I recently been using drafting alot recently and I thought iIshare what I noticed and see what everyone else think and does.

First off, the unit you get seems to go like this..

1 pop used

Warrior

Maceman

Musketman

Rifleman

2 pop used

Infantry

Mechanized Infantry

Drafted units typical have crap exp and few promotions, from what I can figure from watching in game and this forum, its half of what that the normal unit has.

Now on tactics...

*Drafted units are very handy when you need a unit on that turn, sudden unexpected attacks in a location miles from your army (be it barbarians or other civs) can be counted with drafting. For example A good road or rail network can bring a unit of 5 units to one location very quickly and possibly save a city from being stolen from you.

*While drafted units start of really crappy, the ones that last past there first few battles can become rather useful unit, this means you could send in say two drafted units to counter a unexpected knight or such and at the end of it have one more experienced unit in your army.

* Siege guarding. Send your freshly made cannon to the front line with a drafted rifleman to make sure you don't lose your valuable siege unit to sneak attacks on route.

*Swarming. In three turns you can have 15 units. While of poor quality, they might well make the difference in a big war (especially in one where you weren't expecting.)

*Clean up. Got a nice elite stack of troupes, but realise your enemy just got a ton more men that you? Want to make sure that you don't fail to take that city because it had a 0.2 archer left in it? ;)

*City holding. One drafted unit hardly going to make much of difference. But one city guard unit with two drafted backup unit will.

*protecting wounded units. One full hp drafted unit that's fortified on a hill can put up a surprisingly good defence, better that your weakened and precious level 4 units anyway.

I think you may underestimate the offensive potential of drafting units. Ok, they might lack experience, but inexperienced Riflemen fair very well in a war against Longbows. The main problem with getting an army of Riflemen pre-Industrial era is production. Drafting resolves this issue, and with the GT in a food rich city, you can draft a unit every turn with no unhappiness penalty. A few drafts elsewhere and you can create an attack force VERY quickly.

Race to rifling, draft army, kill neighbour(s) is one of the oldest strategies in the book. ;)

pretty sure mech inf cost 3 pop as it is above 180 base hammers.

Yep Mech Infantry is 3 population. So you need a population of 8 to be able to draft a mech inf.

Theocracy + barracks means you get a promotion out of drafted units. I suppose you could throw vassalage in there. Draftable unique units that come with promotions will still get them. I'm thinking of Oromos here.

Build siege and draft your infantry. We walked all over emperor level AI using a drafted army in a recent succession game. Granted, the map was unusual.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=316021

Dave Hartwick: You can't use Nationhood and Vassalage together, they replace each other :p.

I find that drafting reaches it's most useful early in the game with muskets and rifles. These troops if combined with cannons don't need to have a lot of promotions to be effective the cannons just need solid troops to follow up the damage they do and to hold the cities once captured. So a combination of drafting and whipping cannons is all that's needed to raise a powerfuul renaissance army.

In fact you get half the normal experience rounded down, so barracks and Theocracy would give 5 exp to a normal unit (like a cannon) and 2 exp to the draftees. Adding a MI will add 2 exp to the normal troops and 1 exp to a drafted one. But an important consideration is the free promotions from Aggressive and Protective are given to draftees and the UUs berserker, janissary, oromo warrior, musketeer and red coat all get their special abilities.

You sounded like my mom, UncleJJ.

OK, so I guess you really couldn't run Vassalage/Nationhood/Theocracy. Hey, what's a little factual error in an otherwise marginally useful post?

You sounded like my mom, UncleJJ.


I tried to sound more like your uncle, gently teasing your mistake :p

We should mention that certain traits favor the Draft, Protective and Agressive and to a lesser extent Imperialistic and Charismatic.

The draft cuts XP in half, so a barracks get's you 1 XP drafted unit. SO we want to use theocracy. That get's us 2 XP units, enough for 1 free promotion.

Agressive starts with combat I gunpowder unit, which opens up the free promotion to be pinch. Drafting Pinch promoted units is pretty powerful

Protective starts with CG I and Drill, and Drill I opens up the pinch line also. Not only are you drafting powerful offensive units but you now have an army that can defend a captured city better against counter attacks.

Charismatic, you are only 2 XP away from another promotion.

Imperialistic, 1 XP units are very valuable to Imperialistic as you will be pumping out alot of GGs are your drafted units are Blooded. If you spread your settled GGs out you can have crazy drafted units out of ALOT of cities.

