Can losing a city to the Barbs be a good thing?

[Bestbank Tiger]

In my current game, I was playing Raging Hordes +1 and at one point, they threw the kitchen sink at one of my smaller, newer cities and eventually took it. But my partisans took to the hills and I immediately took it back with several partisans left over.

I sent the extras to explore, chase barbarians, and defend other cities--and they were all from "NONE" so there was zero support or production cost.

Which got me thinking...would it be good to build a small city on the frontier just to let the Barbs take it and generate free partisans?

 

[Ace]

That works, but you only get a few partisans, and only after the right techs have been discovered. A better method is called a "Barb Farm". This can be done anytime after you have discovered writing and gotten diplomats (through spies work better). The idea is to build a city and leave it undefended so that the barbs can just walk into it. The barbs will start producing units and as they emerge, you buy (bribe) them with your dips. The units are cheap to buy and since you are bribing them closer to "their" city than yours, and the units will be none units.

Another method is to "Troll" for none units. You send a dip/spy out on a ship and cruise along the AI civs coast. Find a unit, buy it and send it home. This takes more time and coins, but it works. Once you have spies (to cut the cost), this is a good way to hunt for none settlers/engineers

 

[Stegyre]

If your interest is in partisans, yet another strategy is to "build your own." Ppartisans enjoy a unique charactersitic. Unlike other units, which are automatically disbanded whenever their home city is captured or disbanded, partisans become "none" units at that point. One of my favorite approaches (as someone who favors small civs and lots of "none" units) is to send a (supported) engineer close to another civ's city, settle, and then disband into a "none" engineer. At the same time (i.e., just before disbanding), I will have my other cities build partisans, send them to the new city, and support them from there. I end up with a "none" engineer and a handful of "none" partisans. (And even an expensive rush-build of an engineer is usually much cheaper than bribing one from the ai.)

 

[Ali Ardavan]

Very interesting points Stegyre. I have to keep these in mind.

 

[Junuxx]

If it's NON units you're after, just build a few hundred cities until you get a NON town

 

[Ali Ardavan]

Juuxx, I believe what you are refering to is a bug in the earliest version of Civ2 that was fixed soon after.

 

[Junuxx]

Really? I didn't know that

I have always wondered why I only managed to get such a city twice in a decade

It's extremely powerful if you transport all your units there and rehome them; you can have a supportless and war wearinessless democracy.
Ah well, guess that's why they fixed it