Barracks, on the front line or deep inside?

[padillah]

Where do you put your barracks city? Too far forward and it may be the first to go. Too far back and it takes too long to get units to the front.

Hmmm.

Tom P.

[Fried-Psitalon]

I put them in high production cities that I use for military purposes, regardless of where that may be.

[Proteus_MST]

Same for me,
at the frontline as well as in my high production cities.

[kretos]

I use biggest cities with fast production rate - regardless of their position - that way I can switch to military production and get new units fast. And biggest cities are usually best defended so it's very unlikely to loose them.

[Shaka II]

I think it depends what type of game your in and what Civ you're playing. An aggressive Civ gets half price barracks, and if you're playing for domination, barracks may appear in all cities that have reasonable production to allow pumping out units in mass. The Mongols would be a good example for that.

Otherwise, especially a more building game, barracks may only be built in a subset of high production capable cities distributed, so that I don't have to march the troops from one side of my Civ to the other, but that usually happens anyway when launching a full scale invasion.

[Dis]

I usually build them in non coastal cities (those cities I usually have build ships and the like). I like to eventually have them in all my interior cities, but if the city is low produciton, it's not really worth it. Civ4 is challenging because there are so many other useful things to build. It takes a while before I end up with barracks in my cities. And I really have to watch me defenses, because I tend to neglect them.

[khumak]

I usually pick 2 or 3 cities as my "army pump" and only build barracks in those. None of my other cities build any military units so they have no need for barracks. Coastal cities tend not to get them for me since I'm more likely to want to build ships in those if I'm going to build units instead of buildings.

[Tennyson]

Anytime I am tempted to build units in a city, I look and see if it has a barracks. If it doesn't, I decide whether I want the unit badly enough to build a barracks first.

[joncnunn]

Exactly!

Originally posted by Tennyson
Anytime I am tempted to build units in a city, I look and see if it has a barracks. If it doesn't, I decide whether I want the unit badly enough to build a barracks first.

[CiverDan]

Unlike Civ3, Barracks do nothing to healing a unit IIRC. So they are best in cities to be used primarily in unit production. Since they cost nothing other than some sheilds, useful to build in most of you cities if you expect to need to go on the war footing.

[baboon]

When I'm at war, usually all cities build fight units, so I build barracks anywhere most of the time. Also, when you upgrade defenders you don't have to run em around (not so neat anymore as it used to be in like civ2 since you probably don't have that many cities)

[Konquest02]

I usually try to get barracks in pretty much all of my cities. It's the only building that I do not overlook. That allows me to pump quality units from everywhere if I find myself under attack, or want to do a quick strike against one of my opponents.

[tai4ji2x]

Originally posted by baboon
When I'm at war, usually all cities build fight units, so I build barracks anywhere most of the time. Also, when you upgrade defenders you don't have to run em around (not so neat anymore as it used to be in like civ2 since you probably don't have that many cities)

in my experience (albeit only on noble difficulty), you can upgrade a unit no matter where it is (in a city or not), as long as the tile is connected to the city network by road (haven't had to do so on an un-roaded river tile or on a boat along the coast yet, so i dunno about those)

[Hamdinger]

Ships can be upgraded anywhere inside of your cultural boundaries.

[logan_jiang]

do units have to be upgraded at barracks? I haven't actually tried it.