If you really want to create chaos among your enemies during times of war, set up useless fortresses during times of peace. As soon as you make contact, place a phalanx on a mountain near their capital. If it is fortified, the defense is 9 (a brutal target to attack). What you will find is that if they declare war while you have one or more of these useless fortresses up, they will attack that before they invade. If YOU are on the offensive instead of them, you can use the fortified phalanx as a launching point for chariots and catapults.
In civ1, the effect is staggering. I have seen civs halt all other endeavours in preference of attacking a single fortified unit near their capital. They will stop colonizing, building up their cities, or developing technology. Instead, they just try to kill it. Once, I built an actual FORTRESS around the phalanx, making its defense 18, and placed a second phalanx in there in case the first died. This was in about 2000BC. By the year 1650AD or so they were still trying to destroy the fortress. The best tech they had was mathematics, they had one city, and that city's number was 5. This little teasing fortress had kept them at war with a complacent and invincible enemy for 3600 years and essentially destroyed any threat from that civ for winning the game.
In civ2, however, there are complications because placing the unit in the first place may violate treaties (or am I wrong?), or the units may be ordered to leave by the other civ (again, diplomacy). Instead, place the unit on a mountain near their border. They will still try to attack it before invading you, giving you time, and killing off their first wave of attackers. And it also acts as a constant scout, reporting on things in the "midfield". It is not nearly as effective at reducing the enemy civs to fools as it is in civ1, however.
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