Questions about drafting

So, I read the drafting guide in the war academy and I have to admit that I don't feel that I can conceptualize well enough the impact of drafting. For those interested the link is just below:

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/drafting.php

I play on Monarch, although I usually win almost all my games. I've won my only Emperor game and I'm at tech parity on my 2nd Immortal game. So, I'm not a total newb in terms of civ concepts, but drafting/rush buy is almost a completely foreign concept to me and I figure I should learn to implement it.

I have a few questions:
1) How does one recognize a good drafting site as opposed to it being a good GP farm site? Am I right in assuming that by the time you tech Nationalism or switch to Nationhood that the value of Great People has diminished a good bit so that drafting is more efficient than going for GP's?

2) Can anyone give me an idea of the scope that drafting has on quickly building an army? Maybe TMIT can do another LPC IV video using drafting. Maybe some type of before and after illustration. Maybe a save.

3) How viable is it for a small empire? I could see the use where you can rotate drafting sites, but for small empires how viable is drafting?

Overall, this concept is probably one overlooked by many players of similar skill levels, but I would certainly like to learn how to use it and to be able to recognize when it would be a good idea to use it.

dirtyparrot said:

1) How does one recognize a good drafting site as opposed to it being a good GP farm site?

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A decent GP farm can support a city size of 30+. A decent drafting city need only rise to the population of 6 or 7. Thus you only need 6 or 7 decent food tiles, maybe even fewer. Three food sources plus 3 flood plains is more than enough, in my opinion. Please note that I'm assuming you are using the Drafting + Globe Theatre combination and happiness is not an issue in this city.

other then the GT city, which kind of has to take a lot of nice food resources, there is a nice trick i sometimes use when the land is right:
place a filler junk city somewhere where it has access to 2-3 resources that "belong" to your real city´s and "borrow" those resources for drafting/whipping purposes. the city will be total . .. .. .. . hole after a very short time of mass drafting/whipping, but it served its purpose by then and can give back the food resources to the real citys while waiting 70+ turns to come out of unhappines

If I might add... drafting is done best in smaller cities where pop can grow back quicker. Also, as CyrikDC pointed out, unless you have tons of in your big cities you don't need to be nerfing their growth and production with draft-angst. With enough though (and IMO if growth is stagnant due only to a food cap) you can draft out of larger core cities initially at least to create a quick offensive army, or a defensive one should one of your neighbors turn hostile without warning (as so often happens in higher difficulty levels). I must warn though to use some caution there.

Drafting is also done best when a tech lead is narrowly established, ie you just research rifling, and so draft an army of conscript rifles to face the LBs/muskets of an enemy on the cusp of rifling/mil.sci. A few drafted rifles to escort your conventional or only-partially-upgraded stack can really make a difference on offense. I dunno what others do, but I try and fight them in 75%+ odds battles and gain the XP lost in drafting them. Or sometimes they just go in first to get slaughtered so the CR2 maces can clean up and promote to CR3 before upgrading

dirtyparrot said:

So, I read the drafting guide in the war academy and I have to admit that I don't feel that I can conceptualize well enough the impact of drafting. For those interested the link is just below:

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/strategy/drafting.php

I play on Monarch, although I usually win almost all my games. I've won my only Emperor game and I'm at tech parity on my 2nd Immortal game. So, I'm not a total newb in terms of civ concepts, but drafting/rush buy is almost a completely foreign concept to me and I figure I should learn to implement it.

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Well, drafting will change your life.

1) How does one recognize a good drafting site as opposed to it being a good GP farm site? Am I right in assuming that by the time you tech Nationalism or switch to Nationhood that the value of Great People has diminished a good bit so that drafting is more efficient than going for GP's?

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The best site for a Globe Theater draft center is the spot that can grow to minimal drafting size in 1 turn so you can draft a rifle each turn. It looks pretty much as a good GP farm spot. In some games you won't have a place for both and shutting down a GP farm if fast domination or conquest is the goal is indeed an option. But you could do it even without GT, or with a weaker GT. As mentioned, filler small cities are key for this because they will have a big happiness cap. For somewhat later drafting, especially if it comes down to 2 pop infantry, Biology is very important to have for more quicker regrowth.

2) Can anyone give me an idea of the scope that drafting has on quickly building an army? Maybe TMIT can do another LPC IV video using drafting. Maybe some type of before and after illustration. Maybe a save.

