Cleansing of the Intellectuals!

[Alinestra Covelia]

This came up in a recent game I was playing, where I had a very strong infrastructure and was massing my troops to go over the border. I tried an invasion with full out deployment of generals, spies, troops, dirty tricks - you name it.

The invasion succeeded in capturing the city, but after a long war of attrition effort, the defenders regrouped and wiped out my attacking force. I decided that I didn't have enough units and went around finding out which citizens and civilians I could kill to free up some populace. Having slaughtered all intellectuals and razed all my universities to the ground, I discovered that I was able to afford many more military units and storm my way to victory hurrah hurrah hurrah.

Has anybody else had to resort such Khmer Rouge-like tactics in order to get their military into shape? I'm not sure that's what Big Huge Games had in mind when they put in the population limit.

[Mr. President]

Reminds me of the old Age of Empires days.

[trickey]

Meh..brains, who needs 'em?

[Signa]

The Barbarians always win in the end...

[MattH]

Near the end (after endgame techs), I've been know to click a citizen, press home, and then hit ctrl-delete

Then the infinite que's go to work

[Skanky Burns]

/me is glad Poly people do not run the world.

[MattH]

Yeah, from the oval office:

[MattH touches staffer, presses home]

Staffer: Nooooooooo!!!

MattH: Yes.

[MattH presses ctrl-delete]

[big explosion]

Defense minister: we now can create 30 BILLION tanks at once *raises pinky to mouth*

[iamlod]

[SIZE=1]

Defense minister: we now can create 30 BILLION tanks at once *raises pinky to mouth*

Who needs tanks when you have laser-enhanced seabass?

[tetley]

Haven't done it myself, but would you do better to Call To Arms everybody? You can Call To Arms scholars. It's like staging your own Ragnarok in AoM.

Nice idea, though. In AoM nothing was more fun than Ragnarok.

[iamlod]

It is more valuable to have the population spaces then civilians in arms. Partisians and the like don't fight nearly as well as the military units you could make in their place.
...plus its's fun to kill stuff...

[Q Classic]

can't say i have, ali. i'm glad you got ron to work, though.

in my case, i usually go straight for the jugular. forget everything else, unless it's directly in the way--and even then i don't always strike.

[Alinestra Covelia]

I'm playing as the Chinese at the moment, so Citizens are pretty much a must have, and in overwhelming quantities.

I took over Japan in the Conquer the World campaign, and found that having a horde of citizens behind your army doing mop-ups can be very useful. They can construct a few buildings so your exhausted troops can garrison and heal even as you assimilate the city. Then they can get to repairing the city to aid in the next attack.

I find it strange that the Chinese were denied having a larger population, on grounds that it's an unfair advantage, but the Bantu have one that's 100% larger than anybody else's. Does anybody find this weird?

[tetley]

Man, cleansing intellectuals works great on CTW pre-Information Age. I'd still rather Call to Arms them, but nice heads up.

That's also so true about having citizens behind you, especially if you're Turks. When you're up there playing on Toughest, you're in continuous combat. You really need all the Towers you can get on your perimeter, while your artillery shells away behind their cover. Towers effectively add to your pop cap.

[Sirotnikov]

I found that I do it often as well.

Though usually I opt for picking out a farm or a woodcutter's camp and deleteing it and everyone working there...

and making sure I'm still topping the production max.

[Alinestra Covelia]

My big problem is that the game tells you if you're making more than the maximum, but it doesn't tell you how much more than the maximum you're making. Thus, I am very leery of killing off my workers because I don't know if I'll drop below production.