HungryMouse
Chieftain
Samson said:Any war has penalties, wether it is lack of infrastructure (cos you are building units) unhappiness (WW) damage (cos of pillaging) or loss of cities. This si just one way of doing it, and if it means you have a shorter war then you could end up with less unhappiness. You can also choose where the unhappines is, perhaps somewhere where it is not a problem (though I think it unlikely that there will no problem with either the unhappiness or loss of population).
With the proviso that I have never used drafting in offence, I belive you can definatly beat a stronger opponent. The AI is just so bad at war. They tend to have just 3 units in each city other than the capital, so as long as you can kill them you can take cities. You just need enough units to counter there offence, with is not that hard as they are fairly predictable and not tactically clever enough to avoid your units.
Look, it's quite obvious that drafting is an alternative way of producing units, thus in theory you can create ALL of your military units by drafting after you discover Nationalism. However, my point was that in practice you hardly will use drafting for offence purposes except maybe for producing a couple of units, but not the entire army. As you mentioned you have never tried this strategy yourself, and therefore I really would like to hear about some practical experience of using drafting as a succesful offensive srategy.