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Warriors will switch automatically to spears not axemen so won't help if you need some insurance against Barbs [EDIT - But Vel beat me to it 
]. But here I'd tend to drift towards Chariots (with Warlords) although I now know that leaving a chariot across a water as a bait for a barb axemen won't work as well as you might hope - the small print in the rules only give the +100% when you attack
I'm still of the view that the big benefit of a part-build is early game insurance and I've sort of convinced myself of this after I got a visit from said barbs just after my neighbour - Mr "Happy" Tokugawa - finished building a wall to keep them all out.
There I took on role of Mr Bilbo Baggins playing host to a small band of axe-wielding dwarves. In the end I rushed two archers and a chariot and saw off the threat. They managed to destroy two roads and a horse pasture – thankfully I had another – but at least some of the whipping saved me a city despite the fact that I had to live with low population growth for some time to avoid unhappiness. In truth, two of the units that I whipped were not part-builds but started at the “time of trouble”
Could I have done this without the part-built unit(s)? I would have immediately switched to units when I saw the forces coming my way anyway so it’s arguable that I simply got my archer defender in St Petersburg one turn early. But that’s +5% defence of the city. And it was hardly my fault that the axemen who attacked my archer did so across a river. It all boils down to whether the x hammer “insurance premium” – in this case it was 1h – is worth paying for the chance that you would need a +5% defence. In reality if you "make a claim" on the insurance, you get the premium back too so in a strange way, you pay the premium only if you don't need the insurance.
As far as degrading goes I have some confusing conclusions here but it generally seems to follow 10 turns after the time when the unit is first relegated down the build queue. Adding production to the unit at this stage does not “reset the timer” – I don’t even think it shifts it back one turn! In fact, I’ve wondered if it does this even if the unit is on zero hammers but still sitting in the queue. For this reason, I have usually taken the empty unit from the build queue and added another if I wanted to keep another unit in reserve. To be honest, these observations are from an Epic game so it seems that there is a small flaw in the Standard/Epic conversion here. One would assume that 10 turns (Standard) = 15 turns (Epic) but, like the Golden Age, it seems this adjustment was missed here.
Looking at the possibility of linking this with a Pacifist civic approach, I’ll adopt a more macro approach to giving the savings per unit as 1.7gpt. In any case, this will be done for several units and the idea of considering if the marginal unit is a “free” one is much too micro-level.
With this cost there are two areas to consider: those when the unit is degrading and those where it is a state prior to degrading.
Now here the degrading costs are not so bad because, even though we lose 1hpt, we also save 1.7gpt. And that’s a good thing if we follow my rough exchange rate for hammers and gold. In fact, it might seem that a good way to build up an offensive army while running Pacifism is to part-build a whole series of units (leaving them one-turn to complete) across your civilisation and then finish them in consecutive turns. You might even consider switching to the Theocracy civic just before you churn out your army if the anarchy costs can be justified by the size of the army you send. Though I would perhaps allow for two turns of anarchy if you expect to switch back.
Then there is the cost of “part-building” before degrading. If we assume that a unit is part-built (x hammers) and left to degrade to y hammers then the cost to us is (x-y) hammers = 3(x-y)/2 gold. Our gold saving is 17gold + 1.7(x-y) gold.
Total gain => 17 gold + 0.2(x-y) gold
which is maximised when x is highest and y = 0. The maximum saving for an archer is 17 gold + 4.8 gold. For an axeman it is 23.8 gold.
So is THIS an early game strategy?
It definitely looks to pay off a reasonable return if used every so often when the civilisation is small. But then again, even with a larger civilisation, there’ll simply be more cities so the saving will cover a much larger cross-section of units. Even there this will provide a significant benefit to Pacifist civs whether they are preparing for war or simply insuring against it.
The one big omission here is that there may be important buildings that we are not building. Here it’s all in the “price” of hammers and gold. In some cities, hammers may be at a premium since a building there may be very important. If they become worth more than 1.7 gold each then by all means switch to building something useful and productive. But bear in mind that you will also want to be adopting this exchange rate when selecting tiles (eg a 2/2/1 tile is better than a 2/0/4 tile).
Further consideration here could be given to the impact that Heroic Epic would have on this Pacifists “military spam” approach. I am, for example suspicious that the decay rate may be linked to production bonuses too.
Also, I recognised that there is the hidden cost that not having units might have on the likelihood that you will be targeted as weak. Here, it is better to pay 1.7gpt if this means that 20 enemy units stay off your land (and perhaps you may also lose valuable trade with your new enemy). So even if you are running Pacifism, I would take pains to make sure that you do not stray too far down the power graph.
