When I play for a peaceful victory (and I usually do), I like to have a good buffer between me and the warlike civs. This way I can build ridiculously little army until very late in the game, and still fend off that samurai horde. A geographical buffer such as a mountain range or ocean is great, but often you have to close the edges and fill holes with city-states or weakened civs. But those, being inherently weak, often need protection. As we seek a peaceful victory, or just being too weak to sustain an outright war, declaring war on the aggressor is not a great option.
However, I found that I can use my military passively in largely 3 ways, to give protection without declaring war. The first and maybe obvious one is to surround the buffer city with your own troops so it cannot be taken:
This has some drawbacks. You need open borders/alliance, you choke the exit of the protected city, and maybe most importantly - the AI will never understand what's going on. the screenshot above is from about the middle of a war going on for over a century with a ludicrous amount of Songhai troops filling up more and more hexes. At this point it actually feels a bit like cheating, the AI being so stupid.
A second approach, if possible, is to have your army occupy a choke-point outside the buffer's borders:
This time, the enemy can trickle into the buffer and be destroyed one unit at a time. The protectorate actually can field a military so that the aggressor may eventually be discouraged. Downside is you don't always have a nice choke-point to use.
The third form is to keep your peacekeepers as a dormant reserve inside the enemy territory. You wait for the invasion to be whittled-down some by the attacked city, then you join the war on the buffer's side while the aggressor is weak, at which point you can even take some cities from him if you like. Downside is you can't use inferior units such as scouts or crossbows in the industrial era - your units will do actual fighting.
So, what else have you all been doing to keep the peace? What other strategies do you use to keep your buffer healthy, except brute force?
[Playing on Emperor, usually standard size and normal pace]
However, I found that I can use my military passively in largely 3 ways, to give protection without declaring war. The first and maybe obvious one is to surround the buffer city with your own troops so it cannot be taken:
Spoiler :
This has some drawbacks. You need open borders/alliance, you choke the exit of the protected city, and maybe most importantly - the AI will never understand what's going on. the screenshot above is from about the middle of a war going on for over a century with a ludicrous amount of Songhai troops filling up more and more hexes. At this point it actually feels a bit like cheating, the AI being so stupid.
A second approach, if possible, is to have your army occupy a choke-point outside the buffer's borders:
Spoiler :
This time, the enemy can trickle into the buffer and be destroyed one unit at a time. The protectorate actually can field a military so that the aggressor may eventually be discouraged. Downside is you don't always have a nice choke-point to use.
The third form is to keep your peacekeepers as a dormant reserve inside the enemy territory. You wait for the invasion to be whittled-down some by the attacked city, then you join the war on the buffer's side while the aggressor is weak, at which point you can even take some cities from him if you like. Downside is you can't use inferior units such as scouts or crossbows in the industrial era - your units will do actual fighting.
So, what else have you all been doing to keep the peace? What other strategies do you use to keep your buffer healthy, except brute force?
[Playing on Emperor, usually standard size and normal pace]
