How to Conquer Overseas Cities
All credit goes to plaguepenguin !
The loyalty mechanic was added to make conquest more challenging, less of a no-brainer dominant strategy. When combined with the AI’s ability to at least slow down your conquests with walls and encampments and spamming ranged units, loyalty constraints make it necessary to take a large enough slice of enemy cities with enough population that you achieve loyalty viability.
This is less of a problem if you are conquering cities on your borders, because you already have some of your own cities in range of the conquered city to apply loyalty pressure, but for overseas conquest you have the full problem, because all your loyalty pressure has to come from the cities you conquer during the current war. To make overseas conquest work you have to conquer a big enough slice of cities before the time to revolt runs out on your initially conquered city/ies.
One part of the equation you have to work on is extending that time limit to the point that it is possible to conquer enough more cities that you get to loyalty viability.
Sending in a governor gives you 8 points so it is the mainstay. Victor also gives you 4 points for all your cities within 9 hexes if you give him the Garrison Commander title, but any governor gives the basic 8 for the city to which it is sent.
An occupying unit is good for 2. An attacker healing from damage done in the process of conquest can fill this role, but your invading force should also include some units that have not much other use than sitting in captured cities. Scouts are good for this.
A monument is good for another two. Buy it if you can, but if the city already had one you’ll have to repair it using production points. The repair would probably be a one-turner in any of your big, healthy, fully loyal cites, but in a newly conquered city, you should have builders sent in with the invasion force, or buy them in the conquered city, so that you can chop out the monument.
Religious alignment helps,so if you have your own religion, send in an inquisitor with your invasion force.
Low happiness is bad, so try to have a surplus of amenities before you invade. Facing a bad era gradient is even worse, so as much as possible, attack when you are golden or at least normal, and your victim is at least not in a better age than you are.
The other part of the equation is having an invading force capable of taking enough cities within whatever time limit the above efforts can get you. The 5 turns in your example is tough unless you have truly overwhelming quantitative and qualitative advantages, but 10-15 turns is fairly likely to be doable if you had enough force to take that first city.
Qualitatively, you need a force that can take even walled cities with reasonable speed.
The basics of how you do that evolve as you and your victim civ advance in tech. Your victim gets walls, then better walls, and finally steel walls which are really tough to crack. It will also add encampments and spam ranged units, and will get ever higher value units that will increase the defensive value and ranged attacks of its walls. You will go from reliance on rams and towers, to siege artillery, to boosting the range of the artillery, and finally to bombers or GDRs. If you’re an era or two ahead in tech, all of your problems taking cities quickly tend to melt away, but if that’s not the case you have to apply some assists with pacing to increase your tempo.
Great generals give all your units extra mvt points, which tends to be more important than the bonus in combat strength. Not only can your units move on the next victim city more quickly, siege artillery gets to move and shoot in the same turn, which helps out with their fragility problem. Supply convoys get you another mvt point.
Medics and supply convoys get you 20 points extra of healing, which is important if you want to use the same forces to take your next victim city quickly. Absent that you can of course pillage farms to heal, or promote your units, which you get to do more often if they were made in an encampment. Moksha actually has a title, Laying on of Hands, that heals your units in his city instantly, which is great for tempo.
Quantitatively, you send in enough forces to take more than one city at a time, or that lets you keep up the tempo by passing fresh forces through a conquered city and your first wave of forces as they pause to heal. With overseas conquest, that first wave can be your naval forces. Take the first layer of victim cities, the ones on the coast, with naval forces, then land your fresh and uninjured land forces so that they can move inland and attack the next layer without delay.
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