[Norfleet]

Originally posted by FarAway Pretender:
Find a good "buffer province" that forms a nice bottleneck from other provinces, and station a good-sized army there with some powerful leaders.

Provinces that prevent many other provinces from becoming neighbors of an enemy province form good natural bottlenecks. These points tend to serve as natural borders and you should generally work to take and hold these points. Sometimes this occurs before of natural "barriers" drawn on the map....other times it occurs because the province is bloated and mushroomic, and shields a number of physically smaller provinces. However, this is an ideal situation that is generally not that easy to achieve: Most maps are fairly open, and won't have a single-point bottleneck available for you.

As such, any forces you station for such a defense must be highly mobile, or else their coverage area is limited to a single province. SCs tend to fill this gap very nicely: They usually can be, or innately are, flying, and can thus respond to any attack within a 3-province radius: Even strat-move 3 groundpounders cannot move 3 provinces into hostile territory: They have to stop at the end of friendly territory.

The fact that you can utterly destroy an enemy army with absolutely no losses to YOU is certainly a plus, too, since you can butcher your enemies until they think of something better to use, by which time you'll probably have achieved even better weapons...or, in the AI's case, he never learns and will throw endless amounts of troops to their ineffectual deaths. Admittedly, some humans aren't much better....

Then, add the crucial ingredient: Defense. If you buff up the Defense, it amounts to free militia that come back every time they get killed so long as you don't lose a province. You can get 15 Defense for 120 gold, 20 defense and a likely additional Priest/leader for 210 gold.

I'll be blunt: PD is ****. 20 defense gets you a few scrabbly militia. It costs $210, and will utterly fail to stop any kind of actual attack. A watchtower costs $300. No matter *HOW* big the enemy army is, your temple will never be instantly burned down and an army of any size can be prevented from inflicting significant damage for at LEAST one turn. This is more than ANY amount of PD can give you.

Against the AI, which the original poster is playing against, a castle provides another benefit: The AI will never bypass a castle and rampage around forcing you to play a whack-a-mole: An AI will always sit there in front of a castle indefinitely until he can storm it. This means that he is guaranteed to be sitting there still when you retaliate. PD will not do this.

[ June 13, 2004, 19:18: Message edited by: Norfleet ]