Also you can draft 3 units/turn on standard sized maps. Sure you have three unhappy's, but you get 2 back from the barracks AND there is one less population and thus one less unhappy face from too many people. It's a push. Therefore in 10 turns you have an overwhelming army of 30 rifles/musket, add manually built trebs/mounted units and your set to destroy an enemy real fast.

SOme leaders have special synergy with the Draft:

CHurchill Redcoats: with theocracy you are drafting a unit that is CG I, Drill I, Pinch, +25% versus mounted, +25% versus gunpowder plus 1 XP away from the next promotion.

Ottomans, Zara, French all have Musket UU's which can be drafted.

Toku: His gunpowder units start with three free promotions (combat I, CG I, Drill I). The Japanese Draft can be a scary site!

Cyrus 2 traits have excellent Synergy with each other.

Final, the Globe Theater. Build it in a city with LOT's of food and you can abuse the draft here ALL game long.

With that all said, I find myself not using the draft as much as I would generally want. The main reason is that Bureacracy and Free Speech are such powerful economic traits. Only if I find myself in a SE game, and EE game or alot of farms will I use Nationhood.

We should mention that certain traits favor the Draft, Protective and Agressive and to a lesser extent Imperialistic and Charismatic.

The draft cuts XP in half, so a barracks get's you 1 XP drafted unit. SO we want to use theocracy. That get's us 2 XP units, enough for 1 free promotion.

Agressive starts with combat I gunpowder unit, which opens up the free promotion to be pinch. Drafting Pinch promoted units is pretty powerful

Protective starts with CG I and Drill, and Drill I opens up the pinch line also. Not only are you drafting powerful offensive units but you now have an army that can defend a captured city better against counter attacks.

Charismatic, you are only 2 XP away from another promotion.

Imperialistic, 1 XP units are very valuable to Imperialistic as you will be pumping out alot of GGs are your drafted units are Blooded. If you spread your settled GGs out you can have crazy drafted units out of ALOT of cities. [True, MIs can replace Theocracy at times when you run another religious civic]

Also you can draft 3 units/turn. Depends on map size, I think it's 5 on Huge Sure you have three unhappy's, but you get 2 back from the barracks AND there is one less population and thus one less unhappy face from too many people. It's a push. Therefore in 10 turns you have an overwhelming army of 30 rifles/musket, add manually built trebs/mounted units and your set to destroy an enemy real fast.

SOme leaders have special synergy with the Draft:

CHurchill Redcoats: with theocracy you are drafting a unit that is CG I, Drill I, Pinch, +25% versus mounted, +25% versus gunpowder plus 2 XP away from the next promotion.

Ottomans, Zara, French all have Musket UU's which can be drafted.

Toku: His gunpowder units start with three free promotions (combat I, CG I, Drill I). The Japanese Draft can be a scary site!

Cyrus 2 traits have excellent Synergy with each other.

Monty: Not 100% sure but I think his UB's decreased unhappiness applies to the Draft also. [It doesn't ]

Final, the Globe Theater. Build it in a city with LOT's of food and you can abuse the draft here ALL game long.

With that all said, I find myself not using the draft as much as I would generally want. The main reason is that Bureacracy and Free Speech are such powerful economic traits. Only if I find myself in a SE game, and EE game or alot of farms will I use Nationhood.

You seem to have made few factual errors there madscientist :(, mostly around the amount of exp from barracks and Theocracy, which is 2 exp for a draftee. I've taken the liberty of correcting them in bold, plus a few comments.

You seem to have made few factual errors there madscientist :(, mostly around the amount of exp from barracks and Theocracy, which is 2 exp for a draftee. I've taken the liberty of correcting them in bold, plus a few comments.

Thanks for the corrections. You are right about the 2 XP, I will correct the post!

Final, the Globe Theater. Build it in a city with LOT's of food and you can abuse the draft here ALL game long.


15 (from memory) is the magic number to refill your granary at size 5 for optimum drafting. So an ideal GT location may have a few exceptional yield tiles, rather than a larger number of minor surplus tiles.

I'd add that it's likely that a food rich city won't have great production. So you could build the GT using whip overflow. If you whip a bunch of siege units to assist your future drafted army under Heredetory Rule, you can avoid the unhappiness penalty by keeping the siege units stationed until the GT is finished.


