Conquest victory

[Birkhan]

How can I achieve Conquest Victory, given the fact that no kind of government allows much more than 60 cities and larger cities cannot be disbanded?


Fritz

[mslama]

The only method I see is to lower city size by starving, sell every building, set all workers to entertainers and wait till city become small enough.

[Locutus]

A few tips:

1. Build lots of happiness buildings
2. Set sliders at min. settings to maximize happiness.
3. Build/conquer as many happiness wonders as possible as early as possible
4. Have lots of entertainers.
5. Building new troops gets slower and slower as your empire gets bigger (once you're beyond the city limit, that is), so have as little units as possible get killed (bombard cities before attacking, heal damaged units, only use elite units for tough battles).
6. Before taking a city, bombard it for a couple of rounds; this will decrease pop and make disbanding them easier.
7. Don't have a larger army than necessary (costs resources, increases war unhappiness).
8. Start conquering as early as possible, when the AI doesn't have too many cities yet.

With good management you should be able to control 120 or so cities (if not more), when the limit is 60. If you disband the smaller/non-critical cities, this should be enough to conquer the world.

Some mods have an Extra-large maps option (MedMod, Cradle), this will make things much easier. They also let you destroy cities upon capture, makes things much easier when you play on Gigantic or larger maps...

[Martin Gühmann]

I would rather use the large maps versions of the mods in addition I should mention that ApolytonPack and GoodMod for ApolytonPack have ultra gigantic map options, too. If you like the tech tree of the original game than GoodMod is your mod. If you like rather the acient age than play Cradle, MedPack for the Middle Age (also a GoodMod add on version available) and Worl At War for the 20th century.

-Martin

[Locutus]

I would rather use the large maps versions of the mods in addition I should mention that ApolytonPack and GoodMod for ApolytonPack have ultra gigantic map options, too.

Thanks for confirming this, Martin, I wasn't sure about that.

[DeanToth]

I have one more suggestion which I didn't see here for reducing city size to 3 (the size where you can disband).

Set the queue to build tons of settlers.

This has several benefits.

- as each settler is created, send it to other cities where you are building wonders or other expensive things and disband them there to speed up production

- doing this keeps the soon-to-be-disbanded city from being unhappy due to starvation

- Usually, when you are at this point in the game, you are a large, rich empire with many cities creating Capitalization, so you can rush buy the settlers if you get impatient. This is in effect like making "lay away" payments on your wonder by spending a little bit each turn creating settlers to be disbanded, rather than speding 400,000gold on a one-shot rush buy.

- also, it's handy to have some free settlers running around to build temporary cities outside your area of influence, thus allowing you to connect separated areas of your empire with road/rail/maglev. Once the areas are connected, disband the temporary city and do it again elsewhere!

I realise you can build the "fortification" improvement to the same effect, but this is expensive in PW and the fort takes many turns to complete, plus you have to find an "empty" area to build the fort. Using the temporary-city settler, the city is done right away, and it's area of influence is much larger than a fortification.

You can even build your temporary city in another empire's area of influence! Handy for building some roadage into or across their territory.

One more handy thing these temporary settlers/cities are good for is running into the middle of or near to an enemy empires area and building a radar tower or listening post right under their nose! (even inside their area of influence) ONce the radar tower starts construction, you can disband the temporary city and do it again somewhere else! You can also build a fortification in the middle of the enemy territory this way, then disband the city and voila you have some area of influence right in the enemy territory!