Drafting for Fun and Profit

TheMeInTeam, a simple way to exploit the power of drafting is to found several small junk cities, often in between your "real" cities and sharing some resources. These are intentionally drafting and whipping cities. They are small and expendable and only need to grow to size 8 or 10 maximum, so marginal land like 3 grassland farms and a few plains farms are enough to get the city running. A granary, courthouse and barracks are the minumum infrastructure and you can add a forge and marketplace to increase happiness cap. Once you adopt Nationhood you can often draft 2 or 3 times in a few turns from these cities before they are likely to become unhappy and then if you combine a draft with whipping 3 pop you can extract even more military potential. This is a very potent way to raise a large army of riflemen or janissaries.

These junk cities fit into the EE and Nationhood game that you mention as well. They are an ideal place to build / whip jails and intelligence agencies and post Biology can even run a few spy specialists to add more EPs. They won't produce many beakers or much gold but they become handy sources of EPs as well as long term drafting sites.

SAM Infantry: These can be drafted under Bhruic's patch if you research Rocketry (SAM infantry) before Industrialism (infantry) and cost 2 pop each. They replace riflemen as the default draft troop type in that circumstance. I'm not sure what happens when Industrialism is subsequently researched although I expect infantry will be the drafted troop type. Also I'm not sure if this is also true for the new 3.17 patch although that was based on Bhruic's patch. This has occured in one of my games when playing Izzy and stealling technologies. In that game I am avoiding Economics and Corporation for as long as possible to retain the use of my Citadels, so until an AI researches Industrialism and I can steal it (and its prerequisites) I can build 10 exp artillery and machine guns and draft SAM infantry.

Thanks for the advice! Using junk cities seems a good idea. I'd like to point out though that infantry actually come with the assembly line tech, not industrialism (the latter is needed for marines, tanks, and battleships). Regardless, it wouldn't matter if you're delaying economics/corp because those are also pre-reqs for assembly line (specifically corp and steam power)

You're right. I meant Assembly Line not Industrialism, I was working from memory and it played tricks on me

I played a game as Suleiman last night and the draftinf strategy worked amazing. The Hamam UB gives 2, very nice. Suleiman is philosophical which mean you can get liberlism early and choose nationalism as a free tech and then research gunpowder, the draft those janissary's!

Hahaha...drafting with ottomans is borderline unfair . They're dead before they touch rifles or grenadiers...just have to keep them away from military tradition because those annoying superpromo cuirassers that the AI loves spamming can hold vs jani's.

I'm partway through a game where I wound up with a ton of seafood cities and no hammer-rich land outside my capitol. I managed to nab Assembly Line well before the AIs by beelining from the middle game (through other strategies), swapped to Nationalism, drafted a bunch of Infantry from those food-rich cities, and proceeded to take apart the leading AI (and win the game because of it). All of that when I was dead last in hammer production by a significant margin.

Nationalism certainly has potential.

There are also scenarios(like Chinese Unification from Warlords) that have future tech early and so if u can just run nationhood(or any mod civic that lets you draft)while speed researching FT you can dodge the unhappiness. And some scenarios (Again, Chinese Unification) have techs and civics that give huge amounts of food, which means you can just draft practically all u want.

Something that is mentioned in the post, but I ignored. In my most recent game, I was FAR behind in techs and wonders, however I managed to research Military Science before Civil Service. Yes you heard me, Grenadiers before macemen. Anyway, Grenadiers are pretty expensive, so I thought I would tech trade up to nationalism and get drafting on those juicy grenadiers only to discover - Grenadiers cannot be drafted, only musketmen for me

I know the first post implies it, but I will explicitly state it.
you CANNOT DRAFT GRENADIERS.

I'll add CAN DRAFT QUECHUAS in case it helps :shrug:

If you want some undraftable unit fast (gren, cav, cannon, ...) and you have low production you can still chop, whip and/or rushbuy (just need to capture the mids - at least you don't have to spend time thinking who to attack...).

vale said:

To regrow from population 5 after drafting a rifleman or worse you will need 10/15/28/45 food.

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When I read this I didn't understand you meant a surplus at size 5. I suggest you make it explicit:
It's such a useful fact that you might also want to do something to call more attention to it. Right now it's kind of hidden in a section that looks like an aside.

actually, that's the amount of food you need in total, ordered by speed, if I understood this right: (10+size) food to grow one pop if you have a granary on normal speed. So in junk cities where we will never reach the happy cap, drafting is ridiculously efficient, especially with Riflemen. Although it's perfectly possible I misunderstood you and we meant the same thing

I use junk cities religiously, and drafting stands out for needing little investment compared to the other ways to abuse them - like espionage buildings, religious wonders + associated buildings, or corporations.
Doubly so since it allows decent unit production without production modifiers, meaning we can build up while deferring industrialisation. High-hammer cities - especialyl the one with the Heroic Epic - ban focus on rounding out our army... ships, siege units, cavalry and so on.

Iranon, are you claiming that a city with 4 grass farms and a grass mine (15 food at size 5) and a Granary has enough food to draft one Rileman per turn on Normal indefinitely?

No, he doesn't claim that. You need a surplus of 15 food per turn and a grassland farm only has a surplus of 2 food after biology. Four grassland farms would only produce a surplus of 10 food. But 8 grassland farms could give a food surplus of 18 and that is enough to draft a 1 pop unit indefinitely at size 8. It is usual to have more concentrated forms of food resources to get the surplus food. A city with 3 fish, for instance, has a food surplus of 14 and at size 5 it will be able to draft on 14 out of 15 turns which is close enough to continuous to not be noticeable.

