Post by FriedrichPsitalon on Mar 23, 2004 19:23:56 GMT -5
This article is intended as an intermediate/advanced-level course in mastering Dagger style attacks, but could also be quite useful for those seeking to improve their defense against these tactics as well.
The “Dagger” strategy, employed primarily by the Aztec and Incan civs (though certainly possible for any civ with horses, albeit somewhat less effectively) relies on tremendous early concentration on military production – seriously hampering or forsaking economic growth/expansion altogether – with the intent of doing massive/lethal damage to an opposing civ quickly enough that the Dagger player will be able to recover from their slow start, both by utilizing captured territories, and simply because their opponent is in far worse shape than the Dagger player – if they are alive at all.
Crafting The Killing Blade, or How to Make More Troops in Less Time
The most important aspect of the Dagger style of play is, obviously, maximizing your early military production – you need a lot of troops, and you need them quickly. A gradual buildup is wasted; Jags and Chasquis are only a threat in the earlier stages of the game against most players. Once a significant infrastructure exists in an opposing land, where spears and archers can be shifted at will behind walled cities, the success rate of Dagger-style play drops tremendously. Thus the first and largest question of the Dagger strategy is one that does not apply to any of the other three metastrategies: whether or not to join your worker immediately. Regardless of whether or not you join your worker, however, your build order is invariably the same for your capital- Unit (jag or chasqui), Unit, Settler, barracks, unit, unit and continuing units. Typically, when the city reaches maximum size, a worker can be produced, depending on the circumstances. In city two and beyond, the pattern is barracks, unit, unit, settler and then back to units. In this way expansion is not forsaken altogether, but comparatively to other methods, it can be quite slow (particularly in the latest stages of expansion, where the Dagger player is usually relying on having significant kills/captures.) It does, however, create a very large number of troops quickly compared to players building temples, workers, and settlers.
Join Up Now And Serve Your Country!
Many cases favor joining the worker, but not all. Typically, a worker-join start will have 2 or more good production tiles – forests being preferred, with bonus grassland second. Since both the Aztecs and the Inca are agricultural, the lost food for working a forest square is an acceptable penalty for the bonus production, assuming you start with a river. This usually enables you to get a unit out on turn 2/3, and another on turn 6. You can also get your settler out for city two much more quickly. There are limitations here, however – with no worker, your city’s production is tied completely to the quality of your land. When you run out of high production squares, further growth has little effect. Thus a river town with 2 forests, some plains, some floodplain and a hill will BEGIN production excellently, but will never really be capable of high-end production without a worker (who could otherwise make this an excellent production center.) Also, a lack of roads means that your jags/chasquis will have to rely on their own movement bonuses – less of an issue for the Chasqui than the jag, but still significant. That early settler will probably get to his city site a bit slower, since he won’t have any road to get there on.
Bottom Line: Joining the worker gets you a quick jumpstart (most effective on tiny maps) but hurts more and more until you get a worker built later on, in comparison to those who leave the worker out and working – usually by turn 25/30 or so, the “keep the worker out” camp has caught up. On a tiny map, this may be all the time you need to assemble a killing force – but if the gamble doesn’t pay off or the map is bigger, you may end up paying the price. Workers are important, even for Dagger players.
Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You; Ask What You Can Do For Your Country
The “keep your worker” strategy doesn’t get started as quickly, but builds up more quickly after 25 turns or so. This strategy is more useful if you have less ideal starting land, or decent starting land that has much better potential with work. (Lots of bonus grassland, lots of plains with a river nearby, grape hills, etc - Typically non-forest intensive starts.) Use your worker intelligently – don’t just improve tiles higgly-piggly. Try to improve the tiles (including roads, obviously) in the direction of where you want town two to be placed – getting your second town down and working on military production and so on needs to be done as quickly as possible, especially since you are on equal footing with everyone else, having not joined your worker. Often, the worker in a Dagger setup is more of a nomad- traveling to each new town site as the town goes up, and improving the tiles in the direction of the next potential town. As the oldest towns reach maximum size, they spit out a single worker to improve the tiles the nomadic worker left unchanged. Bottom Line: For larger games or games that involve multiple players, leaving the worker out and building a few more as the opportunity presents is probably – but not certainly, as player style is important – the better play.
Proper Positioning of Anvil, Hammer, and Bellows, or Where to Place Cities When Making a Dagger Attack
One thing that many Dagger players fail to appreciate is that in using this strategy – unless you have a ridiculously large area to yourself – the placement strategy to win is CLOSE placement; at times extremely close. There are several reasons why:
1) Your own defense. Dagger players sometimes fail to appreciate the fact that they too, can be attacked (particularly right after they attack someone else or are enroute to do so) and are actually quite vulnerable. Keeping your cities close together allows you to better utilize your (likely) smaller garrisons and keeps your own defensive needs small.
2) Better utilization of your worker’s improved tiles – keeping cities closer together means the worker can spend less time roading to the next town and more time mining and irrigating. It also means that your settlers spend less time running around and more time in city form.
3) More compact means more cities! Since many cities only need a few tiles to get to the ideal 1-2 turns per unit, there is no need to give them lots of room. Particularly in mid-game dagger strategies, unit maintenance can become a real problem – by keeping your cities closer together and occasionally breaking the “build nothing but units” pattern, you can create quite an urban sprawl, capable of churning out quite a few units – but more importantly, supporting quite a few units as well. (This also can assist you in keeping up in score despite a low land area – infinite city sprawls often have MUCH higher populations for their land area than you might expect, often giving “sprawlers” a surprising and unexpected scoring edge that is difficult to predict and counteract.)
