City Chaining (standing wave)

[DaveV]

Everyone may already be doing this, but I thought I'd post it anyway, since I'm (ab)using it constantly in the AI head start game. Consider this situation:

ArrBrrCrrD

Where ABCD are cities, r is a road square. Let's say each city has a fortified pikeman as a defender, and they're all building more pikemen for front line defense. If A builds a pike, he can move to city B on the road. Go to the city menu for B, select the pikeman from city A, then select "support from this city" and "fortify". Next, activate the pikeman who was originally in B. Move that pikeman to C, home and fortify him, and wake up C's pikeman. The pikeman from C moves to D, is homed and fortified, and D's pikeman can move to defensive terrain.

This way, a unit produced in your rear area can be magically transformed to one on your front lines. All of the units fortified on this turn can be awakened to repeat the process next turn. If your rear cities are secure and you're just using the pikeman for martial law, you can move him down the chain the turn before the new pikeman is produced.

Maybe some would call this a cheat, but I see it as very much within the rules. The big disadvantage is that it can greatly lengthen the time of your turns, until only the most patient players will MP with you .

[Ming]

I don't see this as a cheat... heck, every unit is allowed to move on every turn

I do a little bit of that when I'm creating vet defenders and I need to spread them to all my cities, but never to the extent you mention. Just too tedious

[SCG]

why would that be considered a cheat? People have been doing that ever since the idea of troop movements and reserve replacement troops have been around. Granted, rehoming is more of a civ concept, but who hasn't moved most of his standing army 1 teritory east or 1 territory west in a game like Risk if you had new units in an inner province to get more units to the front.

Also, as those Civ I veterans may remember, it was essentially a requirement to do so if you wanted to war in a rep goverment since units caused unhappiness if they were anywhere other than their home city, including another city elsewhere in the empire.

[My Wife Hates CIV]

wow, completely forgot about that in CIV I. I can't even remember what the game looked like.

[VetLegion]

Ups... I got it wrong :=)
[This message has been edited by VetLegion (edited September 26, 2000).]

[VetLegion]

You people do it in multiplayer???

[geofelt]

Sounds like good strategy to me. Two roads separation is a good number for a ICS advocate. I normally have 3/4 roads to traverse, so I sometimes leave cities undefended to shift the units to the target.

[johnmcd]

I sometimes have three or four cities with a cross roads link (as opposed to a ring road) with a knight or mech infantry or whatever in the middle acting as the defense for all four. With two cities you can have a phalanx or whatever standing in between the two ready to run to rescue whichever is in trouble. You can be horribly caught out though. It saves on support and production and if its still in a city radius it doesn't cause serious unhappiness. I just drive it to whichever city is threatend. Depending on how vulnerable the area is I'll sometimes have a couple or have static defenders too and use him as reinforcements.

But as for the initial query, I wouldn't consider it a cheat, just dull.