Gaming the rising cost of MPs

[TheMeInTeam]

The AI also takes the overall diplo situation into account, such as who is likely to attack him if he tries something. If i share a religion with someone, and a second AI has a different religion, and we are all roughly equally powerful, the one guy with the heathen religion is not going to start a war in most cases. Its more likely to be my ally that starts something.

...False... ------> What even makes you say something like this?! It's nonsense.

The AI isn't coded that way. It roles a nice, fat computer dice, with factors such as power ratio (at a finite limit), distance to capitol, diplo, and # of tiles shared border in consideration. If the number is enough, it decides to declare. It doesn't care about diplo considerations at all. Those two AIs are equally likely to declare on each other unless one fails a power check with the other. Your ally is only more likely to start something if you choose the stronger ally.

If, however, i have a bunch of warriors for garrison and i didnt bother building any other military, they will both attack me.

Failure again. Assuming the instance where you have at least one AI pleased, they will only both attack you in this timeframe with one of the following circumstances:

1. They are sufficiently friendly with each other (pleased for warmongers but friendly for many others) AND the person declaring has alphabet AND a tech of sufficient value to bribe the other AI, AND you don't bribe your ally first. If your ally is the type to declare at pleased...maybe you should bribe him...
2. The AP. However we're going to ignore that here and assume you know what you're doing so it doesn't happen.
3. You get an extremely unfortunate and rare WHEOOHRN from both AIs at the same time, assuming your ally can even declare at pleased.

Note that when two civs are at war, the AI runs checks of its power against a target as if the ENEMY's POWER IS ITS OWN. FOR BOTH CIVS. In other words, you're both going to fail the power checks miserably in the early game.

If i have warriors for garrison, and i dont wanna go to war, then my stack of doom is sitting useless somewhere and i probably dont save any hammers anyway.

You don't need a SoD. That's the point. You need to repel anybody who can declare and that's it.

 

[Gliese 581]

I used to try to keep my power rating up to deter invasions because there's been a widely shared belief that this is actually useful even on the highest levels. Even some top players have been talking about this on the forums. More recent digging into the code however seems to indicate that it's usually a futile attempt, you'd better concentrate on diplo and/or avoiding a shared border of 8 tiles or more. Btw I've always wondered exactly how those 8 tiles are counted, is a diagonal contact counted for example? What if one tile is on land and one on water?

One thing good units can help with of course is that if you are invaded despite your best attempt to avoid it you're going to better prepared. Then again I find that most of the time there's plenty of WHEOOHRN warning to give you time to prepare. The most useful time to build strong units would actually be in the early game where dows are more frequently launched without a good warning when you have a known aggressive neighbour that you can't quickly improve relations with (which should be your first line of defence as always). But these attacks are very hard to defend against anyhow on at least deity so then you might be better of gambling on the RNG.

As for delaying Hunting etc, if I build TGW or find horses or copper in the capital bfc and I don't need any camp improvements I will skip Hunting, in other words not often.
If I have chariots and plan for some warfare I usually try to build 2-3 of them before they go obsolete to potentially use one or two as gg healers.