siege tax question

[Boron]

arryn in general you are right .
for everybody else then ermor ae/sg and pan cw expect for raiding purposes keeping unrest low is a better strat . in the long run you get more money as you said .

but as gandalf would agree i think in certain cases e.g. as caelum or a stealth nation it is a good strat . you damage yourself in the long run too but it enables a much earlier victory over the raided nation .
it's scorched earth
and if your opponent e.g. has a vq and heavily relies on it in early - midgame you have not too much chances beating her directly if not having a sc pretender yourself or i think abysia might get her while buffing with a devil attack .
but since the vq can only be in 1 province per turn if you raid 3-4 provinces per turn you will slowly but surely win .
it's always a question between short run and long run . if you can afford the better long run outcome you chose long run but with special nations like caelum or an equal strong enemy the scorched earth tactic is perhaps better .
another good use is if your enemy relies heavier than you on standard troops if you make a death zone through complete pillaging which forces him to either risk that his national troops starve away or he can only bring Neednoteat troops to battle + commanders or needs to forge supply items .
when you e.g. play against ulm which normally relies longer on national troops than almost
every other race this can be good .

edit : another reason for scorched earth tactics :
if you fight multiple opponents you perhaps can delay some opponents with quite low effort through various raging/stealth tactics while concentrating your main forces on your main enemies .

i myself can't afford to guard every border very well with most nations until lategame .
so concentrating your main forces on one - two enemies while delaying and disturbing the opponent with relative weak forces is nice too .

[ July 25, 2004, 15:40: Message edited by: Boron ]

[Arryn]

All very good points, Boron. And such tactics tend to be more useful against human opponents, who are more aggresive than the AI, and thus need to be slapped as hard as you can as often as you can.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Boron:
i myself can't afford to guard every border very well with most nations until lategame .
so concentrating your main forces on one - two enemies while delaying and disturbing the opponent with relative weak forces is nice too .

Heh. I don't know about all humans - but if someone is doing raids on my provinces, they're likely to have another war on their hands.

Or possibly you mean when you're already in conflict with multiple people, concentrating on one while harassing the other to slow them down?

[Boron]

Originally posted by Arryn:
All very good points, Boron. And such tactics tend to be more useful against human opponents, who are more aggresive than the AI, and thus need to be slapped as hard as you can as often as you can.

thnx
yeah it is more useful against humans . the advantage against humans is that they make unreasonable decisions then hopefully
and you have to split your forces a fair bit and keep garrisons at home to defend key provinces .
in lategame things are different of course .
1-2 ghost riders will defeat most stealth armies and if you make them bigger they are more likely discovered . but flyers , mainly abysia devil armies and caelum flying armies are very hard to defend against .

but once the ai is bigger it can work sometimes too because they have most of their troops on their borders too
raiding is especially evil against on the one hand races with total crappy pd and on the other hand with races who don't have the watchtower or mausoleum for castling strat .
you get hopefully their temple + pd destroyed and through pillageing give them more and more trouble while moving on.
esp. pangenea and caelum are evil at that .
they both have flying scouts and caelum can fly behind the lines while pangenea can sneak around .

Originally posted by Cainehill:

quote:

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Originally posted by Boron:
i myself can't afford to guard every border very well with most nations until lategame .
so concentrating your main forces on one - two enemies while delaying and disturbing the opponent with relative weak forces is nice too .

Heh. I don't know about all humans - but if someone is doing raids on my provinces, they're likely to have another war on their hands.

Or possibly you mean when you're already in conflict with multiple people, concentrating on one while harassing the other to slow them down?

---

depends . when you are already in conflict it is of course to slow the others down and attack the in my eyes mightiest with almost maximum forces .

it is more likely that you do this with you as defender but in some cases it could be a good preventive measure . you can do extremely serious harm to heavy blood nations especially abysia and mictlan .
if you neigbor them early on and your negotiations don't go to well and you recognize that he will be most likely your enemy soon it can be devastating .

is there a nation which has stealth preachers , spies and good stealth troops ?

[ July 25, 2004, 18:44: Message edited by: Boron ]