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You can (and should to attack asap) draft 3 units each turn. Use Theocracy and give them combat promotions. In 10 turns that's 30 rifles ready to invade some medieval civ. You can combine them with accuracy trebs for example to bombard defenses, together they are unstoppable. It's also useful to combine drafting with slavery because the unhappiness timers run at the same time.

3) How viable is it for a small empire? I could see the use where you can rotate drafting sites, but for small empires how viable is drafting?

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It's very viable and often best for a small empire. HR rule is very useful here to put older units in those small drafting cities to increase happy caps. The scope of drafting is largely dependent on the economy type and the amount of available food. For example, try a game on Immortal with just a Bure capital, GP farm and a couple of food cities for drafting/slaving. You'll have some nice fun...

1)Your second best food site will do. Some mines to build the Globe are nice, otherwise build it from whip overflows (DaveMcW has made a guide about this). Don't put the NE and the Globe together if you plan on drafting.

2) 30 rifles in 10 turns. (from drafting alone)

3) then draft all your cities twice and the Globe forever. You want barracks everywhere and 20% cultural slider to avoid many happy faces (theaters are in place ofc, coliseums are nice).

The key for using this is to have the Globe in place when rifling kicks in (or gunpowder if you plan on drafting muskets). The Taj Mahal can be a good way to switch in nationalism if you have a spare GE or marble

Cheers

edit: drafting should be forbidden in marathon poor AIs...

General: Drafting is mostly an interim solution.
Whipping Infantry under ideal circumstances (Factories + power, Kremlin) gives a better conversion than drafting them, at less of a happiness hit. Drafting Rifles before factories and Military Academies, however, can give ~3 times as many final hammers as whipping them.

1) A good GP farm and a good drafting location look similar but usage is diffrent. You care less about the tiles beyond what you need to draft (almost) every turn. Growing larger isn't very needed... since each size increase means you need 1 more food to regrow, a 3-food-tile is effectively food-neutral for drafting cities; others can make better use of it.

2) When it becomes available, drafting gives an excellent hammer return but wrecks happiness quickly. Whipping does the opposite, so a combination can give you a workable compromise.
This is the production equivalent to heavy lightbulbing without stopping for much infrastructure... you get a big head start you can hopefully leverage, at the expense of long-time potential. Who cares if your core cities are half their original size with no growth potential due to unhappiness if you can take over the world before your opponents equalise.

3) Quite good if you don't intend to stay small. Smaller empires will probably want a dedicated Globe Theatre/drafting city because otherwise you need many many filler cities to let you draft 3 units per turn sustainably; larger empires can rotate food resources in filler cities and use the GT to boost another national wonder city, making it bigger.

Also, don't forget that having a globe theatre city is obv really nice, but you do not need one to start drafting. The first draft under nationhood is harmless in terms of happiness as long as you have barracks (3 more unhappiness from draft, one less from the population loss, and 2 happiness from nationhood). I for one love drafting but forget all the time to build the globe in advance, but that does not remove the opportunity to get a rifle from a cottage or a village, which is already quite nice

I used drafting a lot in the days i play immortal. I'm using it less and less now. There are some issues with the whole thing.

Nationhood is not a pretty civic to run, apart from a very substantial loss of research capital can often make 1 unit/turn under buro but not under nationhood

GT costs a lot of hammers as well, you could have made units with that money, building 6 theaters in cities isn't that expensive but it all adds up.

You starve a very good city completely, running workshops here would have given the city a very good output anyways, together with the capital this means the whole draft costs you 1 unit /turn while GT gives you 1 unpromoted musket/rifle in return. So GT alone certainly doesn't break even.

So the gains have to come from other cities where you also draft, you can do this once, twice in some cities, i agree this can give you +/- 15 rifles very fast and this is indeed very good. In very well developed cities even drafting twice already hurts though.I 'm working more with mounted wars lately, drafting's simple not that good in this case.

Dirk1302 said:

In very well developed cities even drafting twice already hurts though.I 'm working more with mounted wars lately, drafting's simple not that good in this case.

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Bolded for emphasis. Drafting and lightbulbing are different from direct yields because they don't care about multipliers, they only care about volume.

