What is the best defense against unconventional warfare?

[civmaster_16]

What is the best defense against unconventional warfare?

[Solver]

Unconventiolnal? Please explain for me, I use German version. Unconventional - that's which units, what else

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Solver - http://www.aok.20m.com

[Lord Silvi]

Unconventional warfare: Stealth units that can`t be seen by normal units like legions.
Best defence is to have those units by yourself.

In the early game: build city walls!!
City walls help against slavers and monks.

Another method: Walk around your cities with older cheap units (e.g. warriors). They "see" stealth units when they try to walk on them.

[Solver]

I'd suggest having a stealth unit in each city, but that's easy later in the game. Yes, it's a nice idea to make units walk around, as they can see stealth units, when walk on them. Each unit can do that.
Later in the game, build the necessary Wonders and Improvements, like Gutenberg's Bible to secure yourslef.

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Solver - http://www.aok.20m.com

[Gregurabi]

If this is against the AI, it's usually easy to guess where the stealth units are.

If you have a coastal city, and you see an AI boat sail up next to you and then leave, you can be sure that it dropped off precisely 1 stealth unit on a square right next to your city. The AI does this all the time. All you do then is send one of your units out of the city onto that square and "accidentally" bump into the AI's stealth unit. Then you can kick it or kill it.

Once you've found the city that the AI wants to attack with stealth units, you can park a stealth unit of your own there, in order to see the enemy units. The AI will keep attacking the same city with those single-stealth-unit-on-a-boat tactics, over and over again, until you conquer that AI to put it out of its misery (or change your boundaries enough that the AI chooses a different target city).

But that's in the mid- and end-games. In the early game, it's a bit different, since the AI will generally be sending stealth units over land by routes that you won't be able to predict as easily. There are a few ways to counter this, though:

(1) Build roads leading to your empire. The AI's stealth units will follow these roads in many cases. All you need to do then is park a roadblock on the road -- a stack containing a defender (Phalanx or Warrior) and a Diplomat for the vision radius and stealth unit detection.

(2) Put Diplomats or Slavers in your border cities. The Diplomats can see stealth units two squares away, and the Slavers can see stealth units one square away (and they can participate in border skirmishes and generate slaves for you).

(3)Put sentinels on mountains or hills just outside your borders. By this, I mean a stack containing a Diplomat (unsurpassed vision in the early game) and something to defend it (one or more Phalanxes). If you have enough of these stacks in place, you can detect enemy stealth units before they get within striking distance of your cities.

[JPF_civplayer]

If your production is really tight and you can't afford the diplomats, then build a road thru some tough movement terrain. i.e. mountains, jungle etc., and have a mounted archer move up and down the road each turn. The AI stealth units aren't smart enough to not use the road so your mounted archer will expose the unit by not being able to move thru it. Then you can kick that unit or kill it.