When a city is attacked by 7, it’s reduced to 6 units and the fight starts. So if 1 neighbour put 10 on your city then you need to put 5, not 4, unless you have metal working and they don’t as the smaller army starts to remove units first…… 5 units means you lose all 5, the attacker loses 4, 6 remaining units can’t break down a city. With agriculture every territory can suppor at least 2, double that to 4 then attack with all and repopulate with 2/territory from your adjacent territories, it’s easy to get 10-12 units on a city that way… If the surrounding lands support 3 units, then after pop growth you have 5/territory… 3 next to your city and I doubt you could get enough units in to prevent a city loss. 3 neighbours taking 1-2 cities/round… and you want a low population to move last but this also means it’s harder to rebuild cities…
40 units AFTER pop growth or 20 before, 6 of one and half a dozen of the other… Yup 2/city so with 6 cities ya need 12 to live and 20+/round as fodder to protect 4 of your 6 cities/round, but to get 20 new units you need 20 units in 10 territories 2/territory. If you have 5 in a territory you only had 2 units during pop growth.
I just checked my game, 2 countries can win with 1200 and the rest 1300-1400. Since you can only own 11 cards and the cards are limited I’ve often found that you must have 100-200 points in your hand. In the event of a tie, he who has most points wins…
I’ve just never found it a slam dunk to win when ahead even by 2. I play with alot of pricks, theyco-operate relentlessly to knock the #1 guy down :-)
BB