Purposeful Defensive and Resource Denial

[Theseus]

Admittedly, I have an oft-stated style of play, focused on oscillating war with concurrent build. I've noticed, however, that there is an aspect of my war strategy that has broader application.

There are a number of instances in the progress of a game where I want to go to war, but my attack force has not yet gained enough relative strength in unit capabilities or overall numbers.

Examples include:
- Horsemen faced by an attacking force of Swords-level units, or even other Horsemen
- Swords-level units (except Immortals) faced by Pikemen
- Knight-level units faced by Musketmen
- Cavalry faced by Rifleman
- Worst, Cavalry faced by Infantry

After Cav, the attacker usually has the better stats.

I've developed a methodology for starting wars 5-15 turns before I achieve attack relative strength that I call Purposeful Defense. Actually, I have to give Zachriel a lot of credit here, as it came partially from his demos.

The reason that I bring it up as being broader than my warmongerer approach, is that it probably represents good tactics for the defensive builder as well, and maybe a few other situations.

Purposeful Defense has application in a number of instances: you are a builder; you are at a disadvantage; you don't have gold to upgrade enough; you are not yet ready to go offensive; etc.

The purposes of Purposeful Defensive (huh??) are to: 1) Survive, and 2) eradicate the offensive forces of your current enemy(ies).

[Sidenote: Eradicate - syn. eliminate, to tear up by the roots. Decimate - The practice of the Greeks and Romans to kill one in ten of their own troops as punishment.. no wonder the Hoplites and Legions kick ass]

OK, all of that background aside, here are some of the thoughts:

WARFARE

- Obviously, hit units in the field... and like Sun Tzu said, you pick where to hold battle. Inside of your territory borders, preferably far enough in that it will take more than one turn to leave. On grassland or plains, obviously. Suck'em into a weak position using Workers, Settlers, and damaged units, even at the expense of a few deaths. Or even better, sell them an ROP well before you declare war... and maybe get them to enter a military alliance with you against an AI civ on the diametrically opposite side of your own empire.

- Even better, create kill zones and channels. Especially for fast-mover enemy units, you want them to be unable to survive and escape. A basin inside of hills or mountains works well... that reminds me, secure the high ground. I think people have a tendency to over-stack; in this case you need to station forces on EVERY strong defensive position, just so the enemy can't go there. If appropriate, build fortresses as well.

- Build barracks in the relevant cities.

- Always be able to retreat into a secure position, inside your own territory. This can be a city or a fortress, but at least a hill or mountain. A strong defensive stack, possibly including a defensive or mixed-unit Army, would also work. If need be, build a defensive retreat path along hills or mountains. I don't know yet if the time periods for Armies to heal has been fixed, but there will be cases where you need to protect Armies and elites while retreating back to a city with a barracks.

- Protect your elites like gold... there is no reason to lose a single one during Purposeful Defense, except to bad seeds.

- Artillery... ooooh yeah.

RESOURCE DENIAL

- Read Aeson's threads.

- Make sure you can achieve the Purposeful Defense objective: Eradication of the enemy's offensive force. This means you have to get to ALL of the relevant resources... otherwise don't bother with this part.

- This is actually pretty straight-forward... assuming you can get to all of a given resource, big enough stacks of the best defensive unit will do the job, at least until Tanks vs. Infantry. I especially like defensive or mixed-unit Armies for this task, although you always need at least 2 individual units for the actual pillaging (after railroads, that is; before just 1). Make sure to approach the target resource along a line of hills or mountains, or at least forest and jungle (if possible, take advantage of rivers as well).

- Once you've pillaged, camp out there until the war is over. You may want to have one spare defensive stack to bolster any forward forces that get particularly damaged.

- Rarely, you might destroy roads instead of pillaging the actual resource... in general, I prefer to go to the heart of the matter.

- Battlefield Medicine is obviously a tremendous help for this part.
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Again, the point here is to drain the enemy of its offensive force projection. Kill as many as you can, and prevent the building of any more.

Then, when you are ready for your own offense...