Domination: Building Cities That Feed a War

Encampment Placement: Fortress on One Side, Launchpad on the Other

The Encampment cannot stand next to the city center, so it lives in the second ring — and that restriction is a gift, because the second ring is exactly where an attacker must stand to shoot your city. Once the city has walls, the Encampment gets its own, fires its own ranged shot, keeps separate hit points from the center and blocks enemy movement through its tile. Put it on the side an invasion would arrive from: the land bridge, the river crossing, the gap between two hills. A city with an Encampment on the exposed flank and mountains or water on the others is a city the AI quietly stops attacking.

For staging, the Encampment is where an army is born and where it goes to heal. Placing it on the frontier-facing side of a border core shortens the march to the next target by a turn or two per unit, and across ten units that adds up to an entire timing window. A core deep in the interior should still build one for Great General points and the Barracks-to-Military Academy line, but not pretend it is a launchpad. Great Generals deserve a sentence of their own: earned mostly through Encampment buildings and projects, their aura of movement and strength for nearby units of the matching era is the cheapest army upgrade in the game.

Walls are a timing question, not a default. Ancient Walls arrive with Masonry, and AI aggression peaks in the ancient and classical eras, often before you research it. The working rule: the frontier city facing a known aggressive neighbor builds walls right after its first two units; interior cities skip them entirely until Medieval Walls or until a threat is actually visible. Walls exist to make an unsupported melee attack nearly worthless, and that is their whole value — every wall in a safe city is a unit that was not built.

The Four Attack Windows

The ancient and classical rush is a bet that the neighbor has no walls yet. Warriors and slingers upgraded into swordsmen and archers, a couple of horsemen or heavy chariots for chasing, and one Battering Ram from Masonry so the melee line can actually hurt a wall if one appears mid-war. The window opens the moment scouts find a capital within roughly ten tiles and closes when that capital finishes Ancient Walls or sits on a hill behind a river. Taking one or two cities this early is enormous; failing costs your own expansion, so commit fully or not at all.

The medieval window is the one most players actually win with. Stirrups unlocks Knights and Machinery unlocks Crossbowmen, and the pair is brutal: Knights move fast and hit hard, Crossbowmen shred anything that approaches them. Neither unit is good at walls, though, so this window lives or dies on support — a Siege Tower, which in this ruleset also arrives with Machinery, lets your melee units ignore the wall entirely, and Catapults from Engineering or Trebuchets from Military Engineering grind it down the honest way. Man-at-Arms from Apprenticeship holds the line while the cavalry works.

The renaissance bridge — Bombards from Metal Casting escorted by Musketmen and Pike and Shot — is a smaller window that punishes rivals who skipped Medieval Walls. The true late window is industrial: Artillery from Steel, later stretched by an Observation Balloon from Flight standing beside it, outmuscles every wall of its era, and Biplanes then Bombers from Advanced Flight strike cities from a distant Aerodrome without caring about walls at all. Each of these windows is really an argument about tempo: the attacker wins by reaching the key tech a few turns before the defender reaches its counter, and loses by arriving with last era's army.

• Ancient/classical: swordsmen, archers, a Battering Ram; opens on a close capital without walls.
• Medieval: Knights and Crossbowmen with a Siege Tower or Trebuchets; the widest and most forgiving window.
• Renaissance: Bombards behind Musketmen; short, and only against neighbors who under-built walls.
• Industrial and later: Artillery with a balloon, then Bombers; walls stop mattering, production and oil start mattering.

Siege Composition: Why the Support Slot Decides Wars

A walled city barely notices melee attacks and shrugs off most ranged fire; only siege-class units deal full damage to walls, and only support units let melee bypass them. That is the whole reason armies without a siege element stall in front of one city for twenty turns and lose the war to weariness. The practical shape of a strike force is two siege units, three or four line units to screen them, two ranged units to kill whatever sorties out, one support unit and a Great General — a force one core city with the layout described above can produce inside a single window.

Siege units are slow, fragile and cannot fire on a turn they moved unless they earn the promotion that allows it, so the line units exist to buy them a turn of setup within range of the city. Position the screen first, walk the siege in behind it, and only then declare the assault. Surrounding matters as much as firepower: a city whose every neighboring tile is occupied or under your zone of control stops repairing, which turns a three-turn siege into a two-turn one and denies the defender the reset that ruins so many attacks.

From the civic Nationalism onward, two identical units merge into a corps, and Mobilization later allows armies; a Military Academy in the core speeds the merge. A corps is not just stronger, it is one fewer piece to move and one fewer target for the city's shot, so the same ten-unit strike force reorganized as five corps plus siege is a harder army to stop. Merging does halve the bodies available to surround a city, so keep siege single, merge the melee front, and leave ranged units alone until Bombers replace them.

• Two siege, three or four line, two ranged, one support, one Great General; adjust upward for hill capitals.
• Screen first, siege second, declare third — never march siege into range before the line stands.
• Encircle to stop repairs; a surrounded city falls a turn earlier and that turn is often the war.
• Merge the melee front into corps; keep siege and ranged single for numbers.