I normally love my shinies (infrastructure, wonders, academies, settled GPs...), and spend most of my time on micromanagement to somehow make Settler-level strategies work on Immortal (or Deity with a good start)... but sometimes I have to trim away the fat to survive.
Nationhood is doubly good if you get an underdeveloped but hopefully large empire... drafting takes care of the military angle, a focus on espionage is helpful if you ran your economy into the ground.

Yes that happens, block a lot of land early 12+ cities for instance. Making a lot of workers/settlers means cities are often a bit backward and maybe not all tiles improved when it's time to war. Drafting looks a lot better in his case as there are more cities to draft from and these cities are not that valuable in the first place.

Probably one of the reasons i don't draft that much lately is that i haven't been in this situation much recently.

The real reason I don't like drafting isn't the raw economic hit of losing B or FS; its the diplomatic angle and the tedium of EE.

Running B is one of the easier ways to keep a large number of civs out of declaration range, and also one of the easier ways to reach the coveted Friendly status. The nationalist civs just aren't as good as the B or FS civs for diplomacy. No matter the strength of the production bonus I get out of drafting, the effective multiplier of a Friendly trade partner and the whole - I don't have to worry about that flank - multiplier tends to trump build efficiency. Even when there are good nat civs in the game, I often find it more advantageous to build a B(vassal)/HR/OR(Theo) based diplomatic strategy for the early gains; by the time nat is an option I've already pissed those civs off too much to get them up to Friendly.

The only way to make nationalism competitive in the long run is by having a strong EE component to the economy (argueably most of it), massing the EP buildings and cranking up the EP slider. The sheer tedium of spies (and finding which bloody one is finally at -50%) makes this most annoying.

That being said a religious civ or a GA can let you draft a rather respectable army (normally muskets) with a short flip in and out. Zara taking the Taj off lib can draft a good 20 Oromos without mucking up diplo too badly and be ready to flip back into B to mass crank cannons (or to mass gold and upgrade trebs) before you hit steel.

Interesting discussion.

I wanted to highlight something Iranon mentioned. Infantry are one of the worst units to draft in terms of conversion efficiency. Don't do it unless you're really desperate for the unit this turn. Rifles are the best conversion. In fact, drafting rifles then upgrading them to infantry might even be more efficient than flat out drafting the infantry. I'd be interested in what the gold conversion is there...

Another unit I like to draft is mech infantry, since at that point of the game there could be coastal cities large enough that they are only working 1 ocean tiles or supporting specialists that won't even produce a GP, with their highest pop points. Drafting away 3 pop for a mech infantry means you aren't drafting into unhappiness, and you are only removing citizens from pretty useless tiles anyway. This is also handy if cities have health problems.

Also, you should feel more inclined to draft if you play an Aggressive or Protective civ. Drafted gunpowder units from these civs are a lot better. With just 1 other source of xp than a barracks (by the way, don't be drafting without a barracks!), Pro/Agg civs get units with the second promotion. Often that second promotion is important (e.g. pinch).

And I absolutely agree with mirthadir on the EE being necessary. Nationhood is one of those civics where to justify running it instead of one of the other civics means taking full advantage of each little bonus it gives. No upkeep (good for large empires with tightly packed cities), 2 from barracks (draft from almost every city to take advantage of this), +25% espionage (you'll need to be running at 20% or more (preferably spurts of 100% like is done for binary teching).

I used to draft a lot more than I do now. I prefer mounted warfare like Dirk - it's faster and you get better odds without siege. But if you don't have horses, then rifles/cannons are your next best option. In that case, building/whipping cannons and drafting rifles is a great way to make an army quickly.

As for a good GT city, you really only need 1 good food source + 5 flat irrigable grassland tiles or 2 good food sources. The city doesn't need to grow past 6 and only needs a barracks, granary, theater, GT. You can whip the first three buildings pretty easily and catapult whip overflow the GT in about 20 turns.

Shyuhe, good tip. Especially if you are running Hereditary Rule, you can pretty much build the Globe Theatre from whip overflows without ever having to whip it directly. Just keep the whipped units (e.g. trebs or catapults) in the city til the GT is complete.

A lot of draft hatred on this thread. Or maybe its just Nationalism hatred and Bureau love? Nationalism is definitely a temporary switch but there is no better way to build up an army real quick. Drafting from the GT city every turn and lightly from other spots for 20 turns will result in a massive force. Also, whats with the talk of a pop 6 GT city? I suppose thats fine if you are drafting riflemen and regrowing every turn but not if you want to draft infantry. My typical GT city has tons of crap farms and grows huge in between draft periods, then gets drafted down to nothing. Yeah, drafting infantry costs 2pop but if you beeline AL you can crush the AIs without using any siege.