UncleJJ said:

No, he doesn't claim that.

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I was going to ask you why you said this, but never mind. I don't want to know. Let's just let him answer for himself.

Apparently there's a misundestanding regarding the terms used. Most interesting figures refer to what happens in a given round, so to me, the 'food surplus' is [food yield] - [food consumed], i.e. whatever goes into the food bar of the city in a given turn.
Other uses of the term would also make sense... but Jet's interpretation of my post would be more than ludicrous.

A surplus of 2 (e.g. only food-neutral land is worked, the surplus comes from the home tile) is enough for sustainable drafting every 10 turns up to a city size of 10. This is usually the highest sustainable rate because of the happiness penalty.

If we want to use a filler city purely for drafting, we need something more... To draft riflemen from a size 7 city every round (assuming a very high happiness cap or the Globe Theatre) we would require a food surplus of 16. Doable... 3 pigs/fish, 2 pre-Biology grassland farms, and 2 food-neutral tiles would qualify.
Note that in this case we have no real incentive for growing the city any bigger than it needs to be... if we intend to draft every round, the city needs to regrow any round, and each increase in size will increase the food surplus needed by one. In other worse, growing to work more (again, pre-Biology) grassland farms would change nothing (apart from the obvious... trade routes, maintenance etc).

***

Below the total amount of food that needs to go into the food bar to get to the same population after a draft (Note: I'm counting from the final size, the one at which the draft occurs. This is different from my earlier posts involving whipping/drafting where I always counted from the 'average during regrowth' which I find more convenient to use).

size+9 for Riflemen and below

2 (size)+17 for Infantry

3 (size)+24 for Mech Infantry

A great article and I use this if the situation arises (although I am more a CE player).

However, I felt I have something to add here, an inadvertant sample game illustrating the power of the draft. I am not spamming my own game, but this is definitely right along with this.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=318388

The game is DeGaulle on an Archeopolego map. Forget the rules or why things were done, it's not important here. What is important is how the Draft was used. Things to consider

1) Very limited land for laying down a good cottage system, so this was avoided early. FArms were preferred.

2) As most Archopolego maps are, production was an issue. Thus getting a powerhouse Military Producing city was hard to get.

3) One city (Tours) had access to alot of grasslands, one seafood, limited production, all of which are irrigatable post Civil Service. Production was limited, thus I decided the Globe Theater would be built here.

4) Once I had nationalism I beelined Biology and started drafting. First Muskets, then rifles, then Infantry. Almost 1/turn (and at Marathon)! In no time I had a massive force of weakly promoted units ready to set sail.

5) At this point we turned from a Peaceful trader to a conquering war-monger using a drafted army for almost all the work. We built mostly support unit such as trebs/cannons/Cavalry and eventually tanks. Still, the majority of the game was using coastal bombardment (Frigates/Destroyers) followed by suicidal rifles/infantry all to tremendous success.

6) Once I got Great Generals I settled them in Tours. Since DeGaulle is Charismatic, soon I got combat I, then Combat I/Pinch, then Combat I/II/Pinch drafted out of the city.

My point here is that the draft can be a game breaker is planned for correctly. Getting an entire army out of the lone Globetheater leaves the rest of the empire alot of time for infrastructure.

So teh Draft is pretty damned powerful, and I hope the OP understands my added link is meant to help a great strategy article!

PS: At the post the game is still in progress. That does not matter, the power of the draft has been already shown.

Iranon said:

To draft riflemen from a size 7 city every round (assuming a very high happiness cap or the Globe Theatre) we would require a food surplus of 16. Doable... 3 pigs/fish, 2 pre-Biology grassland farms, and 2 food-neutral tiles would qualify.

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You're saying you need a surplus of 16 at size 7, which is beside the point. Size 6 is the size at which you need the surplus of 16 to draft from size 7 to 6 once per turn indefinitely. It doesn't matter per se what the surplus is at size 7.

Jet said:

When I read this I didn't understand you meant a surplus at size 5. I suggest you make it explicit:

"To regrow from population 5 after drafting a rifleman or worse you will need a surplus of 10/15/28/45 food at size 5."​

Click to expand...

Iranon said:

Actually, that's the amount of food you need in total, ordered by speed, if I understood this right: (10+size) food to grow one pop if you have a granary on normal speed.

Click to expand...

Jet said:

Iranon, are you claiming that a city with 4 grass farms and a grass mine (15 food at size 5) and a Granary has enough food to draft one Rileman per turn on Normal indefinitely?

Click to expand...

Iranon said:

[No.] ...To me, the 'food surplus' is [food yield] - [food consumed], i.e. Whatever goes into the food bar of the city in a given turn...

Click to expand...

So why did you post "Actually, that's the amount of food you need in total"?

Didn't he mean the "net food" collected as total food. FWIW I think I view it the same way - it's easier to look at the numbers in terms of food surpluses. If anything it's easier to count tiles where many are food neutral and many are +1 or -1 than it is to count all the food up and then subtract the amount due to the city size.

Total food just means it's how much you'd need for the regrowth in one turn. And Jet you're right that it's the food required to grow from size 6 that matters if drafting at pop 7. One of the food-neutral tiles would not be necessary. However, perhaps he was counting the city square as one of the food neutral tiles?

Again with the speculative answering for Iranon! Please just let him answer for himself.