I’ve been trying a warmongering game where once I start conquering and happiness becomes a problem, I ignore it, and plunge into unhappiness. It’s working ok.
I’m playing as France, on Emperor difficulty, standard size archipelago map.
As usual, my first war began from trying to save a city state. Genoa was having some trouble with Greece on the island next door. But by the time I had called back my scouting spearmen and sent them over, Genoa had already fallen. So my rescue force was now on a liberation mission. Greece’s Sparta was closer, on a little outcrop two tiles from a similar outcrop on my island, so I decided to conquer that first. My entire landing part was dead the turn after they disembarked.
I reached archery not long after that, positioned an archer on that little outcrop, and he began shooting at Sparta every turn. I prepared another group of spearmen units to storm the beaches once the city was weakened. Again, my forces were crushed immediately after landing on his island, although I managed to extract one unit this time. Greece was using both of his unique units now, so I guess I was a little outclassed.
I eventually broke in due to that little archer gaining ungodly amounts of experience from his constant shooting and being bombarded. Which wasn’t a very satisfying way to win a war. If I didn’t get that archer with +1 range (plus two attacks a turn and healing while shooting), I would probably have lost the game by now from my war with Greece. I think perhaps being bombarded by a city should not give experience, as the attack is so weak.
Anyway, I captured and annexed Sparta, Athens and Sidon, and liberated Genoa. This put me into serious unhappiness. I started selling off my luxuries to other empires, and switching all my farms to trading posts. My cities wouldn’t be growing any more, but I was making good money. Enough to buy any more units I’d be needing in the future. I would be getting a -33% penalty to combat, but that could be overcome with generals and lots of use of ranged power.
I moved on to a war with Songhai on the same island, at the request of Copenhagen. This war took a long time. He had seemingly unlimited numbers of pikemen, and there was just a narrow path between the sea and mountains for me to fight from. Again, my super archer (now a crossbowman with the ability to shoot over mountains) pretty much won me the war. When I got gunpowder tech and my french musketeers, I pushed out and captured the Songhai capital.
About this point, Egypt declared war on me, and landed three spearmen, two longswordmen, an archer and a war chariot next to one of my undefended cities on the other side of my home island, backed up by two caravels and more units in the water. Yikes.
I made peace with Songhai, which they were quite happy with, and started to recall my forces. It was going to take them about ten turns to make it back, though, and my city wasn’t going to get that much time.
I got on the phone to Catherine, and sold her some luxuries for all of her gold. I spent that gold on a cannon in the doomed city. There was so much incoming ranged fire on the next turn, I figured I wasn’t going to be able to prevent the city being weakened. What I did instead was focus my fire on the strongest melee unit in attack range each turn. On about the third or fourth turn of the siege, he attacked with his last wounded longswordman, taking the city to 0 hitpoints, but losing the unit in the process. He was now out of melee units. The city was still surrounded by caravels, archers and war chariots, but it was safe for now.
My frigates have just turned up and cleared out the units in the water, and my veteran armies have landed on the other side of the island, and are moving in to clean up.