[RED] The Fastest Way To A Man’s Heart Is Through The Ribs And Up….[/RED] Or, A Detailed Look at Dagger Tactics
The “Dagger” strategy, employed primarily by the Aztec and Incan civs (though certainly possible for any civ with horses, albeit somewhat less effectively) relies on tremendous early concentration on military production – seriously hampering or forsaking economic growth/expansion altogether – with the intent of doing massive/lethal damage to an opposing civ quickly enough that the Dagger player will be able to recover from their slow start, both by utilizing captured territories, and simply because their opponent is in far worse shape than the Dagger player – if they are alive at all.
Crafting The Killing Blade, or How to Make More Troops in Less Time
The most important aspect of the Dagger style of play is, obviously, maximizing your early military production – you need a lot of troops, and you need them quickly. A gradual buildup is wasted; Jags and Chasquis are only a threat in the earlier stages of the game against most players. Once a significant infrastructure exists in an opposing land, where spears and archers can be shifted at will behind walled cities, the success rate of Dagger-style play drops tremendously. Thus the first and largest question of the Dagger strategy is one that does not apply to any of the other three metastrategies: whether or not to join your worker immediately. Regardless of whether or not you join your worker, however, your build order is invariably the same for your capital- Unit (jag or chasqui), Unit, Settler, barracks, unit, unit and continuing units. Typically, when the city reaches maximum size, a worker can be produced, depending on the circumstances. In city two and beyond, the pattern is barracks, unit, unit, settler and then back to units. In this way expansion is not forsaken altogether, but comparatively to other methods, it can be quite slow (particularly in the latest stages of expansion, where the Dagger player is usually relying on having significant kills/captures.) It does, however, create a very large number of troops quickly compared to players building temples, workers, and settlers.
Join Up Now And Serve Your Country!
Many cases favor joining the worker, but not all. Typically, a worker-join start will have 2 or more good production tiles – forests being preferred, with bonus grassland second. Since both the Aztecs and the Inca are agricultural, the lost food for working a forest square is an acceptable penalty for the bonus production, assuming you start with a river. This usually enables you to get a unit out on turn 2/3, and another on turn 6. You can also get your settler out for city two much more quickly. There are limitations here, however – with no worker, your city’s production is tied completely to the quality of your land. When you run out of high production squares, further growth has little effect. Thus a river town with 2 forests, some plains, some floodplain and a hill will BEGIN production excellently, but will never really be capable of high-end production without a worker (who could otherwise make this an excellent production center.) Also, a lack of roads means that your jags/chasquis will have to rely on their own movement bonuses – less of an issue for the Chasqui than the jag, but still significant. That early settler will probably get to his city site a bit slower, since he won’t have any road to get there on.
Bottom Line: Joining the worker gets you a quick jumpstart (most effective on tiny maps) but hurts more and more until you get a worker built later on, in comparison to those who leave the worker out and working – usually by turn 25/30 or so, the “keep the worker out” camp has caught up. On a tiny map, this may be all the time you need to assemble a killing force – but if the gamble doesn’t pay off or the map is bigger, you may end up paying the price. Workers are important, even for Dagger players.
Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You; Ask What You Can Do For Your Country
The “keep your worker” strategy doesn’t get started as quickly, but builds up more quickly after 25 turns or so. This strategy is more useful if you have less ideal starting land, or decent starting land that has much better potential with work. (Lots of bonus grassland, lots of plains with a river nearby, grape hills, etc - Typically non-forest intensive starts.) Use your worker intelligently – don’t just improve tiles higgly-piggly. Try to improve the tiles (including roads, obviously) in the direction of where you want town two to be placed – getting your second town down and working on military production and so on needs to be done as quickly as possible, especially since you are on equal footing with everyone else, having not joined your worker. Often, the worker in a Dagger setup is more of a nomad- traveling to each new town site as the town goes up, and improving the tiles in the direction of the next potential town. As the oldest towns reach maximum size, they spit out a single worker to improve the tiles the nomadic worker left unchanged. Bottom Line: For larger games or games that involve multiple players, leaving the worker out and building a few more as the opportunity presents is probably – but not certainly, as player style is important – the better play.
Proper Positioning of Anvil, Hammer, and Bellows, or Where to Place Cities When Making a Dagger Attack
One thing that many Dagger players fail to appreciate is that in using this strategy – unless you have a ridiculously large area to yourself – the placement strategy to win is CLOSE placement; at times extremely close. There are several reasons why:
1) Your own defense. Dagger players sometimes fail to appreciate the fact that they too, can be attacked (particularly right after they attack someone else or are enroute to do so) and are actually quite vulnerable. Keeping your cities close together allows you to better utilize your (likely) smaller garrisons and keeps your own defensive needs small.
2) Better utilization of your worker’s improved tiles – keeping cities closer together means the worker can spend less time roading to the next town and more time mining and irrigating. It also means that your settlers spend less time running around and more time in city form.
3) More compact means more cities! Since many cities only need a few tiles to get to the ideal 1-2 turns per unit, there is no need to give them lots of room. Particularly in mid-game dagger strategies, unit maintenance can become a real problem – by keeping your cities closer together and occasionally breaking the “build nothing but units” pattern, you can create quite an urban sprawl, capable of churning out quite a few units – but more importantly, supporting quite a few units as well. (This also can assist you in keeping up in score despite a low land area – infinite city sprawls often have MUCH higher populations for their land area than you might expect, often giving “sprawlers” a surprising and unexpected scoring edge that is difficult to predict and counteract.)
But I guess where would the fun be if everyone knew everything? Someone little birds told me fried knows how to make cities size 6+ without aqueducts too on non river sites 