With that all said, I find myself not using the draft as much as I would generally want. The main reason is that Bureacracy and Free Speech are such powerful economic traits. Only if I find myself in a SE game, and EE game or alot of farms will I use Nationhood.

Agreed, but Nationhood is really a warring civic, so it is doubtful you will want to run it for longer than necessary, even if your whole strategy revolves around drafting an army. Besides, the lifespan of drafting is normally quite short, it simply can't compete with the production advantages that become available in the Industrial era. It can be great though to milk the advantage of a military tech within turns of discovering it, before you can nurture your empire into a production powerhouse. Nationhood also enables smaller empires to conjure an army, and claim more land before their lack of production potential becomes a telling factor.

1) Always try to draft with theocracy for the promotion
2) Drafting synergizes well with aggressive and, to a lesser extent, protective
3) The first good offensive unit you can draft is the rifle, unless you have a UU like the janissary
4) Make sure you get the globe theatre set up in a high-food city before you start drafting

Drafting from filler cities working a couple farms is great. Just plopp down a city anywhere and it'll soon make a lot of hammers just through drafting. While drafting with plan + factory + forge might not be the best, drafting while you are building a factory works just fine. And of course a unit you produce in 10 turns can't fight now...

If you whip a bunch of siege units to assist your future drafted army under Heredetory Rule, you can avoid the unhappiness penalty by keeping the siege units stationed until the GT is finished.

This is great advice. Generally speaking, whipping the hell out of the GT city while you're on the way to building the GT and under HR works really well. Just keep stationing troops there. I mean, you might as well build the granary, forge, courthouse, barracks there first all by whips. Then rather than building the GT normally, keep building a unit over and over that if whipped produces a large overflow. That way you are effectively whipping the GT bit by bit but without the rush penalty of the wonder. It might take about 10 cycles or so of doing this but in the meantime you have built up an army which you would have built after building the GT anyway so it's no loss, unless you count having a bit more unit costs in the meantime.

Whenever I use the GTdraft city in a game, I think of it as a challenge to see how many :mad: faces I can produce in that city during the game.

1) Always try to draft with theocracy for the promotion
I think the decision to run Theocracy while drafting is more dependent on other bigger factors like whether you are building armies (normally) in cities or whether you need the research from Free Religion (and don't want a state religion). I don't agree with using the quanitifer "always". (edit. Wait. Is that a quantifier? :lol:)
2) Drafting synergizes well with aggressive and, to a lesser extent, protective
I would have been inclined to say it's slightly better with Protective but it's hard to say. Is part of the reason you say this that Agg gets the 1/2 price barracks and hence 2:) easier?
3) The first good offensive unit you can draft is the rifle, unless you have a UU like the janissary
Agreed. The rifle is insanely efficient to produce through the draft. Infantry and mech infantry are only so-so, and from the top of my head I think they're less efficient than muskets.
4) Make sure you get the globe theatre set up in a high-food city before you start drafting
Obvious but good tip nonetheless. :goodjob:

I know of a thread that has a few relevant tips.

Agreed, but Nationhood is really a warring civic, so it is doubtful you will want to run it for longer than necessary, even if your whole strategy revolves around drafting an army.
Nationhood has at least 3 economic benefits:

+2 happiness from barracks
+25% Espionage Points
No Upkeep

The larger your empire and the higher the inflation rate, the more important the upkeep of a civic becomes. The other two bonuses are of variable use, depending on what you are doing, but they will be useful in almost every situation.

That is ignoring the fact that the ability to draft is also an economic benefit, albeit in a slightly more roundabout way.

The GT is great, but often times I have found that I don't bother getting it up for my first war, instead choosing to simply draft twice from all cities and build theaters in captured cities/larger core cities for culture/happy woes so that I don't have a GT up until the middle-end of a war, luckily who says you only have to have 1 war :devil:

Also the more I play, the more I use drill promoted drafted muskets to back up my cannons. I can often take down a foe with muskets I have drafted as I was teching towards steel rather then keep waiting for rifles (upgrade trebs after I tech Steel). I gradually transition into grenadiers or rifles depending on production needs, but if I am first to cannons I like to use them as early as possible, there are times when I have sent in medieval armies with cannons with great success (on immortal). I find Rifles a great unit, but cannons are easily my favorite (Cavalry/Cuirassers are a close second)

I know of a thread that has a few relevant tips.


