Nationhood?

[Eomer]

Can someone explain Nationhood to me? I mean, I understand the +2 happy, but I don't get the draft 3 units for turn.

[fani]

You can create up to 3 melee units per turn by sacrificing 1 pop and getting a -1 happiness penalty for a few turns (for each unit drafted). The draft button is near the bottom right corner of the city screen near the poprush and cashrush buttons. You nay not draft more than one unit per city per turn. The unit drafted is going to be your standard mainline melee or gunpowder unit(depending what you have researched so far in military tech)...ie if you have not researched gunpowder and you dont have iron nor copper you will get a warrior!!!!
Even if you have researched vassalage and archery. You will not get longbowmen or knights....

[Mr Justice]

LOL Fani,

that must have been quiet a shock when u found that one out!

[Son of David]

You need a minimum of population 6 in a city to draft and your culture must be predominant in the city, i.e., you won't be able to draft units from a recently-conquered foreign city.

Overall, I think this civic is for emergency purposes only.

[Thrar]

I never figured out what to use it for, really.
Maybe if things look really bad, one turn of anarchy is better than losing the game entirely, but otherwise I think the drawbacks are too big for this to be useful. On top of that it comes only in the middle game, when you will probably have both free speech and bureaucracy as alternatives.
By the way, later units cost more than one pop. Muskets or at least rifles and infantry cost two, and mech infantry cost as much as three pop each. Must be a pretty big emergency to find that useful...

[Blake]

It's essential for MP and well worth the anarchy. You get the drafted unit immeditaely an better to draft a city into submission than let the enemy have it.

It works best with an "ablative layer of fringe cities", cities protecting your core which you can aford to abuse and even lose.
Drafting core cities like the capital and ironworks city isn't so cool. It is -3 happy, and that's a lot for big cities already at the happy cap. It's not a problem for small fringe cities though.

[Eomer]

Well, from what I hear it doesn't sound very useful. Actually I had only used it once- but not for long. I guess I'll stick with Vassalage or Free Speech- those are the two I generally have.

[Quillan]

It's situational, like so many things in this game. It's really good for rapidly building up a defensive military force. You can draft units faster than you can build them.

[axisworks]

I just used it in a game last night where three AI's randomly declared war on me. It came in damn handy when I had a stack of macemen and riflemen heading for my capital, and I only had about 2 units per city at the time. I got +3 for ten turns, though. The anger-per-turn increases the more you draft units... and the units you get have only 2 experience, so I usually use them defensively and give them a city defend promotion.

[Ijuin]

Good move, axis. Drafting is mainly for total war situations where you would ordinarily be devoting the production of at least half of your cities toward building more units anyway. As in real life, conscription is for when you can't get enough soldiers through regular means.

[JackRudd]

It's not a civic you want to be using long-term, and it's only useful in very specific situations. I would therefore hardly ever use it unless I were playing a Spiritual leader.

(Mind you, I nearly always play as a Spiritual leader, so that's not much of a restriction.)

[uberfish]

I actually use the draft more as an offensive weapon than a defensive one. If I hit rifling first there's no faster way to get an up-to-date army in the field by drafting a couple of rounds from most of my cities to really make that tech advantage count. Even once the enemy closes the tech gap, the draftees are useful for defence.

I also make sure to build globe theatre in a high food city when planning for this and that one city can produce a large proportion of my army on its own.

It's particularly strong if you are playing as England of course, since even 1* redcoats beat everything in their era.

[Yosho]

If you're spiritual, the ability to switch over to nationhood and draft a ton of soldiers is an incredibly powerful weapon, especally on the slower game speeds. On marathon, you'd be lucky to build 1 or 2 riflemen a turn in your entire empire; with nationhood, you can build your 2 riflemen and draft 3 more in a turn. Nationhood is basically the ability to create a huge army, very quickly. It's won me games I would have otherwise lost many times.

I usually just use it for short-term use because you can't do a really heavy draft-rate for long. However, if you're a complete warmonger, you can still make a lot more units with nationalism then you can without it in the long term; a good food city can make more units faster with nationalism then your ironworks city probably can, so long as you use the drafting carefully and intelegently. You're giving up a lot not using representation or universal sufferage, though.