Just recently started playing on noble

[RedRalph]

As Stalin and following the advice I got here I've stopped building the pyramids in favour of a decent army and maybe an extra settler. I tried the tactic of early attack on neighbours with horse archers, not as a land grab but to slow down their progress early on so they will be more vulnerable by the time I have Knights. Has anyone else used this tactic? So far its worked for me but I'd imagine it could backfire very easily

 

[carl corey]

I'm not much of a pillager myself, but I imagine this would work well if you also had a city raider stack to take out the biggest cities. The AI tends to have lots of workers and rebuilds pretty fast, so I don't like pillaging alone to slow them down.

A question though: why build Horse Archers with an Aggressive civ? You get Combat I for free for melee units, I'd rather have Axemen running around with Stalin. There are civs out there with Horse Archer unique units that are better suited for extreme pillaging in my opinion.

 

[RedRalph]

Yeah sorry I do also use axemen, but for speed reason I use more horsearchers. If a city is going to be easy to take, sure, I'll go for it, but as this often hapopens before catapults I dont go for the big ones

 

[carl corey]

Just build more Axemen. Protective AIs and cities built on hills might be a problem. So could be holy cities. But the rest is easy to capture even if you don't have catapults.

Or, if you want a later war, then you can even consider building the Pyramids (you are Industrious after all) and switch to Police State to boost unit production. Axes, swords and cats should do the trick. I just don't see using too many horse-based units with an aggressive civ as being a good use of the traits, that's all.