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.
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.