Nationhood has at least 3 economic benefits:

+2 happiness from barracks
+25% Espionage Points
No Upkeep

The larger your empire and the higher the inflation rate, the more important the upkeep of a civic becomes. The other two bonuses are of variable use, depending on what you are doing, but they will be useful in almost every situation.

That is ignoring the fact that the ability to draft is also an economic benefit, albeit in a slightly more roundabout way.

True, and good points. If you are well on your way to a domination win the gold saved by running Nationhood can outweigh the beakers gained with a strong Bureaucracy capital, and may beat Free Speech if you don't have many towns. Once you reach this point, the zero upkeep would likely outweigh the drafting benefit, as you should have many cities that can churn out troops effortlessly via production.

I suppose I come to think of Nationhood as economically bad because it hurts my economy when I'm using it to draft an army with a medium to small empire in the renaissance, when Bureaucracy is clearly the stronger economic civic. By the time Nationhood is unquestionably superior economically, I'm so clearly winning, I can easily miss hemorrhaging a few hundred gold here and there. ;)

All three of the economic aspects of Nationhood can have a beneficial effect on an economy not too heavily reliant on cottages. It is the ideal late game civic for a SE and some flavours of hybrid economies.

The +2 happiness is good for big cities (which will not usually be drafted) often allowing growth and for the smaller cities the happiness helps counter the drafting unhappiness.

The +25% EP bonus of Nationhood goes really well with jails and the beginning of an espionage economy. Jails are needed in big cities anyway to counter WW. Nationhood boosts the passive EPs from a jail by 1 EP and adds 1 EP for each spy specialist run. Later in the game with widespread intelligence agencies and some security bureaus (both gain 2 EPs) an empire with 20 cities and running some spy specialists could expect to gain 100 EPs each turn from the civic. Economically this compares fairly well with the commerce boost of Bureaucracy especially when its zero maintenance cost is accounted for.

Agreed, but Nationhood is really a warring civic, so it is doubtful you will want to run it for longer than necessary, even if your whole strategy revolves around drafting an army. Besides, the lifespan of drafting is normally quite short, it simply can't compete with the production advantages that become available in the Industrial era. It can be great though to milk the advantage of a military tech within turns of discovering it, before you can nurture your empire into a production powerhouse. Nationhood also enables smaller empires to conjure an army, and claim more land before their lack of production potential becomes a telling factor.

This is actually an interesting historic un-realism: before the rise of nationalism and drafting in the late 17th and 18th century military strength was related primarily to economy and empire efficiency: given money, you could buy ships, weapons, and mercenaries. Standing armies were rare until the early 17th C and usually around 10-20 thousand men. With nationalism and conscription, it was possible to raise much larger armies, and standing armies of more than 100.000 men became possible. Suddenly, military strength was strongly related to population. This (and mercantilism) made it impossible for the Dutch to keep up their trade kingdom and fight off the French and Germans in 1672, leading to their decline.

It is interesting that drafting in CIV can be a way for smaller empires to build military, due to the (silly) absolute limit on #drafts per turn...

In a Tokugawa game i could draft CG3 Rifles in my main military city :) (11 XP for normal troops, 5 XP for drafts)

Hammer conversion for whipping and drafting:
Whipping: 1 pop = 30 :hammers:
Draft Mech Inf.: 1 pop = 63 :hammers: (x 2.2 of whipping)
Draft Mace: 1 pop = 70 :hammers: (x 2.33)
Draft Infantry: 1 pop = 70 :hammers: (x 2.33)
Draft Musket: 1 pop = 80 :hammers: (x 2.66)
Draft Rifle: 1 pop = 110 :hammers: (x 3.66)

Rifles are by far the best thing to draft, once you have Infantry, you also have a huge production boost from plants and levees, so building Infantry is often better then drafting.

As mandscientist said, he doenst use drafting very often and thats because of marathon speed.
Whipping: 1 pop = 90 :hammers:
Draft Mech Inf.: 1 pop = 133 :hammers: (x 1.48 of whipping)
Draft Mace: 1 pop = 140 :hammers: (x 1.55)
Draft Infantry: 1 pop = 140 :hammers: (x 1.55)
Draft Musket: 1 pop = 160 :hammers: (x 1.77)
Draft Rifle: 1 pop = 220 :hammers: (x 2.44)