Holding What You Take: Loyalty and Amenities

A captured city starts with poor loyalty and stays flagged as occupied until the peace treaty formally cedes it, which drags loyalty further unless a unit garrisons the center. Loyalty pressure flows from the population of nearby cities weighted by whose they are and how far away they sit, so conquest should advance as a wave from your own border outward: each new city then sits inside the pressure of the last one, and the enemy's remaining cities push on it from only one side. Leapfrogging to a distant capital produces a prize that flips to a Free City within a dozen turns.

Governors are the fastest fix. Any governor's presence steadies a city, and Victor establishes quicker than the others, so he rides with the army and is reassigned to whichever city fell last. Amani's later promotions push loyalty outward to neighboring cities, which makes her the right permanent resident of a conquered regional capital. Policy cards that reward a garrisoned unit or an assigned governor stack on top, a Monument goes first in the build queue, and the city project that trades production for loyalty and amenities is the emergency brake when the numbers turn red.

Amenities in a war empire come from three places: luxuries, Entertainment Complexes and peace. Conquered cities usually bring luxury resources you did not own, which lift every city in the empire, so a conquest that nets two new luxuries can pay for its own unhappiness. Entertainment Complexes want to be central, because the Zoo and Stadium reach every city within their radius — one well-placed district covers a cluster of captured cities that could never afford their own. Raze only when the loyalty math is hopeless and the city is small; razing generates heavy grievances and capitals cannot be razed at all. Otherwise keep it, garrison it, and let the wave move on.

• Advance as a wave from your border; never leave a captured city outside the loyalty shadow of another you own.
• Garrison immediately, Victor next, Monument first in the queue, cede at the treaty.
• One central Entertainment Complex with a Zoo covers a whole conquered cluster.

War Weariness and Grievances in Plain Terms

Every battle adds to an invisible pool of war weariness, and losing units adds more than winning does. When the pool grows large, amenities fall across the whole empire, not just the front, and cities that were content turn unhappy and slow. The pool drains during peace, and how fast it fills depends on how the war was declared: a surprise war fills it fastest, a formal war after a denouncement more gently, and wars justified by a proper casus belli such as reconquest or liberation barely register.

Grievances are the diplomatic mirror of the same idea. Declaring war and taking cities hands every other leader grievances against you, heavier for surprise wars and heaviest for razing; those grievances decay over time, and while they last they sour relations, invite denouncements and make it cheaper for others to gang up on you. The mechanic cuts both ways, which is the useful part: when a neighbor wrongs you — takes a city, converts your holy city, breaks a promise — you accumulate grievances against them, and a war you then declare is judged far more kindly by the rest of the table. Patience is a weapon; let the target denounce you, settle on your border, or declare first.

In practice this means fighting short, decisive wars separated by real peace. Declare with the best casus belli available, take two or three cities in one window, then accept a peace that cedes what you hold before weariness bites. Let the pool drain and the grievances fade while the cores retool for the next era's units, and reopen the war when the next window arrives with a fresh justification. An empire that fights in chapters keeps its amenities, its allies and its tempo.

When the Continent Is Yours: Pivoting to Another Victory

Domination requires every rival's original capital, and once your own continent is unified the remaining capitals are usually across an ocean, defended by navies and by the whole world's grievances against you. Sometimes the naval campaign is the right call, especially with the Venetian Arsenal and a Harbor-heavy coast. More often, the empire you just built is simply the best science or culture base on the map, and the honest question is which finish line is nearer. Count turns, not pride.

A science pivot is the natural one, because production is what conquest builds. The cores that trained armies become spaceport cities, Ruhr Valley belongs in the best of them, and every captured city gets a Campus and later a University no matter how ugly the adjacency looks. Swap military policy cards for the science and production set, and keep a modest defensive army at the frontiers rather than disbanding everything. A culture pivot works when the conquest swept up wonders and Theater Squares, since captured wonders count as yours for tourism; it needs Open Borders and trade with the survivors, which grievances make slow.

The pivot has a cost you should pay deliberately: unit maintenance. A late army is expensive in gold and, from the industrial era on, in strategic resources, so upgrade what you keep, disband what you do not, and let the gold fund districts instead; the same machine that stamped out Knights stamps out spaceport projects. The player who conquers a continent by the renaissance and then quietly out-researches the survivors wins more games than the one who insists on sailing.

• Pivot signals: the last capitals are overseas, weariness is climbing, or a coalition has formed against you.
• Science: cores become spaceports, every captured city gets a Campus, military cards come out.
• Culture: only if the conquest captured wonders and Theater Squares, and only with surviving trade partners.

Related pages

• District adjacency calculator — compare Industrial Zone and Encampment tiles
• Terracotta Army placement — the Encampment-side wonder for an early army
• Alhambra placement — military policy slot beside your fortress Encampment
• Macedon (Alexander) — the civilization built for continuous conquest
• Early district planning — pinning cores before the first settler lands
• Diplomatic victory — the opposite path, and how grievances shape it