Blocking & Borders

[Bahgtru]

Do you do this? I've opened a poll because I'm curious to see what the fellow players think.

Is it kudos to block AIs? Like at the beginning when the settlers are on their way towards a good spot?

Is it kudos to bring this to the final consequence of trireme borders around your empire, so that the "allies" can't explore it? (I failed - there's 3 red stacks, red is ally and I'm at war with blue)

Or does virtue lie in the middle... And then what's your middle, how do you decide what's kudos and what isn't?

[Nelphine]

I block towers, I occasionally block settlers, only if I happen to have a settler actively going there and don't want to declare war on that ai, and occasionally I block (well, delay for no more than 2 turns) my cities from ai doomstacks to give my doomstacks time to arrive and kill theirs.

[Seravy]

I block settlers when I'm already having my own going to a spot and have the means to do so.
I block towers when an opportunity arises (prolonged peace, or I have strong enough unused troops to do so despite war)
Generally, blocking things is impossible without heavy expenses on troops during war, and during peace it doesn't really do all that much so I think it's ok. The AI gets advantages because the humans can use smart tricks like these against them, anyway.
I don't think I've ever tried to block entire continents - having to produce 80+ units and maintain them is too much of a price to keep the AI away from nodes no my territory - with all that I might as well just clear those nodes. Also I don't really have a reason to bother, treasure is nice but not a core element of my strategies, usually.

When I play a strategy that relies on combat damage spells, I sometimes produce weak units and take advantage of AI stacks attacking them but I don't think that counts as blocking.

[Nelphine]

I believe he's doing the 80+ triremes to prevent the AI from using city curses, ever. Also, probably to avoid ai outposts in annoying spots that break wizards pacts. Oh raise volcano, how you manipulate us!

[Seravy]

Well, I think the main reason why I never even tried doing that is the AI will get there and find my cities way before I could have 80 triremes so it's not that effective against scouting, plus hostility triggers both attacks into the blockade (which is in no way strong enough to stop a real army) and curses (so if there are no attacks, there also are no curses)

[teelaurila]

Could you use these 200 triremes to create impossibly long "conduits" for AI units? I mean the trireme might be weak, but also low priority. So the AI might choose to attack, say, a nearby city, but the trireme walls make the shortest path to that city 50 squares long?

Anyways, you can keep 200 triremes because no upkeep. But with the same hammers you would have massive resource production buildings and/or city unit armies that can actually conquer stuff. So very much doubt this makes sense strategy-wise.

That said, spearmen walls to cut off continents can work to delay the enemy. Because you need 5 or less.

[Nelphine]

You can make 'tunnels' yes, although I believe the 'distance' factor when choosing priority if a target is based on the length of the shortest path, not the straight line distance, so if your 'tunnel' is too long the trireme walls will end up higher priority than the city.

[Bahgtru]

The trireme walls have no maintenance To me they're mostly useful to avoid having allies in you lands before the war.

When the war starts, every trireme is an opportunity for a save or die spell... Or more, given that triremes are quite ok at fleeing. Basically I just confuse away enemy stacks.

Really the only issue with this strategy is that it works so well that the game becomes boring.

[Bahgtru]

Ah, the cost... That's quite low actually, counting the dots I seem to have done more or less 100 triremes, but they're often done anyway to move troops around fast and cost no maintenance... The others don't come for free but when a 100 prod city is doing something long, like a tower, you don't even feel that as all that actually happens is the tower coming some turns later.

[rgp151]

I pretty much just block cracked towers if necessary or obvious choke points.