On quick speed, it's usually unnecessary for the GT city to go any larger than 6 pop (only ever working 5 tiles). Certainly if you can afford to keep switching in and out of Nationhood then growing to higher pop in the GT city can be a lot better, but this is more applicable to the slower speeds - especially Epic and Marathon, only to some extent on Normal.

Actually, it can be quite funny on quick speed because if you build up a big enough food income from few tiles in your GT city, you can have a huge amount of food stored because your city can only grow by one pop per turn, which you then keep drafting away. I've seen things like 81/20 stored. I suppose a city like that could actually grow into pretty bad starvation and rely on its built up food until it starts drafting again! So maybe it's not so bad on quick speed.

JBossch, though I haven't tested it, I have a sneaky feeling that drafting rifles and upgrading them could be more efficient than drafting infantry. Drafting infantry is a poorer conversion than drafting macemen if you focus purely on the hammer from food cost (that is a possibly biased simplification, I admit).

PieceOfMind said:

On quick speed, it's usually unnecessary for the GT city to go any larger than 6 pop (only ever working 5 tiles). Certainly if you can afford to keep switching in and out of Nationhood then growing to higher pop in the GT city can be a lot better, but this is more applicable to the slower speeds - especially Epic and Marathon, only to some extent on Normal.

Actually, it can be quite funny on quick speed because if you build up a big enough food income from few tiles in your GT city, you can have a huge amount of food stored because your city can only grow by one pop per turn, which you then keep drafting away. I've seen things like 81/20 stored. I suppose a city like that could actually grow into pretty bad starvation and rely on its built up food until it starts drafting again! So maybe it's not so bad on quick speed.

JBossch, though I haven't tested it, I have a sneaky feeling that drafting rifles and upgrading them could be more efficient than drafting infantry. Drafting infantry is a poorer conversion than drafting macemen if you focus purely on the hammer from food cost (that is a possibly biased simplification, I admit).

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It is relatively weak in terms of efficiency, but the returns if the approach is successful aren't to be discounted.

Wouldn't upgrades being effective or not also depend to a large extent on the ease of attaining gold (either via multipliers or possibly a GM)? One could always draft rifle en route, turn the slider off at AL, draft MORE infantry and upgrade the rifles to gain as many units as possible, though there's some cost from not running an alternate civic that is hard to quantify.

It is relatively weak in terms of efficiency, but the returns if the approach is successful aren't to be discounted.

Wouldn't upgrades being effective or not also depend to a large extent on the ease of attaining gold (either via multipliers or possibly a GM)? One could always draft rifle en route, turn the slider off at AL, draft MORE infantry and upgrade the rifles to gain as many units as possible, though there's some cost from not running an alternate civic that is hard to quantify.

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Part of the charm of drafting then upgrading is that you can overdraft and then let the anger cool while you are raking in the cash to upgrade/actually fighting. Generally these types of draft then flip things are really only useful if I'm about to come into some serious happiness that I wasn't getting elsewhere (i.e. I'm going to flip FR, I'm going to begin astro based luxury trades, I'm going to grab eman), or with Spi civs.

A far more powerful strat is to go Zara and draft mass oromos, efficiency is a bit impaired, but you can delay rifling until after AL is in. Then mass upgrade those instantly into infantry. High drill infantry backed with cannon (later arty/air) shreads the AI quick and easy.

JB: Nat is only a good civic if you are massing EP, either via slider cottages or spy specs. Drafting is extremely good, but it just doesn't give you enough to use the civic long term without building your empire around it. If I want to convert in infantry, it is FAR more efficient to just build/take the Kremlin and whip the buggers out. In some scenarios, getting communism first with the free GSp, the monopoly trade techs, and first crack at the Kremlin can get you to AL faster and you SP/Kremlin whips can let you whip out more infantry sooner.

mirthadir said:

JB: Nat is only a good civic if you are massing EP, either via slider cottages or spy specs. Drafting is extremely good, but it just doesn't give you enough to use the civic long term without building your empire around it.

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I disagree. For a large Representation run Specialist Economy, the Nationalism civic is the cheapest civic you can run, the extra happiness is just gravy.