40 Rogues in capital, 6 turns until strike

[Esfera]

Currently playing a Nightmare difficult game, everything went spectacularly well until the AI started to produce rogues and ambushers.

There are 40 rogues in my capital and more are coming, back before I lost all my other cities to these I have seen stacks of up to 80 rogues.

My civiliian unit maintenance is a huge expense, bringing my balance to -200 per turn, I only have enough reserves for 6 turns, and then a strike will begin, which only disbands military units for some reason, which is a surprising outcome considering I'm far from capping the free military unit cost

My initial plan to deal with this was to have enough culture to get the Lawful trait and meanwhile save lots of gold to deal with rogue stacks that decided to hang around my cities



My current plan to deal with this is to create as many enforcers as I can before my capital starts revolting and ignore the strike, as apparently it doesn't affect civilians.
Before the strike starts I plan to use my military units to destroy the 6 or so rogues that might be around and then sell them, a huge problem is that the Romans are at war with me and enforcers are a low strenght unit.
Any ideas?

 

[Snofru1]

Enforcers is the way to go...
To avoid the bancruptcy I would sell a number of expensive buildings and check whether there are some cheap ones that create a lot of gold and build them quickly.

 

[Yudishtira]

Doesn't anyone think that's too many rogues? I'd say given that he's not ignoring the problem, you should never have more than 20 in a single city. Sounds like they're too cheap/easy to train.

 

[Esfera]

I'm certain that this is impossible to be dealt with, for a moment I thought I found a solution but it turns out it isn't enough, keep in mind I'm playing on Nightmare and with Revolutions on and downsizing is profitable on, I played from turn 1060 to turn 1086, here's everything that has happened:

• Whipe enforcers and conscript military units to both bring population down and help me in the war against my neighboor, I managed to bring down the population this way from 12 to 5.
• Get to 45 enforcers before the revolts get too constant.
• City starts to revolt every few turns, change civics between Caste System and Tribal to get anarchy so I don't have to lose 300-450 gold every turn, also, for some reason, during anarchy I get 17 gold every turn.
• Move my military units towards one of the cities of my enemy.
• Get 5 of my enforcers killed by ambushers.
• Take over the enemy city.
• Move back my units while combating against the militias that were raised by taking the city.
• Avoid more enforcers being killed by ambushers and manage to get a ceasefire.
• Sell military units.
• Whipe more enforcers before crime and revolution points get too high.
• Get back to 45 enforcers.
• Change civics every 3 or 4 turns, trying to syncronize it when the city isn't revolting, keep in mind I have to wait 1 additional turn between civic changes and every time my city is revolting but I'm not in anarchy I lose 300-450 gold.
• Get to 51 enforcers but almost 8000 crime points and 2500 revolution points.

With 8000 crime points and 2500 revolution points the city is permanently revolting and since there's a wait time between civic changes of one turn...

 

[Maltazard]

Used to be a few versions ago that AI on high difficulty would run away tech wise and completely crush the player sometimes. Now it's using asymmetrical warfare by the looks of it. I wonder if this is one of those unintended consequences or if it's actually kind of guided in what its doing. As in, not that the AI knows that by amassing rogues it's going to cause revolts, but at least that it know that amassing rogues in one city is a good strategic move and that it counts as a kind of offense. Or rather that it's just a random outcome of some varied miscalculation, since 40 rogues is indeed a lot.

As for dealing with it, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes. I used to be very proactive and amass enforces at the first sight of a rogue, but now with gold being more valuable it's not so easy. Higher difficulties might be getting too hard considering many mantenance costs scale up with difficulty as well, which means even less gold available.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Interesting situation. Would take some analysis. Can't say it's a BAD strategy, but it also is indicitive of an unhealthy obsession by the AI - some kind of control system intended to put on the breaks and allow the AI to consider doing other things isn't firing perhaps.

 

[garfunkel]

It's like when the AI, few versions back, was obsessed with building dogs. There were cities with literally hundreds and hundreds of dogs in them.

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's like when the AI, few versions back, was obsessed with building dogs. There were cities with literally hundreds and hundreds of dogs in them.

Similar problem but different reason.