Drafting Janissaries

First post...of course, out of frustration! I was playing on monarch as Ottoman, on a brutal map landlocked in the middle of 5 other civs and fighting wars on all sides thanks to religious problems. I love Otto's traits and UB - happiness was never a concern for me. Thanks to a strong economy (a super specialist city, two powerful commerce cities from Mao, and two good production cities), I was able to be right near the tech and points lead, and way ahead of both Saladin and Kublai, so I was able to fend both off for a long time with cavalry and janissaries (before getting grenadiers), but they wouldn't accept reasonable peace offerings. Made peace with Saladin after pillaging him for 20 turns or so, and finally got Kublai Khan to make peace with me (he kept demanding my production city as part of the peace treaty!) for 10 turns. My force was depleted from these stupid long wars though - watched my power rating stay stagnant while Peter, Bismarck and Brennus all beefed up, laughing at our stupid religious wars.

I switched all my cities to military production to try to get my force back up, and continued researching. As background, I was pretty much first to chemistry and military tradition, and had just started to research rifling when I made the peace with those two. Just after I made peace with those twom and five turns from me hitting rifling, Brennus (who was only cautious with me, and had rifling) declares and moves in a stack. Brings trebs, rifleman and grenadiers to my main production city. I saw him coming and had at least three turns to react, so switched to nationhood and tried to trade for rifling - no takers. After the anarchy, i go to draft....and it drafts janissaries!!!! Not grenadiers (strength 12 vs. 9) or cavalry (15 vs 9), but janissaries. What a complete suck job. I lose my super military production city (with heroic epic, military academy, 3 settled GGs), and at that point, the game is done...no chance to fend him off, with furious civs on both sides.

I was so pissed at the stupid janissaries...cavalry or grenadiers totally would have stopped the onslaught. My beef with the game is why can't you choose what unit to draft - why does it have to assign one - I play warlords - is it the same on BTS. Not being able to draft cavalry and grenadiers totally killed me and ruined a nice game. Nothing worse than playing on epic, having a great, long game, and something stupid like that completely shells it. Ugh - I hate reloading, and after playing 5-6 more turns, realized that I was about to lose a key commerce city, and saw I had no hope of recovering from that. Time to start a new game - why does the stupid drafting system choose a crappy UU over two much stronger options?? If I could have chosen my draftees, I would still be alive and have a great shot to win.

 

It could be worse. If you were any other civ, it would have drafted musketmen.

I think the theory is that the draftable unit is the unit that would be the easiest to train an average citizen to be. If you had rifles, you would have drafted rifles. The average citizen can pick up a gun, aim, and shoot. I suppose it takes special training to throw a bomb at someone or shoot and ride a horse (I'm not sure, I have done neither - but I can shoot a rifle)

 

Being able to draft what you like would be way overpowered imho. Can you imagine drafting tanks? Artillery? Choppers?

 

ICBM

You can choose what you get, if you Whip or Gold-rush stuff. Drafting seems to make sense giving "basic" troops...

 

I get that I shouldn't be able to draft modern armor if I haven't even teched through rifling, but I thought that drafting would give you one of the strongest units available to you based on the techs you've completed. I had completed the techs for grenadiers and cavalry, but my forces were depleted due to the stupid religious wars...if I could have at least drafted one of those options instead, could have staved off the troops.

 

well, next time you'll know

drafting is about getting standard troops, not specialists

 

Dude, that sucks.

 

I think the idea is that Grenadiers are a specialist unit rather than draftee cannon-fodder. I'll bet if you had Industrialization, it would still draft Infantry rather than Marines, too. Anyone tried this?

I know some people love Nationhood, but I've never used it. I probably should think about it, as it sounds like a great thing for emergencies when you're past Slavery and not running Universal Suffrage (or are out of money). But as your experience demonstrates, it does have its limitations.

 

The drafting order is Warrior > Axemen > Macemen > Musketmen > Rifles > Infantry > Mechanized Infantry.

 

The AI can be pretty nasty if it has you in a noose. Do you set up yer territory with your borders to the mountains and to the coast ? It always helps to have some thick land areas where you have some protection from attack.

If I am in a fight to the death with the AI, I drain all of my internal or non threatened teritory of troops and send them all to the front. I'd rather take the -1 "we fear for our safety". Even units from a primitive draft can be upgraded later on if they survive. Let the AI hordes die on your walls. Let the defence work in you advantage. Populations recover from streneous drafting. They won't be chanting "hell no we won't go" forever. I say better dead than assimilated.

I know that having the AI take a city sucks, but these are some of the most satisfiying games to win. Starting over again is an easier and wiser choice though.

 

This was a pangaea map, and i got stuck in the middle...so basically, had neighbors on all sides. In hindsight, I never should have founded a religion, because with so many neighbors (including aggressive ones like Kublai), there was no doubt someone would hate me from a religious perspective. So I really never had any shot to use mountains or coast to block anything - there were too many civs around me settling like crazy, so I had to get cities up to try to block them out and then backfill later. Was going ok until the drafting moment.

I think it'd be a nice feature to allow you to choose what you want to draft, obviously limiting it only to things you've teched through, and have resources for. Would at least give you flexibility.

 

Yeah, it would be nice, but so would being able to build any city improvement in the same number of turns that it takes to build a temple. I'm being snarky, I know, but I am making a point: if you could draft specialist units (that take more hammers to build than the basic units), then drafting would be much more powerful.

There's also the realism element that others have mentioned. Conscripts are usually quickly trained and relatively cheaply armed, and so it makes sense that they're always a very basic type of unit.