Now, who’s going to play out this to see if it works?
]. But here I'd tend to drift towards Chariots (with Warlords) although I now know that leaving a chariot across a water as a bait for a barb axemen won't work as well as you might hope - the small print in the rules only give the +100% when you attack I'm still of the view that the big benefit of a part-build is early game insurance and I've sort of convinced myself of this after I got a visit from said barbs just after my neighbour - Mr "Happy" Tokugawa - finished building a wall to keep them all out.
There I took on role of Mr Bilbo Baggins playing host to a small band of axe-wielding dwarves. In the end I rushed two archers and a chariot and saw off the threat. They managed to destroy two roads and a horse pasture – thankfully I had another – but at least some of the whipping saved me a city despite the fact that I had to live with low population growth for some time to avoid unhappiness. In truth, two of the units that I whipped were not part-builds but started at the “time of trouble”
Could I have done this without the part-built unit(s)? I would have immediately switched to units when I saw the forces coming my way anyway so it’s arguable that I simply got my archer defender in St Petersburg one turn early. But that’s +5% defence of the city. And it was hardly my fault that the axemen who attacked my archer did so across a river. It all boils down to whether the x hammer “insurance premium” – in this case it was 1h – is worth paying for the chance that you would need a +5% defence. In reality if you "make a claim" on the insurance, you get the premium back too so in a strange way, you pay the premium only if you don't need the insurance.
As far as degrading goes I have some confusing conclusions here but it generally seems to follow 10 turns after the time when the unit is first relegated down the build queue. Adding production to the unit at this stage does not “reset the timer” – I don’t even think it shifts it back one turn! In fact, I’ve wondered if it does this even if the unit is on zero hammers but still sitting in the queue. For this reason, I have usually taken the empty unit from the build queue and added another if I wanted to keep another unit in reserve. To be honest, these observations are from an Epic game so it seems that there is a small flaw in the Standard/Epic conversion here. One would assume that 10 turns (Standard) = 15 turns (Epic) but, like the Golden Age, it seems this adjustment was missed here.
Looking at the possibility of linking this with a Pacifist civic approach, I’ll adopt a more macro approach to giving the savings per unit as 1.7gpt. In any case, this will be done for several units and the idea of considering if the marginal unit is a “free” one is much too micro-level.
With this cost there are two areas to consider: those when the unit is degrading and those where it is a state prior to degrading.
Now here the degrading costs are not so bad because, even though we lose 1hpt, we also save 1.7gpt. And that’s a good thing if we follow my rough exchange rate for hammers and gold. In fact, it might seem that a good way to build up an offensive army while running Pacifism is to part-build a whole series of units (leaving them one-turn to complete) across your civilisation and then finish them in consecutive turns. You might even consider switching to the Theocracy civic just before you churn out your army if the anarchy costs can be justified by the size of the army you send. Though I would perhaps allow for two turns of anarchy if you expect to switch back.
Then there is the cost of “part-building” before degrading. If we assume that a unit is part-built (x hammers) and left to degrade to y hammers then the cost to us is (x-y) hammers = 3(x-y)/2 gold. Our gold saving is 17gold + 1.7(x-y) gold.
Total gain => 17 gold + 0.2(x-y) gold
which is maximised when x is highest and y = 0. The maximum saving for an archer is 17 gold + 4.8 gold. For an axeman it is 23.8 gold.
So is THIS an early game strategy?
It definitely looks to pay off a reasonable return if used every so often when the civilisation is small. But then again, even with a larger civilisation, there’ll simply be more cities so the saving will cover a much larger cross-section of units. Even there this will provide a significant benefit to Pacifist civs whether they are preparing for war or simply insuring against it.
The one big omission here is that there may be important buildings that we are not building. Here it’s all in the “price” of hammers and gold. In some cities, hammers may be at a premium since a building there may be very important. If they become worth more than 1.7 gold each then by all means switch to building something useful and productive. But bear in mind that you will also want to be adopting this exchange rate when selecting tiles (eg a 2/2/1 tile is better than a 2/0/4 tile).
Further consideration here could be given to the impact that Heroic Epic would have on this Pacifists “military spam” approach. I am, for example suspicious that the decay rate may be linked to production bonuses too.
Also, I recognised that there is the hidden cost that not having units might have on the likelihood that you will be targeted as weak. Here, it is better to pay 1.7gpt if this means that 20 enemy units stay off your land (and perhaps you may also lose valuable trade with your new enemy). So even if you are running Pacifism, I would take pains to make sure that you do not stray too far down the power graph.
Now, who’s going to play out this to see if it works?
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