It is a nice feature to use Shake's to keep a SSC growing without revolt under a democracy.
I guess my ten yrs of CIV has made me a Late Conquest pursuer. When I searched for "strategies and civilization", I recently stumbled upon CFC, Apolyton and the concept of Early Conquest. This immediately caught my interest, because it is the opposite of what I have been doing!
In a late conquest, you aim for a high score and give your opponents the final blow late in the game, mainly aimed at your nearest neighbors. It requires a serious effort on the part of the AI to withstand the combined forces of 100+ units, even just a task force of 10-20 howitzers that don't care if they are left out of a city on a railroaded continent where you can move them fast. On islands I use airports an plan ahead of time. When a particular neighbor starts acting up, demanding tributes, if an alliance is broken, etc, I start shipping off the units. The "go" function is useful when you have to repeat a move from a city in one end of the continent to a city in the other - You do have to answer "yes" to "continue moving unit," sometimes more than once. Generally it doesn't seem to be a problem moving the units around, but I only played on normal size maps.
Did I forget to mention that you can of course also use Bach's, Womens Suffrage and police stations to have units out there from the other cities as well? Anyway I soon noticed that if I let a howitzer attack a city and used up it's turns outside the city, often the home city started rioting. But then Shake's solved the problem for me.
Earlier in the game, the Shake's city is useful for building wonders, because it's accumulating lots of shields, engineers/settlers working mines on the hills around it and so on. I agree of course that for an Early Conquest as demonstrated by Peaster, there is no real use of Shake's, so it would be a waste of shields to build it. Even if you somehow made a "democracy version" of EC including Shake's, it would be difficult to move the units out to the far away places, which would be the first priority in an EC scenario. You may look at it this way - Which requires the most effort:
- To heal up several cities simultaneously, build the units and transport them to the scene from different cities nearby?
- To take an overwhelming force of already made units and move them from scene to scene along railroads on the map?
One feature that is nice late in the game is, that you can let the Shake's city own the high tech units that require many shields, for instance stealth bombers. You don't easily accumulate a force of stealth bombers from newly healed cities far away from your home land. To "heal" a city would imply building a solar plant or a recycling center, a manufacturing plant and a mass transit plus infrastructure for maintaining a large amount of citizens. If you are able to cluster several high production cities nearby you Shake's city, you can have a pretty high output rate of high tech units. Then you move them where the action is!
It's nice to see another demo-shake's CIV II player, elmenhorster!
By the way, I really shouldn't have called Shakespeares Theater "ST" because it's already been used for Sun Tzun's War Academy. Let's call it Shake's. I'll try to get more reading done, and thanks for the references! I'd like to correct one mistake in my original posting at the start of this thread - When I wrote "mountains" I meant "hills," but you probably figured that already.
