A civ's military is like a growing tree some times. It needs to be pruned to stay it's healthiest. Unless you have LW at your disposal, your troops are going to be outdated fairly quickly, and outdated units are next to useless for anything but making your citizens unhappy and wasting your shields. Instead of keeping these antiques around, send them to die an honorable death in a blaze of glory. Unless you're at peace with everyone (when does that happen?!!), and your enemy isn't across the globe, gather up your obsolete units into a troop and send them into the jaws of the beast. Pillage and destroy as much as you can with these sloutches before they die (Which is part of the plan). *This doesnt mean to just waste these units, (dont attack a musketeer with that damn warrior!) pick your points- cause as much havoc as you can.
As soon as you send the old fogies out of your town, start production on the more advanced units. When the fogies kick the bucket, your production rate for their home towns should increase as well as their happiness -go figure on that one -. By the time your enemy has a chance to retaliate, you should have some of the new and improved units at your disposal.

So as a result your production should increase and your enemys should hopefully decrease. Your military will be stronger, the people happier and ready to start the whole thing over soon when the time comes. When it comes to units, in almost every case, quality is more important than quantity.

You could disband your old units and get similar results, but its not nearly as fun and the enemy won't lose anything.

I disband them.

That helps generally but it is a real boost to micromanagement. You can disband a humble warrior after taking a city and then, now with some shields in the shield box, rush buy a modern defensive unit so as to cope with the counter-attack.

Or you can use the shields from the disbanding to increase the efficiency of the city's production (some city's seem absolutely determined to produce 9 shields, never ten).

And so on.

I would rather disband and incremental rush buy new troops with them or use them for marshall law or in bottleneck forts etc.

I will certainly never give my opponent an easier chance at vet status with outdated troops

quote: <font size=1>Originally posted by drake on 11-07-2000 08:51 AM</font> As I said before, this is only a good idea if the enemy is in striking distance. Disbanding units that could be used to pillage and cause some trouble doesn't make sense to me. The end result is the same as disbanding except you could potentially do some damage (however slight) this way

But the end result isn't the same as disbanding. When you disband in a city, half the shields that were needed to build that unit go back into the city's shield box. When the unit is lost in combat, its shields are gone forever.

This is my last thought on the issue: in light of info just received, I would send my rejects to enemy territory simply to pillage and when finished disband.....that way we get the city positives and the enemy doesn't get their vet status.... Or if needed, these extra units could stand in for martial law too I suppose.........

I see very little reason to send old units out in an attempt to do damage. First, they have to travel in pairs to avoid being bribed (a big concern in MP games), and second, since they are weaker units, they will probably get killed long before they can really get in a position to hurt the enemy.

So I view them for what they are worth... free shields to be used to help a city produce something quicker