, this now allowed me to attack the American colony of Detroit over by my main continent, which I took out in 1715.

Continuing my progress up the Egyptian coastlines, Byblos was captured in 1712, Giza (west coast) and Hieraconopolis (east coast) captured in 1715 and 1718, respectively. With the razing of El-Amarna in 1721, I now had complete control over the Egyptian half of the AI continent. I should have snapped a picture of that, but forgot to do so. At the first American city on the former Egyptian border, I ran into a major dogfight. FDR had a decent force assembled there, and he attacked out of the city with his grenadiers, killing several of my conscript rifles. Not good. I took the city, but my losses were higher than I would have liked:

Nevertheless, with the razing of Chicago, I now had solid control over all of former Egypt. Unfortunately, FDR showed up with rifles for the first time in 1724. Dang it. That's not going to make this any easier... At least I was able to shuffle some extra cannon from Group #1 to Group #2 here where the land was narrow between the two coasts. Both of my forces were REALLY beat up by now, but they were still plucking along. They were totally isolated at the moment, but reinforcements were on the way, preparing to open up a new front on the east coast of America.

As I explained on the outset of this page, the SECOND wave of conscripts were on their (long) way to get into the fight now. Beginning in 1709AD, my cities began to come out of their draft anger and I began conscripting more rifles from each city. Technically I could have drafted without waiting for the 15-turn unhappiness penalty to wear off, but it was going to take me 15 turns to get enough galleons built and routed over to the west coast of my island anyway, so I didn't see any need to draft my cities into the ground. As it was, I had to whip out additional galleons from several different coastal cities in the west, abusing them very harshly. Paris, where I built the Heroic Epic, built nothing but frigates and galleons for ages. Not many games where you'll hear someone say that! But galleons were what I most needed, so that's what I built in my top unit-producing city.

I put one final city out on the extreme northwest of my island to serve as a staging point for all the soldiers. They looked quite impressive filtering into Land's End, all my conscript rifles along with a scattering of cannon:

These units are all on goto orders heading to the tile northwest of Land's End; I didn't setup this picture in any way, but it certainly came out looking pretty neat! That's a lot of conscripts. Have I mentioned how incredibly good conscripts are for an Aggressive civ like Huayna? They get the default Combat I built in, and along with a barracks and Theocracy, all those units start with 3XP. That's enough to take Pinch, and if you win a single battle, it's usually enough for a third promotion. Pretty good for units pulled out of thin air! Conscripts for an Aggressive civ are just about as good as regular units for a non-Aggressive civ. You've got to leverage your civ traits to your advantage in a game like this!

Here is my navy ferrying the Second Wave over to America a couple turns later:

Just the way I drew it up! Ha!

I had fewer frigates in the area here, but my ships were still fairly well protected. I lost one galleon to an American frigate that came out of nowhere, probably was just fog-busting and happened to run into my units. I later lost a second one when I had two frigates one turn away from protecting it. Argh! But those were the only two, and otherwise I didn't lose any of my forces, so overall I was quite pleased. It didn't hurt that I had almost a score of frigates out there bombarding city defenses and protecting my galleons.

In terms of the war, my cities were experiencing severe war weariness (as you would expect from the 50% luxuries I was running in the above shot), so there was pressure on me to finish off Egypt as soon as possible and move out from under a large part of the unhappiness. Hatty had several cities scattered across the map still, but I had detachments on the way to cover them all. 1734 was a busy turn, as Portland was razed in the steamy American jungles, Atlanta was captured to gain control over American ivory, and the Egyptian colony of Avaris was auto-razed. On the other side of the map, the soldiers of the second front captured Seattle the following turn in 1736 (I would have had it earlier, but I ran into the RNG of doom and lost several battles I should have win. But that's why I try to make sure to bring some extra forces "just in case.") Abydos taken from Hatty in the extreme northwest in 1738, and the final Egyptian city fell in 1740:

One down, one more to go.

I did kill that American longbow/settler pair on the island above; no sense in having to come back and take out another city later on. Miami, another American city on the west coast, was also razed on the same turn in 1740. Now when my group of conscripts from the second wave attacked the American city of San Francisco, they found a nice defense being provided by FDR, although certainly not something they couldn't handle:

FDR is still in the process of upgrading his longbows to rifles here, by the way; when I first got here, there was one rifle and the rest longbows. All the more reason not to delay. Nevertheless, things look good here at San Francisco. Why then does the city have more defenders than the capital of Washington?!

I took these two pictures on the exact same turn, and I have no idea what's going on here. Evidently an offshore island has greater defensive priority than the American capital. Anyway, San Francisco fell on this turn in 1742 despite the many defenders. Atlanta was recaptured the following turn by an American cav (at 25% odds, sheesh), so I retook it and razed it to the ground. Should have done that in the first place... Washington itself was toast just shortly thereafter:

I pushed a little too hard here, attacking from the seas when my land units were wiped out, and took rather heavy casulties. But we're getting real close to the end here, and so I was ready to accept higher losses to keep pushing ahead. New York followed Washington on the bonfires on the following turn:

Since that was the Hindu Holy City, I thought it was important enough to deserve its own picture. And yes, that's the shattered remnants of Group #1 from the invasion of Egypt much earlier, limping in here to take one of the last American cities on the north coast. I'll admit that they had some help from the Second Wave conscripts, but this was kind of the final feather in their cap at the end of a grueling campaign. Look how far they had come! They wiped out every city on the western coast of the AI continent. I was mighty proud of those guys. In addition to New York, Phillie in the east and Houston in the south were also razed in 1748.

After razing Buffalo at the start of the turn, here's where FDR stood at the halfway point of the 18th century:

Looks like America's last stand, heh. I had been hoping to get my conquest done by 1750, but I just missed it by a few turns. Ah well. Nobody's perfect. St. Louis fell in 1752 despite some really HORRIBLE dice luck, forcing me to use two more conscripts than I had expected to take the city. I thought that I could get both Houston and LA in 1754, but after all the combat was done, I ended up one unit short of taking LA - one American cannon remaining with like 2 health left. ONE unit short of finishing off America! Argh! If only I hadn't had bad dice luck at St. Louis... or if I had not lost one of my transports... or if I had gone back and grabbed some of the rifles I drafted out of Egypt's cities... Nuts. I got delayed by a whole turn here because I literally was one unit short on the last city. Don't ever let it be said that one unit doesn't make a difference!

*Sigh*

Should have been taken in 1754, not 1756. I just hope that one turn doesn't make a difference! Go on to the next page for the wrapup and final comments.