Luring the AI- a tip for (probably) beginners

Here’s a tactic I tried very recently which worked quite nicely. Not tried it enough to call it fool-proof, and it’s probably only suitable for certain situations, but I thought I’d put it out there! (Apologies if it's not original in any way)

I was defending one of my better border cities while at war, and spotted an AI stack on its way. Not a particularly menacing one, but one that needed to be destroyed.

I had a couple of hills just outside the city boundary and one plain in between them. So I moved the weakest city unit (some geriatric archer) onto the flat land when the AI was two squares from the city. The AI attacked, as I hoped, my bait and then moved the rest of his stack on to that square rather than the +25% defence squares either side. Made my stack-attack a little easier!

 

Good point. It is worth noticing that this can work the other way around. Blocking forest hills with longbows (if you have sufficient defenders to spare) can work detrimental as the enemy will be fighting against a 12 unit (unpromoted LB on forest hill, not counting fortify), and may choose to move out in the open, or, more often, suicide units on the LB. Especially if they sacrifice siege, this can be decent.